National Champions - Part Five

This is the final installment of the first chapter of the new history of Syracuse rowing, entitled Mark of the Orange.

While the third 500 was the key, Street knew that Vic Michalson’s Brown was a very good headwind crew. This was shaping up to be a very long two thousand meters, and they’d have to go very, very hard to hold them off. After the effort of the third five hundred, that was a tall order indeed. Brown evidently knew it had to go early, as the SU lead was too big to overcome in the last thirty strokes. About ten strokes into the last five hundred, Street saw them begin to go. He told his crew “Here comes Brown, just relax.” Waiting for a few beats, the boat noticeably relaxed, the tension seemed to dissipate. Ozzie called the sprint, the rating came up, the boat was flying, and Brown’s push into the Syracuse lead halted, then reversed. With 20 strokes to go, the Orange bow was in front and moving away from Bruno. Those last twenty strokes, Henwood would say years later that he knew they would win, and despite the utter exhaustion, there was an incredible feeling of accomplishment, of joy. So much had gone into this six-and-a-half minutes, so many hours of training and so much effort and struggle, and now, in that instant, it was coming together just as they’d pictured it so many times.

As the Orange eight crossed the finish line, the stands erupted. The hometown crowd had watched and listened and cheered, dismay turning to exuberance as SU had driven through the field in that key third five hundred, held off Brown, then moved out again to win convincingly. Now, as the crew men waited their turn to pull into the awards dock, there were handshakes up and down the boat, back-slapping, yells of congratulations and a celebratory dive into Onondaga by Gerry Henwood. With bronze and silver medals awarded, SU pulled into the dock, Street called the ‘one foot, up and out’ and the oarsmen faced a roar from their coach, teammates, families, friends, and fans.

They had done it. They were IRA Varsity Champions.

For Sanford, the victory was sweet indeed. Walking down to the awards dock, he ran into the Herald-Journal’s Bob Snyder. Earlier, Sanford had heard Snyder was going to write Sanford’s epitaph if the Varsity didn’t come home with the trophy. Spotting Snyder, Sanford told him “Looks like you’re going to have to rewrite your story.”

Pedaling the short distance back to the boathouse from the finish line, Sanford recalled the difficult path they’d trod on the way to the podium. That opening loss to Harvard on a course shortened by a blizzard, the injury to Sibley, his decision to keep Street – at 146 pounds, by far the heaviest coxswain at the regatta – in the Varsity, the pressure to produce after two years of freshman championships, the prior year when he felt SU should have won. The memories flooded back, halted only when he pedaled up to the dock.

There, Ozzie Street was in full voice. Sanford remembers Street talking to the press, saying “I told everybody we had this thing back in April and nobody wanted to listen to me; now maybe in the future you’ll listen to me.” Recalling that moment, Sanford said “I can remember him going off and everybody laughing at him. He had a good time with it and he took full credit. He took full credit for it, which every one of them should have. But you’ve got a guy like (three man Andy) Mogish who sees a camera or a recorder and ducks away and he wouldn’t want to talk - and then you’d see (seven man) Bill Reid, who came out of his shell and he starts talking. The guy you couldn’t get that close to over the years, all the time he was feeling the same thing everybody else was. And he was a real big part of that whole thing.”

The crew threw Street into the river in celebration. And then they threw Sanford in too.

After 58 years, the Syracuse Varsity was finally back on top.