Authors: Ginny Gilder
At graduation, Cathy Pew, the Yale Women's Crew captain for two years and my fellow varsity rower for our four years together, was recognized as the university's female athlete of the year, which every graduating member of the women's varsity crew reveled in and claimed partly for herself. But I didn't spend much time savoring my role in my class's terrific success on the water. I could boast four varsity letters, only two dual-race losses, and a Collegiate National Championship, but I had more important things to do and no time to waste enjoying my accomplishments or reflecting on the past. After all, there was no better way to cap a tremendous senior year of rowing victories than with the fulfillment of my dream to make the National Team. I was ready to exchange my wannabe status for the real deal, but I had no inkling of how well south of success I remained, and the twisted path ahead.
I started out pretty well. I garnered an invitation to attend camp. So did Mary and Bouche. I'd been there before and felt ready. I was two years older, two years tougher, fitter, more determined, and emotionally prepared.
However, so was everyone else. The pool of candidates had grown, the rowers all seemed taller and tougher, and everyone was generally fitter and stronger than the cast of characters from the 1977 team. The first day I surveyed the competition for starboard seats and wondered how I stacked up; I didn't notice that my precious confidence had already begun to dwindle.
To a northerner, Princeton is practically the south, especially in the summer. Weather conditions often paralleled Madison's 1977 summerâoppressive humidity broken by explosive storms that whipped the water into a fury. We rowed in steam-room conditions, minus the fog.
Beyond the weather, however, nothing resembled Madison. The dainty and confined Lake Carnegie, a mere three miles from end to end, acted more like a river. Barely two hundred meters of water separated its opposing banks. Princeton University's boathouse occupied one end, and the race course took up the other, separated by some gentlemanlike bends and one ornately decorated footbridge.
The Princeton atmosphere seemed too refined and straight-laced to permit anything as chaotic as a raging thunderstorm to chase its rowers off the water. Stately homes lined the lakeshore. The setting seemed a fancy location for a National Team selection process, but its elegance disappeared soon enough in the camp's intensity.
I kept my hopes up through the entire camp. I rowed hard, maintained my focus, and tried to behave. I attempted to contain my emotions, not to show anger, seem desperate, or exude cockiness. I tried to keep my cool, retain an air of detached interest, suppress my eagerness, downplay my excitement; and treat people with friendly, if distant, respect. This was a tall order under the best of circumstances, but I was on my best behavior.
I don't recall how many athletes attended the selection camp, when it started, how long it lasted, or when cuts were made. In the waning days of camp, Kris Korzeniowski seat-raced me against a newcomer to the National Team selection process, a newly minted UCLA graduate
named Carol Bower. Seat racing involves racing two crews, side by side, usually in four oared shells, then pulling the boats together on the water and switching one person from one boat with one from the other, and racing again. The difference in winning margins between the two races determines which person, of the two who were switched, is the more effective boat-mover.
Carol was a National Team wannabe novice; I was an expert. Surely I should've walloped her. We raced in fours. I lost, perhaps narrowly, perhaps by open water; all I remember is that I lost. He didn't race me against anybody else, so I kept my hopes up. After all, one lousy loss was merely a single, isolated instance, not a pattern or proof of anything.
A couple of days later, Kris announced the cuts. I hadn't made the team.
Walking down the path away from the boathouse, steaming in the hot sun, I heaved my empty water bottle into the bushes. Goddammit! How could he cut me on the basis of one simple race?
I sought Kris out and forced a conversation with him. He spoke with a thick Polish accent but had no trouble making himself crystal clear. “Carol Bower beat you,” he said.
“Yes, but I didn't race Bouche. Why didn't you give me a chance against her?”
Kris stared at me, squinting slightly as if he didn't quite understand. “Bouche? She will just be a spare. You want to race her so you can be a spare?”
“Yeah, you should've raced me. It's not fair. I could've beaten her.”
