Folks…
A couple of articles of interest:
* row2k interview with Tom Weil. This is a follow-on to the earlier reports on Tom’s collection and the opening of the rowing exhibits at Mystic Seaport
* From today’s Yale Daily News on the history of rowing competition and betting of shirts.
Enjoy … Cheers!
Best regards,
Coach and TB406
Folks…
A couple of articles of interest:
* row2k interview with Tom Weil. This is a follow-on to the earlier reports on Tom’s collection and the opening of the rowing exhibits at Mystic Seaport
* From today’s Yale Daily News on the history of rowing competition and betting of shirts.
Enjoy … Cheers!
Best regards,
Coach and TB406
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row2k Interviews
Tom Weil Q&A
by Peter Van Allen
posted on April 4, 2008
click for full-size image!
Touring the Mystic Seaport Museum with Tom Weil
click for full-size image!
Outside the Museum. (l-r) Tom Weil, Samuel Hazard Gillespie, Dave Vogel, Tom Fuller
click images for full-size version
Mystic Seaport Museum received a substantial collection of rowing artifacts from Thomas Eliot Weil, who lives in Woodbridge, Conn., but has a long and storied career both on and off the water.
Weil was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1948. He was educated at Andover and Yale, where he was on the lightweight crew and raced at Henley in 1970. He also has a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served in the Navy and served as energy-group counsel and partner at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, D.C., and Houston.
We asked Weil to tell us about his involvement in rowing and how the rowing collection came together. Part of the collection is at the River and Rowing Museum in Henley.
row2k.com: How did you get involved in rowing?
Tom Weil: My first memory of the sport was attending Henley Royal Regatta in 1963, while my parents were stationed in London. I then started rowing at Andover, but was never big enough to get to the varsity over the next three years. At the 1964 HRR, it was a great privilege and memory for me to see the Harvard 1914 Grand Challenge Cup crew, back 50 years later to the man (one of the spares had died, but the other spare was still the spare), row down the course in front of the Queen Mother. I hope to be in Henley in 2014 to celebrate the centenary of that victory.
After graduating from Andover in 1966, I joined the lightweight crew under coach Jim Joy at Yale, and, as the heavyweight program began to slip in league stature, enjoyed being part of a squad that was on the rise. During the 1970 season, my senior year, our varsity, which included junior Dave Vogel, and our 2V were undefeated until the Goldthwait. The weekend of the Goldthwait in New Haven was the weekend that the Black Panthers and their sympathizers had descended on the city to protest the Bobby Seale trial, where they faced off against a phalanx of National Guardsmen on the Green. Coach Joy moved us to a motel out of town Friday night, but it probably didn’t make much difference. Both undefeated Yale 150 lb. crews were beaten by the undefeated Steve Gladstone coached Harvard crews, one of which, with one or two future Olympians aboard, was anointed the “Superboat” the following year.
Seeded no. 2 at the Sprints, we won our morning heat, and finished second to Harvard in the afternoon. Because Harvard had gone to Henley the year before, and was a lock to go the next year, they passed on the Regatta in 1970, leaving us room to go for the Thames Cup. We trained with the heavies at Gale’s Ferry for two weeks, then flew to Henley. We defeated Liverpool Victoria and Garda Siochana (the defending Irish heavyweight champions!), and lost in the semi-finals to the Leander second boat, who won the Cup. The Garda invited those of us who did not have further travel plans to race in the Irish nationals on Lake Blessington a week later, and five of us went over to compete in the championship four (the “Blue Riband”) and singles races. We didn’t collect any silver, but had a great time.
One of my teammates, Jon VanAmringe, who would later coach lightweights at Navy, and I were NROTC. The trip to Henley interfered with our normal active duty schedule, so the Navy let us spend the summer in New Haven. Tony Johnson was starting up the New Haven Boat Club then, and we were among its first members. We started training in a double, raced at the Canadian Henley, won the New Englands, and then, at the 1970 national championships in August, took second to Duling and Belden in the elite lightweight doubles on a washed out course at Camden when Klecatsky and his partner ran into a drainage pipe. That was my last competitive row.
row2k.com: How did you start the collection?
