A Shell Game : Webb and Farrell Help UCLA Crew Pull Together in Run at National Title

The old Speed Queen washer that sits in the UCLA boathouse in Marina del Rey looks like something you might find on an abandoned lot.

After thousands of cycles, however, the rusty appliance remains finely tuned and efficient, much like the UCLA men’s crew, which is cleaning up on shirts taken off opponents’ backs. Literally.

A uniquely American rowing tradition decrees that the spoils the victor receives for winning a standard 2,000-meter race include the jerseys from the defeated crew. It is a rite that neophyte-turned-veteran Bruin oarsmen Dave Webb and Mike Farrell have come to appreciate as their wardrobes--and UCLA’s reputation--continue to grow under second-year Coach Zenon Babraj.

This weekend at Lake Natoma near Sacramento, the Bruins will attempt to defend the Pacific Coast Championship they won last season--the school’s first in 17 years. The Cinderella crew from the West Coast finished fourth at last year’s national championships in Cincinnati behind champion Harvard, Brown and Wisconsin.

Webb, 21, participated in football, basketball and track at Calabasas High. He had never given rowing a thought until he saw it listed on a general information sheet he received as part of UCLA’s freshman orientation. Now a fifth-year senior, Webb is the captain of a varsity eight that already has defeated Brown and Wisconsin this year and is pulling together for another shot at Harvard at the Cincinnati Regatta on June 11.

“Looking back on where I started, it’s amazing,” Webb said. “I’m in the varsity boat, we’re beating teams we’ve never beaten before and I might have the opportunity to try out for the Olympic team. Five years ago, I didn’t even know what an oar was.”

Farrell, too, was unfamiliar with the sport when he graduated from Chaminade High three years ago. A basketball player in high school, he tried rowing his freshman year because it was one of the few sports available to nonscholarship athletes that is contested on the intercollegiate rather than intramural level.

Like Webb and most novices who attempt to get a grip on rowing, it took Farrell a while to get in the swing of things--swing being a crew’s perfectly coordinated stroke that causes a $13,000-$25,000, 62-foot, 250-pound shell to almost float above, rather than cut through, the water.

“Some people get the feel right away and some people never get it,” said Farrell, 20. “My freshman year, I was having real trouble. Last year, I opened myself to learning.”

Babraj (pronounced BOB-rye), is the teacher responsible for molding the Bruins’ oar-thrashing motley crew into an outfit hooked on swing and his East-bloc-inspired new-wave training techniques.

Before he defected from Poland in 1984, Babraj, 33, coached Warsaw’s SKRA club to three elite, two national and seven junior-national titles. He was an assistant at Washington, head coach at Cincinnati and freshmen coach at Brown before taking the job at UCLA in August, 1986.

Babraj brought with him to Southern California “some strange Polish exercises,” Farrell said. The land-based training, fondly labeled Zen-ercise by the Bruins, involves somersaults, freestyle medicine ball workouts, wheelbarrow races and about 100 other coordination and flexibility activities that Babraj improvises based on available materials.

During the winter break, for example, the Bruins spent a week at Big Bear Lake, where each day they dashed on cross-country skis through the light, early morning snow. After a few hours spent climbing through the woods, the group of about 20 would-be oarsmen stopped for Babraj-led aerobic workouts that involved the surrounding logs, stumps and trees. When the workout was completed, the group skied back to its base in near-blizzard conditions.

The idea behind the mountain adventure was to break down the preconceived barriers that limit a crew’s ability to deal with the physical and accompanying psychological punishment endured during a race.

“At Brown, they’re in the water in the middle of February when outside it’s 30 or 40 degrees and there’s snow, wind and they’re all wet,” Babraj said. “They can break their own limits easier so when they get in a race they don’t care. Here it’s sunny, so we must create situations that push people past their limits.”

Like marathon runners, oarsmen often hit “the wall” during competitions. Sometimes, the physical and psychological trauma occurs as early as 1,000 yards into the race.

“I start getting tunnel vision,” Farrell said. “Everything starts getting real small around a point. Your arms become hard to move and you’re just totally exhausted. Yanking the oar through the water becomes no fun at all.”

Instead, moving the 12 1/2-foot, seven-pound, carbon-graphite oar becomes a matter of survival.

“Everything starts turning white and fuzzy,” Webb said. “But you have to maintain the stroke because if you fall out of sync, you’re going to get an oar in your back and be seriously injured. You just have to hang on.”

It is the suffering of this collective pain that enables multiple personalities to work together as a single mechanism.

Take, for example, Webb and Farrell. One member of the Bruin rowing program described the former as “apple-pie Americana” and the latter as “a self-styled rowing James Dean.”

The blond-haired Webb is an applied math major striving toward a career as a teacher. Discipline and attention to detail are attributes that make the sinewy, 6-foot, 4-inch, 190-pound captain the crew’s hardest-working and most accomplished oarsman, Babraj said.

Farrell, 6-5, 185 pounds, is dark-haired, lean and angular. An art history major who wants to design automobiles, Farrell drives a big, black 1966 Chrysler New Yorker with “power everything” that he calls the Deathmobile.

“Farrell is a guy who sometimes forgets about doing the warmup,” Babraj said. “But he will never let you down in a race. He has the fighting instinct when he’s pulling. You don’t have to tell him, ‘This is a big race, you need to do your max.’ He always goes all out.”

Much the same can be said about Webb, who is known as the Terminator in seat racing, a Darwinian method of natural selection that allows a coach to determine who is capable of moving a boat and who is along for the ride.

During a series of heats in four-man shells, oarsmen are matched in different combinations that soon identify strengths and weaknesses.

Last year, before the Pacific Coast Championships, Webb and Farrell were so dominant in seat racing, they jumped from the junior varsity boat, where they had spent the season, to the varsity.

This year, Webb and Farrell are hoping the championship experience pays off in the Bruins’ drive toward a national title. It has already paid dividends in their personal lives.

“There are no substitutions or timeouts on the water,” Webb said. “You can’t slow down and do anything you want to do. You push some limits you’d never touch in other sports because of the teamwork that is involved.

“I think that applies to the real world. I’ve learned so much about myself and working with other people.”

Farrell said his rowing experience has given him more confidence. The long hours, the repetition and the pain are forgotten when a boat is moving fast.

“Coach mentioned once that he didn’t like the sport of rowing, but he loved it,” Farrell said. “That’s how I feel. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s worth it.”