SOONER OR TAITER: It’s All About Racing, Baby

April 3, 2006.

The worst day of the year.

Not because I was stuck on a crowded flight back to school. Not even because I landed on a rain-soaked, dreary runway at Logan Airport just hours after leaving 80-degree weather.

No, the first Monday in April is the worst day of the year, every year. It’s NCAA Championship Monday, when all interest I have in sporting events gets packed away with the pre-made championship T-shirts of the unfortunate loser.

As an almost lifelong resident of Oklahoma, I’ve never been attached to professional sports. Franchises appropriately shun the underpopulated and geographically-dispersed Sooner State for the greener pastures of big cities and more loyal fan bases.

Most of the time, I don’t really mind.

The NBA lost its luster for me when Michael Jordan retired, and even the enormous Oklahoma City Hornets billboards on I-35 have trouble wresting attention from a populace rabid for college football.

And the prospect of a summer of baseball highlights and steroid scandals leaves me uninterested and even perturbed.

Baseball isn’t big in Oklahoma. It’s often dwarfed in the papers by high school football or a detailed article about which second-string OU cornerback pulled his hamstring in two-a-days.

So the spring, at least for me, is hardly the time for new beginnings.

Or at least it was before I came to Harvard last year. Last spring, as Opening Day came and went, as baseball games lasted late into the night and Baseball Tonight ran even later, I found myself engaged in one of Boston’s spring pastimes.

And not once did I ever set foot in Fenway Park.

The spring came alive for me on the Charles River, often before most people had even woken up to check the sports page. In 20 years, I’ve never managed to sit through an entire baseball game—but I’ll wake up at 5:30 a.m. to go watch crew races in the driving rain.

Hear me out on this. Few teams on the Harvard campus win as often or as triumphantly as those that occupy the Newell and Weld Boathouses. The men’s and women’s programs have combined for 30 national titles. Olympic boats—both from the U.S. and many other countries—quite often have a Crimson tint to them.

I’ve been spoiled most of my conscious life by Oklahoma football and Kansas basketball, though even their frustrating collapses on the biggest of stages pale in comparison to the consistency of Harvard’s crew programs.

But enough about success. The trophies and photos enshrined in both Newell and Weld are testament enough to that.

Rowing, both on the collegiate and the Olympic level, maintains the winner-take-all element so unique to college sports and so neglected in most of the professional realm.

There’s no drawn-out series to watch, no seven-week playoff colossus that dulls the NBA until the Finals.

There’s one start, one six-minute race to see who can outlast lactic acid buildup longer, and one hurried chance to get everything perfect. There are no timeouts, no pitching changes, and no substitutions. One chance, and one chance only.

And that’s what makes the 5:30 a.m. stroll along the Charles so worth it. Boats don’t take days off, as is often the charge of baseball analysts who criticize lazy base runners. The pressure to get things exactly right the first time makes those brief six minutes some of the most exciting I’ve ever seen.

There’s the back and forth of bow balls as two neck-and-neck crews approach the catch at different times. There’s the furious start from dead in the water, when boats go from zero to 50 strokes per minute in five flicks of an oar. And there’s often a concerted push at the midway point, as crews prepare to enter the brutal third 500 meters on a high note—and with some distance between opposing boats.

Tenths of seconds change races; baseball innings, on the other hand, can last half an hour.

Even though the Eastern Sprints and IRA Championships still sit a month away, each weekend plays out as a mini-championship. Harvard has just one shot at each opponent until a rematch at Lake Quinsigamond and another in Camden, N.J.

It’s a veritable NCAA Tournament every weekend, culminating in a six-across frenzy that can cater to both upsets and the domination of perennial favorites in May.

Baseball season, and its annual 162-game epic, can wait—I’ve put it on hold all my life. But both the men’s heavyweights and lightweights are at home this weekend for the only time all spring.

I don’t know about you, but my alarm’s set for 5:30 a.m.

—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.