Introduction:
The cover of The Boys in the Boat tells you this book is about “Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics.” Perusing the book’s contents will reveal it is also a story about ideals: Hitler and his Aryan race clashing against the ideal Americans, and the backwoods North and Northwest clashing against the upper crust elite of the American East. The book is also an underdog story, a coming of age tale, and a celebration of heroism. But I think what the book is about at its core is not a celebration of heroism (though it is that) nor a clash of ideals (though they do frequently). I think the book at its core is about nine Americans and their pursuit of glory.
Section 1: Buckshot
Since the core of the book is a brief one, I have plenty of room to verbally spread out. Here, therefore, are a series of scatter shot observations that might not seem related, but will (hopefully) in the conclusion tie up with a neat little bow. Proverbs 22:29 states “do you see a man who excels at his work? He shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before unknown men.” Solomon illustrates here one of God’s recurring design features in the universe, which is cream rises: excellent work will not go unnoticed. Proverbs 22:29 is especially appropriate for the boys in the boat: at the end of their Olympic race, their coach who understated everything, unambiguously told the press these nine boys were “the finest I ever saw seated in a shell. And I've seen some corking boatloads” (354). It seems appropriate that men who excelled at rowing better than any other group, stood before probably the single most influential man of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, as well as 10,000 citizens in the crowds, and the rest of the world at their radios.
A second takeaway is their virtue: it is one thing to perform and do well at something difficult, like a workout or a football game, when everything is pretty equal. It is another to perform when all of the odds are in favor of everyone else. Playing well when the odds are even shows excellent skill. Playing when the odds are against you shows character. The character displayed by the Washington rowing team, the subjects of the book, crops up more than almost anything else in the book. Joe, the 7th oarsman is dirt poor. He is partly dirt poor because he is growing up in the great depression, and partly dirt poor because when he was 15 his family literally left him standing on the front porch, in the pouring rain, to fend completely for himself. Joe, however, paid for his own high school and fed himself by finding odd jobs (during a time when most men couldn’t find work): “he dug wells. He built barns, crawling around in the rafters and pounding nails. He hand cranked cream separators and lugged 120-pounds of cans of milk and sweet cream around dairy farms…” He found part time work felling giant cottonwoods so immense “...that it took an hour or more for Joe and Charlie to fell just one, pulling an eighty-four inch two man saw across the soft white heartwood” (62). Heading to their rooms rented for them before they raced the California, the Washington team couldn't help noticing the contrast between California’s “brand spanking new boat house...complete with city water, hot showers, a dining room, cooking facilities, electric lights, and sleeping quarters,” and their own accommodations, “with its leaky roof, cold river water showers,” (182-183) meager fare, and eight or nine boys to a room. In the Olympic race the Washington team spent four years training for, the Germans, anxious to prove the Aryan race superior, “had implemented new rules for lane selection, rules never used before in Olympic competition” (335). The Germans had arranged the racing lanes so that “it handicapped the fastest and most talented boats and gave every advantage to the slower boats. It gave the protected lane to the host country and her ally, the worst lanes to her prospective enemies' ” (334). The day of the race, the eighth oarsman of the Washington team, the oarsman who set the pace for the entire rest of the crew was sick. While the crowds and the German leaders, Hitler foremost, filed into the stadium to watch, “the American boys found a free massage table and laid Don Hume (the eighth oarsman) out on it, like a corpse bundled in overcoats, keeping him warm and dry and rested as long as they could” (337). When they climbed into their boats and all six boats were tensed at the start line, the official starter “emerged from his shelter…almost immediately, he turned to lanes one and two and...dropped the flag” (340). The Americans and the British never heard him, and never saw the flag drop. “Four boats surged forward. The British boat and the [American boat], for a horrific moment, sat motionless at the line, dead in the water” (341). In response to cheating, sudden disease, and the prospect of a titanic battle that they were sure to lose, “all eight american oars dug into the water” (343).
Third, if there is one refrain over and over in the book, it is that of unity. When interviewing Joe Rantz, the author discovered Joe would tear up most when he talked about the boat. “I realized that the boat was something more than the shell or its crew. It encompassed but transcended both...it was a shared experience...when nine good hearted young men strove together, pulled as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love” (2). Unity is what bound these boys together and gave an experience beautiful enough to move a man to tears 50 years later by its memory. The emphasis on unity is everywhere in the book: after FDR’s speech to a crowd, the author sums up the moment “if there was little they could do individually...perhaps they lay in something more fundamental—the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together” (122). Since his family’s utter desertion of him, Joe holds onto his independence, refusing to completely trust others—resulting in poor oarsmanship. George Pocock, a philosopher carpenter and the best shell builder in the world, gives Joe the advice he needs: “it wasn’t enough to master the technical details of [rowing]. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it” (214). Joe surrenders himself in the Olympic race: “Joe realized with startling clarity there was nothing more he could do to win the race...except one thing. He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it” (355). The first chapter of the book puts unity as the chief virtue of rowing: the author in that chapter details what it would take for the scatter of freshman boys of 1933 to be part of the team to win Olympic gold in 1936: “the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique. And which of them, coupled improbably with all these other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other boys in the boat” (23). Unity is the principal thing in rowing.
Conclusion: Man’s Chief End
So what about rowing could cause an old man simply recalling his experience to break down in tears? Why would rowing a boat fast in an arbitrary direction be worthwhile to anyone? Because rowing is glorious. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism declares, man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever: we are designed by God to be “earthen vessels” that carry His glory, a role we begin now but fulfill when we are raised up on the last day (2 Corinthians 4:6-7, 14-15). But there are also lesser shadows of glory that mimic man’s chief end: Proverbs 20:29 states “the glory of young men is their strength, and the splendor of old men is their gray hair.” Paul tells us “if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her…” (1 Corinthians 11:15). So there are many kinds of smaller glories, which are shadows of the great glory awaiting Christians at the end of history. These smaller glories are the appetizers in this world to the marriage supper of the lamb in the new world (Revelation 19:9): young men’s strength and woman’s hair do not fulfill men’s and women’s desire for glory, but they do whet the appetite. I do not think it is a coincidence that the men throughout The Boys in the Boat use religious analogies to describe rowing: for instance, an entire section of the book is titled “touching the divine,” quoting Pocock. Rowing mimics the kind of glory humans were created to be filled with, the kind of glory only found in worship of God. It is rowing’s mimicry of that glory found in worshiping God that makes it worthy of desire. The boys in the boat then are pursuing glory achieved through physical excellence. But the boys strive for glory not as Hitler strives to make his Germany glorious. The boys do not row for themselves: they threw their egos over the stern a while back. They pull for the glory of the man in front of them and behind them. They pull for each other's glory. It is this humility in rowing that the author asserts was the doorway to their greatness. It is this self sacrifice that the author asserts is the most important characteristic of rowing, a characteristic combined with discipline and strength that results in glory that puts to shame all of the Nazi machinations in the Berlin Olympics, a glory that is “a poem of motion, a symphony of swinging blades” (249). It is a glory worth enough that whole hosts of men and women strain at oars and devote themselves to all kinds of sports to pursue it, a glory beautiful enough that recalling it 50 years later a man can be moved to tears—and, glorious as it is, it is only a shadow of the glory when the Church, in unity, humbles herself before the King of Glory.