Joe Rantz—George Pocock

The relationship between Joe Rantz and George Pocock develops from a coach’s request for help into a practical lesson in how to belong to a crew. Asked to understand Joe’s uneven rowing, Pocock does not offer a quick correction or a simple verdict. He invites Joe into the world of shellbuilding, where wood becomes a language for endurance and craft; later, he uses music and the demands of teamwork to challenge Joe’s belief that he must carry the boat alone. When Joe finally rows with trust in his crewmates, Pocock’s advice becomes visible in action.

A Rower's Inconsistency

By the fall, Al Ulbrickson had been studying Joe for a year. Tom Bolles had first described him as touchy and uneven: on some days Joe rowed with such smoothness and power that he seemed part of the boat, his oar, and the water; on others, he was poor. Ulbrickson had scolded and encouraged him, demoted and promoted him, without understanding the fluctuation. He turned to George Pocock, asking the English boatbuilder to talk to Joe, work out what made him difficult to read, and, if possible, help him.

The request places Pocock in a role different from that of a coach assigning seats or judging trial times. He is asked to interpret Joe—to find a way of speaking to him that technical correction alone has not supplied. Their first conversation begins not with a rowing test but with an invitation. One September morning, Pocock notices Joe doing sit-ups at the back of the shell house, beckons him over, and asks whether he would like to see the loft. Joe bounds up the stairs. The response is immediate: he is drawn toward the shop and toward the older man’s attention.

The Loft as a Lesson in Resilience

Pocock shows Joe the tools of his craft, including old English rasps, augers, chisels, files, and mallets, and explains why their many variations matter. He introduces him to sugar pine, yellow spruce, cedar, and white ash, each with qualities that contribute to a shell. In Pocock’s account, no single wood supplies everything the boat needs: its life in the water depends on different materials bringing their distinct properties together. The lesson gives Joe a concrete image of individuality joined to a shared purpose.

The cedar’s growth rings carry the discussion from materials to survival. They record more than a tree’s age: their changes in thickness and color speak to hard and nourishing years, while flaws preserve evidence of fires, lightning, storms, and infestation endured. Joe already knows something of cedar and its rings from splitting shakes with Charlie McDonald, but Pocock gives that knowledge another dimension. Wood becomes not merely useful material but a record of difficulty survived, and of the beauty and grace that make survival matter. Pocock’s reverence is part of the teaching; he speaks of the wood as something sacred, then recalls the poet Joyce Kilmer’s line, “But only God can make a tree.”

Pocock next flexes a thin sheet of cedar, milled to three-eighths of an inch for a shell’s skin, and has Joe feel how it yields. Camber and tension give the wood life; its fibers can spring back intact, or, under steam and pressure, hold a changed form. Pocock connects this capacity to people: yielding and adapting can be strengths when guided by inner resolve and principle. Then he sights along the new shell’s pine keel. The sixty-two-foot line must remain true, without a centimeter of variance, and that exactness depends on the builder’s care and heart. In each example, Pocock makes craft a model for character: strength is not simply hardness, and precision is not separable from devotion.

From Craft to Crew

Pocock finally names the spiritual dimension of the work. Building a boat, he tells Joe, is like religion: technical mastery is not enough; the builder must give himself to the task and leave part of his heart in the finished shell. He turns the analogy toward rowing and life. Joe is nervous and unsure he understands, but nods, returns downstairs, and resumes his sit-ups, still trying to work out what Pocock means. The scene does not present the lesson as an instant cure. Its significance lies in planting a different account of effort—one in which commitment means more than exertion by an individual.

Months later, during a stormy afternoon in early March, Pocock calls Joe back to the loft. While varnishing the upturned hull of a shell, he offers a specific technical diagnosis: Joe breaks his arms at the elbows too early and would catch the water more cleanly if he kept his hands moving at the same speed as the water beneath the boat. But Pocock says that mechanics are not the main issue. At times, Joe rows as though he alone must take the boat across the finish line. That attitude makes him attack the water and prevents the crew from helping him row.

Pocock asks Joe to imagine a well-rowed race as a symphony, with each man a player in the orchestra. A single rower out of tune or out of tempo can spoil the piece; what matters is how each man’s actions harmonize with the others, not simply how hard he pulls. That harmony, Pocock insists, requires an open heart and care for the crew, even at the risk of hurt feelings. He tells Joe that even if he dislikes a fellow in the boat, he must learn to care whether that man wins, not only whether Joe himself does. The advice recasts trust as a condition of rowing well, rather than a reward that comes after success.

Pocock also reminds Joe that he has already learned to row past pain, exhaustion, and the voice telling him he cannot continue. Those hard-won capacities, he says, give him the chance to do something most men never experience. His final image joins the physical act of rowing to an almost unearthly sense of shared power: “Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.” The line extends the earlier lesson about boatbuilding. What matters is not the isolated strength of one part, but what becomes possible when effort is joined and brought into harmony.

Advice Tested in the Boat

Joe’s opportunity arrives on March 21, after he has spent time in the third boat and seemed unlikely even to make the presumed junior-varsity boat. He finds his name on the chalkboard at seat seven in boat number two, then considered the strongest candidate for the varsity place. He does not know whether Pocock spoke to Ulbrickson, whether Merton Hatch made a mistake, or whether Ulbrickson merely needed another rower at that seat that day. The narrative preserves that uncertainty: Joe’s change of position is not clearly credited to Pocock’s intervention.

What follows, however, puts Pocock’s counsel into practice. Joe likes the boys in the boat; Gordy Adam and Don Hume welcome him, Roger Morris waves from the bow, and Chuck Day and Johnny White, his friends from Grand Coulee, are aboard. Stub McMillin says the boat will fly, and Shorty Hunt tells Joe, “Got your back, Joe.” Joe rows as an extension of the men ahead of and behind him, follows Hume’s stroke, and passes its rhythm back to Shorty in a continuous movement. Rather than making himself the solitary engine of the boat, he gives himself to its collective effort.

Joe experiences the change as a transformation, but recognizes that it is not merely his attempt to follow Pocock’s instructions. This is a group of boys with whom he can follow them: he trusts these particular crewmates. Ulbrickson’s log records that changing Rantz and Hatch helped a lot, but the account’s emphasis is relational rather than purely administrative. Pocock’s counsel has offered Joe a way to understand why rowing alone had failed him; the welcome of his teammates makes trust possible in the moment when he needs to row differently.

Significance and Limits

Pocock’s influence on Joe is shown through two linked teachings: the shell depends on materials that contribute different qualities, and the crew depends on rowers who surrender the fantasy of acting alone. The first lesson makes resilience visible in cedar that bends and returns, and in a keel made true by painstaking care. The second turns that principle toward human relations, asking Joe to let his crewmates matter to him. Together, the lessons offer a counterpoint to the solitary self-reliance that has shaped his efforts: individual strength remains necessary, but it cannot create the crew’s shared rhythm by itself.

The evidence establishes a decisive moment of understanding and trust, not the complete later history of Joe and Pocock’s relationship. It does not confirm that Pocock secured Joe’s move into boat number two, and Joe initially leaves the first loft conversation still uncertain about its meaning. Their bond is therefore defined less by a single intervention than by the progression from attention, to metaphor, to direct counsel—and by the change in Joe’s rowing when he finally finds a crew with whom he can act on it.