Free The Amateurs by David Halberstam Page A

about rowing was in the obstacles it presented, even if these were, in his words, manufactured obstacles.
    He was, of course, intensely competitive. Rowing indoors on the tanks during the long, boring winter months, he invented competitive games to keep him going—he would try to row a larger puddle than the oarsman just ahead of him. (He was scrupulous about not cheating, though of course the other oarsman did not know the contest was going on.) When Wood graduated from college he had gloried in taking the tests for both business and law school and had done exceptionally well. He always tested well. Some friends had teased him about the fact that he should have taken the tests for medical school as well. Just one more group of applicants to compete against, they said.
    His fiance, Kristy Aserlind, also a rower, liked going for long, aimless walks. Tiff Wood did not. If Tiff went for a walk, there had to be a form to it, 3 1/2 times around the block. It would be even better if there were an existing record for those 3 1/2 blocks that he could compete against.
    There had to be form and purpose to the walk because there had to be form and purpose to life. That was one of the interesting things about rowing. Those who competed at this level did so with a demonic passion. Yet there was no overt financial reward at the end, nor indeed was there even any covert financial reward, a brokerage house wanting and giving special privilege to the famed amateur. Yet the athletes were almost always the children of the upper middle class, privileged, affluent, a group that in this society did not readily seek hardship. One could understand the son of a ghetto family playing in the school yard for six hours a day hoping that basketball was a ticket out of the slum; it was harder to understand the son of Beacon Hill spending so much time and subjecting himself to so much pain to attain an honor that no one else even understood. Perhaps in our society the true madness in the search for excellence is left for the amateur.
    For Tiff Wood was a son of Beacon Hill, the home of the American establishment, and he had gone to the best schools, as had his father before him. The Woods were not very old Boston. Reginald Wood, the grandfather, who had quit school at fourteen to be a runner on the floor in Wall Street, had been successful in the stock market. Very much a self-made man, he had been determined that his children would have the best in education.
    Richard Wood, Tiff's father, had gone to Harvard, and in his early sixties, he was as lean as his son. He still ran three or four miles a day, and on weekends he usually ran ten miles a day. In his late fifties, he had run in three marathons. In the first one he quit after seventeen miles. In the second, when he made twenty-three miles and could no longer run, he alternately walked a block and ran a block, finishing in 5 1/2 hours. The next year, better prepared, he made it home without limping, in 4 1/2 hours. He loved the outdoors, and he was the first one on the ski slopes in the morning, the last one off in the evening. He took a special pleasure in being on the slopes on days when it was ten degrees below zero and no one else would go out except, from the time he was eight years old, his son Tiff. There had never been a doubt in Richard Wood's mind that the boy was determined to stay with his father on all occasions, to push himself as hard as he could even if he had to absorb an unusual amount of punishment in the process. If he was not competing with a father (for the question of whether an eight- or nine-year-old competes with a parent is a difficult one to answer), he was certainly proving something to his father, again and again. Even as a little boy he had been obsessive. In kindergarten, he had become so voracious a reader that the school at the end of the year had given him a handsomely lettered certificate proclaiming him "the World's Greatest Reader." His father thought his willingness