Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs

In retrospect, it seems like a moment of epiphany, but on that Saturday in June 1963, it was simply a day of rough, stormy weather on the Thames River in New London, Connecticut. No one could remember the Harvard- Yale crew race ever having been postponed. Late that afternoon, race officials sent the freshman crews out, using them as guinea pigs to see if the course was rowable. It wasn't. Both freshman boats nearly sank, and at times there was air visible beneath the hulls as they cut across the huge waves.

To the Harvard varsity, the day's delay might have seemed a reprieve. That morning, a headline on the Boston Globe's sports page declared Yale the favorite by a huge margin, and their crew was openly talking about going to the 1964 Olympics. At the Eastern Sprints, the spring regatta that brings together the major college crews in the East, Yale came second to Cornell. In contrast, Harvard had finished next to last in its heat, failing even to make the final. Harvard coxswain Ted Washburn '64, A.M. '66, recalls, "They were just a superior crew, period. Rowing the way we had at the Sprints, I never imagined we'd beat Yale."

It had been an unsettling year in Harvard's Newell Boathouse. In January, head coach Harvey Love had died suddenly of a heart attack; the freshman coach, 27-year-old Harry Parker, took charge of the program in an acting capacity. Under Parker, the crew recorded a respectable 3-1 record that spring, but after their disastrous elimination at the Sprints, Parker decided to take the varsity back to fundamentals. He made them row at rates as low as 22 or 24 strokes per minute (racing cadences are generally in the 30s or 40s), and concentrate on solid technique-long strokes through the water, optimal blade coverage. Parker starved his crew of race-tempo work. "We begged him," Washburn says. "When are we ever going to row at racing cadence?" The Harvard eight didn't realize that they were getting faster. They knew only that the boat felt good.

The Connecticut weather cleared. Early Sunday morning, the varsity race went off under a blue, cloudless sky. The throng of pleasure boats that had crowded the course the day before had gone home; there were almost no spectators. The river was dead calm-ideal for rowing.

At the start, Yale shot emphatically away from Harvard. "There they go," thought Washburn. "But we're going to row our race." Yale developed their lead for the first mile, Washburn recalls, until open water separated the crews. But then they stopped moving away. Harvard began grinding down the gap. A little before the two-mile mark, Harvard passed Yale and continued rowing away from them, finishing over eight boat lengths in front after four miles. It was not only an upset, but a rout.

Harvard continued rowing away from Yale for another 18 years. The Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations would pass, and Ronald Reagan would become president, before Yale won again at New London, in 1981. From that moment in 1963, Harvard would not lose a single intercollegiate race until 1969. By then, Harry Parker was a demiurge in the world of rowing. He is the most successful college rowing coach of the latter half of the twentieth century, and perhaps of all time. After 33 years, Parker is the dean of all Harvard coaches. He has compiled an astounding regular-season record of 125-25 (.833 winning percentage), with 14 undefeated seasons. His crews have won the Eastern Sprints 17 times; the next best record over the same span is Brown's, with five wins. Since the institution of the national cham-pionship regatta at Cincinnati in 1982, Harvard has prevailed there six times. (Brown again is second, with three championships.)

Parker's record dazzles not only with its excellence but with its consistency. He has had only one losing season, in 1984, when the crew won two races and lost three. "Over the past 33 years, how many years has Harvard not been one of the three fastest crews in the country?" asks Travis Metz '91, varsity coxswain from 1989 to 1991. "My guess would be: less than five times. Look at all other programs-how many times were they among the top three? Nobody else could claim more than 10 years, at best."

Georgetown coach Tony Johnson, who as Yale's head coach from 1970 to 1989 opposed Parker for two decades, observes, "Forty years ago, one school would win for three or four years-like the Navy Admirals in the early '50s-then someone else would come along. But Harry would dominate with one group of guys, they'd graduate, and another group would come in and he'd still win." Al Shealy '75, who stroked the 1973-75 varsity boats, puts it simply: "Harry is in a league by himself."

"Who is this man they call King of the Crews?" asks Eric Sigward '68, an oarsman on the undefeated 1966 varsity. Parker is both brutally simple and exceedingly complex, utterly straightforward and maddeningly elusive. "When people approach Harry, they have certain expectations of the reaction they are going to get, and they are often surprised," says Peter Raymond, Ed.M. '83, who coached Harvard and Radcliffe crews from 1974 to 1981. "They are not talking to someone who thinks about things the way they do. Harry represents a categorically different way of living in the world. So they call him `weird.'" Indeed, generations of Harvard oarsmen have nicknamed Parker "The Weird One." The moniker has never been one of the coach's favorites, but the athletes' use is not pejorative. Washburn, Harvard's freshman coach from 1964 to 1987, notes that one etymology of "weird" derives it from "wayward" (way'rd), meaning "off the beaten path," or "different." Yes. He is different.

