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Show Royal Regatta Lures Park Gty Resident To England in the last week. Harry Parker, the U.S. Coach who was also coach of the Harvard varsity headed the eight man , U.S. . cj-ew, of whom six were Harvard men. - - "I know it's, hard -to. keep politics out of something like that in it's first year," said Brody, " But I was pretty disgusted. I figured that was the end of my rowing career." In the fall of '74, Brody packed his bags and rode a motorcycle west to Park City where he worked for a friend and former Killington resident, Gregg Ashe who was a partner with, Terry Janot in the Sirloin Saloon The next two summers, he rowed in San Diego, and in the fall of 1975, he returned to Boston, put together a team for the Head of the Charles Regatta and "just beat their ass" as he puts it. Upon returning to Killington in- 1976, 'Brody spent several seasons there managing a major hotel before moving 'back to Park City in " the spring of 1980. VI get tired of one place, so I move back to the other," said Brody. "I really like the hotel business and I hope to get back into it in Park ' city!" "I picked it up real fast," said Brody. "Steering was second nature with me. I've seen new coxswains since who go down the entire course doing 'S' turns. If you hit a bouy, you can cause the oarsmen to catch a crab, the oar comes up and hits him in the chest. "My principle function is to steer the boat," Brody added. "However, the rudder should be used as little as possible, as it takes away from the run of the boat." Instead of using the rudder, the coxswain observes the pull of the oarsmen's blade, and the way it comes out of the water, radioing changes to . the particular oarsman when necessary. "I have to make instantaneous changes. If we're out in front, and another boat pulls even, I have to determine to go for more power or increase the number of strokes per minute," Brody said. "A , . coxswain has been compared to a quarterback in ". football or a jockey in a horse race. All the oarsmen should have to do is row, I do everything else. I'm their eyes and ears. If I'm not in shape physically, I'd collapse from the strain." After serving as freshman coxswain in 1967, Brody made the varsity crew at Boston University by David Neu The mist and sunlight of early morning play evenly on the water of the Charles River in Boston' when suddently the lapping of eight oars breaks the silence. A crew of athletes sweeps by in a long flat boat. The powerful, sucking of their oars fades like the trumpeting of a swan and in a moment the shell disappears into the fog. Whether it be on the Charles or Schuylkill rivers or Lake Washington, the scene of eight oarsmen and their coxswain plying their skills is one never to be forgotten. A different dimension is present in the confines of the 60 foot shell. Oarsmen sweat like gladiators, shiny arms moving like pistons, sweeping 12 foot oars as fast as 52 strokes per minutes. The coxswain calls the orders, harmonizes their muscles and plays the fiddle so to speak, feeling each stroke in mental anguish. In the old days he used to bark orders through a megaphone hoping the lead oarsmen might get the message muddled through the sweeping of the seven oars in front of him. Now a bone conducting microphone the size of a ' But the competitive urge of rowing remains. He admits he's thinking about the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and points: out that there's no age limit for coxswains. It was in 1979 when he staged his first comeback. Friends who had seen him the previous fall at the Head of the Charles urged him to try out for the U. S. National Team. "It just cameout of the blue," said Brody. "I had years of slovenly Killington living to get out of my system, and it wasn't'easy." To drop from 135 marshmellow pounds to the 110 pound international limit for cosxwain, Brody played two hours of tennis daily and rode his bicycle through the Vermont hills. The payoff was the position, of coxswain on the U.S. National Team which took him to Yugoslavia for the World Championships in August of '79. Leading the entire way, the U.S. eight oar shell battled to a photo finish with Spain, loosing by a . mere .18 of a second. ' That second wasslilf fresh in his mind when he took a call three weeks ago from Boston. It was from Bill Miller, coach of this year's B.U. Crew . and one of the oarsme.n Brody had teamed up with on the U.S. Pan Am entry in 1971. Boston University's fourth place finish in the Eastern sprints, their best finish in recent history, ' I ... It . , ' - A V - 5 V , I 7 t I : . ....... milil lin quarter slips beneath the coxswain's head band. Messages are transferred to' two speakers on the boat's keel by a six-inch-square amplifier weighing only six ounces dubbed the "cox box." Strokes per minute are recorded in the box by a magnetic eye focused on the oars. On the finish line, the wonders of science cease. The entire crew, waiting, agonizingly, for their times, lean over the side of the boat and vomit. The guts and glory have been there since 1967 for Bob Brody, the former Boston University and Union Boat Club coxswain extraordinaire who in eal life is a bartender at Texas Red's Pit Barbecue on Park City's Main Street. Pushing PBR's and Lone Star for illustrious co-owners, Waterbed and Kuby, and daily facing a witty clientele, Brody is known as just plain Brody. In the record books, winning the Canadian National Championships in '69 and the bronze medal in the Han American oames in '71, to mention just a few, better make it Robert Brody. This year on his 32nd birthday, July 5, Brody w ill head the eight-man crew of Boston University in the Grand