NATIONAL ROWING FOUNDATION HONORS KENT MITCHELL ‘61

The National Rowing Foundation honored Kent Mitchell for a lifetime of Exceptional Service to Rowing at their annual US Team Reunion. Mitchell, class of ’61 and two–time Olympic medalist, was honored along with others who were newly inducted into the NRF Hall of Fame. While Mitchell is a prior inductee, he was further honored for his contributions as a Pioneer in Live racing graphics, media, and statistics. Kent is also one of the five founders of the NRF.

Earlier this fall, Kent attended the coaches’ launch for Saturday practice. The Rowing Association took the chance to catch up with him afterward:

TRA: The 50’s and 60’s saw Stanford Rowing on the podium both at National level and Olympic level and you were a central part of that. Can you tell us how you ended up at Stanford and eventually in the coxswain seat from 1957–1961?

KM: After three different high schools (9th grade in northern New Jersey; 10th grade in southern California; 11th & 12th grade in Beaverton, Oregon), I finally got to choose where I wanted to go to school. I chose Stanford, the only college I applied to (wouldn’t try that today). On my first day in my dorm room in Cedro One, a big guy came down the hall, stuck his head in my room, saw a skinny kid and said he was with the Crew, and thought I looked the right size for a coxswain. Then he asked me if I would turn out for Frosh Crew…my reply, “no”, as I had no idea what he was talking about, and was worried enough about grades without a distraction like crew. Then he made the closing pitch: “Well, as long as you show up, this fulfills your one unit P.E. requirement and you get an automatic ‘A’ and 4 points towards your grade point average.” That did it and was the only reason I turned out. The rest is fate and history.

TRA: You walked into the boathouse on the heels of Fifer and Hecht and Ayrault, Findlay, and Seifert, all winning Gold in the 1956 Games. Tell us what that was like. Was there momentum in the boathouse, or was there a need to rebuild after graduation?

KM: I don’t recall much being said about those guys back then, at least during my first year.

Conn was not coaching but was getting his MBA from Cal and hanging around the workbench area in the back of the A–Frame boathouse that he and other crew guys built in the mid–50s across the water from the Leslie Salt dock. Conn had coached frosh crew before I arrived. Lou Lindsay was coaching the varsity, had placed 3rd at the IRA, and beaten Cal in the Big Row the 1957 season before I landed at Stanford. We knew all about that but not too much about the Olympians.

The varsity and frosh crews did all right my first year against all but Washington and Cal. The Stanford–Washington dual races were in Seattle – 3 miles for Varsity, 2 miles for Frosh in the Seward Park Lagoon.

I got a big kick on that trip when the Stanford Crew’s bus had a police escort to the race course from the YMCA where we were staying. Looking back, it turned out like it did for the lions being brought in cages to the Coliseum.

By the time my frosh crew crossed the finish line, it was humiliating to see Washington’s frosh already lifting their boat out of the water. There was a huge crowd on the shoreline jeering at us . . . They even tossed stuff at us as we dejectedly rowed back to our launching area.

Varsity did not do much better, and it was the final year of Lou’s coaching at Stanford. I remember sitting in the bus with the entire crew when the student–run steering committee, which then ran the Crew program, not the athletic department, voted to find a new volunteer varsity coach. Lou soon surprised us all when he got the varsity job at the Naval Academy, then unexpectedly won the 8–oar Olympic trials in Syracuse in 1960 and took his crew to Rome, which placed 5th.

Little known, our group of small boats from the Lake Washington Rowing Club coached by Stan Pocock won at those same 1960 trials in 3 of the 7 events: four without, pair without, and pair with. Then during the Rome Olympics at one workout on Lago Albano (site of Castel Gondolfo, the Pope’s summer residence), our three boats took a flat out staggered time trial against each other in the morning. Then, after lunch, expecting a light paddle in the afternoon, we saw that Navy was taking its time trial and asked if we could put our three boats in an eight and pace them. I was the coxswain and with a tired bunch of old guys, we beat Navy by almost a length – a real shocker since the USA had never lost the Olympic eight event before. Next morning the Navy cadets were doing jumping jacks with the “old guys”, after previously mimicking our guys when we did them after every earlier workout.

TRA: You ended up coxing two Olympic boats, 1960 and 1964, bringing home Bronze and Gold. Stanford also won a couple of National Championships during that time. Can you tell us about how the success at Nationals played into becoming the US Olympic entry in those years?

KM: Well, the 1960 Nationals were also the Olympic Trials. We won our trials event by about 6–lengths in Syracuse. It was a “two–fer”. Of course, we drove almost non–stop from Seattle to Syracuse in private cars to get there, so I guess we were proving ourselves somewhat hardy and up to the task.

