Josh Gruenberg’s Decision : The Passion of Crew

At 6:30 on a frigid January morning, Lake Cachuma is just beginning to reflect the light of day. Hills fold into green valleys to the north. Mosquitoes socialize over the water’s misty surface: There’s good fishing here.

And also good rowing. Much better than coach Doug Perez ever thought before he left a successful program at San Diego State University to direct the efforts at UC Santa Barbara last spring. Six days a week, from late September through June, 100 rowers make the 40-minute drive from campus to work out here. Thwarted by windy afternoons and too many individual class schedules, the rowers are used to these early workouts, just as they are used to thrice-weekly weightlifting sessions and a couple of hours each week of running stadium stairs.

To be an oarsman is not only to be in the best physical shape of your life; it is also to learn the art of time well spent. One does not engage in the sport for anything so common as excitement or stardom. One’s involvement is based on the desire to prove something to oneself. It is so physically grueling and time-consuming that university rowers do not worry about being cut from the team--they worry instead that they are merely too human to meet the sport’s demands.

“A kid who’s played American football in high school, no matter how tough he thinks he is, won’t last in rowing, because it’s too much work and there are no heroes,” says Perez, as he starts up the engine of the small launch he uses to watch his team practice. He pulls a stocking cap down over his ears and zooms out onto the lake.

Today may be the coldest morning of the season, yet many a bare torso is visible among the crews, an indication of the effort they will expend over the next hour and a half. Under a moon slowly losing its battle with the sun, crew after crew--eights, fours and the odd pair and single--launch their needlelike craft onto the water. “They’re 60 feet long, 2 feet wide and worthless for anything but going in a straight line,” Perez says. “You can’t turn them. You can’t fish from them.”

The crews delicately propel themselves into position for the day’s workout. They seem not so much on the lake as simply a part of it. The wind picks up, kicking the water’s surface into boat-rocking wavelets.

Perez lifts the megaphone to his lips. “Use this chop. Try 29 or 30 on this one, and keep your weight behind your blade.” The rowers settle into an introductory pace. Soon their bodies are drenched in sweat.

Perez readies them for another “piece,” or sprint, by announcing, “Three to build,” and eight bodies slide into their curved-back positions, heads straight up, faces implacable. The rhythm-setting three strokes accomplished, Perez barks the crews into a lung-busting pace. “This is an endurance sport,” Perez says as rowers sail by in a motion reminiscent, curiously, of both ballet dancers and blitzing linebackers. “After a certain level of fitness, you can do anything your mind lets you.” He calls out another stroke rate, exhorting the oarsmen to the brink of exhaustion. The final piece finishes at a brisk 38 strokes per minute. The rowers hunch down into themselves, sucking wind. They can do anything their minds let them.

The ditch was 30 feet long, 2 feet wide and 4 feet deep, and by the time he was finished digging it, Joshua Gruenberg had made his decision. At the end of the most eventful summer of his life--a summer that began with the completion of a glorious junior-year racing season, including the crew’s appearance at the Henley Regatta in England, and ended with his job on a construction crew--he would forsake a happy life at San Diego State University to finish his final year of school at UCSB.

“I was torn,” Gruenberg says, “because my friends were in San Diego, and I liked my classes there.” But his coach, Doug Perez, had moved from San Diego State to Santa Barbara the previous spring, to try to build a lackluster rowing team into the credibility he had attained at San Diego. “The difficult thing,” Gruenberg says, “was that San Diego’s rowing program was much better than Santa Barbara’s, and as a senior I wanted to row with a winner. But I also knew that Doug Perez was a major reason San Diego State was a winner.”

Gruenberg’s transfer to UC Santa Barbara shocked most of his friends in San Diego, because so much of his life there--virtually all of his life there--had been built around the rigors of crew. A kid who had theretofore possessed unremarkable athletic skill, Gruenberg, as a freshman, had embraced the esoteric sport of rowing with a passion that surprised even those who knew him best.

In a discipline that epitomizes the concept of teamwork, Gruenberg has carved his own niche, at one time last year ranking No. 3 in the nation among rowers his size in tests for strength and endurance on specially designed ergometric equipment. At 20, still far from rowing prime, he also realized the glory of team success when unheralded San Diego State’s lightweight-division boat ended the season with an astonishing 39-1 record, beating perennial power Harvard before losing to perennial power Yale.

From a modest high school career--athletically, academically, socially--crew had taken Josh Gruenberg to a place in life where anything was possible, to the sanctuary of achievement, and the self-confidence and discipline it requires. Then, in the middle of his junior year, the news came down.

“The team captains were summoned to Doug’s (Perez’s) house for a special meeting,” Gruenberg recalls one morning over an enormous post-workout breakfast at a local campus hangout. “All his money was spread out on the coffee table--nickels, pennies, everything. He said, ‘I’m outta here.’ Now, Doug’s a pretty melodramatic guy, and this was a heavy performance. He said he had been borrowing from his parents to pay his rent, and that he’d received an offer from UCSB as a paid rowing coach.”

During the next several months, Gruenberg agonized over whether to follow Perez. The ditch-digging assignment he pulled that day in the summer of ’85 prompted him to consider his options for what would be the last time. Come September, he would join Santa Barbara’s varsity crew.

“Shoveling out that dirt, I was so happy,” he said. “There was no need to think about it any longer.”

Josh Gruenberg, like almost every other American rower, had hardly heard of the sport until college. “Most rowers have some jock background, but because there’s so little emphasis on rowing in America, you can start late and do well,” says Perez. “By the time you’re 17, if you haven’t been picked out of the mob to play football, you can forget it. There aren’t many sports you can begin at 18 and within a few years be national-team material.”

