Daily World reporter remembers interviewing Bob Moch

Rick Anderson

For The Daily World

The pleasure of receiving an unexpected phone call from my friend Weedy McCauley in the summer of 1988 diminished a bit when she opened the conversation by saying, “I’ve got a great story for you.”

Experienced journalists tend to cringe at that introduction. Not only is the story idea seldom great, but the journalists sometimes have to explain why it isn’t even good.

This suggestion, however, was more than equal to the buildup.

Bob Moch, the Montesano High School graduate who was the coxswain on the University of Washington crew that won the eight-oared rowing gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was a part-time neighbor of Weedy and her husband, Mark.

Their summer homes were located near Belfair on the south shore of Hood Canal.

Weedy’s offer to arrange an interview with Moch was readily accepted.

Moch’s account of how the Huskies overcame numerous roadblocks to harvest Olympic gold was indeed a great story. The crew’s remarkable saga later inspired the publication of Daniel James Brown’s 2013 best-selling book, “The Boys in the Boat.”

The long-awaited movie adaptation of the book, directed by George Clooney, will open in theaters on Christmas Day.

My interview with Moch wouldn’t crack any best-seller lists. But it was memorable nonetheless, at least for me.

Still a practicing Seattle-area attorney in 1988, Moch was robust and articulate at the age of

74 (he died in 2005).

He was a spellbinding conversationalist whose recollections of events 52 years earlier remained vivid. Daily World photographer Brian DalBalcon (who had located Moch’s home on the drive to the canal by noticing the oar attached to his garage) was as mesmerized as I was.

Moch related how the Huskies overcame illness on the crew, an unfavorable lane assignment and a botched start (positioned in the lane farthest from the starter’s platform, Moch failed to hear the command to commence racing) in the gold-medal race to launch a dramatic, come-frombehind triumph in front of numerous Nazi Party dignitaries that included Adolf Hitler.

Don Hume, the stroke oar from Olympia, was suffering from a severe virus and all but passed out in the boat before finally being roused at about the midway point of the 2,000meter race. Moch also admitted to a bit of chicanery to rally his troops.

“I lied to the crew,” he acknowledged. “I told them there were 30 strokes left. Then we rowed another 10 and I’d tell them there were 25 left and we’d row 10 more and I’d tell them there were 20 left.”

The Americans would end up edging Italy and Germany in a finish so close that most spectators were initially unaware who had won.

The race was so dramatic that Moch recalled legendary Washington coach Al Ulbrickson biting his cigarette in half, with the butt end going down his throat.

One surprising revelation was that Moch and his teammates gave little thought to the political ramifications surrounding the Olympics at a time when the Nazis were poised to begin their reign of terror throughout Europe.

“We didn’t pay any attention to Hitler,” Moch asserted. “We didn’t care if he was there or not. We had a job to do and we did it.”

Moch didn’t volunteer a pertinent detail recounted in Brown’s book. On the eve of sailing for Europe, he received a letter from his father, Montesano jeweler Gaston Moch, revealing that he was Jewish — a heritage that the elder Moch had previously concealed from his son.

The only member of the eight-oared crew who doesn’t wield an oar, a coxswain serves as the boat’s navigator and strategist.

“He is sort of the quarterback and the steersman,” Moch said. “In addition to that, you call the shots, you determine what the stroke is, whether you go up or down or when. You’re the one who has to determine whether you try extrastrong strokes and when you do it. In that respect, you’re sort of in psychological warfare with the other crews.”

Successful coxswains are invariably small, quick-thinking and assertive. The 5-foot-6 Moch, who weighed 128 pounds in college, fit all those descriptions.

“He had a rare instinct for skippering an eightoared shell,” George Pocock, the famed builder of Washington’s racing shells, wrote of Moch in a 1972 journal. “More importantly, he had a tremendous spirit which spread the length of the boat. A winning spirit.”

Joe Rantz, a UW oarsman who experienced an Oliver Twist-like upbringing in Depression-era Sequim after being essentially abandoned by his father and stepmother, was the central figure in Brown’s book and presumably the movie as well.

But although he never interviewed Moch directly (he relied on interviews and journals supplied by his survivors), Brown provided a comprehensive portrait of the Husky coxswain.

A member of the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society who graduated magna cum laude from the UW and later earned a degree from Harvard Law School, Moch was depicted as the brains of the outfit. He was also described in the book as headstrong and feisty — a stark contrast to his subsequent gentlemanly persona.

When Moch kept the Huskies farther off the pace than instructed before rallying to win the Intercollegiate Rowing Association nationals earlier in 1936, Ulbrickson commented, “I guess the little runt knew what he was doing.”

I’m both anxious and apprehensive about the movie version of “The Boys in the Boat.”

For all his talent as an actor, Clooney has acquired the reputation as an underwhelming director — making such decent but middling films as “The Monuments Men” and “Leatherheads.”

Early reviews of “The Boys in the Boat” have been mixed at best. The opinions of film critics, however, often fail to jibe with those of audiences.

While confirming to former Daily World editor and publisher John Hughes (now the Washington state historian) that the screenplay altered some of his narrative, Brown signed off on the movie version of his book.

If nothing else, Clooney deserves credit for having the clout to bring this oftdelayed project to the big screen.

He obviously realized, as did Daniel James Brown and Weedy McCauley, that this was a great story waiting to be told.

Rick Anderson is a former sports editor at The Daily World. He earned the Silver Helmet award from the Washington State Football Coaches Association, the Jim Redding Award from the Washington State High School Baseball Coaches Association and was inducted into Aberdeen High School’s Athletic Hall of Fame.