Guest TigerBlog - Sail On, Sail On, Sailor

TigerBlog has a standing invitation to anyone who would like to borrow the floor here for a day. The people who have taken him up the most on this offer are men's soccer head coach Jim Barlow and Tad La Fountain, Class of 1972. 

Tad is back today with a story of Princetonians and Olympic sailing. He also pointed out a few errors on the list of Princeton Olympians, including having listed F. Gardner Cox as having a country of origin as "Princeton." 

Having said that, TB made the correction. He also hopes you enjoy what Tad had to say, because, as always, it's 1) very entertaining and 2) very well-written.

It was an entirely unexpected letter in early Spring 1968 – my senior year at Westtown School. This was long before Westtown became known for hoopsters such as Mo Bamba, Cam Reddish and Derek Lively, or even 30 years before Charlotte Kenworthy, who went on to captain the Princeton women's lacrosse team that defeated Georgetown in 2002 to win the NCAA tournament. It was about the same time that I was accepted at Princeton, but it was just coincidental that the letter was from F. Gardner Cox ’41. 

Gardner was the defending world champion in the 5.5-metre class and was mounting a campaign to become the American entry in the Olympics to be held in Mexico City/Acapulco later that year. His crew was stellar – Stuart Walker in the middle and Steve Colgate up in the bow. 

Dr. Walker had literally written the book – “The Techniques of Small Boat Racing” – that was the guide for every decent sailor back in the 1960s, and he was later to be inducted into the U.S. National Sailing Hall of Fame. Yale graduate Steve Colgate had been on the foredeck of American Eagle in the America’s Cup trials the previous year and had founded the Offshore Sailing School in 1964; he was also later inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame.

Living in Villanova, Gardner brought Dr. Walker up from Annapolis and Steve Colgate down from Long Island Sound for practice sessions on the Delaware just below Philadelphia International Airport. There were a couple of practice sessions that Dr. Walker was unable to attend, so Gardner was writing to invite me to fill in for him. I’m not aware of Miller Huggins asking a schoolboy to suit up for the ’27 Yankees, but it struck me as roughly equivalent.

For two glorious Sundays, I was Dr. Walker. We spent hours sailing out of the Corinthian Yacht Club in Essington, basically sail testing. As luck would have it, there was an identical 5.5-metre sloop in Philadelphia (somewhat unusual, as they were an “open” class with designs measuring conformity to a formula of measurements, rather than a “one design” class where the boats had to conform to an actual design), sailed by Don Cohen (who would go on to win the Bronze in Dragons at Munich/Kiel in 1972).  

By swapping sails between the boats and sailing them close together on identical headings, we could ascertain the better mainsail or jib or combination of the two. It could have been viewed as tedious, but to the 17-year-old me, it was simply glorious.

Gardner won the Trials with Cadenza and headed to Acapulco, where they had an unnaturally poor series and finished eighth. In the Princeton Olympic record, it shows Gardner’s nationality as Princeton; in fact, it should be corrected to United States.

There are other Princetonian sailors who have represented the United States. Herman (“Swede”) F. Whiton ’26 (not Whilton, as it shows on the list of Princeton All-Time Olympians) finished sixth in 1928 in Amsterdam in his 6-metre, was denied entrance to Germany in 1936 due to his outspoken criticism of the Nazis, then won the Gold in 6-metres in both 1948 (London/Torquay) and 1952 (Helsinki). Lockwood Pirie ’27’s Bronze in 1948 was a last-minute entrant – there was no American boat for the Swallow class, so Pirie (who happened to be in England) teamed up with Harvard grad Owen Torrey and gained the podium. Ferdinand P. Schoettle, Jr. ‘55 (not Schottle, as shown on the list) skippered the American 5.5-metre in Melbourne, with his classmate Robert Stinson, a third-team All-America lacrosse player, in his crew.

When Gardner Cox sailed for the U.S. in 1968, he was a teammate of Finn (the single-handed dinghy, not the nationality) sailor Carl Van Duyne, who had graduated earlier that year.  Like Cox and Schoettle, Van Duyne spent his summers sailing out of Mantoloking (N.J.) Yacht Club. When I started Princeton that fall, Carl’s log of running laps around the Dillon Gym floor was taped above the weight room scales.

Many of these Tiger Olympians had acquitted themselves well while sailing at the collegiate level. A glaring omission on the list of Princeton’s national championships (team and individual) is the compilation of Tiger sailing titles: three national dinghy championships, four women’s national championships and two single-handed national championships, all as club teams racing against varsity programs.   

The women’s titles are particularly noteworthy: four consecutive victories from 1974-1977, led by Collegiate Hall-of-Fame inductees Marilee Allan ’74, the late Nina Nielsen ’76 and von Kienbusch Award-winner Anne Preston ’77. The first five women’s teams also included two future University trustees, the chair of the University’s 250^th celebration and a future class president. Including the three women mentioned above, there are 11 Tigers in the Intercollegiate Sailing Association Hall of Fame (including Gardner, his brother Bill ’35 and nephew Bill, Jr. ’63), stretching back to Arthur Knapp, Jr. 1928, who founded the Princeton University Yacht Club as an undergraduate 100 years ago.

Any aspirations I harbored to attain a position on these lists faded over my undergraduate years like a dying breeze. But 35 years ago, my classmate Carl Arentzen – who had crewed for me senior year in winning the Ivy Dinghy Championship – invited me to crew for him in the Star districts trying to qualify for the Star Worlds later that summer.   

It was a daunting task – the Star is considered the most competitive and prestigious class of sailboats and I had never sailed in one. I flew to Chicago, we trailed the boat up to Green Lake, Wisconsin and raced together for the first time in 17 years. We took the first race, and in so doing beat a former Bronze winner, the alternate Star skipper to the previous year’s Olympic team, and a winner of one of the races in the previous Star Worlds.  That evening, the best way to celebrate was an ice cream cone at the next town over – Princeton, Wisconsin.   

Sad to relate, the wind came up the next two days and it became painfully apparent why all the other crews seemed to be 10 years younger, six inches taller and 40 pounds heavier. The obvious conclusion was that desk work was not the best preparation for competing in the most competitive class of sailboats at that level. 

Now I have an 18-foot Cape Cod catboat with 500 pounds of lead in the bilge (and that’s before I sit in the cockpit!), which is old, heavy and slow. I can relate very well and have developed an intense understanding of the wisdom of linking “cocktail” and “cruise.”  

 If one is in the autumn of one’s years, one needs to suck all the marrow out of summer’s pleasures.  And it’s true: the older I get, the faster I used to be. But when the sail fills and the boat heels and the bubbles in the wake start moving faster and farther behind, decades get dropped quickly and the teenager within feels extremely close.   

I’m sure every Tiger who has wiggled a tiller knows exactly of what I write, including all those mentioned above. If they are now sailing on courses that are spiritual and no longer watery, then it’s the best way I can memorialize them.