There is an almost mythic quality that envelops rowing. Largely deprived of media attention, and being so incredibly taxing, rowing creates an insular, singularly dedicated society of egos simultaneously bonding with--and besting--one another. The sport will never be a media favorite; rowers will never hawk Wheaties or Bud Light on television because television doesn’t like rowing. TV likes power unbound; it likes to pick out individual performances, if not actual faces. It’s impossible for a spectator to follow all 2,000 meters of a race on a straight course. “I can’t complain about not being recognized in the media,” Gruenberg says. “It’s a fact of life in this sport, and recognition isn’t why I row. Rowing does things for my confidence and discipline that nothing else ever has.”

Rowing remains a sport of the true amateur. If you are a college rower, whether for an Eastern power such as Harvard, Yale or Penn, or for Orange Coast Community College in Costa Mesa, you are an athlete who rows for some reason other than funding your education. Virtually without exception, alumni, community groups, members of crew and their families support rowing in the best club sport tradition. Club sports, unlike the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.-regulated football and basketball (whose revenues support at least a university’s athletic department), rely on outside sources of revenue. Athletes on many teams must double as fund-raisers. Gruenberg figures that his parents fork out $600 each school year. In the months before the Henley Regatta, he personally hustled $5,000 to help the team make the trip. Of the 52 schools in the Western United States with crews, only a handful pay their coaches a living wage. Perez, the first full-time paid coach at Santa Barbara, at $30,000 a year, is by far the best paid, and he knows he got the job largely for his ability to raise funds.

Just as the Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1932 prompted the creation of UCLA’s crew in 1933, the Games of 1984, held at nearby Lake Casitas, helped solidify the program at UC Santa Barbara. The Olympic success awakened the interest of the affluent local residents, whose contributions were supplemented by the equipment left over from the Games.

National recognition, of course, could only help increase UCSB’s budget and attractiveness to rowing talent. When enough “stars” row for a particular school, its currency rises in the national market, a subject of no little concern to Doug Perez. The U.S. team, Perez explains, is picked by Kris Korzeniowski, the full-time coach, after an invitation-only tryout. Perez objects to what he sees as an unconscionable East Coast bias, one he believes is grossly unfair, especially to long-shot national team contenders such as Gruenberg.

“Korzeniowski always holds the national team camps in the East, yet the team he picked last year to go to the world championships (in the heavyweight eight boat) included four guys from California and one guy from Washington,” Perez says. “He forces these people to spend their time and money to live back East. It’s hard to fight 100 years of tradition.”

Gruenberg, who faces the prospect of moving east for the summer to try out for Korzeniowski’s team, is less adamant. “With the exception of one erg championship (the ergometric competition at which he excels), I don’t feel victimized by being out here,” he says. “If I had gone to that championship last year in Boston, though, I’d have had a good chance of winning. Only four days before, I had beaten Boston’s winning score on our equipment.”

“Josh’s erg score last year was so good he may get invited to try out anyway,” Perez says. “He is a helluva undergrad oarsman, and because he’s far too small to row on the Olympic team (only heavyweights compete in the Olympics; Gruenberg is 6-foot-1 and 160 pounds), his only shot is the lightweight national team. He’s got to decide whether he can afford to drop everything in his life and go East.”

Gruenberg’s mother, Maggie, shudders in recollection of the physical torture her son has already put himself through to become a competitive rower. She is standing on a grassy bank of San Diego’s Mission Bay one day in early March, awaiting the start of the first crew meet of the season and thinking about rowing. The conditions today are lousy: drizzle accompanied by a head wind that favors the powerful boats over those with better technique.

“Here’s a kid,” Maggie says, “who used to come back from the first few weeks of practice each season with bloody hands. The pain is not a pleasant part of this sport.” It is also not something rowers discuss. When Gruenberg is asked to reveal his blistered hands, he merely shrugs. “I have soft skin,” he’ll say. Or, “the blisters are due to my poor technique.”

About 200 people wander the banks along the rowing course this day; maybe 30 of them are not competing. Except for the San Diego Crew Classic, Southern California’s premier rowing event in which even financially strapped national teams compete--and which draws 30,000 spectators--almost nobody without a personal interest in the outcome goes to these meets. The Gruenbergs attend as many as possible throughout the season, because it’s important to Josh. After almost four years of watching her son compete, Maggie and her husband, Daniel, understand well the temperamental disposition to rowing.

“This was an obsessed child,” she says, squinching her face against the elements. “When he was 4 or 5 he refused to leave the house unless his shoelaces were of equal loopiness. And they couldn’t touch the ground. He’s always been a fixated kid.”

“He called this morning, before the meet,” Dan Gruenberg says, shuffling his feet against the damp grass. “He didn’t speak. He just started to giggle.” He sighs, pleased with the vision of a young man whose future is uncertain but whose present is so utterly perfect. “He’s so young, so unworldly. His responses have to do solely with him.” Dan’s gaze shifts to the water. As near as he can tell from this distance, the race, Josh’s race, has begun. “I just hope they win. He’s in such a terrible mood when they lose. Just insufferable.”

Later, over lunch, Josh Gruenberg smiles about his decision to row for Santa Barbara. He has no regrets. Santa Barbara is a much better team than he thought. Much better. To the victor, the spoils--he sports the two shirts of his opponents in the boats the Santa Barbara Gauchos had beaten in this meet. Having never beaten them before, he is in a cheerful mood. He has decided to head for Philadelphia after graduation to pursue a seat on the national lightweight team. If he doesn’t make it, maybe he’ll try again next year. He’ll worry about how to pay for it later. Simply to know his goal and be happy trying to reach it is a wonderful thing. “My sense of well-being comes from the fact that I’ve made the right decisions,” he says. “Rowing has helped me find the good life in college, and I can’t see myself being any happier than I am right now.”