“You want now a chance to race her? You can race tomorrow if you want. We will do ergometer tests.”
Now I was staring at Kris.
What do I do now? Do I take the chance? What if I blow it?
Silence.
Not one cheerleading voice spoke up to parry my sudden gutlessness.
No one said, “No guts, no glory.”
No one said, “Finally, a fair chance, go for it! You can do it!”
No one piped up, reminding me, “Think how hard you've worked, how much you want this.”
Not even me.
Kris was looking directly at me, his hands well apart and raised around his chest, palms upward in a slight shrug as if to say, “It doesn't matter to me who the spare is. She will not be racing.”
I turned my hands over and looked at my palms, rampant with running sores and cracked blisters oozing watery serum. They hurt. Exhausted and worn down by the weeks-long selection camp, I'd not bargained for a chance or a choice. I'd sought Kris out to complain, to position myself as a wounded and cheated warrior. Instead, he'd turned the tables on me and given me an opportunity to claim a position on the team in a fair fight.
“Uh, I don't think I can do that,” I responded slowly. “My hands are so ripped up, I don't think I could hold an oar long enough to finish an erg piece.”
I heard my voice copping out. In disbelief, I saw myself turning away from a fight I'd longed for, one I'd actively sought out and worked for so long and so hard. I didn't recognize myself. I didn't know what was happening to me, that my fear of failure had overcome my desire to prove myself.
“Okay then,” he said as he nodded at me. Our conversation was over. And so was my third consecutive attempt to make a National Team.
10
My Yale racing career was over. My four years of eligibility had expired, even though I had one more term of college to complete. I no longer had the cover of college sports to obscure my training for the Olympics. I had no proof of progress with which to console or inspire myself. The real world of college graduation and employment beckoned. Time was running out on my dream of greatness.
Four years as a solidly successful varsity athlete on a superior college crew made no ripple in my thinking. Three years of rejection from three different National Team coaches, however, reverberated. Three hard-thrown, hard-to-ignore punches in the stomach: not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.
I couldn't get anyone to want me. I had convinced no one to take a risk on me. No one had discerned any flicker of something special to invest in and build on. I wasn't worth a leap of faith.
Yet, I couldn't stop myself. Last chance, last chance. The longing would not die quietly. The 1980 Olympics hovered on my horizon.
I started my final term in the autumn of 1979. All the varsity rowers from my senior class, now college graduates, chose to train in New Haven one last time for a shot at the Olympics. Sally Fisher, Elaine Mathies, and Cathy Pew rejoined Mary O'Connor, who had made Kris Korzeniowski's US team along with Bouche. Having successfully stroked our collegiate crew to a National Championship, Mary stroked the US eight and, sure enough, Bouche was sidelined as a spare. The
eight won a bronze in Bled and returned home with visions of gold.
But Mary brought home more than her medal and a newfound confidence. “You really impressed Kris, Ginny,” she told me one day at the Yale gym. “He thought you were really feisty. You should keep training.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you could make it. He loves spirited rowers.”
What? I was shocked to learn that my bailing-out of the erg test he had offered hadn't torched my credibility. I didn't flunk that test of character after all.
My father thought it was ridiculous. Three strikes and you're out, as far as he was concerned. “It's time to grow up and enter the adult world,” he said. “You'll be graduating in December. What about finding a job?”
“Dad, you don't understand! I want to make the National Team. I came so close last time.”
“You've tried out three years in a row. The market's trying to tell you something. You're just not good enough.” My father could read the writing on the wall, even if I wouldn't.
He'd been a good supporter for four years. Yes, he had jazzed me about rowing, applying his trademark teasing to test and toughen me, but he'd made his share of trips to Derby to stand on the dock and witness the last snippet of many victories. He'd taken my phone calls and listened to my reports of team victories and private failures. He had followed my story closely, but now he was ready to turn the page and move on.
To get him off my back, I told my father I would stop training. But I kept showing up at the boathouse and heading to the gym. The heart wants what the heart wants.
