Boys of '36, The (2016)

[bunniefuu]

♪

NARRATOR: On a chilly August day in ,

just outside Berlin, Germany,

a team of American boys prepared to row

the biggest race of their lives at the Olympic Games.

[crowd cheering]

The competition that would become known

as Adolf Hitler's Games was nearly complete.

The n*zi leader had regarded the Olympics as a chance

to introduce the world to the glory of a new Germany

and prove Aryan supremacy through athletic triumph.

The host nation had won more medals than any other.

And on this afternoon,

with Hitler at the race course, German rowers

earned gold medals in the first five races of the day,

to the delight of the Fuhrer.

Now, in the final race,

they were looking to continue their domination.

TIMOTHY EGAN: The Americans walk into this thing

thinking they're in a race.

But what they actually are are a part of the global stage.

NARRATOR: As tens of thousands of spectators filled the grandstand

and millions back in the United States

tuned into their radios, the Americans entered the water.

With a key member of their team

suffering from a severe lung infection,

and the worst lane assignment on the course,

putting them directly in the face of an unrelenting wind,

adversity was once again shadowing the nine boys

who'd brought their racing shell across the world

from what was still America's frontier.

EGAN: These guys were nobodies.

The odds of these blue-collar boys living in the worst time

in American history becoming sports heroes

were just astronomical.

NARRATOR: On October , , in Seattle, at the old airplane hangar

that served as the University of Washington's

shell house, several dozen boys showed up for crew practice.

The bulk of them would ultimately succumb

to rowing's cruel demands,

leaving the team behind.

A few of them, however, would not.

EGAN: These kids were very representative

of the Pacific Northwest, which was raw, newly shaped.

The city of Seattle was only about years old.

These boys were the sons of loggers, the sons of fishermen.

They did odd jobs for a buck a day.

They used their hands as claws and their backs as levers,

you know?

They were grunts.

DANIEL JAMES BROWN: This was the middle of the Depression, and these guys

were having a hard time putting a couple meals a day

in front of themselves.

NARRATOR: One member of the Washington crew

well acquainted with that hardship

was a -year-old named Joe Rantz.

Rantz had been born the second of two boys

in Spokane, a lumber town across the state from Seattle.

When he was four years old, he watched his mother die

of lung cancer.

BROWN: He remembered the handkerchief with blood on it

when she'd take it away from her mouth.

He remembered being at her funeral.

But he never really knew his mother.

NARRATOR: He was sent east to be with an aunt for a time,

and eventually, returned to the care of his father Harry

and stepmother Thula.

Their life together was fraught with financial troubles

and emotional tension from the outset.

BROWN: They found themselves living at this gold and ruby mine

out in Idaho.

Thula took a dislike to Joe almost immediately.

One day, Joe got in a spat with Thula's child.

Thula was just outraged, and demanded that Joe

leave the house.

Joe's father took him up to the schoolhouse,

and the teacher agreed to let Joe stay there

if he would chop wood to keep the stove fed day and night.

To feed himself he had to work at the camp kitchen.

So he found himself basically living on his own

for the first time when he was just ten years old.

NARRATOR: Joe lived in the schoolhouse for a few months

before moving with his family to another town in Washington.

There, the Rantzes' troubles only deepened,

and Joe became a casualty of the desperation.

BROWN: A day came when Joe came home from school,

and he found the family car with the whole family in it,

and all kinds of luggage in it.

And he didn't know what was going on, and his father said,

"We can't make it here.

"We're going to leave, Joe.

"But the thing is, you're going to have to stay behind.

Thula doesn't want you to come with us."

JUDY WILLMAN: He started to drive out the driveway.

And Harry and Mike, the little brothers,

were looking out the back window of the car,

and he could just hear Harry screaming, "What about Joe?

What about Joe?"

EGAN: It was emblematic of other kids during the Great Depression.

You had the economic thing, not knowing where your next meal

is going to come from, and then you had the family dysfunction.

The only place you can go, the place to call home,

that was taken away from Joe Rantz.

And it was somewhat typical, because people felt like,

"I just don't have the means to give food to this child."

So he comes out of those two completely broken systems,

the two foundations of living, basically.

WILLMAN: But there was where he really had to make the decision of,

"Am I a victim or am I a survivor?"

Because he had to pick up his life from there--

had to, somehow.

NARRATOR: The teenager lived alone for two years.

He hunted and fished for food, and made money by selling

stolen liquor and working as a logger.

All the while, he remained in school.

Then his older brother invited him to come live in Seattle.

For the first time, he could live something close

to a normal life.

He began competing in school sports.

One day, he caught the eye of the University of Washington

crew coach, Al Ulbrickson, who was looking for

potential rowers to recruit.

BROWN: Ulbrickson showed up at Roosevelt High School,

and he noticed this big, tall, blond kid

on the gymnastics equipment.

Joe had great upper body strength.

He'd been cutting hay and digging ditches

from the time he was on.

WILLMAN: I'm not even sure before that

that he really had his eye on college.

He had somebody that wanted him.

I think he saw an open door and he decided

he would go through it.

BROWN: There were no scholarships for rowing

at the University of Washington in those days.

As long as you were in good standing on the crew,

they would find a part-time job for you somewhere on the campus.

And for somebody like Joe Rantz that made all the difference.

ERIC COHEN: There were multiple men on that team

that were finding it hard to survive, and had found it

hard to survive up to the time that they had gotten

to Washington.

BROWN: Gordy Adam worked on a salmon boat to make money for college.

Very hardworking kid, very tough.

Roger Morris would find himself working for his father

on the weekends, time and again

moving families out of their homes--

homes they had lost because of the Depression.

Stub McMillin was working at nights as a janitor.

Stub was having a very hard time making ends meet.

EGAN: Some of them got into rowing for the food.

I mean, they knew they were going to get fed regular meals

by the University of Washington, which seems laughable

to a modern audience,

but it was a big deal back then.

COHEN: So these guys were hanging on by the skin of their teeth.

MAN: Keep your shoulders squared around.

NARRATOR: By June of , at the end of his first year on campus,

Joe Rantz had emerged as one of the strongest rowers

on the freshman crew.

He joined his Washington Huskies teammates on a journey

across the country

to Poughkeepsie, New York,

site of the National Collegiate Rowing Championship.

There, Rantz and his teammates would face crews from Cornell,

Columbia, and Penn--

opponents with backgrounds very different than their own.

EGAN: You have the worst lot in life against privilege.

And all of that happens when they go against

the Ivy Leaguers.

But then add to that the regional thing of,

"Oh, the Pacific Northwest.

"I suppose if I ever thought about it I wouldn't care.

But I don't ever think about it, because you're off the map."

That's a real generator, because it goes to that

chip on their shoulder-- that insecurity that,

"You do not respect us or even understand us."

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Oakland, California-- crosswinds and...

NARRATOR: From coast to coast, in the s,

rowing was one of the nation's most popular sports.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: , spectators see the classic rowing field

in the far West.

NARRATOR: Thousands of fans attended regattas...

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: ...the Poughkeepsie Regatta.

And there they go.

NARRATOR: ...where they cheered their favorites from beaches, docks,

rooftops, ferries.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Going out on a rough and windy

three-mile course of Lake Washington.

NARRATOR: And even open observation trains

that ran the length of race courses.

The biggest race of the ' Poughkeepsie Championship

was the varsity competition, won by the University of California,

the longtime West Coast powerhouse.

But the Washington freshmen were the revelation of the regatta,

capturing their national collegiate title

by five boat lengths over Syracuse.

WILLMAN: It was almost like it was effortless.

They came out of that sitting up instead of gasping.

There was a huge amount of press and speculation

of whether this was an Olympic team.

NARRATOR: The <span tts:fontStyle="italic">New York Times</span> called the performance

of the Washington crew "stunning" and "serene."

BROWN: I think trust is the single most important thing in rowing.

You really do become part of something larger than yourself.

Every time you take a stroke, you are counting on

everybody else in the boat to be putting

his whole weight, full strength, into that stroke.

That is only going to happen if every man in that boat

trusts the others on a very fundamental level.

NARRATOR: The freshmen champions returned to the shell house

as sophomores

to train for the upcoming spring racing season.

Most observers thought

they would be named to the top varsity boat--

the crew that would give Washington its best chance

to get to its first-ever Olympics in Berlin

the following year.

But the idea that Joe Rantz and the sophomores

were the boat to beat was deeply resented by upperclassmen.

One of the more vocal dissenters was Bobby Moch.

Just five feet seven and pounds,

Moch was a coxswain, tucked in the rear of the racing shell,

where light weight was an advantage.

A coxswain commanded the pace and direction of the boat,

and ensured the rowers in front of him were fully in concert.

A Phi Beta Kappa student, Moch had endured a childhood

racked by asthma in a logging town in southwestern Washington.

He took his seat in the racing shell every day

the same way he approached everything-- set on defying

anyone who doubted him.

He was on the basketball team.

He constantly played sports.

He was very competitive.

He was very smart, but he did not see himself as smart.

He saw himself as disciplined.

BROWN: His strength in the boat was this sort of attitude that,

"I'm in charge."

And that's exactly what Bob Moch was so good at.

And Moch always had his chin up a little bit,

and just exactly what you want in a coxswain.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: With the Olympic games in view,

the University of Washington crew gets the jump

on eastern oarsmen.

NARRATOR: Like every other upperclassman, for Bobby Moch, the central goal

of the season

was to find his way into the varsity boat,

ahead of Joe Rantz and the sophomores.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: While the icebound Easterners work out in gymnasiums,

the Huskies pile into their shells and shove off...

NARRATOR: There was no relief

from the winter's long daily practices, punishing workouts,

and countless time trials.

COHEN: It's painful.

You're talking about hours of work

at a relatively high heart rate.

You're pushing the limits of your body every single day.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: ...pulling hard for coveted seats in the varsity shell.

NARRATOR: It was all overseen by a coach who,

just a decade earlier, had been a star Washington rower himself.

Al Ulbrickson had won two national championships

as a Husky, but never got to an Olympics.

As the team's coach, he'd watched rival California

win gold medals at the and ' Games.

BOB ERNST: That's huge motivation for a coach.

If you're a great athlete and you don't make it

to the Olympics, and you don't get a gold medal, then that...

that's a fire burning all the time.

BROWN: Al Ulbrickson was a pretty hard man.

He was not at all communicative.

Sportswriters called him the Dour Dane.

He was very stern.

So I don't think any of the boys that rowed for him

felt real warm and fuzzy about him.

NARRATOR: The taciturn coach appeared content

to fuel months of battle

between his rowers as the first race of the season approached.

In the boathouse, confusion, tension, and hostilities

between the sophomores and upperclassmen escalated.

BROWN: Ulbrickson would sometimes

just jerk boys out of boats without giving an explanation.

Some of the kids had a hard time with that.

Joe Rantz certainly did.

It made him very uncertain about things.

PETER MALLORY: Nobody challenged Ulbrickson.

He put the lineups up on the chalkboard.

He barely said anything in the launch.

It was very toxic-- boats not talking to one another.

MOCH: My dad liked to play mind games

on the other... primarily coxswains,

but also the guys that were... were rowing,

if he could think of a way to do it.

MICHAEL MOCH: He wasn't liked to start with at all.

And these guys were in the way

if they weren't going to pull their oar.

And he was really pushy, you know?

I mean, he... this was going to happen.

COHEN: There was this animosity that led to a bare-knuckle

kind of environment.

There would be almost vicious competition between the men.

BROWN: There were shoving matches.

Feelings got very hurt.

Psychologically this was a hard game that these kids

were involved in.

NARRATOR: Ulbrickson waited until after dinner the night before

the first race of the season

to finally announce his decision.

He named Rantz and the sophomores the top varsity crew

over Moch and the more experienced rowers on the team.

The next day, April , the coach's faith was rewarded

when the sophomores edged out a victory

at the annual Pacific Coast Regatta,

a duel race against Cal.

But when training resumed, Ulbrickson still had questions

about his top crew,

testing them relentlessly in practice,

and watching them grow sloppy and unpredictable.

Just before the national championship,

Ulbrickson reversed himself.

He elevated Bobby Moch's crew to the top boat,

and demoted the stunned sophomores.

WILLMAN: They had gotten themselves to the place where it was

kind of easy to be demoralized.

And they didn't have the kind of confidence

in each other that they had to have

to be consistently competitive.

ANNOUNCER: There they go, with seven finely trained crews

churning the fog-shrouded waters of the upper Hudson

in the supreme rowing test of power, speed and coordination.

NARRATOR: On June , , a blustery day in Poughkeepsie,

Bobby Moch took Washington out to an early lead.

But Cal and the rest of the field soon caught up.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: California leads Washington by a length

approaching the river bridge at the three-mile mark.

NARRATOR: Cal won its third straight national championship...

RADIO ANNOUNCER: In a surging drive,

the California Bears nose out the Cornell shell by...

NARRATOR: ...positioning themselves as favorites to return

to the Olympics, now just a year away.

The Huskies, meanwhile, returned to Seattle a worn-out,

fragmented team.

Ulbrickson had gambled and lost.

Now, after the upheaval between the sophomores and upperclassmen

they were all in danger of missing out on the Olympics.

COHEN: A good coach creates the framework

for a team to trust each other.

And so there was a breakdown of the trust in the shell house.

BROWN: George Pocock was so much more than a boat builder.

He really in many ways was a sage.

And Pocock taught generations of rowers at Washington

to approach rowing as if it were a craft.

He said, "When I build a shell, I leave a piece of my heart

in that shell."

"When you walk away from a race, I want you to walk away

having left a piece of your heart in that race."

He really believed that by rowing as well as you could

you were lifting yourself up and making yourself better.

And if you rowed well enough, he said,

you were approaching perfection.

And if you approached perfection,

you were approaching the divine.

NARRATOR: Going into the rowing season,

George Pocock had been a fixture at the University of Washington

for more than two decades.

He'd grown up in England building boats with his father

at Eton, the prestigious secondary school

on the Thames river, the birthplace of the sport

of competitive rowing.

Within a few years of his arrival in America,

Pocock set up shop building racing shells

in the loft above the Washington boathouse.

An accomplished oarsman as well, Pocock became a valued advisor

to Washington coaches along the way,

including Al Ulbrickson.

COHEN: There was a very, very strong connection there.

George was a man of few words as well.

I can imagine Al Ulbrickson and George Pocock in the launch,

and nothing being said the entire time

they're out there except for maybe two or three words.

But those two or three words likely were very powerful,

and probably changed things along the way.

NARRATOR: With the Olympics just months away,

Ulbrickson was determined to put his mistakes

of the previous year behind him.

He made clear to his team

that the upcoming season would be their most grueling yet,

and added a sixth day of training to every week.

Every seat in the varsity boat was up for grabs.

It was every man for himself.

There was one rower whom Ulbrickson

approached differently; whose raw potential he'd first spotted

in a high school gymnasium, but who'd grown too erratic

to be depended upon-- Joe Rantz.

BROWN: Ulbrickson takes him out of the boat.

The boat slows down.

Ulbrickson puts him back in the boat.

The boat goes faster, but then it goes slower the next day.

And he can't figure out why Joe Rantz is so uneven.

So he finally asks George Pocock.

WILLMAN: George Pocock was almost like a father figure.

He was somebody who saw Dad's potential.

Dad was sinking from boat to boat.

As somebody who had sort of been a throwaway kind of person,

he found himself being thrown away again.

BROWN: He developed an attitude that he had to do everything

his own way.

And that worked for him living out in the woods.

But that was really a problem for him when it came to crew.

Pocock really begins to teach him

that if he wants to be great, he needs to understand

that he's part of something bigger than himself.

He needs to begin to trust.

MALLOR: Going into ',

this was it.

This was when he had to do it.

Ulbrickson was well aware that he had to take advantage

of the enormous talent from the ' freshmen boat.

And he had to take advantage of the enormous talent of Don Hume.

NARRATOR: After just one season on the team,

Don Hume was being talked about as perhaps the best

Washington stroke oar-- the rower charged with keeping

the rhythm of the boat-- since Al Ulbrickson himself.

The sophomore was not physically imposing,

but he'd led his freshman boat to resounding victories

the prior season.

BROWN: He actually worked in a pulp mill as a kid.

And there was an unfortunate consequence of that.

Fumes in the mill damaged his lungs.

So it made him very susceptible to respiratory illnesses.

He had a very hard time shaking them off.

COHEN: Al Ulbrickson would have preferred to have

a -pound guy in there

who could pull twice as hard as Don Hume.

But Don Hume was special.

ERNST: He had a natural feel for the rhythm of the water

and how fast the boat would move.

They don't have to be the most powerful person,

and they don't have to be the biggest person,

but they've got to have a sense of what's moving the boat.

Don Hume would just do his job, and all the guys

super respected him for that.

NARRATOR: By mid-March, Hume was a regular in the lineup that Ulbrickson

envisioned for his varsity boat.

In his daily logbook, he added another name

he hadn't written for some time.

Over the next several practices, the boat got faster.

BROWN: Pocock's advice would work for Joe in this boat.

That was a bunch of guys that Joe could trust.

And Ulbrickson knew

at that point he had the boat that he wanted to try to take

to Berlin.

NARRATOR: The varsity crew was named four months

before the Olympics.

Bobby Moch was the coxswain, Don Hume was the stroke oar,

with Joe Rantz and Shorty Hunt seated behind him,

the powerful Stub McMillin in the middle, then Johnny White

and Gordy Adam, Chuck Day, and Roger Morris in the bow.

After so many months of second guessing

and bruised egos, the former boathouse adversaries

comprised a powerful Washington crew.

In their first race together, the Pacific Coast Regatta

in April, they accelerated away from Cal and annihilated

the course record by seconds.

"All were merged into one smoothly working machine,"

the <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Seattle Post-Intelligencer</span> noted.

"They were, in fact, a poem of motion,

a symphony of swinging blades."

COHEN: Swing comes when you really have that harmony,

synchronicity.

Eight hearts beating as one, as George Pocock would say.

It's elusive.

It doesn't happen every day.

ERNST: Swing, it's the sweet spot.

It's a perfect connection.

And the best teams

dream about having it in the big races,

because then they know they can't be touched.

NARRATOR: In June, the national championship

in Poughkeepsie loomed.

A few days before their race, Ulbrickson gave them

the day off,

and the boys from Seattle decided they would visit

one of the local residents.

BROWN: They know that

President Roosevelt lives at Hyde Park just up the river.

And they get it in their heads that they're going to go visit

the president.

They find a gardener who points it out to them.

They walk up and knock on the door.

And one of the Roosevelt sons comes to the door.

And he is himself a rower, so he invites them in.

And for the next hour or so they talk about rowing

sitting in President Roosevelt's parlor.

One of the guys sits actually in the chair that Roosevelt

sometimes delivers his fireside chats from.

Johnny White writes a little note in his diary that night--

"They sure have a swell place."

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: The historic Poughkeepsie Regatta

draws seven varsity shells to the starting line

and a crowd of spectators to the sideline.

NARRATOR: The national championship was June .

Washington's strategy was to exercise patience

in the four-mile race.

COHEN: Don Hume

and Joe Rantz and all of those guys,

Stub McMillin, they all knew the plan--

they would row

the first two miles of that race in cruise control.

And then they would start to pick it up.

BROWN: As the boats are in their third mile,

Ulbrickson can't quite believe what he's seeing,

because Bobby Moch has got the boat four lengths

behind the leaders.

COHEN: He's riding the train with George Pocock

and he's going, "Come on! Come on!

You guys got to go now!"

BROWN: Moch continues

to hold the boat back.

And then, at the last possible moment,

he finally leans in and tells Don Hume to pick the pace up.

MALLORY: Bobby Moch had faith in his team.

He just stayed cool and calm, and then just mowed them down.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The Huskies of Washington proceed to sweep the river,

surging to victory to become the ace candidate for the Olympics.

NARRATOR: With reporters afterwards, Ulbrickson praised his coxswain.

"I guess that little runt knew what he was doing."

Two weeks later, Princeton, New Jersey, was the site

of the Olympic Trials.

Despite everything they'd already achieved,

the boys had to win one more time to become

the first Washington crew to represent the United States

in an Olympics.

The strategy, once again, was to race from behind.

COHEN: The Olympic trials for Washington was probably

one of the best races they ever rowed.

And people were rightly intimidated

by the way they rowed.

You're sitting there going, "Oh, oh, no.

"Washington is three lengths back from us,

but they're going to come eat us alive," you know?

"We've got to hold on, we've got to hold on,

we've got to... oh, no, here they come."

MALLORY: And they waited a long time.

It was , meters from the end,

and Penn still had three quarters of a length.

And then Moch said, "Let's go," and bam!

They just exploded and went right through them.

NARRATOR: Ulbrickson spoke to the national press after the race.

"Why they won cannot be attributed to individuals,"

he said.

He got to the heart of the matter when he noted,

"Every man in the boat had absolute confidence

in every one of his mates."

The crew of the Washington University,

I want to congratulate you on winning the championship

of American eight-oared crews.

[laughter, shouting]

NARRATOR: On the morning of July ,

two-and-a-half weeks before the start of the Olympics,

the boys from Washington, who had previously

only been on lakes and rivers,

began a journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

The <span tts:fontStyle="italic">SS Manhattan</span>luxury liner

was a -foot ship that would transport

members of the U.S. Olympic team to Germany.

And also a -foot Pocock racing shell.

When they get on a boat to cross the Atlantic,

they're all pinching themselves.

Their world had gone very quickly from

the sawmill, the edge of the forest,

to the biggest stage of all.

NARRATOR: Over the ten-day crossing,

Don Hume, always prone to respiratory infections,

began struggling with a deep chest cold that persisted

as the ship took them through the English Channel to Germany.

ERNST: This was like going to another planet.

These are guys

that if they want to know where Germany is,

they're looking at a cardboard globe.

BROWN: They actually saw

a very clean, well-scrubbed city,

very carefully laid out.

There were swastikas hanging from every street corner.

There were banners everywhere.

But swastikas didn't yet mean anything to Americans.

NARRATOR: The opening ceremony was held on August

at the newly built sports stadium.

The hosts' objective was not simply to welcome

the world to Berlin,

but to put on a show of national unity and pride

unlike any the world had ever seen.

To Adolf Hitler,

the Games were the ultimate propaganda tool.

DAVID CLAY LARGE: He was a very effective propagandist.

And he was going to use the Olympics

as his great show.

He was going to bring out onto the world

this new healed Germany, this reunified Germany,

a stronger Germany, but also, he insisted, a peaceful Germany.

Meanwhile,

behind the scenes, he was planning for w*r.

NARRATOR: Hitler expected the German teams would dominate the Games.

The rowing team that the host nation brought

to the narrow lake, Langer-See, was no exception.

MALLORY: The German team was extremely dominant.

Their government made it a national priority

that their sports teams should succeed.

They had clubs all over the country

that were well coached, well funded.

LARGE: They're given uninterrupted training.

If they have jobs they quit the jobs,

and they're sponsored by the government.

EGAN: The University of Washington, the Americans, come in

as poor athletes from an unknown part of the world.

Their ethic is because these guys worked on farms

and crappy jobs.

There's sort of a purity versus this artifice.

BROWN: And the boys went out and just sort of explored the streets.

And they quickly discovered that whenever Germans

walk up to them they would extend their hands,

give the n*zi salute and say, "Heil Hitler."

So the boys didn't quite know what to do about that.

So they took to walking up to Germans, extending their hands

and saying, "Heil Roosevelt."

NARRATOR: Eight days before the gold medal race,

Ulbrickson grounded his team.

They were rowing poorly in workouts, and the chest cold

Don Hume had contracted on the trip over

had gotten worse, not better.

COHEN: Don Hume went from pounds to about pounds

over that period of time.

It was an extensive amount of weight loss.

BROWN: He was very sick, he had a high fever.

He had been kept in bed for several days.

And going into the day of the medal race,

Ulbrickson didn't think that he could row.

NARRATOR: On the morning of the final race,

with Hume's fever rising once again,

Ulbrickson announced that he was going to remove

his stroke from the boat, and replace him

with an alternate.

When he told the team, they refused to leave Hume behind.

ERNST: The guys

just absolutely could not see themselves racing

without Don Hume in the stroke seat.

He's the guy who's leading the dance step.

And if it was a little bit shaky, we'll make up for that.

BROWN: They put it to him almost as an ultimatum,

and that was a very unusual thing.

Ulbrickson thought about it for a bit, and he decided

this was a case where he had to trust the instincts of the boys.

He was going to put Don Hume in the boat.

They were going to win the race for each other.

They had each other's backs.

NARRATOR: August , race day, was chilly and rainy.

In the men's eights, the marquee event,

the Americans faced a full slate of intimidating opponents.

MALLORY: George Pocock, being a Brit himself, was rightly concerned

about the British entry.

They were full of Oxford and Cambridge boat race veterans.

So it was an all-star crew.

They'd won in ', '.

They had been second in '.

They were always on the premises.

The Italians were a group of longshoremen from Livorno.

They had been together as a team for more than ten years.

They were big, strong guys.

They were literally the most experienced crew in the field.

The German team won the first five races.

They were the class of the Olympics.

LARGE: The Germans wanted desperately to win the heavyweight eights--

very important, because that was the most prestigious

of all the rowing contests.

And they knew the course like the backs of their hands.

So they had a huge advantage in that regard.

NARRATOR: The Germans had another distinct advantage in the race,

the best lane assignment-- even if it appeared

to have been dubiously determined.

BROWN: Although the Americans had the fastest qualifying time,

and the Brits had turned in the second fastest qualifying time,

they were mysteriously assigned lanes five and six

out in the windiest part of the racecourse.

Italy and Germany had turned in relatively slow

qualifying times.

They were assigned lanes one and two, protected from the wind.

How they would end up with the best lanes

and the teams that had won their heats would end up

in the worst lanes, there's nothing to explain that.

NARRATOR: At a quarter past : in the evening in Germany,

it was still morning back in Washington.

As the state and much of the nation listened in

on their radios,

the Americans paddled to the start line.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: It's a very interesting sight to be here

and describe this to you.

The Washington crew is probably the slowest starting crew

in the world-- it gives everybody heart failure.

BROWN: The crowd is already chanting, "Deutschland, Deutschland,

Deutschland."

They don't actually hear the call of the start of the race.

COHEN: The Washington crew had a horrible start.

Horrible.

They were thrashing.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: I can see that Italy is leading, Germany is second,

Switzerland third.

COHEN: They were a quarter way through the race,

and they were behind the field.

They were facing the wind and the chop.

MALLORY: Suddenly, Don Hume seemed to go into a trance.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The American crew appears to be fairly well in the rear.

BROWN: Don Hume hasn't been responding to Bobby Moch's

calls to him to pick up the rate.

WILLMAN: Bobby Moch knew that if something didn't change,

everything was lost.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The United States dragging along.

Not in the first three.

BROWN: Suddenly Don Hume

pops his head up and starts rowing beautifully.

And the boat explodes forward.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The United States is beginning to pick up quite rapidly now.

That's good old Washington, all rushed.

COHEN: Within a thousand meters,

they started to move back on the field.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: Washington crew is driving hard on the outside of the course.

MALLORY: There were people

screaming down on them.

It must have been absolutely deafening.

WILLMAN: Nobody could hear him.

Even Don Hume

couldn't hear him inches

in front of him with a megaphone.

He did the only thing he could, which was start whacking

on the side of the shell.

He could go [imitates sound].

RADIO ANNOUNCER: There is not one length of difference

between the first five crews!

ERNST: They had to fight and claw and drag that boat.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The United States is in front with meters to go!

ERNST: It was a total gut check.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: meters to go, and they have half a boat length on Italy!

meters to go.

Ten meters to go.

And the United States wins, with Italy second

and Germany third,

Great Britain fourth,

and Hungary fifth.

And Don Hume, the very light stroke on the American crew,

who has lost something like or pounds,

stroked that great crew from the Northwest

to the outstanding victory of the Olympic games.

ERNST: It would have been really, really easy

to lose.

But I'll tell you what--

they were kids that were tough.

They were used to working

in tough conditions, and they were used to paying

a lot physically to accomplish a goal.

BROWN: Al Ulbrickson was watching

from a balcony nearby with George Pocock.

And he fought his way through the crowd trying to get

to the boys to congratulate them.

NARRATOR: A few moments later, Ulbrickson told a reporter that his boys

were "the finest I ever saw seated in a shell.

And I've seen some corking boatloads."

BROWN: Mostly, they were very proud of not having let one another down.

I think for Joe Rantz, winning that gold medal,

I think after all he'd been through,

he knew he was valuable,

and he wasn't the disposable boy he had once been.

BROWN: Every one of them also had a measure of humility.

And that humility was the gateway through which

they were able to approach one another

and start building the bonds of trust

that really made them into the great crew that they became.

COHEN: There is this element of redemption, but there's also

this element of achieving a goal through trust and brotherhood.

EGAN: They were considered rubes from the far West taking on

the elite.

Reaching in, finding something.

The coming together from those disparate backgrounds,

hunger for some dignity in a world that wasn't giving

these boys dignity.

I love the fact that they spoiled the script.