One year after the Olympic gold:
"Lucky Al Ulbrickson, the boys are saying. A world championship rowing crew right in his lap; all eight men back; nothing to do but sit in the coaching launch and watch them coast home with the gold-rimmed, diamond-studded crown.
Sure, all eight oarsmen are back at the sweeps but remember the little squirt who steered the boat to victory on Lake Washington, at Poughkeepsie, at Princeton, and at the little village of Grunau near Berlin? (That entire winning crew in the photograph above.)
Bob Moch--he'll be missing.
The Huskies will miss the paperweight coxswain with the baritone voice like N.Y. Yanks would miss Lou Gehrig. Nobody knows the vital part that the quick-thinking Moch played in Washington's success.
Maybe the game Don Hume and his gallant fellows would have emerged victors in Berlin; maybe they would have won in the Olympic trials and on the Pacific Coast, but here's one observer who doubts very much if Ulbrickson's crew would have finished in front at Poughkeepsie but for the icy little man who rode the stern seat. As thrilling as their win in the Olympic Games finals, I maintain Washington's accomplishment on the Hudson was the finest bit of rowing of the year, and for that matter, of the decade.
"Take ten more for Ulbrickson," he shouted as they went under the bridge.
"Now ten more for Pocock," he screamed.
"Here's California, boys--ten more big ones for mother and dad," he yelled, as astonished experts ashore thought the shell had been shot out of a gun, so rapidly did it eat up that last spread of water, to finish ahead by a length.
The picture of Bob Moch driving his Huskies to victory both at Poughkeepsie and at Berlin still thrills this hard-shelled scribe to the tips of his fingers.
All eight oarsmen back at Washington? Not a man missing from the championship shell? Maybe so, but the Little Napoleon of the tiller ropes won't be squatting in the stern, and the musclemen at the oars will have to prove to me that they can win without him."
Thank you to journalist Royal Brougham for these goosebumps written in 1937.
Published by the Seattle P-I.
Pocock, Moch, and the musclemen are gone but they left behind their George Pocock shell "Husky Clipper"-- archived at the University of Washington. A daughter of one of the crew tells more about the Shellhouse here.
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