ROWING STYLE From those outlines of style that have been given in the preceding chapters it will be appre ciated that the American oarsman has gone nearly the whole gamut of rowing, and that pre tentious and circumstantial must be any essay that attempts thoroughly to trace the develop ment of our style. And such a minute dissertation is rather a useless effort, for, although rowing is a matter of small things, yet there exist certain characteristics of each period which sufficiently determine the stroke.
It seems to me that our American passion for victory and our complete neglect of the personal equation have been the reasons for the absurdly slow progress that a half century has brought in our styles of rowing. England passed through a period of chaos, and came out with what they believed to be the best stroke, and it is certainly one that produces speed in an English crew. They have experimented from time to time with their stroke and have made improvements, but the changes have been real improvements upon the former idea, and never started, like our im provements, by first destroying the older stroke. It is a common fault to neglect the oarsman in all discussions of stroke, — to consider him a machine, and to take for granted that it is style and not strength that wins races ; therefore, when a race is lost, the first criticism is that of form and manner, and somehow it always happens that the crew leading home is said to have rowed per fectly, and that all the other crews had faults. This may be true and it may not ; often the win ning crew rows very badly but very strongly, and a third crew may have far better form and may be putting on a lesser strength in a far more economical manner. But in our happy manner we close our eyes to the faults of the victor and think that the losers are wretched; the followers of the losing crew wag their heads sagely and declare that a change in stroke must be made.
Thus no stroke ever has a really fair trial in this land unless it happens to win in the first year, and since winning is as much strength as style, our oarsmen have often discarded good sys tems because just at that time their college did not turn out oarsmen. There is a vast differ ence between oarsmen and men who are simply possessed of great physical• strength, though the latter have often found favor with coaches who believe that speed for a boat will come out of every swelling muscle.
A survey of the fastest crews that America has known : in club crews— the z4ialanta four that went to England, the Shoe-wae-eae-mettes, the Hillsa'ales, and the Vesper eight; and in college crews — the Cornell six of '75, and their eight of 19o3, the Bancroft crews of Harvard, the '88 crew of Yale, and the Henley eight of Pennsylvania. Here are nine crews all using the slide, and every one fast, yet each is the exponent of a different stroke. But each realized that fundamental of all speed rowing, — men strong and enduring on the oar, no matter how slight their build, who took the water at the same moment, put on their power together, and left the water as one oar. This is the secret of every fast crew, and though we may wonder how the boat moves while the oarsmen are conducting themselves so out rageously, yet a glance at their outboard form will show why they go so fast. In watermanship all of these crews were alike in their nicety, but in other respects varied widely. The club crews and the Cornell six had nothing of what we call body form, while the other college crews were all machine-like in their regularity. Some used a short stroke and some a long; some caught hard, and others did not put on the power until the middle of the stroke. Their styles of rowing have all been touched on elsewhere, and from these examples which represent the speed of our rowing, I deduce certain propositions of rowing, nearly all self-evident, yet some of which are often lost in discussion. They are : — (I) Each oar must take the water at the same moment and with nearly the same power, so that a single and firm impetus may be given the boat ; if the power is not equal, one oar will be going faster than another and the firmness destroyed. It is seldom possible to have a crew of equal strength, yet, endurance being equal, a crew of even strength will go faster than one of the same total strength, half of whose members are stronger than the other half. The power, through the stroke, must go on in unison, whatever point is selected, and the oars must leave the water to gether, else the late man will drag the boat when it is most important that it should be kept under way.