THE COMMISH: Stroking Below The Radar

There’s this old story about Harvard men’s crew coach Harry Parker. No one really knows whether it’s true or not, and in a sense, no one really cares. The fact that it could have happened is what makes it so intriguing.

As rumor has it, Parker—long considered the Vince Lombardi of the sport—was minding his business in the Murr center when he was approached by a security guard. Apparently, the guard did not recognize Parker—mistaking him for a homeless man—and asked him to leave the building.

Think that ever happened to Lombardi at Lambeau Field? Even better, think that ever happens to Tim Murphy?

But this is old news for people in the world of competitive crew, and anonymity is certainly nothing new for the men and women rowers here at Harvard. Despite the fact that both the men and women’s varsity teams are defending national champions, they receive about as much attention as The Harvard Crimson’s softball squad.

“Do we care that no one really pays attention?” says Radcliffe captain Stef Levner. “People will come up and ask ‘are you guys any good?’ And you’re like ‘yea, we’re pretty good.’ It’s kind of a running joke on the team.”

Keeping it a joke is probably the best way to deal with it because in crew, if you can’t look at things with a humorous twist, you probably won’t last too long.

From afar, it appears you have to be slightly crazy in order to actually enjoy the sport. There are no fans, no chance of fame and certainly no illusions of future fortune. Instead, rowers look forward to early morning practices on frigid rivers and vomit-inducing workouts.

“It certainly seems to attract those people who like a certain bit of hardship,” said senior Kip McDaniel, a stroke of the men’s heavyweight team.

However, getting rowers to talk about those hardships seems to be almost impossible.

“There is an underlying rule not to talk about how much it hurts,” McDaniel said.

Instead, rowers will tell you about their “horror” stories, which many of them wear like badges of honor. And there appears to be a common thread between many of these torture tales: the erg.

The erg, short for ergometer, is a training device used by rowers to simulate rowing in water. A stint on the erg is, as one rower described to me, “seven minutes of wanting to kill yourself.”

Sounds like fun, right?

The erg causes people to throw up so frequently that it doesn’t even turn heads anymore. At the C.R.A.S.H Bs—a nationwide competition every year conducted entirely on ergs—McDaniel once had to erg in his best friend and teammate, captain Alex Chastain-Chapman's, vomit.

“He went right before me and vomited all over the erg,” said McDaniel with a laugh. “And they didn’t have time to clean it up so they put this catnip type stuff down and I had to erg right in that…Alex is what we call a puker.”

Then there’s captain of the lightweight squad, Alex Binkley’s story from C.R.A.S.H Bs his junior year in high school.

“I got off the erg and just passed out. It wasn’t a big deal. I woke up two minutes later,” said Binkley, who then continued on to what really bothered him about the episode. “But I lost my watch. I think someone stole it.”

Finally, there’s Levner’s story from high school about watching her coxswain nearly lose her ring finger in order to save the boat during a practice.

“She reached under the boat and pushed away a log,” Levner recalled. “Then she pulled up her hand and said ‘the boat’s ok, but my finger is not.’ And her finger was almost severed right in half”

So, we’ve got a sport where you lose your lunch, your consciousness, your watch and nearly your finger—like I said, you’ve got be slightly crazy to enjoy it.

But they do enjoy it, and when you ask them why, they all give the same answer: the team.

“There’s a bond that forms that doesn’t form in other sports,” McDaniel said. “Your teammates are so important.”

Said Levner, “Everyone relies so much on each other. It’s not like you can sub-in someone when you’re not feeling well. You really need everyone on the team…and then there’s this bond.”

And then maybe, for just a second, it all seems to make some sense. While they’re anonymous to the rest of the world, to each other, there’s no one more important.

It’s almost enough to make you want to run down to the MAC and hop on an erg—if it wasn’t for the whole puking and fainting thing of course.

—Staff writer David H. Stearns can be reached at stearns@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears alternate Thursdays.