Benefield: Santa Rosa's boy on the boat

Jack Russ had never rowed a day in his life.

But as a college freshman in the fall of 1947, he showed up at the University of Washington shell house, home of the vaunted Huskies crew program, and was given a spot in the freshman boat.

Required by the ROTC program to participate in a sport, Russ was not inclined to football, not a fan of baseball and uninterested in tennis.

So Russ, who now lives in Santa Rosa and will turn 86 in April, walked from the campus to the shell house - the headquarters of the Huskies crew that 11 years before had rowed its way to gold under Hitler’s watchful eye in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

That program’s story, and the tale of guys who rowed to the top of the sport, was told in Daniel James Brown’s bestselling book “The Boys in the Boat.”

Russ was transported by the tale and its depiction of a sport that few truly grasp. Talk to someone who had participated in crew and you are likely to be told something along the lines of “If you haven’t rowed, you wouldn’t understand.”

But the book, and its description of both the sport and the trying times across the United States, was a transport for Russ. A time machine back to the days of undergraduate studies, blindingly difficult workouts and the unique relationship athletes have with one another when they are assigned the eight seats in a varsity shell.

“I was delighted with it,” he said of Brown’s depiction of the sport and crew life in Seattle. “I found no fault with any of it.”

In circumstances not wildly different from the boys depicted in Brown’s book, Russ enrolled at the University of Washington because his options were not plentiful.

His father, a Navy man, was killed in World War II. Russ needed the ROTC program to put himself through college.

“My mom was hard pressed to pay the bills,” Russ remembered.

And like the boys in the book, Russ, standing 5 feet, 11 inches and weighing 175 pounds, had the unique mix of might and will to be a good rower.

“You have eight people about the same size,” he said. “It didn’t take long to realize there were guys who weren’t adapted to this.”

Not that he heard much praise from head coach Al Ulbrickson.

Brown’s description of the legendary, and legendarily reticent, Huskies coach was spot on with Russ’ memory.

“His few words were so carefully chosen and so effectively delivered that every one of them fell like a blade or a balm on the boy to whom they were delivered,” Brown wrote.

Russ, a three-year varsity letterman, remembers sitting in his usual No. 5 seat of the varsity light boat when Ulbrickson stopped the workout to address the rowers sitting in the fourth and sixth seats - on either side of Russ.

“?‘See how Russ is doing it? That’s the way I want you to do it,’?” he remembered the coach saying.

“It was like getting a reward,” Russ said.

Unlike the boys in “The Boys in the Boat,” Russ didn’t row to glory or even to the famed annual regatta in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

But Russ remembers racking up wins on memorable trips to Berkeley to race arch rival Cal and to British Columbia, where the home team almost sank its boat, so awash were they from rough waters.

Russ recalls his coxswain yelling “Weigh enough,” meaning for his guys to stop rowing - right in the middle of the contest - to see if they could assist with the flooding boat.

Maybe it was because the rivals stopped to help, or maybe not, but Russ remembers the B.C. squad threw a tremendous party that night.

“They were great hosts,” he said.

Russ said the lessons of learning from scratch the physical skills needed to succeed in rowing was a challenge he embraced. And the mental toughness - the toughness he needed to row on the waters of Lake Washington in Seattle’s winters and the toughness he needed to master the teamwork necessary to make an eight-man boat glide across the water - was something he couldn’t have gotten in many other endeavors.

“All it has to do is have one guy make one minuscule mistake, getting his oar in too early or too late” and your whole effort was derailed, he said.

“Rowing was something that appealed, and physically I could handle it,” he said.

And when everything was going just right, the boat would “seem to have a life of its own,” he said.

Brown described it as “the swing.” Russ remembers it as making the boat “sing.”

“It was a mental thing,” he said. “You felt like you were part of a machine rather than a part on a machine.”

And although part of a team, Russ didn’t keep in touch with members of the crew.

“I wasn’t close friends with any of those people,” he said. “That wasn’t the nature of society.”

A week after graduation from Washington in 1951, Russ shipped off to San Diego and then to Korea. He spent three decades in the Navy, years on the water, but never rowed again.

It didn’t feel the same.

He may have walked away from the sport, but lessons learned from rowing never left him.

“Even when things go bad, you go back and do the job anyhow,” he said.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.