Harvard University has not fielded a national championship team in football since 1919. It has never won even an Ivy League title in basketball, and its tiddlywinks team is 0-for-one against Oxford. So the record of the Crimson crew is somewhat irregular. No college crew has beaten Harvard's varsity in more than four years, and nobody at all has beaten this year's crew.
Harvard's oarsmen have won the Eastern Sprint Championships, the Stein Cup (from Brown and Rutgers), the Adams Cup (from Pennsylvania and Navy) and the Compton Cup (from Princeton and M.I.T.). In New London, Conn., last month, they swept to their fifth straight victory over Yale, by the huge margin of seven boat lengths. And on New York's Hunter Island Lagoon two weeks ago, they outstroked Philadelphia's Vesper Boat Club, the 1964 Olympic champions, to 1) earn the right to represent the U.S. at next month's Pan American Games at Winnipeg, Canada and 2) prove that they are the best crew in the nation—if not the world.
What's more, they did it all in an old shell. Sitting in the Crimson boathouse is a new 50 ft. English racing shell that Coach Harry Parker, 31, bought last winter to replace Harvard's heavier 56-ft. Swiss shell. His varsity oarsmen have never been able to use the new boat—simply because, at an average 6 ft. 3 in. and 196 Ibs. per man, they are too big to get into it.
Reasonable & Real. A onetime No. 2 oar at Penn who shifted to single sculls after college, won the national championship and a Pan American Games gold medal in 1959, Parker says: "What I look for is somebody with reasonable size and a very real interest in athletics." His favorite way of testing that interest is with drills like "stadiums"—races up and down the steps of the Harvard stadium, run at the rate of 50 times per rower per day. "Most of the things around here are boring as hell," grunted Stroke Ian Gardiner last week, as he hefted a 100-lb. weight over his head for the 19th time. "Except for the winning, of course."
The victory over Vesper was anything but boring. It was anything but easy, too. Rowing at a beat of 50 strokes a minute, the lighter (by 7 Ibs. per man) Vesper crew sprinted into the lead at the start, stayed there until midway through the 2,000-meter race. Finally, Harvard's weight and strength began to tell. Stroking at a steady 36, the powerful Crimson boat edged alongside, fought off still another Vesper sprint, and drew out to win by 1 ½ lengths. And so back to the stadium they went, but this time they got a break—they only had to do the steps 25 times.