6 March 2024

By Peter Mallory

A few days ago, I had a long talk with Tom Daley, whose three-part critique of The Boys in the Boat (TBITB) was recently published on Hear the Boat Sing (see here). I told him that I was planning to provide HTBS readers with a bit of a different perspective, but before putting pen to paper I wanted to discuss with Tom the source of the intense anger I perceived in his words.

I told him that he should know up front that author Daniel James Brown is a personal friend of mine, that he has stayed at my house and I have stayed at his, that I have introduced him at several of his speaking engagements around the country and around the world, that I had proudly been a part of the PBS documentary that received so much incoming artillery in his HTBS piece, and I had even helped arrange for Dan to make his first trips to the San Diego Crew Classic and to Henley.

Over the phone, Tom and I dug deeply into his sundry objections to The Boys in the Boat. He told me that he had loved the book when he first read it and had been profoundly moved by Joe Rantz’s family history. Only years later did he sour on the whole TBITB phenomenon. 

I listened carefully. It seems it all began for him with a single sentence in the prologue. Dan Brown is knocking on Joe Rantz’s door for the first time and is musing about what he might discover when he meets Joe. He writes:

And I knew that he had been one of the nine young men from the state of Washington – farm boys, fishermen, and loggers – who shocked the rowing world and Adolf Hitler by winning the gold medal in eight-oared rowing at the 1936 Olympics.

Now, nowhere else in the entire book is the 1936 crew described as made up of “farm boys, fishermen, and loggers”, and nowhere else is there any suggestion that their Olympic success shocked anybody . . . but the proverbial genie had been let out of the bottle.

To switch metaphors midstream, from that single sentence, a pebble started rolling down the hill, gathering momentum and eventually turning into an avalanche. When it came time for publicists to write a text for the book’s dust jacket, it looks like they read as far a page 2 of the prologue, maybe skimmed the rest of the book, and produced this:

[T]he improbable, intimate account of nine working class boys from the American West who at the 1936 Olympics showed the world what true grit really meant . . . the story of the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew, a team that transformed the sport . . . It was an unlikely quest from the start—a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, who first had to master the harsh physical and psychological demands of collegiate rowing and then defeat the East Coast’s elite teams that had long dominated the sport. . . unexpectedly wiping the smile off Adolf Hitler’s face by beating his vaunted German team to capture the Olympic gold medal.

Those same words and phrases from the dust jacket were again used in the 2016 PBS documentary The Boys of ’36 (available in the U.S. on Amazon Prime or Apple TV+) and then fleshed out into a full 1930s-style Hollywood fantasy in the recent movie directed by George Clooney (now widely available on the internet). To again switch metaphors, from a single teeny tiny acorn came a mighty oak, now sadly and laughably void of historical accuracy, as has been well documented by Tom Daley and others, myself included.

All this reminds me of that old science fiction trope, the Butterfly Effect. Someone goes back eons in a time machine in order to see dinosaurs in the flesh, stays only a few minutes but accidentally steps on a butterfly before climbing back into his machine. When he returns to the present, he finds everything has been utterly transformed. Killing that teeny tiny butterfly had led to an ever-widening cascade of minute changes that over millions of years had made the whole world unrecognizable.

Watching the Butterfly Effect of Dan’s single sentence take hold over the last decade has been sufficient to drive Tom Daley absolutely over the edge, as he readily admits. He tells me he blames the publicists, not Dan Brown, but I can tell you that both Dan and I respectfully disagree. It was definitely Dan who started that pebble rolling, planted that acorn, stepped on that butterfly.

The one thing that Dan truly regrets is the “shocked the rowing world” line in the prologue. Me too, now that I have tasted Tom Daley’s rage full in the face.

I told Tom that I more or less agreed with many of his points. He got a lot right, and I told him so, but I also respectfully disagree with a number of his conclusions, and I am most uncomfortable with his tone of damnation and denunciation. He kindly provided me with a number of additional “rants” (his term) that he has distributed to his 1973 Princeton teammates over the last couple of years, and they are more of the same, as often as not even more incendiary.

My take is that Tom is a black-and-white kind of guy, and when it comes to The Boys in the Boat even the slightest perceived deviation from historical fact angers him to his very core. He described to me watching TBITB film director George Clooney and book author Daniel James Brown being interviewed on the PBS News Hour and being infuriated that Dan didn’t immediately interrupt correspondent Stephanie Sy when she spoke of those “scrappy freshmen” rowing against great odds.

