Daniel James Brown Quotes

It's not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it's a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.

They are almost all gone now - the legions of young men who saved the world in the years just before I was born. But that afternoon, standing on the balcony of Haus West, I was swept with gratitude for their goodness and their grace, their humility and their honor, their simple civility and all the things they taught us before they flitted across the evening water and finally vanished into the night.

Every good rowing coach, in his own way, imparts to his men the kind of self-discipline required to achieve the ultimate from mind, heart, and body. Which is why most ex-oarsmen will tell you they learned more fundamentally important lessons in the racing shell than in the classroom.

I lingered a bit longer. The tug of kinship held me there, bound me to the place and to a man I had never known, but without whom I would never have been. I conjured up his image one more time, and then laid back to rest. The late summer darkness drifted down from the sky like a warm mist, enveloping me and the graves before me,uniting us in its soft embrace. The world spun eastward beneath me, and the darkness deepened and spread over Hinckley, over Minnesota, over the American countryside, covering all of us in the same black shroud, tenants in common, tenants of time.

Joe had never flown in an airplane, never seen a city from any higher vantage point than that afforded by his own six-foot-three frame. Now, standing on the observation deck, he looked out at the many spires of New York rising through a pall of smoke and steam and heat haze and did not know whether he found it beautiful or frightening.
He leaned over the low stone parapet and peered down at miniature cars and buses and swarms of tiny people scurrying along the streets. The city below him, Joe realized, murmured. The cacophony of honking horns and wailing sirens and rumbling streetcars that had as**saulted his ears at street level were reduced up here to something gentler and more soothing, like the sonorous breathing of an enormous living thing. It was a much bigger, more connected, world than he had ever thought possible.

Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They're the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that's why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That's what he gets from rowing.

It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can't waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I've just gotta take care of it myself' Joe Rantz

You will eat no fried meats," he began abruptly. "You will eat no pastries, but you will eat plenty of vegetables. You will eat good, substantial, wholesome food - the kind of food your mother makes. You will go to bed at ten o'clock and arise punctually at seven o'clock. You will not smoke or drink or chew. And you will follow this regimen all year round, for as long as you row for me. A man cannot abuse his body for six months and then expect to row the other six months.

Hurting was nothing new to him.

Nobody ever took time out in a boat race," he noted. "There's no place to stop and get a satisfying drink of water or a lungful of cool, invigorating air. You just keep your eyes glued on the red, perspiring neck of the fellow ahead of you and row until they tell you it's all over . . . Neighbor, it's no game for a softy." When you row, the major muscles in your arms, legs, and back - particularly the quadriceps, triceps, biceps, deltoids, latissimus dorsi, abdominals, hamstrings, and gluteal muscles - do most of the grunt work, propelling the boat forward against the unrelenting resistance of water and wind. At the same time, scores of smaller muscles in the neck, wrists,

As Joe raised a hand to acknowledge the wave of applause rising to greet him, he found himself struggling desperately to keep back tears. He had never let himself dream of standing in a place like this, surrounded by people like these. It startled him but at the same time it also filled him with gratitude, and as he stood at the front of the room that day acknowledging the applause, he felt a sudden surge of something unfamiliar - a sense of pride that was deeper and more heartfelt than any he had ever felt before. Now it was on to Poughkeepsie again, and then maybe even Berlin. Everything finally seemed to be starting to turn golden.

Then the coxswain called out, 'Ready all!' Joe turned and faced the rear of the boat, slid his seat forward, sank the white blade of his oar into the oil-black water, tensed his muscles, and waited for the command that would propel him forward into the glimmering darkness.

Seattle's Hooverville Northwest of downtown, in the old Scandinavian neighborhood of Ballard, tugboats belching plumes of black smoke nosed long rafts of logs into the

George Pocock learned much about the hearts and souls of young men. He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope, to see skill where skill was obscured by ego or by anxiety. He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust.

Two days later, Republican senator William Borah of Idaho, though widely considered a progressive Republican, warned that Roosevelt's policies were endangering the very foundations of American liberty and that their "creeping paralysis of bureaucracy threatens freedom of the press, placing the yoke of torture, colossal expense, and demoralization on the nation.

