THE EIGHT

Hagiographic account of the 2008 Harvard rowing season and a general paean to all things Harvard.

“The first collegiate sports competition,” writes former U.S. World Rowing Team member Saint Sing (The Wonder Crew: The Untold Story of a Coach, Navy Rowing, and Olympic Immortality, 2008), “was a rowing race between Harvard and Yale” in 1852. Since then, Harvard crews have dominated the sport of rowing as no other college team has done in any other sport. The author follows the trials and tribulations of the elite of the elite—V8, the men’s heavyweight varsity eight of 2008—as they attempt to continue this tradition of excellence. Saint Sing ably captures the grueling nature of the sport, in which the athlete must exert maximum physical effort and mental concentration over the full course of a race, and at the same time remain perfectly synched with the seven other crew members. She follows the scholar-athletes of the V8 as they train endlessly while fulfilling the demands of a Harvard education, and offers a loving portrait of Harvard’s legendary coach, Harry Parker. The 2008 season started slowly for the V8 as they struggled in the early Dual Cup races, lost in the Eastern Sprints and experienced, for Harvard, a lackluster season—until the Harvard-Yale race, the most venerated of rowing competitions. With lightning-quick prose, Saint Sing describes the dramatic tension of the contest. Unfortunately, there is too little of this type of detail and too much overblown metaphor. Parker’s coaching words “echo a call into the hollows of the soul where slumbering dreams nestle on a dark rock.” The athletes become almost props: “regal, elegant, and a bit mysterious in their sleek, taut profiles…breathing promise in the morning mist.” Harvard is not a university but a holy abstraction: “Alexandria on the banks of the Nile, Rome on the banks of the Tiber, Harvard on the banks of the Charles, each has its own link to the sacred, through temples, pyramids, and fountains that link the earth to the world above.”

Intermittently revealing but inundated with hyperbole. Rowing enthusiasts are better served by David Halberstam’s now classic The Amateurs (1985).