Doctor Rowing: How to Watch the Head of the Charles

Many of you have seen him at the big head races, binoculars bored into his eye sockets, a faded USA Rowing hat pulled forward over his balding pate. Most likely, he’s wearing a threadbare Syracuse betting shirt, despite never having rowed himself. This will be his 26th consecutive Head of the Charles. Recently, I caught up with rowing’s super fan—Duane J.  Chapin.

“I first came to Boston in 2000 to see my cousin Jimmy Joe row. He was good, really good, so big and powerful that he made the oar look like a toothpick in his hands. Seeing that big broad back in a boat made you think that you’d need to load up a camel train to cross that expanse.

“He’d told me that it would be a fun day, with a lot of kegs along the riverbanks, so I thought, Why not? Back then, kegs were allowed. The next year, they were banned because of public drunkenness, but one of the MIT frats buried a bunch of kegs the night before along the shore and the beer kept flowing.

“I got to Harvard Square late and wasn’t sure where to go but I followed the stream of people down toward the river. One guy said, ‘Go to one of the bridges.’ The first bridge was the Anderson Bridge, so I walked up to get a look. Below me, I saw a couple of boats pointed at each other, trying to squeeze through at the same angle, neither one giving an inch.

“Hello, I said. This looks more exciting than I thought it would be. Sure enough, both of the boats kept playing their game of chicken. They collided. One guy kept rowing, even though his oar was smashing against the rowers in the other boat, catching one guy in the back, another under the chin. A lot of cursing and shouting.

“My God, I thought, this is it. A sport to rival roller derby or UFC fighting. The people around me were into it, too, howling for more. From then on, every time a pair of boats converged on the bridge together, we screamed our encouragement. ‘Don’t yield! You can both make it! Full speed ahead!’

“I didn’t see any other real crashes that day, just a couple of oars that smacked against the unforgiving bricks, but I was hooked. This was serious stuff, monster trucks with college degrees.

“Imagine my surprise later on when I found out from Instagram that I hadn’t even been watching at the best bridge. Well, I’ve made a point of coming back and watching from all different points, and I can tell you that there are no bad bridges; some are just more dangerous than others. All near misses are alike; each crash is exciting in its own way.

“The Footbridge is underrated. Sure, you rarely see a boat hit the abutment, but it’s so low that a fan can get close enough to almost be part of the race. My cousin Jimmy Joe said he’d never forget the time a few years ago that I had my buddies hang me over the side by my ankles. As his boat came under the bridge, I shrieked, “Two-man, look out for the bridge” from about five feet over his head. You should have seen the look on his face as he panicked and caught a crab.

“I know, you’re thinking that I’m one of those yahoos who think it’s pretty funny to drop water balloons, but I draw the line there. There’s no excuse for physical interference. But if you can’t handle a little crowd noise, well, maybe you shouldn’t be out there. Why not try croquet, chess, or interpretive dance?

“The River Street and Western Avenue bridges, down nearer to the start, have their devotees. The arches on these two are narrow and dark underneath. On a really sunny day, sometimes a sculler coming out of them will be momentarily blinded. I’ve seen some terror-stricken dudes when the crowd begins roaring, ‘Look out! Look out!’

“The other bonus about watching here is that most of the time, even on nice days, there’s choppy water between the two bridges, the product of the seawall that runs between them. One year, I saw some poor guy who wasn’t prepared hit the chop and flip. And that wasn’t the worst of it; someone had their phone out and posted the video of him diving under water for the next 10 minutes every time the next sculler came by. Dude was lucky he wasn’t decapitated.

“Jimmy Joe says that there’s nothing better for team unity than being told to row all eight square blades on your way down to the start. Togetherness is built—everyone hates the cox. There’s no feeling in all of sport like hammering your knuckles into the gunnel on a raw autumn day, Jimmy Joe says.

“Another favorite trick of ours is to pick out crews on shore with overweight coxswains, usually in the masters events. Like those poor bastards in the coxed four don’t have enough to worry about without dragging some guy who 20 years ago weighed 120 down the course. I swear I’ve seen ’swains who outweighed their strokes. Anyway, we like to yell things like, ‘Hey, you need a coxswain in that boat’ or once they’ve gotten into the boat and it settles low in the water, ‘Hey stroke, you’re rigged too low. You’ll never make it through the race with your blade on the water.’

“OK, the big one. The Eliot Bridge. This is the one with all the best social-media posts. This is where you want to be when the championship eights come churning down the course. Looking downstream, anybody who is more than a length outside the buoys as they come into view is not going to make it. But don’t focus solely on the bridge. I’ve seen some great stuff on the Cambridge and BB&N docks. Boats making spectators jump over their oars. Boats running up onto the dock, coxswains never saying a thing. Collisions between launching and racing shells.

“This year, there’s repair work going on, so the right-hand arch is closed off. Without it as an escape valve for crowded boats, I predict a banner year for crashes. The mother of all collisions is a three-boat squeeze in the championship eights through the center arch. Like sharks with blood in the water, the crowd at Eliot will go nuts.

“People think that rowing is a gentleman’s sport, a tea-and-crumpets, pinky-upraised kind of affair. Bull! If you want to see war, this is the place. Look at how those big dudes and women, too, in the black shirts, most of them probably ex-Marines, intimidate that boat beside them. Watch the coxswains try to figure out if they should keep rowing with only six oars.

Remember, this sport is all about pain; if you want to be at the point where pain and misfortune converge, the Eliot is it. On Sunday from 2:15 on, that’s where I’ll be. Enjoy yourself at the Head. There’s something for everyone.”

Last Tens—Head of the Charles musings:

Definitely playing my Old Man card here, but rowing your brains out in a hard race and then having bags of beer lowered down by alums on the row back—a tradition that has been lost—that was the best. I miss the days when you could have a beer after the race without having to pay outrageous prices.

Now that the Yankees beat the Sox in the playoffs, will some New York crew dress in Yankees uniforms to row the Charles? Like Brown did in Mets uniforms in 1986.

Does anyone row head races naked anymore? It’s been done: Head of the Trent, in the ’90s.

Do any coxswains have CoxBox speakers mounted on the bow deck facing forward to yell “Yield!” at crews they are overtaking?

Will some crazy invention be unveiled? Concept2’s Big Blade made its debut here in 1991.

Doctor Rowing, a.k.a. Andy Anderson, has been coxing, coaching, and sculling for 55 years. When not writing, coaching, or thinking about rowing, he teaches at Groton School and considers the fact that all three of his children rowed and coxed—and none played lacrosse—his single greatest success.

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