Almanac Book Review: Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics.

 

In January 2024 Amazon MGM studios will release the film The Boys in the Boat, directed by George Clooney. The film is based on the book of the same name written by Daniel James Brown. I reviewed the book in the May 2015 issue of Sporting Traditions. The review is reproduced here as an ‘introduction’ to the film. It was a great read and I am looking forward to seeing the film.

 

 

Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics, Penguin Books New York, 2014, pb, pp. 404, (US) $17.00.

 

 

In the second half of 2007 Daniel James Brown was asked by his neighbour to come and meet her invalided 93 year old father Joe Rantz. Joseph Harry Rantz had been a member of the rowing eights crew which had won a gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games at Berlin; what has become known as the Nazi Olympics. Joe wanted to tell him about the events that lead up to and were associated with that win. There was something in Joe’s telling, his reverence for his fellow crew members, that struck a chord with Brown and motivated him to spend six years researching and writing up this Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics. Brown drew on contemporary documents on rowing, the dairies of three fellow members of the crew plus the records and writings of coaches, newspaper reports, interviews with Joe and his daughter Judy and various secondary sources on rowing, the Olympics, Nazi Germany and America in the first four decades of the Twentieth Century. Joe Rantz died approximately six weeks after this meeting with Daniel James Brown.

 

In this most modern of times rowing is a sport that is beyond the reach of most of us. We have little understanding of what is going on, the physical and psychological demands it makes on participants and the strategies and tactics employed by coaches. With rowing occurring over long distances, it is not something that lends itself to modern spectators in being able to observe the start, the main drag of long middle distances and the helter skelter of the dash to the final line. This however was not the case in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth century. Rowing was popular with spectators, widely reported in newspapers and broadcast on radio. Rowing was an affectation that America borrowed from the English, especially the annual Oxford – Cambridge eights race on the Thames in London.

 

Brown employs a chronological approach in his account. He begins in the 1890s and provides background information on rowing, the harshness of those times especially in the depression of the 1930s and dust storms which engulfed America, machinations associated with the Olympic Games and the rise of Nazi Germany and the atrocities that were visited upon Europe. He also focuses on the straightened circumstance of Joe Rantz. His mother died at an early age. His father remarried and his step mother persuaded him to leave Joe, at age fifteen, behind when they moved in search of work. Rantz quickly learnt to scrounge for food and found odd jobs to maintain himself. Later on, an older brother took him in to enable him to finish high school. Working out in the gym he was spotted by a rowing coach from the University of Washington at Seattle to try out with the rowing eights after graduating from school. He enrolled in an engineering degree at Washington.

 

The rest of the book examines Rantz’s rowing career, culminating with the Gold Medal race at Berlin. He like many other members of the crew worked their way through university with odd jobs during semester and longer stints during the summer break. Rantz and fellow crew members Chuck Day and Johnny White hang over a cliff with jackhammers to break up rock to help build a dam in a New Deal project for the princely sum of 75 cents an hour. Brown takes readers into the minutiae of University of Washington rowing; the fears and tribulations of those competing for places in the crew; the decision making and tactics of coaches; the rivalry between Washington and the University of California at Berkley for West Coast supremacy and between the West Coast crews and those from the Ivy League East Coast for national honours; the winners in an Olympic year having the honour to represent America; and the races at the Berlin Olympics. With respect to the West and East Coast rivalry, in what is undoubtedly the best quote in the book, Brown says

 

The 1934 regatta was once again shaping up to be a clash of eastern privilege and prestige on the one hand and western sincerity and brawn on the other. In financial terms, it was pretty starkly going to be a clash of old money versus no money at all (p. 114).

 

Detailed information is provided on the various races of Rantz’s career. He with George ‘Shorty’ Hunt and Roger Morris never lost a race! Brown’s account of these races is fascinating and exciting; especially that of the Gold Medal race. I could not turn the pages quickly enough. Everything that could go wrong in the race did go wrong. I counted four strikes but The Boys in the Boat were not struck out and won by a small margin with a powerful late burst. The book is worth buying for an account of this race alone.

 

The Boys in the Boat is a testament to the human spirit, of how Joe Rantz and his fellow crew members overcame personal circumstances where life had dealt them a bad had and through rowing, both as individuals and collectively, forged a sense of self worth which bound them together for the rest of their lives. While Brown has provided brief information on the subsequent lives of these boys/men after 1936 they all seem to have had happy and productive lives. They were educated, they had stridden to the top of Mount Olympus and learnt the hard way what was needed to be done to succeed in life. This book that demystifies and makes accessible the dimensions of an arcane activity called rowing is about something more important than sport.

 

 

Check out the trailer for the movie.

 

 

More from Braham Dabscheck can be read Here.

 

 

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