Big Voice Speaks Out for Crew

The voice on the phone was as rich, deep and mellifluous as a voice from the heavens. It was like a great organ in a medieval cathedral. You imagine God sounds like this. Reassuring, soothing, commanding.

So, you didn’t have to say, “Who’s calling, please?” It was either God, Moses or General MacArthur. Or Gregory Peck.

Any moviegoer would recognize the voice in an instant. It is one of the great instruments given to any actor, as easy on the ears as a sonata by Beethoven. It is the voice that made believable and inspiring roles from a Southern white lawyer defending a black man in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a man in a gray flannel suit fighting discrimination in “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” a troubled priest in “Keys to the Kingdom,” a stressed-out general in “Twelve O’Clock High”--a library of parts that brought one Academy Award and seven nominations.

Eldred Gregory Peck is distressed. It’s not the state of the art of motion pictures, it is the state of the art of collegiate athletics. UCLA is dropping rowing from its athletic calendar--also water polo--and the old No. 8 in the Cal crew of 1937-38 thinks it is a mistake. So do a lot of other people.

Crew used to have a special place on the athletic agenda. No one pretends football educates its players any more. It can’t even keep them out of jail. But it pays the bill for other college sports, it says here.

Somehow it misfired in the case of the UCLA crew. It isn’t as if crew were a sport where you had to get Buick Regals for the defensive secondary or provide walk-around money for wide receivers. Crew members don’t even get in on scholarship. When Gregory Peck rowed at Berkeley, he was a pre-med student--and he remembers walking to the boathouse on the Oakland Estuary with most of the other oarsmen, carrying slide rules so they wouldn’t fall behind in their engineering classes.

Crews have 100% graduation rates. Every guy with an oar gets a degree. Football doesn’t even have a 100% literacy rate. But it brings millions of dollars to the colleges to support the other non-revenue-producing sports. Supposedly.

Crew members are not in school to become Green Bay Packers. They’re there to become doctors, lawyers, Secretaries of State, engineers, even Academy Award actors.

The problem, as UCLA sees it, is strictly economic. The athletic department accrued a deficit of $3 million over the past several years. It promises to grow.

You can’t cut football or basketball or even tennis--a UCLA grad might win Wimbledon! The networks are ponying up billions for the ball sports. Notre Dame gets more money than Chase Manhattan.

About five years ago, the UCLA athletic department agreed to provide $55,000 annually--or about 20% of the sport’s total nut--for rowing. Booster groups outside the university would provide the rest.

Athletic Director Peter Dalis notes that the boosters failed to meet the quota. Crew cost the school about $375,000, or about $75,000 a year.

Plus you can’t put crew in the Rose Bowl.

It isn’t as if crew were quoit-tossing or synchronized swimming, something to be tossed out like fuel off a crashing plane. It’s more like babies off a sled. Crew, it so happens, is the oldest intercollegiate sport in the country--in fact, in two countries. It began in England in 1829 with Oxford vs. Cambridge. It began here in 1852 with Yale vs. Harvard.

It was the sport of Frank Merriwell, Dink Stover, all the pulp-fiction heroes of childhood in the early 1900s. The stroke oar was once a bigger man on campus than the tailback.

Before there was a Super Bowl, a Final Four or a Rose Bowl or Sugar Bowl, there was a Yale-Harvard boat race, and it was the social event of the season. A boat train trailed the contestants from the shore, and 60,000 spectators lined the banks. There was no spread, but there was plenty of betting.

There was a Poughkeepsie Regatta. Yale-Harvard on the Thames in New London and the Henley Regatta on the Thames in Old London.

But it was never a big business. It was un-American, I guess. The bottom line was a well-rounded student, not a well-rounded TV contract. As one reader wrote to the editor, “Why would a university want a sports program in which young men carried a better-than-average GPA, could read and write, did not have financial help from the alumni, did not depend on painkillers to get them through to the next event, get up between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning to go to practice in order not to miss classes and whose parents and friends helped them finance their trips to most competitions?”

Why, indeed? It’s almost Communistic.

They used to say that football built character, although we don’t hear that much anymore. But rowing actually did.

“It’s the most grueling sport known in college,” claims the old No. 8 oar, Gregory Peck. “It’s the most demanding and painful. We used to have (Coach) Ky Ebright’s famous 18-mile workouts. If it’s a close race, you really go beyond your limits. It’s a sport where strong men faint as they go over the finish line because they have spent every last ounce of their strength and consciousness. Your chest feels like cement, your legs feel like rubber, your mind is numb, your back feels broken but you learn never to give up.

“We were racing the University of Washington Olympic champion crew one day, and the coxswain is giving us the ‘big 10’ (for 10 strokes at maximum effort). . . . When we crossed the finish line, we found the Washington crew had already finished and were even pulling their shell out of the water, and we asked the cox, ‘Why?’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘we were gaining on ‘em.’ We never got anything out of it but love of competition and camaraderie and the feeling of having exercised the mind and body in a wholesome, exhilarating way.”

In short, what collegiate athletics were supposed to be all about. Adds Peck: “I think it’s prestigious for the university, even though it does not attract 90,000 people.”

UCLA palpably does not agree. The notion of the student-athlete probably died out with Burt L. Standish, Ralph Henry Barbour and Boys Life magazine. The campus hero today not only can’t row a boat, he can’t even spell it.