Challenge Cup of the Henley on Thames Royal Regatta in England. First held June 4, 1839, the Royal Henley is the most famous regatta in the world and oldest next to the Doggett's Coat and Badge and the Oxford Cambridge Classic all held on the River Thames, the first water of competitive rowing. If you win the prestigious Grand Challenge Cup (eight oar shells) you go before the Queen of Englad who hangs a medal on your chest. nistory, naa so tickiea tne B.U. alumni, tney decided to pay for the air fare to send the team to the Royal Henley. For some reason the B.U. coxswain couldn't make it. Since Brody was the jnost notable coxswain to ever come out of B.U., Miller popped him the question, " Can you make it?" Scrapping together the $1,000 Brody needed to make the trip was as monumental a challenge as : the One mile 550 yard race down the Thames, but it came easy. There was the matter of $400 entry fee each crew member had to pay and the $375 round trip air ticket to the East coast and expenses. Much of that was cleared up with a call to his parents. . , . "My dad was really encouraging. A friend of mine from England even offered to put me up at his place," said Brody. "Everything is going right. Waterbed and Kuby said they'd cover my , shifts while I was gone, and I'd have a job when I got back and Jeanine at the Prospector Athletic Club game me a temporary membership so I can train." Brody said training' at this altitude will benefit him on the Thames becuase he has to increase his Please Turn to Page m in 1968. That fall he also teamed up with an electronics engineer to develop an electronic amplifying system. "It weighed eight pounds," remembers Brody, "and a lot of times it would fail and I'd have to reach down and grab the megaphone." In the summer of '69 he coxswained for the. Union Boat Club of Boston in their Pairwith shell (two oarsmen and a coxswain) which qualified for the U.S. National Team in 1969 and placed 7th out of 24 crews at the World Rowing Championships in Klagenfurt Austria. The Union Boat club crew won the Canadian Nationals that summer before breaking up after their poor showing at the U.S. Nationals. 1971 was his last year competing with B.U.'s varsity. That summer, he teamed up with four oarsmen to win the Pan Am Trials in Syracuse, . New York, and take the Bronze medal behind Argentina and Cuba in Cali, Columbia. Brody spent the winter of '71 -'72 in Killington, Vermont working at a ski lodge, but the lure of the first open U.S. Olympic Trials brought him to Hanover, New Hampshire the following summer. After two months of intense training, he was cut Cleveland to Boston When Brody left Cleveland after high school and headed for the campus of Boston University, little , did he know he would achieve athletic stardom at t a University which is sometimes obscurred in the ' shadows of Harvard and MIT on the opposite side ' of the Charles. In the same manner Big Eight football coaches ( prowl the campus each spring looking for magical f kickers with missing letters in their names, Ivy r League rowing coaches send out strong armed ! oarsmen to look for short intellectuals who can fit 1 into a two-foot square portion of the boat without ; rocking it and proselytise the oarsmen into a i straight-eight-dyamo of oar power. I Sociology major Robert Brody, a short dark haired guy with rimmed glasses who weighed 120 f pounds wrapped in a wet Navy Pea Coat fit the bill. ' Coxswain England Bound Continued from Page 4B overall stamina and loose weight. "The weight is crucial, a matter of two pounds can loose a race. I'm bicycling quite a bit here, but I'll wait until I get back to Bsoton to do weight training and increase my endurance," Brody said. In addition to the bicyling Brody has been pumping the Dynavit machine at the Athletic Club, wearing weights and heavy sweat clothes. He's down to 117 lbs. now and said he is way ahead of schedule he set in 1979 for the World Championships. with the crew twice daily, and alternate running wind springs and long distances while logging many miles on his bike. He said it's necessary to run with the oarsmen, lift weights with them, and "know where their heads are at." On July 5, the boats will be lined up on the Thames by an official starter and an official at each boat holding on to the end. Brody will join the other coxswin with his hand in the air as the oarsmen respond to his instruction in jockeying the boat so it is perfectly straight at the start. He'll drop his hand when ready and freeze solid as the starter says in french, "Are you ready, go." The oars beat stacatto like at 48 to 52 per minute for the first 30 strokes. "Breathe" or "Settle" will be the coxswain's first utterance as the crew settles to 38 to 42 strokes per minute, and the sleek carbon fiber shell plows the water ahead. The British National Team, The Russians and probably Harvard and the University of Washington will be there. The crews will summon their final energy for the last 40 strokes at the 48 to 52 per minute rate and then collapse at the finish. Hanging over the boat and peering at a muddled reflection from the Thames, the result might be that agonizing second or third that Brody has grimaced through before. Or the call could come from the victory stand where Her Majesty, the Queen of England, stands ready to meet the victors, a vision which is clear to the lean and hungry man standing behind the bar at Texas Reds. "Things are coming together so well," says Brody, " that it seems ordained that we're not only going over there, but we're also going to win this damn thing." Never mind that his job will be in jeopardy if he forgets to wear the bar's t-shirt in front of the television crews. |