I went back and watched the interview myself (see the interview here), and I observed a very uncomfortable Dan Brown walking and sitting beside George. Dan knows very well that there were no freshmen in the 1936 Washington Eight, one of the many farcical deviations from history in the movie (which George sort of apologized to Dan for during this very interview), but Dan angrily interrupting anybody? That’s not Dan Brown.

Last December I reviewed the movie for HTBS. You hardly have to read between the lines to conclude that I, too, was “disappointed” that the producers made the choice to deviate so very far (and so absurdly) from the truth. You might say Tom Daley and I are on the same page on this question, perhaps differing only in tone and word choice, me being a glass-half-full guy, while Tom’s a pulverize-the-glass guy.

But it seems appropriate to go back and remind ourselves, Tom especially, that Dan Brown did not set out to write a “history” of the 1936 crew. He set out to write a bestseller. He calls his writing “narrative non-fiction”, not a novel but rather a dramatization of historical events, definitely not quite straight history.

No one, least of all Dan, could have predicted or prepared for the unexpected tsunami (yet another metaphor) of success that followed the publication of TBITB, and so it seems to me hardly fair to come down too hard on him for the cumulative (Butterfly) embellishments that were made by others, by publicists, the press, and especially Hollywood, long after he had sold away the manuscript and film rights.

The fact is that Dan was not writing his book for Tom Daley, or even for you and me, members of the HTBS community. No one has ever gotten rich writing for rowers. Dan was writing for the average person who would read TBITB in their book club or as required reading in school or because they saw it spend months and months and months on The New York Times Bestseller list or maybe because their neighbor raved to them about it. 

Nevertheless, the one sentence Dan wrote in the prologue makes him the original ground zero of the epidemic of mythmaking that followed. (Yikes, another metaphor, and a mixed one at that!) He must shoulder ultimate responsibility, but surely there was no malice in his actions.

I also think it’s unfair to put too much blame on George Clooney. He was hired to direct a movie that would fill movie theaters with happy, paying customers, and virtually all of them non-rowers to boot! Well, with a 96% satisfaction rate, I think we can agree that he has succeeded very well. I may well have felt disappointment leaving the theater, but I was misty-eyed at the same time.

Tom, George Clooney wasn’t making a movie for you, and PBS wasn’t making a documentary for you either. Blame society if you like, but please don’t be too hard on Dan Brown or George Clooney for doing their jobs . . . and doing them with distinction.

Other than that, Tom, I could nit-pick a whole bunch of your specific criticisms, but upon reflection only a couple really stand out. As for whether the Washington boys were treated as “hicks from the sticks” in 1936 when they came East to Poughkeepsie, they most certainly were, not for their lack of prowess in boats, something you illustrate well, but as social inferiors. Respected on the water . . . but resented and ridiculed on land. Remember, the Intercollegiate Rowing Association was only formed because Harvard and especially Yale flatly refused to race any institution they considered below their social status, so Cornell, which they considered to be an ag school, Penn, a trade school, and Columbia, whose only shortcoming seemed to be they were not Yale or Harvard, were forced to start holding their own championship in 1895. Not until 2003, more than a frickin’ century later, for Heaven’s sake, did Yale and Harvard finally relent and join the IRA.

Fun fact.  

As for whether or not the Washington boys were underdogs or favorites at the 1936 Olympics, they were most certainly considered the favorites by everyone, though the real history is a great deal more nuanced. Perhaps a topic for some future HTBS posting.  

I imagine the germ for the underdog myth that found its way into the TBITB phenomenon may have been, of all people, Jesse Owens. Back in 1936, the world and American press reacted with astonishment when he won his four gold medals, but any thoughtful observer would have known that American sprinters had dominated international competition since the birth of the modern Olympic Games. No particular surprise in 1936 that America’s best sprinter was also the world’s best sprinter, but it didn’t hurt the mythmaking that Owens was an era-defining athlete with a wonderful smile and “aw, shucks” humility, and that as a “negro”, he had put the lie to Hitler’s Master Race ideology, and with the Führer himself in the stands watching!  

Fast forward nearly 80 years, and why wouldn’t a book author or publicist or documentary filmmaker or screenwriter not want to piggyback onto a legendary feelgood story as good as that? (Surely by now we’ve all lost count of the number of metaphors I have thrown at you so far today.)

