ROWING AS SPORT MAKES PROGRESS

Taranaki Daily News, 6 September 1935, Page 12

ROWING AS SPORT MAKES PROGRESS

NEW, PLYMOUTH OARSMEN FACE NEW SEASON PASTIME THAT WEEDS OUT THE SELFISH' (By “Oarsman.”) ROWING has made remarkable progress since its establishment by Thomas Doggett as long ago as 1715. To-day every English school with the facilities makes the sport the rule and the traditional Oxford-Cambridge race is the event of the sporting y eal ’- The growth Of the sport in England has its parallel in New Zealand. Next month will mark the new season of the New Plymouth Rowing Club, which was formed 12 years ago by Mr. T. Campbell. Steady progress has been made by the club, which has produced a good stamp of oarsman and has now all the facilities for this sport, including a well-equipped shed at Moturoa.

Like most other sports, rowing is not an art to be mastered in a day. It requires long practice and careful living to reach the standard of precision and physical fitness necessary to a champion team. Unselfishness is essential jn rowing. Individualists cannot exist where a lack of team work is disastrous.

To be able to take an efficient part in the management of a boat may frequently be found to be of the greatest service; but even if no such opportunity arises, the time is well spent that gives one the power to enjoy so cheerful-.and healthy a recreation. It is a remarkable thing but none-the-less true that the fact of having rowed in the true sense of the word puts men, possibly as far apart as the poles in other respects, on common ground at once. Only an oarsman who has trained and denied himself pleasures for’ months for the welfare of crew and club, who knows what it is to rc blind for the line in a gruelling race, and knows the disappointment of knocks and defeat and the joy of victory well won, can appreciate, without being able to express it in words the value of the game and the friendships formed. An enthusiastic and experienced oarsman who knows the sport- and its adherents writes the following:— “Almost without exception the man deficient in character does not climb to the top of the tree in rowing—the sport is too exacting for that. No sport more than rowing- reflects the character of men. It does not take long to find the man who is not to be depended on, the man who puts himself first and the crew last.

“Physical and natural advantages may carry a man along some distance, but sonner or later, usually sooner, his own reliability or his selfishness will find him out. But if this sport of rowing searches out character, it also moulds character. Many a youth who has passed through a rowing club has benefited by the buffeting he has received, and has emerged a better man, a man respected by his friends, a man who treasures the friendship of men who are friends indeed—dependable to the last stroke.”

Every schoolboy plays cricket and football, but only a few schools have their vicinity rivers or harbours on which rowing is possible. Moreover—and this, perhaps,is the chief reason why oarsmen ape few in comparison to those who play other games—the science of oarsmanship is a highly technical business. The learning of it bristles with difficulties. It involves a complicated series of movements that have to be performed not merely with accuracy, but with an accuracy based upon that of others. The cricketer may make his brilliant strokes in hjs own way and run up his special century; the footballer may tackle, or kick or pass in his own particular celebrated style; the golfer may earn praise for his driving or his putting; but the oarsman who does his work in a crew must be content to subordinate his individuality, to lose even his name and be one of a number. These facts are porne out at every rowing club and it is this that has made it internationally a much-loved sport.