Coxswain

Finding an able coxswain is a major problem for most college crew coaches. Coxswains must be strong enough to steer the shell straight, shrewd enough to detect faults in the crew's performance, aggressive enough to correct them, good-natured enough not to mind an occasional ducking for their pains. Until crew-conscious alumni start subsidizing midgets, cox-swains who fill these requirements but still weigh less than 120 Ib. will be scarcer than good halfbacks. Last week in England, crew coaches at Oxford, which hopes on March 24 to win the Boat Race against Cambridge for the first time in 14 years, were paradoxically perplexed by a coxswain who filled the requirements of his job too well. He was Hart Massey, second son of Vincent Massey, Canada's High Commissioner in London.

Six years ago, the Cambridge crew rowed proudly onto the Thames with the third lightest coxswain in Boat Race history--97-lb. J. M. Ranking. Hart Massey, 19, a graduate of Upper Canada College in Toronto, now in his first year at Balliol, is less than 4 ft. tall, weighs 56 Ib. Using Coxswain Massey would give Oxford at least 50 Ib. weight advantage. It would also mean building a shell specially weighted in the stern. If Coxswain Massey were suddenly unavailable on Boat Race Day, only alternatives would be i) using a shell other than the one the crew was accustomed to, or 2) using an average-size substitute coxswain, whose weight would cause the shell to drag. Last week, Oxford's crew coaches were trying to decide between two shaky solutions of their problem: i) building two new shells, one for Massey and one for an average-size coxswain, drilling the crew in both; 2) building a shell for an 84-lb. coxswain, putting 28 Ib. of lead under Coxswain Massey.

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