And Tom, you’re a smart guy, an incredible detail guy, a CPA like me, which makes me surprised by your argument that because as a group the nine boys in the 1936 boat had excelled in high school, succeeded in college back when even going to college was a rarity, and distinguished themselves in professional careers after graduation, a lawyer, a doctor, several engineers, then they must have been “simply above-average middle class boys of the era, or upper-middle-class by the depressed standards of the day.” You are drawing a conclusion based upon a statistical sample, not of a million or a thousand or even a hundred. Your sample size is nine. They were not simply above average. As a group they were the very tippy top of a huge iceberg below the surface (keep counting!). They became Olympic Champions, for Heaven’s sake. They were a once-in-a-generation, perhaps, once-in-a-century anomaly. George Pocock spoke fondly of them till the end of his life. And they did it all in faraway Seattle, at the very edge of civilization, and in the midst of the frickin’ Depression.

And as for that huge trigger phrase of yours from the prologue: “farm boys, fishermen, and loggers”, in your effort to prove your point that this phrase was shockingly and unconscionably misleading and untruthful, you go on and on trying to minimize, even make light of the challenges these boys faced. You even seek to diminish the harrowing childhood that Joe Rantz endured. That’s very hurtful to Joe’s daughter, Judy, and it makes me sad that you don’t get that.

Let’s take a forensic accounting look at the facts, Tom. According to your own research, Joe Rantz and Gordy Adam spent time on farms. Check! They also spent time fishing, Joe poaching salmon for survival, Gordy working on a fishing boat and in a salmon cannery. Another check! And Joe worked in a logging camp, which completes your trigger-phrase trifecta, and we haven’t even mentioned Roger Morris working odd jobs, Joe and Chuck Day working on the face of Grand Coulee Dam, Joe and Jim McMillin working as janitors while at UW, and Don Hume working in a pulp mill. That much hard work within one eight-oared crew seems sufficient to impress even Hugh Matheson mucking out 500 meters of mill race. (See Hugh’s terrific 27 February HTBS posting: Showing Some Class.) Surely it is enough to characterize your “farm boys, fishermen, and loggers” trigger phrase as embellishment at the very worst, hardly rising to the level of, in your words, “a lie, pure and simple.”

But don’t get me wrong. Your general point is well taken. During the last ten years, the not-quite-historical account of an extraordinary historical event has slipped the surly bonds of fact and risen (or descended, depending on your point of view) into the realm of mythology. Tom, you end your piece by making this exact same statement, just in your own colorful and well-chosen words, writing “the book was written, and the narrative of Brown’s historically accurate work of non-fiction was hijacked and transformed into a mythical underdog fairy tale. Now we have the release of the movie, which amplifies the myth far beyond the absurd, with its own fabricated narrative that bears absolutely no connection to reality. The true history of the 1936 UW Olympic eight has been lost.”

Indeed! Such a lost opportunity! I would have loved to have seen a movie that stuck to the facts, not merely “based on a true story”, Hollywood-speak for “Don’t ever let the truth get in the way of a rousing good yarn!” From the dawn of time, human culture has always run on the Liberty Valence principle: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Yes, this didn’t begin nor will it end with The Boys in the Boat. Our collective cultural memory is ultimately passed down through myth and legend: the Gods on Mount Olympus (along with myriad other religious texts), the Trojan War, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Shakespeare’s historic plays, la Longe Carabine, Remember the Alamo, the Lost Cause, Custer’s Last Stand . . . even the Nazi Olympics, all now so encrusted in myth that even if they were originally “based on a true story”, the historic truth ultimately becomes – dare I say it? – irrelevant to many.

And myths and legends can have unspoken agendas, like America’s Founding Fathers, their humanity now conveniently disregarded, invoked to justify one current political viewpoint or another.

Does the Hollywood fantasy version of The Boys in the Boat have some nefarious agenda? Only to create a nostalgic movie that will make a profit by making paying viewers happy. Now how bad is that, Tom? A lost opportunity for sure, but hardly something worth raising your blood pressure over. Go buy a box of popcorn and watch the movie again for fun, if you can.   

Tom, your piece surely has provided fodder to stimulate continuing fruitful conversations on HTBS about our favorite topic, our rowing heritage, and I thank you for that, but I encourage you to . . . You know? I’m going to stop right there. I almost slipped in yet another metaphor, something about tilting at windmills.