Anyone see the movie?
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I’m a little afraid to. I really enjoyed the book, and I don’t want to be disappointed.
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It only started a couple of days ago here. Probably be next week befrore I have time.
I read the book, excellent. Will suffer the gaps of things being a film.
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I am a third generation Husky. We grew up talking about trying out for crew. I have read the book twice, and give to friends to read.
I will see the movie more than once.
Learn the story of Joe Rantz.
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It opened on Christmas at a theater 55 miles away. The town gets inundated by obnoxiously entitled rich second-homers and tourists from a certain state. I intend to see the movie, but it might have to wait for DVD version. This theater generally does not have runs longer than a week at most, which is too short for the town to resume normal peopling.
I read the excellent book around 2016 or so. Not only was the tale of the rowers’ struggles absorbing, the depiction of mass madness horrified me in realizing that a similar phenomenon could happen again.
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Resist Fascism.
Thought it was wonderful.
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In spite of its predictability, I enjoyed it. Shades of Top Gun, Rocky, and many others.
I would submit that it is nothing like “Top Gun.”
Rocky is a good analogy. It is a story of under dogs for sure.
Crew is one of the hardest physcial sports. The guys from suburbs with sweaters around their necks don’t usually make it. It was boys from the PNW during the Depression that were tough enough to compete at a world class level. Plenty of loggers sons.
Go Huskies.
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The only theater showing it extended the run into a third week, YAY! By next week the hordes will have diminished.
Never saw Top Gun but remember smarmy ol’ Rocky. As for the analogy between grunt-class students competing as part of their climb towards economic survival, what most resembles it is PRO bicycle racing in Europe. The young men rode to make a living.
You guys think too much. It must be winter.
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A lot more people don’t think enough.
If they don’t think enough and they shout too much, well, here we are.
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It’s far easier to turn up the volume than it is to present a compelling argument.
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Planning to see it this Friday (I would go today but my nearby friend with whom I usually catch movies is busy through Thursday).
I enjoy encountering the crew teams on our local rivers and there are several crew-specific dock installations and boat houses in our major river valley city. I’ve wondered how I would feel about propelling myself backwards over the water like the crews do, but imagine it might be kind of liberating to just be concentrating on one’s speed and form without having to be constantly reading the water conditions ahead as one does in a canoe or kayak.
My nephew/godson was on a champion quad crew through high school and I used to watch him race at the regional course that is built on Fish Creek outside Saratoga Springs NY (where he grew up). They won regional finals several years running (I think they were East Coast champs one season) – very fun to watch them compete on the water! He was on track to get a rowing scholarship for college and possible even qualify for Olympic tryouts when he started having scary fainting episodes after meets and it was discovered that he had an extremely rare heart valve birth defect that had never been detected. In fact the doctors who eventually discovered it said that had he not been such a fit athlete, his body would probably not have been able to compensate for the flaw – secondary blood vessels in his heart had actually enlarged to increase blood flow that was constricted by the structural defect. It was interesting to read that people who row crew tend to have longer than average lifespans. I’ve read that is also true of orchestral conductors (researchers concluded that their vigorous upper body movement was beneficial to circulation and heart function) and people who regularly cross country ski (Olympic Nordic racers are considered the most overall fit athletes of any sport). There appears to be a correlation between vigorous upper body arm movement exercise and long term fitness and overall health.
In my godson’s case, his heart defect was still a significant enough weakness that the doctors felt that progressing to the higher stress of adult level competition might have killed him and he had to give it up.
Really sad because he loved crew so much. Fortunately, he has other strong interests, including art (he ended up attending Tyler Art School at Temple U). In fact he later worked with his dad (also an artist) to design and create a wonderful glass mosaic mural for the Fish Creek rowing center boat house trophy wall that is an aerial map of the race course and adjacent landscape.
But back to the potential benefits of vigorous rythymic upper body movement: based on the number of spry older paddlers that I continue to encounter over the years, regular paddling appears to be a great benefit to both life extension and to healing. I have a good friend, a former Canadian national champion downriver racer now in his mid 70’s, whose left arm was severed in an accident that left only soft tissue and nerve threads attached. Yet he survived several operations for reattachment and rehab and went back to both sea kayaking and solo canoeing as well as cross country skiing.
My cousin’s daughter got a crew scholarship at Gonzaga. Most of her wedding party was her teammates. My brother, who is not small, said he felt like a hobbit among elves.
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I grew up a few blocks away from the UW Shell House and until a year ago kayaked in the area regularly. We called it the “Canoe House” because it was where any third grader with a note from their Mom could once rent a canoe for about a buck an hour. The crew activities were in a non-descript building on the bay about 500 yards to the north. Canoes and SOT’s are still rented in a complex adjacent to the Shell House.
As a child I fished all along the Cut and the docks around the Shell House for salmon, trout, bass, bluegill, perch, catfish and carp. Early mornings near sunrise we would be down at the quiet waters casting for whatever and the crews would come slipping past. The sounds on a still morning are quite different than they are after the city is awake.
Seems like almost all of my life I have been around shells but never sat in one.
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Purple Reign.
My parents are Huskies and talked about crew all the time when were kids. They wanted us to try out for the team. We are all tall but mostly were swimmers and basketball players.
I have a friend in our local service club that rowed for UW 8s in the late 1950s. He talks about how difficult of a sport it is.
Iin the 1930s before TV, the popular sports were boxing, baseball, horse racing and crew.
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Saw this movie last night. Having read the book, they kind of mashed a whole team of hard scrabble lives into the lead character and just a few mentions of others’ challenges. And you got the sense of the legacy with California’s tem and others even if there was not a deep back history.
But I can’t fault them for this. It was a dense and very well-researched book and no way could anyone have been literal to the details in 2 hours. I thought it was very well done, and aside from the automatic shudder when I see swastikas and brown shirt youths I enjoyed every moment. But it was Berlin in 1933, the last could not be avoided.
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Future Fascist regimes in the US can be avoided.
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Hope so. I have played in a pit orchestra for Caberet. The moment when the swastikas show up on everyone’s arm is tough to take.