Tom Weil: I have always been a collector, and loved art, reading and history. In the couple of days after Henley and before we flew to Ireland, Dave Vogel and I went around to old bookstores and print shops in London, and bought up every rowing book and print we could find, and that was when my collecting of rowing art, literature and memorabilia really took off. I served on a destroyer escort out of Pearl Harbor from 1970 to 1972, with a Vietnam deployment, and while others spent their combat pay on the latest Japanese electronic marvel (which was then reel-to-reel), I spent mine on prints and books offered by dealers in London and Boston. The incoming letters would be flown out to us and dropped with buoys, or held until we hit the next port or a supply vessel, and outgoing could go to a supply vessel or wait until the next port call, so the elapsed time sometimes cost me a purchase opportunity, but the print market in the 1970’s wasn’t much focused on old rowing scenes, so I was able to build a pretty good collection relatively early in the game.
My next tour was at the Defense Language School in Monterey, California, where I spent eight months learning Turkish and brushing up on my French and German, and kept on acquiring vintage rowing items with the benefit of pretty dependable mail service. My final Navy post was at the Joint United States Military Mission for Aid to Turkey, in Ankara, from 1973-1975, where I got to experience the Turkish movement into Cyprus, and kept on adding (primarily prints and books) to my collection.
After resigning my commission in 1975, I started law school in Charlottesville, and traded the inconvenience of overseas billets and benefit of income for the convenience of being closer to the sources, but without any money. Nevertheless, I was able to keep acquiring in a modest way, especially when summer clerkship paychecks kicked in, and could now go to Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston and meet the print and book dealers from whom I had been buying for years. I practiced corporate and energy law in Washington and Houston from 1978 to 2005, and that provided the wherewithal for the bulk of my collecting.
row2k.com: What made you want to share the collection?
Tom Weil: From the beginning of my interest in collecting, I was troubled by the relative lack of rowing histories, the extent of ignorance among rowers and non-rowers alike about rowing’s past, the absence of scholarship on rowing artifacts, the lack of any infrastructure or network for rowing history and memorabilia scholars, collectors and dealers, and the dearth of any major public rowing collections. I wanted to make a difference in these areas by putting together a collection that could begin to tell the story, joining in efforts to create a rowing museum and identifying others who might share the same interests.
row2k.com: How large is the collection?
Tom Weil: My collection is now somewhere between 5,000-10,000 items, which may or may not include a substantial donation of rowing artifacts to the British American Arts Association, which is now in the River and Rowing Museum in Henley, and a smaller gift of rowing artifacts to Mystic Seaport. The book collection is tracked in a 463 page bibliography. The artifacts and archives collection catalogues total 788 pages.
row2k: Why not just keep the collection to yourself?
Tom Weil: I’m sometimes asked “How can you bear to give these items away?” or “Aren’t you afraid that an object that you send out on loan may get damaged or lost?” The answer to the first question is that I never collected for myself – I’ve always hoped that an opportunity would arise for items from my collection to find a permanent home in a museum that was committed to honoring rowing history. I have been fortunate enough to find one such home in the Mecca of rowing at Henley, and I hope that Mystic may be that place in the U.S. As to the possibility of damage, you can’t be a prisoner of fear – I lend so that people can see. My basement, where most of my collection is kept, flooded last night. Some very nice pieces were damaged. It comes with the territory. Much worse things can happen.
row2k: What are your favorite items from the Mystic collection?
Tom Weil: -An 1825 engraving celebrating the victory of the Whitehall boat “American Star” over a British naval cutter.
-An 1837 coin silver presentation pitcher awarded to the Erie Boat Club, victors in a 5-mile race, the earliest American team trophy award of which I am aware.
-The iconic 1960’s rowing print “Late Fall Practice” by Jim Anderegg.
The Mystic Seaport Museum is located in Mystic, Conn. For more information, see < a>www.mysticseaport.org.
View the entire Mystic Seaport Museum gallery here.
A full list of the Tom Weil Collection can be viewed here.
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Yale Daily News
Published: Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Oarsmen must win to keep shirts on their backs
By Tyler Borek
Since the fall of the professional oarsman in the late 19th century, American rowing has survived only as an unpopular amateur sport, carried on by a small groups of fervent, oft-ignored devotees.
In “The Amateurs,” perhaps the most professionally rendered recent account of competitive rowing, David Halberstam emphasizes the amateur nature of competitive rowing. Back in the day, he says, oarsman rowed “because they wanted to, for no reward other than the feeling itself.” And now, for true rowing enthusiasts and modern dissidents like Halberstam, the sport has come to embody a conservative aesthetic, he says — a charming, anachronistic curiosity.
