Two Make Ready But One to Go

Most top college crews have a calm, tree-edged river or lake to paddle around in, a well-appointed boathouse to change in, and money from old grads for new equipment. Not so the University of California at Berkeley. One of Coach Jim Lemmon's shells has been around for 29 years and the building his eights call home was built in 1925. His practice course? It would probably be easier to row through Times Square.

Freighters, pleasure boats, barges and tugs wash up wakes like walls in San Francisco Bay's East Oakland estuary, but they are getting used to watching out for the thin-skinned craft with the straining oarsmen. Since California first dipped an oar in 1907, it has won the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta eight times. Golden Bear crews have won three Olympic gold medals in three tries, and established themselves as the power in the West.

None of which holds any water with Easterners. They simply think U.S. rowing never left its East Coast cradle. So when California traveled East for last week's 62nd annual I.R.A. regatta, undefeated in six West Coast races this year, the competing coaches got together and voted twice-defeated Cornell the crew to beat. California thought that was a fine idea. And on New York State's Lake Onondaga, they did it with ease.

Using the tulip-shaped oars popularized by Germany's 1960 Olympic-winning Ratzeburg crew, the high-stroking Californians soon jumped into a boat-length lead. From then on, they unconcernedly looked back at their pursuers for the length of the Olympic-size 2,000-meter course. At the finish, the coxswain took the stroke up to 40 for kicks, and California slid across in 6 min. 31 sec. Adding insult to injury, another Western crew, the University of Washington, was second, nearly two lengths back, and exhausted Cornell was a sorely beaten third.

That kind of shellacking would seem to make the West odds-on favorites to win the Olympic trials in New York next month. But the East still had one champion left to send against the Western windmill--undefeated Harvard, which didn't race in the I.R.A. Instead, Coach Harry Parker's Crimson was down at New London, Conn., keeping a 112-year-old engagement with Yale. The four-mile distance is the longest in U.S. college-rowing, and since both crews had been at 2,000 meters all year, it could have been up for grabs. But Harvard had it all the way. Ticking along at 30 1/2 strokes per minute, the precise Cantabs slowly built up their lead until at the finish they were almost five lengths ahead. Now that makes them the crew for California to beat.

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