A Sweep for Conibear

One day, nearly 40 years ago, shaggy-haired Hiram Conibear, ex-trainer of the Chicago White Sox, stood on the shore of Lake Washington and cussed through a megaphone, so loud that his University of Washington oarsmen could hear. When parents objected, Conibear confessed: "I have to cuss a little in order to bluff my way along." Washington's new crew coach didn't know the first thing about rowing.

Conibear read up on physics and experimented at night in his living room with a broom for an oar. He decided that the traditional Oxford style, in which oarsmen put their maximum power at the end of a long layback stroke, was not only unsound but uncomfortable. He taught a short stroke with a "sock" as the blade entered the water; the men were sitting upright at the end of the stroke, and ready for a quick recovery. In 1917, Hiram Conibear was killed (when he fell out of a cherry tree) but Washington crews went east year after year to win fame at Poughkeepsie. Last week, for the first time, eastern crews went west to race on Seattle's Lake Washington.

The largest crowd ever to see a sport event in the Pacific Northwest--some 150,000--hardly expected its Huskies to win (Washington had scuttled crew during the war). But Cornell, Harvard, M.I.T. Rutgers and California were all coached by Washington alumni, and used the Coni- bear stroke. Only Wisconsin, which claimed that it trained on Wisconsin cheese and hadn't lost a race all year, did not.

A sharp wind roughed up the lake as eight shells pulled away. The Husky crew jumped into an early lead, stayed there until the three-quarters mark. Then Cornell, in the sheltered No.1 lane toward shore, stepped up its beat to 37. Ten powerful strokes pulled the Cornell shell into command; it held the lead against M.I.T.'s finish-line sprint. Washington's Huskies came in third. Wisconsin's heretics also ran.

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