Free The Amateurs by David Halberstam Page B

to take on excessively harsh challenges bordered on a form of masochism.
    When he was ten, he had stayed at the home of a friend named David Hansen and they had decided to sleep outside in the simplest kind of tent. It was early spring and cold. That night there was a horrendous rainstorm. In the middle of the storm David Hansen had come inside, but the next morning Richard Wood was appalled to find his son asleep in four inches of water. From then on he had realized that his son was always going to push himself to the limits in terms of physical risk, that he was not just proving something but gaining recognition as well.
    A year later they had gone mountain climbing in New Hampshire, and very high up they had come to a tiny pool of water that was at most twenty feet in diameter. The water was absolutely ice cold. Above it stood a very steep mountain cliff, perhaps thirty feet high. Anyone diving from it to the pool would have to make an almost perfect dive or be splattered on the rocks. Richard Wood had taken one look at the cliff and known exactly what was going to happen. Tiff was going to want to dive in, but the pool was so small that he could easily miss it. "It'd really be something to dive in from there," Tiff had said. "I think I'll pass," Richard Wood had said. He had watched as Tiff had measured the distance and he thought, Do I tell him not to do it? He had decided, no, he could not forbid him, and Tiff had made one dive and done it cleanly, a dive into water that no one in his right mind would want to swim in in the first place.
    Those were not particularly happy years for Tiff Wood. His parents' marriage was coming apart and they were about to get a divorce. He found himself painfully shy, and his feelings about things were completely internalized: It was not that he was without feelings, it was that he found no way to express them. Just after his parents had been divorced, he had once started to cry over some minor incident. When his stepmother had tried to comfort him, he had turned away from her abruptly. "I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me," he had said. Given a chance by his father to stay at home or go away to boarding school, he had seized the chance to go away.
    He had arrived at St. Paul's School in 1967, thirteen years old, small for his age, unsure of himself, confused. He was, he realized later, a very shy little boy who kept all of his pain inside. At St. Paul's he had not done well in the beginning. He was smart, but he had realized immediately that too strenuous a use of his intelligence and the accumulation of exceptional grades did not bring popularity. He was rebellious and wore his hair long. Popularity eluded him. "The people I wanted to be my friends were not interested in being my friends," he said of that time. "I thought they were making a mistake. But it was not easy to show this to them."
    At St. Paul's popularity and status were in some indefinable way tied to things that might well be outside his reach, such as looks and size and athletic accomplishment. He had never been a particularly gifted athlete. His eyesight was terrible, and in those days there were no soft contact lenses. He felt clumsy and awkward at almost everything, and then he tried rowing. On the first two days he had gone out, the conditions had been appalling, cold and snowy. The boat had been filled with water and he had loved it. The harsh weather, which drove off most of his contemporaries, drew him in. He had always felt comfortable in such weather. From the start he had had a sense that this was a sport in which he could excel, for it required only strength and dedication, not skill or grace or timing.
    At St. Paul's, rowing had a particular prestige, it was bound into the tradition of the school as much as football was. Besides, football was out. He could barely see the ball. But in rowing the athletes looked behind them. His mother, aware of his problem, encouraged him in crew; his father still preferred