“It takes energy to get angry . . . I have to stay focused.”
Joe’s relationship with his family was always tense and his stepmother especially refused to accept Joe as part of her family. Thula saw Joe as an intruder, someone that would only make her life harder and she did everything she could to make sure that Harry cut Joe out of their family. Despite being treated in a mean way, Joe refused to hate his family, despite being shut off by them. He thus decided to focus his energy on rowing and refused to let himself be influenced by his family’s negative attitude towards him.
"But not just about me. It has to be about the boat."
Rowing is considered to be one of the most intensive sports, a sport that depends on the cooperation between the rowers in the boat and the boat itself. Joe was well aware of the fact and he wanted to make it clear from the beginning that he was not the only one who was responsible for the team’s success. Instead, it was the sum of the combined efforts of his teammates, the boat that had to be built in a certain way to reach a certain speed, and the way they were trained. In this sense, Joe is humble enough to admit that if he were to be alone, he would have never succeeded.
The hurting was taking its toll, and that was just fine with Joe. Hurting was nothing new to him.
Rowing is an extremely demanding sport from a physical point of view. The rowers have to be fit and resistant when faced with pain. In the beginning, when Joe applied to be on the team, a large number of students were accepted. After two months, however, more than half gave up on the team because they were no longer able to put up with the pain of being a rower. The ones who did not give up on the team were the boys coming from modest backgrounds, those who were already accustomed with dealing with pain. Joe was among those people and he admitted that his past is what helped him push through the pain.
If you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places. The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind.
This is a hopeful quote that ends Chapter 2, which focuses on Joe's difficult early childhood. Despite everything that Joe had experienced within his young life, his eyes were still open to finding and discovering wonder and amazement in unexpected places. In this case, it is when he learned that edible food grew in the wilderness during a school outing. This quote foreshadows themes of the book: people you would least expect rose to the occasion and became national heroes.
The common denominator in all these conditions—whether in the lungs, the muscles, or the bones, is overwhelming pain. And that is perhaps the first and most fundamental thing that all novice oarsmen must learn about competitive rowing in the upper echelons of the sport: that pain is part and parcel of the deal. It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.
This quote accompanies the description of the pain associated with rowing and how that pain can transform you from one thing into another. The author makes the point that much of what one experiences while rowing is a metaphor for what is experienced during life, and this was true in Joe's life. Joe had experienced an incredible amount of pain and loss for someone his age, yet he continued to go on, working and fighting for everything. In Joe's case, he had not allowed himself to be defined by his circumstances but instead by how he had responded to his circumstances. This quote echoes throughout the book, particularly in his wife Joyce's explanation for how she fell in love with Joe.
But Bolles sometimes spoke of life-transforming experiences. He held out the prospect of becoming part of something larger than themselves, of finding in themselves something they did not yet know they possessed, of growing from boyhood to manhood. At times he dropped his voice a bit and shifted his tone and cadence and talked of near mystical moments on the water—moments of pride, elation, and deep affection for one’s fellow oarsmen, moments they would remember, cherish, and recount to their grandchildren when they were old men. Moments, even that would bring them nearer to God.
Bolles' statement turns out to be true, as evidenced by the fact that a story about a boat of boys is now a book. All of the men in the boat were transformed by their experience.
"Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you've ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars."
Pocock said this to Joe after calling him up to the loft in late February of the Olympic training season. He had been watching Joe row and thought he was a fine oarsmen. While he had a few technical deficiencies, the thing that was really holding him back was his inability to be vulnerable with his fellow teammates. If he could trust them, if they could think of themselves as a team, as an orchestra trying to play a symphony, then he would open up an entire world of possibility. He would be rewarded with a richness of experience that he could not imagine. He would feel as if he were rowing among the stars, as Pocock said.
The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were all also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they. The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility— the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.
After months of playing with lineups, Ulbrickson finally landed on a roster for his varsity boat, and the effect was immediate when the roster was finally right. The boat sped away from the competition and was head and shoulders better than the others. They were a group that was comfortable with one another, and this quote explains why. Not only had they all been through the same grueling training from Ulbrickson, but they had gone through similar life circumstances. They had humility because of larger events that they had no control over, and they understood how precarious life could be. This quote reflects on the boys' pasts, but it also foreshadows the larger forces going on while they were rowing, such as the rise of Nazism, the Dust Bowl, or the recovery from the Great Depression.
That same day, back in the States, a New Yorker named Richard Wingate sat down and penned what would turn out to be a prophetic letter to the sports editor of the New York Times. "Mr. Brundage," he began, "has reached his destination, the Utopia of sportsmanship and good-will, where Nazi beer and Jewish blood flow freely— where Hitler-made robots torment and persecute the living dead . . . For two months the dead will be buried. But with the conclusion of the Olympics in September, their graves will be desecrated . . . and dead men once more will walk the streets of Germany."
The letter speaks to how Germany was using the Olympics as a smokescreen to distract from the ongoing atrocities there. The imagery of Nazi beer flowing with Jewish blood elucidates an image of celebration and destruction occurring concurrently. It had been hidden—buried—but would go on once more when the Olympics concluded.
Johnny White said, "It gave you a grand feeling." And that was precisely what it had been carefully crafted to do—give you a grand feeling. It had begun the process of determining the world's opinion about the new Germany. It had hung out a sign for all to see: "Welcome to the Third Reich. We are not what they say we are."
Germany's primary goal in hosting the Olympics was to create a "movie set" that would convince foreigners there was no need for intervention, despite the ongoing detention, and eventual killing of, Germany's Jewish population. It was a global propaganda campaign and it was successful. When Avery Brundage, the American Olympic Committee chair saw the reception from the Germans when the Americans arrived, he declared, "No nation since ancient Greece has captured the true Olympic spirit as has Germany." In reality, it was as contradictory to the Olympic spirit as it could possibly be.