‘Lost in the mists of time’
Shirt-racing, or shirt-betting, embodies this traditional aesthetic. Pre-eminent rowing collector-historian Tom Weil ’70 says losers were traditionally obliged to strip the racing shirts off their backs and hand them to their opponents on the water. The boats would pull together, shake hands, pass the shirts and push apart, with the losing crew rowing back to the dock shirtless.
Today, generally speaking, crews pass shirts on the dock or on shore, tempering, at least somewhat, the humiliation of the defeat.
The delay of the exchange has emerged in tandem with another variation on traditional shirt-racing, in which teams purchase cheaper shirts for trading purposes. This practice, according to Weil, was implemented by a savvy Athletics Department to deal with crews who were losing shirts every race, incurring a substantial cost to the University.
Despite shirt-racing’s status as an established tradition in the rowing community, its origins are strangely unclear. Weil describes the practice as one “particularly lost in the mists of time.”
Yale lightweight coach Andy Card, who rowed at Princeton in the late ’80s, recalls taking part in the tradition.
“It was certainly established when I was around,” Card said.
Presumably, shirt-racing is so old that no one remembers how it began, only romanticizing further the practice. But Weil suggests that the betting of shirts may have been introduced by a Syracuse crew in 1920, or even more recently than that. While Weil’s collection includes stories of shirt-racing dating back to the ’20s and ’30s, the collector has never seen an image of the practice before the ’60s. Weil further emphasized that one can be sure of shirt-racing’s 20th-century origins since, pre-1900, racing was done primarily without shirts.
Today, shirt-racing remains largely confined to men’s collegiate rowing in the United States. Most current rowers, including Yale oarswoman Tess Gerrand ’10, attribute the gender discrepancy to the anti-gambling regulations of the NCAA. Women’s rowing is an NCAA sport, while men’s is not. But shirt-racing was never a part of women’s rowing, even before it became an NCAA sport in 1997.
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times on June 10, 1997, Mary Gallagher, a female Princeton rower in the mid-1970s, claimed a lack of women’s shirt-racing resulted from economic constraints due to unequal funding for women’s athletics prior to Title IX.
‘An unwritten code’
As for the exportation of shirt-racing, it seems the practice remains an exclusively American tradition. At international competitions, oarsmen often exchange uniforms and team gear regardless of the result, but actual shirt-betting does not occur.
In American men’s collegiate rowing, shirt-racing happens primarily in the spring. Competitive rowers train all year, competing in the fall and spring. While in the fall rowers race 5K head races against the clock, the spring consists of side-by-side 2K races. A team’s typical spring rowing program includes a number of dual races, featuring one or two other crews in preparation for the championship regatta-style races in May and June. For Division I men’s rowing, these championship races are the Eastern Sprints and the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships (IRAs). The IRA is considered the national championship.
Division I rowing schools compete in annual dual races in which shirt-racing is established tradition. Similarly, the championship regattas operate according to an unspoken winner-take-all arrangement. In these races, because of large number of competitors, competition is divided into heats, semifinals and finals. The winner of the “grand final” takes home all of the jerseys, including those of teams eliminated in earlier rounds. Thus, championship crews return to campus with piles of racing jerseys, sometimes as many as 25, which they are free to wear as emblems of conquest.
While oarsmen don the gear of vanquished competitors with pride, the exchange itself is generally characterized by respect and humility.
Yale lightweight freshman coach Joe Fallon ’06 describes shirt-racing as a time-honored practice.
“[It] adds to the camaraderie of the sport,” Fallon said, “since the shirt exchange after the race typically involves a collegial dialogue in which men, who were bitter foes only minutes before, express mutual respect for one another.”
Lightweight rower Spencer Salovaara ’10 characterizes the shirt exchange as a civil completion to the race.
“[It] operates according to an unwritten code of humility,” he said.
Halberstam traces the respectful tone of the exchange to the sense of community that has developed in the insular world of rowing, in part due to the intense physical demands of the sport.
“Humility became part of the code,” Halberstam wrote in his book, “Because your adversaries had subjected themselves to virtually the same regimen that you did, you respected them as much as you respected yourself.”
To an outsider, the civility of the exchange might disguise the intensity of the competition, but many of the rowers interviewed said it merely reinforces it.
The humiliation of losing one’s shirt is palpable and personal, described by Weil as both “symbolic” and “very real.”
“In a normal sport, if you lose, you can go hide yourself in the locker room. In this sport, you offer yourself up to the victors,” Salovarra notes.