Our Most Beautiful Sport

 

Arshay Cooper writes what’s real. And it’s A Most Beautiful Thing.

He writes turmoil and peace and conflict and redemption and death and survival and escape. Funny thing is though, Cooper’s story of Manley High Crew in the 1990s barely touches the uncomfortable stuff. But it’s uncomfortable anyway.

Get it, read it, do it now. Then watch the movie.
www.amostbeautifulthing.com

Want some privilege? Or at least, wanna see it? Maybe privilege is just comfort: a shelter from what’s real.

Take a look at rowing. Our sport. Our devotion. Tons, literally millions and millions, of dollars get shoveled into our passion every year for equipment, gear, outfits, travel. And who receives all this largesse? Youth teams from private preps all over the country. Colleges with vast endowments. And of course, holy vanilla milky mayonnaise, Batman. The White is so bright, I gotta look the other way. Or I might get, y’know... uncomfortable.

For more privilege, pick up a copy of Doctor Frank’s The Boys in the Boathouse. OK, you can’t pick one up. You have to read it on line until that glorious day it gets published. But blissfully unaware, we were, of the gifts handed to us. We cared about rowing, about each other, and at least in some cases, about school. And by the way, in our whiteness and our maleness, we were assholes about it. Major assholes. Please see Chapter Nine. 

Hardship, beyond rule violations and lake shots, was virtually unknown. Burning your toast at breakfast was about as bad as it got.

We didn’t plan a route through gang territory every day on the way to class. We never saw dead bodies in the street. Dawn found us wondering about practice, the weather, our finals; not about which of us might be dead, or lost to drugs, or in jail, by sundown. 

Cooper writes of transformation. He describes with eloquence that moment the boat leaves the dock, that moment when turmoil falls away like the shell's rippled wake. It’s escape, it’s peace, it’s a moment on the water like no other in his life: he just lets it all go. For the next hour and a half, until the shell slips back alongside the floats, Arshay Cooper is free.  

Doc got baffled right there. For us, nothing on land needed escaping from. And it’s no exaggeration that for the Boys of Conibear in the 1970s, the turmoil was on the water. The stress, the uncertainty, the “what’s Dik gonna do next?” kept us pulling. If we didn’t embrace the turmoil, fight, scrap, give everything on every stroke… if some other guy on some other team was working that much harder that day… our team, our friends, and the honor of our program was at stake. There was no peace out there. 

That, as much as any scene in the book, describes our privilege. We struggled on the water because we could… because there was peace on land. Anyone from our times who gets all nostalgic about sunsets and flat glimmering water and kumbayah being part of rowing, they’re too old to remember. Or they weren’t a Husky.

And it’s what sets Cooper’s story apart. But he circles back to the brotherhood part. Manley High had brotherhood. At Washington, we had brotherhood. And we still do. And so does Manley. In that sense, Doc is proud to say, we’re all connected. 

Arshay Cooper. Our stories connect us.
© 2019 Richard Schultz.    www.amostbeautifulthing.com

 Daniel James Brown wrote a pretty good rowing book too. A fabulous rowing book. Maybe you’ve heard of it. He wrote grit and determination and victory at the top of the rowing food chain: the 1936 Olympics. He wrote improbable heroes and a watershed moment in history. He wrote with passion and love about Seattle’s top sports story of the 1900s. 

Improbable, yeah. Everything about those godlike Huskies and their fabled victory was improbable, from their humble logger/fisherman/farmboy roots, to their desperate need for dollars to stay in school, to their victories over the east coast snobs and again over Hitler’s best. 

But Arshay Cooper’s story… it was, frankly, impossible. That a rowing shell would appear one day, with a recruiting video and an enthusiastic white ambassador, in the lunch room of one of the most violent schools in Chicago – no way. That a handful of young men and women would even show up for practice, learn on ergs, and make their way to the water – you’re kidding. That a team of them would train at Princeton, travel to regattas around the Midwest, and finally beat their cross-water white preppy rivals – absolutely not.

And that any one of them survived to adulthood after so many mornings wondering if they’d see the sundown… that any are  even alive today to tell the story (the tragedy is that not all of them are) – well, that story tops them all. That is nothing short of a miracle. 

And that, my privileged rowing friends, should make every one of us pretty damn uncomfortable.

Book – A Most Beautiful Thing: A Memoir     by Arshay Cooper

Film Documentary – A Most Beautiful Thing     Directed by Mary Mazzio / Narrated by Common

              Click to watch the trailer