It was pretty spotty between 1960 and ’64. Won both pair without and pair with (Ferry and Findlay) in ’61 and ’62 Nationals (again after cross–country drives with a 36–foot boat strapped to the top of Conn’s old green Plymouth). No rowing in the summer of 1963 (Ed had his NROTC summer cruise obligation to cover). Then at Nationals in ’64 in New York, we were beaten by a Vesper pair with, both boats overlapped all the way down the course. Real bummer, since the Vesper crew went to the European Championships the following week and did not even make the finals. What chance did we have even if we made it to Tokyo? (Nationals and Trials were separate events in '64) I had to take the California Bar Exam the following week after driving back to San Francisco from New York. The exam was all day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Thursday was also the first day of our heat in the ’64 Trials in New York. They got a cox from Penn for the prelim. I caught a red–eye in SF Thursday night, planning to race Friday in the repechage if they had lost, but they won the heat. Afterward, the Penn cox said that was the first race he had ever won! On Saturday, we won the trials handily. Busy week.

We then had 2 months to figure out what we were doing wrong. With much help from Stan and George Pocock, we improved our 500–meter interval times by 2 to 3 seconds each interval, which made a massive difference in Tokyo. (Having a crew with two big, strong guys rowing a long stroke in an 18–mile–per–hour headwind also fit right into our race plan.)

TRA: So, decades of Stanford Rowers shared the early morning waters on the Redwood Slough with Conn. Many of us never realized he was actually a USC rower until later in our lives. Can you tell us how he ended up being a fixture of the Stanford Boathouse? By the time you arrived at Stanford, Conn had already been in 2 Olympics and was on his way to a third. What influence did that have on you and the other guys in the boathouse in those years?

KM: Conn’s younger brother, Bill, had rowed at Stanford. Conn rowed at USC only in his senior year. Within 2 years, he had won his first gold medal in Melbourne in 1956, that time with Dan Ayrault and Kurt Seiffert on the tiller lines. During the winter and spring of ’56, George and Stan Pocock coached them via review of 16mm film loops of their Stanford workouts. Sort of like a mail order course in crew. They then trained in Seattle all summer next to Stanford’s Jim Fifer and Dewey Hecht in the pair without, both crews winning gold in Melbourne with on–site guidance of Stan and George.

In my junior year, I was varsity cox, and Conn had a huge influence on me. Once he and Dick Draeger decided to go for the pair with in Rome (in '60), Conn was revamping a boat moving the cox’s seat traditionally in the stern to a lie–down area in the bow. Conn never liked to be eye–to–eye with coxswains. Often, at the end of our Varsity workout, Conn would put the boat he was reworking on in slings and ask me to get in and recline in the bow. It was sort of like being fitted for a suit. When the Varsity season ended, we started training together that way. Everyone at Stanford was then looking God–like up to Conn, knowing that he was going for the gold again. It was quite a surprise for us in Rome to get waxed in our heat by much smaller guys from Russia (actually, good guys from Lithuania who hated Russians). Did a little better playing third fiddle in the finals to Germany and Russia. Actually, we had a great closing 500m against them but came up short with the bronze (which, incidentally, is a much nicer piece of hardware than the gold medals).

Where we went to Rome expecting a shot at gold, we went to Tokyo (in '64) after our fiasco at the ’64 Nationals looking forward to a nice trip to the Far East. Conn’s mother was the only one who said, “you’ll win”. When the draw for our heat pitted us against the European Champion and two other European Championship finalist crews that crushed the Vesper boat that beat us at Nationals, as well as a Czech crew that beat the German champions a week later, it looked like a quick trip for us to the grandstands to watch the finals. Quite a shock to us and everyone when we won our heat, qualified directly for the final, and then beat them all again for the gold.

TRA: The boathouse now sits in a prime location off of Seaport Boulevard. Can you tell us about the efforts to secure the land and ultimately build the boathouse we have today?

KM: Basically, Redwood City wanted the land underneath our A–Frame back for what is now the Seaport development. The crew was able to construct a big box about where the boathouse now stands. Conn almost single–handedly demolished the A–Frame, saved members and parts where he could, and used them to put a big box together. Then there was a gift from a charitable remainder trust, the crew receiving a bequest of almost $3M. This was used to buy the land from Cargill where the boathouse now sits with its long sought permanent home. The University then jumped in and raised funds to build the current boathouse. The generosity of John Arrillaga and possibly to some extent Title IX requirements for women’s sports enabled this to happen.

TRA: Lastly, after graduating from Stanford, you went on to get your law degree from Cal, win gold in Tokyo, and start numerous impactful rowing ventures. Your law office has never been far from the Stanford Boathouse, though, and several rowers–turned–lawyer have hung their licenses there through the years. Even today, The Rowing Association is headquartered in those offices. Any final thoughts on all that? The influence of Stanford Rowing on your path?

KM: Stanford Rowing has impacted everything in my life – met my wonderful wife who was referred to me by Conn who met her through rowing people in Annapolis who told him she was coming to the Bay Area; then around 1997 started working out with former Olympians who happened to be in the Stanford boathouse area, when John Pescatore (World Champ, 1987) was coaching Stanford, and others equally pedigreed also ended up in the area – spent the next 25 years winning masters’ races across the US, and in Canada, Henley England, Australia and New Zealand, with guys just like them who’ve stayed in shape, are natural champions, and just wanted to row together and beat people. As for the gold medal, Ed Ferry always said “it’s the gift that keeps on giving.”