Miami Recognizes Coach Harry Parker

Miami: The city of the ’72 Dolphins, Dwyane Wade, and…Harry Parker?

Miami Beach City Commissioner Jerry Libbin seems to hope so, as he declared Jan. 20 “Harry Parker Day” in the city to thank Harvard’s heavyweight head coach for bringing his (and Radcliffe’s) crews to the Ronald W. Shane Center for a winter training trip.

Of all of Parker’s accomplishments, this may have been the most surprising.

Arguably the most recognizable name in rowing, Parker has won pretty much everything at the collegiate level —starting with eight official national championships.

He also won eight “unofficial” national championships in which his crews beat all the best teams (of course, if this were BCS football, those titles wouldn’t need the “unofficial” label).

In addition, he’s taken home 25 Eastern Sprints varsity eight titles (including every single year between 1964 and 1970) and gone undefeated in the dual season 20 times since 1963. In the process, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated (1965) and had a boat house named after him (the Harry Parker Boathouse dedicated in 2008).

I could go on and on, talking about his Olympic experience, his accomplishments in single scull, and his success against Yale (“The Race” predates “The Game” by the way).

But why should I extol my admittedly-biased opinion when I can let Elaine Roden, executive director of the Shane Center, do the talking?

“Harry is a legend,” she said. “Anyone involved in rowing has heard of Harry Parker.”

That kind of visibility, Roden hopes, will bring crews to Miami Beach in the future.

But publicity aside, Roden felt that Parker’s accomplishments stood as reason enough to get his own day in Miami.

“We wanted to acknowledge that this amazing rowing legend was here,” Roden said.

Now Miami has a day celebrating a sports legend most in the city have never heard of. So just what exactly does this mean for the city?

Parker’s fame among the casual Floridian sports fan probably won’t increase too much.

Don’t expect people to replace Dwayne Wade jerseys with Harvard crew unis (you don’t want them to, trust me) or to watch Eastern Sprints instead of the NBA Playoffs.

But expect local businesses to get a boost in January if teams as large as Harvard and Radcliffe keep coming back.

Roden guessed that the average visiting crew brings 40-60 people; Harvard, on the other hand, brought 191.

And after a grueling practice, rowers tend to be pretty hungry.

That can make the difference for small businesses such as the Juiceatery, the team’s favorite smoothie spot this trip. As a rower on the women’s crew team, I went in to order a “milkberry” smoothie last Friday, only to be surprised when the girl behind the counter told me she was giving rowers a special discount because they brought so much business.

While our performance on the water may be what helps raise the profile of the Shane Center, if we are to have any kind of impact on the surrounding area, it will be with our appetites.

But maybe there’s a way we can contribute a little bit more. Now that we’ve gotten rave reviews from Roden for our behavior, maybe we can take it a little bit farther next year.

Because crew is such an exhausting sport, it’s easy to forget what a luxury it is. Everything about it—the travel, the boats, the oars, even the ergs—costs money. Even the best rowers in the world don’t turn a profit from it. Perhaps for these reasons, rowing has earned the reputation as a prep-school sport, one where the rich succeed.

Those more familiar with the sport know that’s not true—certainly not at the collegiate level, where anyone can walk on to an elite program such as Harvard, as I did last year.

But not everyone realizes that. The rowing world is very much separate from mainstream athletics, which is why we rowers hear Harry Parker and think of the rowing legend when others think they misheard “Harry Potter.”

But we have an opportunity to show otherwise. What if one afternoon, instead of rowing, we volunteered at a Miami elementary school or soup kitchen? Then we could give back to the community that plays host to us in January, allowing us an escape from the erg. It’s one thing to buy smoothies; it’s another to demonstrate appreciation.

Everyone seems to look up to sports stars. Maybe someday they’ll count Harry Parker, Liz O’Leary, and the Harvard and Radcliffe Crew teams among those stars.

We’ve already got a holiday, right?

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.