Stowing the Manly Oar

As the oldest (118 years), most gruling U.S. college sport, rowing long attracted zealous spartans who inspired he term crew cut and spent their alumni years flocking to regattas in blazers, white flannels and white bucks. Hired three years ago as head crew coach at Columbia University, Bill Stowe, 27, seemed just the disciplinarian to maintain traditionuntil he crossed oars with the new student generation.

A member of champion crews at Cornell, Stowe had stroked Philadelphia's amateur Vesper Boat Club to a gold medal in the 1964 Olympics and kept in shape by rowing on the Saigon River while a Navy lieutenant. He extolled crew as a way to learn the virtues of "discipline, sacrifice, teamwork and sportsmanship in an atmosphere of men." At Columbia, he said, crew should be a refuge for "white-hat" fugitives from the creeping culture of "cruddy weirdo slobs."

Who Wants 'Em? On a day of mourning for Martin Luther King, Stowe called a double practice. "If I got killed," he said, "I'd want everything to go on normally." During Columbia's 1968 campus uprising, he led 100 policemen through underground tunnels against the protesters. He ordered his white hats to use clean words and wear short hair: "I didn't particularly want our squad to be called 'the hippie crew.' I told 'em I wanted to be proud to be the Columbia coach."

But Stowe found his oarsmen buffeted by more than the polluted Harlem River. "Sleep is crucial," he laments, "but today a guy is likely to have a drug freak playing a stereo all night in the next room. One guy roomed with a kid who killed himself with an overdose; it was fairly unnerving."

Although Columbia's crew improved, the supply of willing oarsmen dwindled. "Columbia may be a good place for radical liberals and what have you," says Stowe, "but they don't come down to the boathouse, and when they do come, you're not sure you want 'em." Last year the varsity lightweight squad was seeded sixth out of 15 in the crucial Eastern sprints. But the crew skipped the races to join the protest over Cambodia and Kent State. For 18 places on the freshman squad, the turnout dropped from 70 two years ago to 20 this fall.

Now Stowe has quit his Columbia job to think things over. "These kids are so warped that you just can't get to 'em at the college level any more," he says. "Can you imagine? They actually have a homophile league on the campus now. I guess times are changingbut I'm not changing fast enough with them."

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