Morning lifting sessions joined afternoon rows, and soon double workouts framed my waking hours once again. As the semester wound down, I prepared for my final exams and completed my senior essay.
I broached the truth with my father shortly before coming home for the Christmas holidays: “Dad, I've decided to keep rowing. I have to try out for the Olympic team. It's just one more try. A few more months.”
He sighed and said, “Well, as long as you can support yourself, I
guess it's up to you.” At least he knew enough not to waste his breath on a done deal.
I didn't relish the idea of staying in New Haven through one more winter, training in the steamy bowels of Payne Whitney. No matter. I organized every logistic to further my task of making the Olympic team. I tossed my newly minted BA certificate into a cardboard box, landed a menial job at Yale Medical School filling out grant application forms, and fed my training habit. I swallowed workouts like a whale gulps minnows. I welcomed the flow of physical challenges that defined my days, the twice-daily tide of workouts that washed away everything else.
In the four years since I had first learned to row and fallen hook, line, and sinker for my beloved sport, I had developed a prodigious appetite for the work involved. Instead of five to six weekly workouts, the number rose to ten, eleven, twelve, depending on the week. The quantity of total work multiplied, as each workout grew longer, with more exercises, more minutes, and more repetitions to complete.
I never had a chance to feel lonely as I submersed myself in the deep, narrow pursuit of rowing excellence. Every day I greeted Mary, Cathy, Bouche, Sally, and Elaine at the gym, just as I had for the past four years. Even though we were no longer training for the Yale team, we still regarded each other as teammates. Unspoken was the obvious truth that most of us wouldn't make the Olympic team. But that was for later, under the faraway cloud of the selection process, which would take place in Princeton again, starting in early May. We focused on the now: today's weight circuit, tank session, or stair run. The future would arrive soon enough. We had to be ready.
I had tried out three years in a row and ended up empty-seated every time. Any sane person would've acknowledged the obvious: it was time to give up and move on with life. But I never questioned the relevance or purpose of my goal. I just had to work harder, want it more, and prove myself tougher. Maybe I could make things happen. Maybe what I did would make a difference.
Just one more time, one more time. I know I can make it this time. I chanted encouragement to myself repeatedly, in spite of my exhaustion, my asthma attacks, and the writing on that damn wall.
Global geopolitics wreaked havoc on my dreams more fully than any coach. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the last week of 1979, ostensibly to support the country's prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, whose attempt to reduce the influence of Islam and introduce a more Western approach had triggered a civil war. Muslim leaders declared a jihad on him, joining the Mujahideen, a guerilla opposition group, to overthrow the Amin government.
The Soviets then proceeded to assassinate Prime Minister Amin, replacing him with Babrak Karmal, another local leader, but one who depended on the Russian military's support to maintain his position. Naturally, the Mujahideen weren't wildly enthusiastic about this arrangement either, but the Soviets claimed the Amin government had requested military aid to maintain its democratically elected hold on the country: they had simply selflessly responded to prevent the Afghan government's downfall at the hands of a terrorist group.
At any rate, the Mujahideen wanted their country back and generously extended their jihad to include the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the United States, embroiled in the Cold War and dedicated to preventing the spread of communism, interpreted the Soviets' maneuvers as an invasion of Afghanistan with an end goal of transforming the country into another communist bulwark. Of course, the West could not allow another country to join the Communist Bloc.
American foreign policy was headed by a president ostensibly dedicated to peace, generally not a problematic concept, but Jimmy Carter was also struggling politically. Halting the spread of Communism was not the only issue his administration had on its plate. All was not copacetic on the country's domestic front. Going into an election year, Carter's presidency was marred by the US energy crisis and the long lines at gas stations, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, rising unemployment, and inflation that exceeded 10 percent. The November 4 seizure of the US Embassy in Teheran added an international flavor to the pervasive scent of defeat wafting around the president. He could not risk further accusations of weakness.