Like other rowers, Biglow was pushed in athletics and academics by a hard-driving father for whom victory was all that mattered. My own favorite among the scullers, however, is John Biglow, a member of an old family that moved to Seattle to escape the pressures of living in the East. Overshadowed on a famous Harvard crew by more colorful personalities, Wood had turned to sculling as if to prove himself personally, and was known as the Hammer because of his fierce determination and questionable technique. He had been a spare on the `76 Olympic team, captain of the `80 team that was not able to compete because of the American boycott, and at age 31 was among the older of the competitors. Tiff Wood, for instance, was probably the sentimental favorite among the scullers in 1984. I would not care to know most of them, but their lives make fascinating reading. (Once they do retire, they often take their inflated egos to Wall Street, where their fiercely competitive natures find a different outlet.) Rowing is a world of Type A personalities, compulsive obsessives, and perpetual adolescents, and Halberstam has wisely devoted most of his narrative to the people who inhabit it. They are often arrogant men, full of macho, who ignore pain as if it doesn`t exist, delight in humiliating their opponents, and continue to compete in their sport long after a sane person would have given it up. They are mostly children of the privileged upper class, and attend such schools as Harvard, Yale and Penn. Rowers may be admirable for devoting themselves to a sport that offers little tangible reward, but they do not sound like people one would necessarily want to meet. Rowing is also no easy sport to watch in person, and though it enjoyed a brief vogue in the 19th Century, it is presently an activity, like contemporary poetry, whose most avid fans are also competitors. Despite its imaginative coverage of many sports, television is somehow unable to capture the intense drama of rowing as a best-selling author such as Halberstam so expertly can.

It is probably rowing`s lack of television appeal-as Halberstam points out-that has doomed it to permanent amateur status.

The amateurs halberstam