THE FIRE.
Parker has "a consuming desire to win," says Metz; Geoffrey Knauth '83, another Harvard coxswain, adds, "I put Harry's desire to win as being above all other coaches'." Washburn says, "The difference between Harry and other coaches is that those guys can live with losing. He is the most competitive human being I've ever met, period." Parker, characteristically, smiles and underplays it, simply noting that "I vastly prefer winning to losing."

Vastly prefer. At a pick-up soccer game one fall, Parker went up for a head ball and chipped his tooth as he collided with another player, then kept on playing as if nothing had happened. After tripping and landing on the concrete while running up the steps of Harvard Stadium to train with his crew, Parker, blood streaming from his leg, not only sustained his pace but elbowed a slower oarsman impeding his progress. During a 50-kilometer cross-country ski race in 20-below Vermont weather, Parker once concealed his frozen ears as he skied through a medical checkpoint; he completed the race with ears that were severely frostbitten, and tender for years afterward.

In another recreational soccer game, at an Olympic training facility in Gunnison, Colorado, in 1968, Parker and Peter Raymond, then a rower on the U.S. team, both charged a loose ball. "He was going full tilt," Raymond recalls. "I realized that if I continued after the ball he was probably going to break my leg. Here I was, an Olympic oarsman, about to have my leg broken by the coach of the team!

"When Harry was personally engaged, the limit to competition was entirely set by the other person," Raymond continues. "There was never a point where he would say, `This isn't worth it.'" At an early age, Parker himself seemed to recognize the ferocity of his competitive instincts. Although he played high school baseball and basketball, Parker didn't go out for ice hockey because, as he once explained to varsity oarsman John Brock '77, "I didn't think I should play anything where they would give me a stick."

He could, however, hold his own with a croquet mallet. At Red Top, the camp on the Thames River where Harvard crews train for the Harvard-Yale race, croquet games involving outrageous rule-bending and overt cheating are a tradition. "One year it was decided that the old croquet set had bitten the dust-half the wickets were made of bent coat hangers," recalls Tiff Wood '75, who rowed with the undefeated Harvard crews of the early 1970s. "We went out and bought a brand new croquet set. Harry read the rules and then threw them away. So he was the only one who could play with complete authority!"

Be it horseshoes or checkers, no contest is so casual that Parker won't try his utmost to mow the opponent down. Another Red Top tradition is the board game Risk, whose goal is world domination. "It's well known that Harry loved to cheat at Risk," says Knauth. "Somebody would get a phone call and leave the room, and Harry would rearrange the board." Parker and his wife, Kathy Keeler, have a summer place in New Hampshire where one can drive golf balls into a lake. Since the lake is shallow, it's also possible to retrieve the balls by diving. "Of course, even there," grins oarsman Jake Fiechter '67, "it's, how many golf balls can you get?"

Raymond once asked Parker what he might choose if he could be anyone at any time in history. Skipper of a pirate ship, Parker said. One boat dominating another. Raymond smiles, and muses on piracy: "No rules."

THE DRIVE.
"Competitiveness reeked through the boathouse," says Gregg Stone '75, J.D. '79, another undefeated oarsman of the early 1970s. "Harry knew how to play on that and how to get the most out of it." Ian Gardiner '68, M.B.A. '74, who stroked the undefeated 1967 varsity, says, "He'd let us joust with each other-running stadiums, lifting weights. He created a very competitive environment and turned us loose in it." Stone adds, "It almost got out of control at times. Some couldn't take the intensity-the occasional fistfight at a soccer game."

Steve Gladstone, who coached at Harvard from 1969 to 1972 and was Brown's head coach from 1982 to 1994, says, "There are loads of competitive coaches, but they don't bring that out in others. The issue is how the coach translates that competitive urge to the athletes." Coxswain Ted Tsomides '82 says of Parker, "He let us know in no uncertain terms that when it came to races, what it was about was winning. It wasn't about `doing your best,' it was about winning." At the Cincinnati regatta in 1989, when Harvard beat Washington for the national championship, the Washington oarsmen raised their arms and cheered after finishing second. "You'd never see us do that," says Metz. "We'd feel devastated to have lost."

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs