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Do I have a hero? Yes. Harry Parker.
Craig Lambert
By
Published: May 02, 2022
Category:
Non Fiction
You’re in a long, narrow boat, with a skin that’s just one-sixteenth of an inch thick and oars that extend fifteen feet. It’s 5:45 on an October morning in Boston. It’s chilly. And you are about to begin a race that is the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. On a Tuesday morning. Before work. Just for fun.
This is how “Mind Over Water” begins: "In the darkness, deep in silence, the lights — green, red, a few of white — surge ahead, in the rhythm of breathing."
Craig Lambert is a veteran oarsman with the soul of a poet. And so is Harry Parker, the Harvard crew coach whose exploits first got Lambert, a gifted amateur, interested in writing about the sport.
You never heard of Harry Parker? That was his design. Recognition was the least thing he cared about. He was single-minded about something else: winning. And win he did. He became Harvard’s crew coach in 1963, when he was just 27. For the next 6 years, Harvard didn’t lose a single intercollegiate race. His crews won 18 consecutive races against Yale. In his 50 years as head coach, he led his crews to 21 undefeated regular seasons. He was the coach of the first U.S. women’s national eight, which won a silver medal at the 1975 World Rowing Championships. He served as the coach of the first U.S. women’s national eight. His winning percentage from 1963 to 1997 is .806 — he was, very probably, the most successful coach in any sport in the whole and entire world.
Meet Harry Parker in this short video.
As a coach, Harry Parker did not make inspirational speeches. For that matter, he did nothing to motivate his rowers — he thought if they needed coaching like that, they were in the wrong place. He didn’t even promise Olympic veterans that they’d been rowing first boat. And yet guys loved him. No: revered him. Thought he was the best teacher they had at Harvard.
For some reason, Harry Parker tolerated Craig Lambert long enough for the writer to harvest the coach’s voodoo wisdom. Lambert’s story in Harvard Magazine — a cover story that blew Parker’s cover — is how I learned about Harry Parker. To read it, click here.
Some samples of Parker’s wisdom:
"Speed demands that we risk our balance. Velocity comes with volatility … That which is stable is slow."
"Being part of a crew makes the individual shine; in rowing you pull harder and longer that you could ever alone because everyone else in the boat is depending on you."
"My years of rowing in eights [eight-man boats] convinced me that to succeed in this world we must be willing to do whatever is required despite what our mind says."
"Sometimes the best response to stormy weather is to unleash your own tempest. It is one way to restore equilibrium."
"Grabbing an early lead costs energy, an expense that may later haunt the front-runner … In practice, Parker would remind his rowers that when opponents jump out in front, you must make them pay the price."
"To build a winning crew, select the right athletes, place them in the proper seats, and allow for the freedom to create. In other words, hire the right people for the right jobs and manage with a long, loose leash."
If you’re employed in almost any organization that I can imagine, I’ll bet that last idea — it’s also Warren Buffett’s mantra — is one you’d like to print out and slip under the boss’s door. It’s light years away from the sport of rowing — and yet it’s not New Age, hippy-dippy sloganeering. What it is, I submit, is thought at a level we’re not used to seeing from sports coaches. [To buy “Mind over Water” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
"We are out here in the darkness to reveal ourselves, to discover who we are," Lambert writes. "With the oars, we attempt things that we cannot do, we confront that which is beyond our capacities. Mind over water. The shells transport us into the unknown."
It almost makes you want to get out there some early morning and see how far, how fast, how smoothly you could make a boat — or, really, your life — go. But first, please race to read this book.