The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility - the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole - and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.

Competitive rowing is an undertaking of extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment. Unlike most sports, which draw primarily on particular muscle groups, rowing makes heavy and repeated use of virtually every muscle in the body, despite the fact that a rower, as Al Ulbrickson liked to put it, "scrimmages on his posterior annex." And rowing makes these muscular demands not at odd intervals but in rapid sequence, over a protracted period of time, repeatedly and without respite. On one occasion, after watching the Washington freshmen practice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Royal Brougham marveled at the relentlessness of the

after reading an article about Ulbrickson's nutritional regimen, and contemplating his boys' success, a horse trainer named Tom Smith would go in search of hay with a high calcium content for a racehorse named Seabiscuit.

In a sport like this - hard work, not much glory, but still popular in every century - well, there must be some beauty which ordinary men can't see, but extraordinary men do. - George Yeoman Pocock

Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race - the Olympic standard - takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes. A well-conditioned oarsman or oarswoman

Neither is necessarily a better or more valuable oarsman than the other; both the long arms and the strong back are assets to the boat. But if they are to row well together, each of these oarsmen must adjust to the needs and capabilities of the other. Each must be prepared to compromise something in the way of optimizing his stroke for the overall benefit of the boat...Only in this way can the capabilities that come with diversity...be turned to advantage rather than disadvantage.
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When all is said and done I think the story tells us that hope is the heroes domain, not the fools. Because we dare to hope, even when doing so might undo us. We leave the worlds we create behind us, swirling in our wakes, eternal and effervescent with the beauty of our aspirations.

The wood...taught us about survival, about overcoming difficulty, about prevailing over adversity, but it also taught us something about the underlying reason for surviving in the first place. Something about infinite beauty, about undying grace, about things larger and greater than ourselves. About the reasons we were all here.

If you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places. The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind.

From the moment he stepped in the shell that afternoon, he felt at home. He liked the boys.He didn't know Gordy Adam and Don Hume well, but both made a point of welcoming him. His oldest most reliable shell house friend, Roger Morris, sitting up front in the bow, gave a wave and a shout, Hey Joe I see you finally found the right boat!" His buddies from Grand Coulee Chuck Day and Johnie White were sitting up front too. As he strapped in his shoes and began to lace up, Stub McMillin, his face alight said, This boat is going to fly now boys." Shorty Hunt slapped him on the back and whispered, I got your back Joe!

Pocock paused and stepped back from the frame of the shell and put his hands on his hips, carefully studying the work he had so far done. He said for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn't enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. "Rowing," he said, "is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts that really matter anyway. Do you know what I mean, Joe?

All were merged into one smoothly working machine; they were, in fact, a poem of motion, a symphony of swinging blades.

The exuberant Husky crew gingerly hoisted Walling out of the shell and sent him off to the hospital. Astonished fans and journalists gathered around them on the dock, peppering them with questions: Was the University of Washington in the District of Columbia? Where exactly was Seattle, anyway? Were any of them really lumberjacks?

Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you've ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.

All these miseries seemed compounded into a single horrific moment one misty winter morning when she turned from the woodstove with an iron skillet full of hot bacon grease, potatoes, and onions and tripped over Harry Junior, who was lying on his back on the floor. She dropped the skillet and its contents directly onto the boy's neck and chest. She

But the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff - of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself - in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity - is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time - and this is key - no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort - the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes - is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That's the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than for trophies or accolades. But it takes young men or women of extraordinary character as well as extraordinary physical ability to pull it off.

There seemed to Joe to be some kind of connection between what he was doing here among a pile of freshly split shakes, whta Pocock was doing in his shop, and what he was trying to do himself in the racing shells Pocock built - something about the deliberate application of strength, the careful coordination of ind and muscle, the sudden unfolding of mystery and beauty.

It was when he tried to talk about 'the boat' that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his eyes...Finally, watching Joe struggle for composure over and over, I realized that 'the boat' was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it encompassed but transcended both - it was something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experience - a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.

The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race - the Olympic standard - takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes.

set up machine-gun emplacements at Pier 91; the chief refused