In the coxswain’s seat
Mazzio steers tale of first Black high school rowing team to screen
What was the first reaction when Black high schoolers from Chicago’s gang-ridden West Side were asked to join a rowing team? “We don’t even swim.” Yet as Friday’s incrediblebut-true documentary “A Most Beautiful Thing” shows, it hardly mattered.
Narrated by Oscar winner Common and executive produced by NBA Hall of Famer Grant Hill and All-Star player Dwyane Wade, “Beautiful” tells how the nation’s first-ever African American high-school rowing team came to be in 1997, changing many lives in the process.
A look at overcoming obstacles, a demonstration of how change can happen, “Beautiful,” as writer-director-producer Mary Mazzio says, “speaks to all the trauma and deeply embedded racism stories like this face.
“This was made before George Floyd and these young men are so honest about their trauma, frankly, it makes the story now more relevant.”
A 1992 Olympics rower, Mazzio explained, “I’m a fantastical rower, part of this really quirky community.
“Someone alerted me to this self-published book (now available through Flatiron Books) about Arshay Cooper’s experience rowing on the West Side of Chicago. My first thing was, ‘Such a team does not exist!’ ”
Coincidentally, she had a tweet from Cooper.
“Twenty minutes later, my phone rang and it was Arshay. And he didn’t tweet just to me, he tweeted to Will Smith, Martin Scorsese. I answered.”
The rowing story didn’t end in ’99 with the team’s last race. When in 2018 their coach suddenly died, Cooper rounded up the team for one last memorial race. He also stunned pretty much everyone by inviting members of the Chicago Police
Dept. to join his team in training.
The 2019 Chicago Sprints saw a boat team of 8 — four cops, four veterans — one rowing while under house arrest.
“My job as director was to take my cue from Arshay,” Mazzio said. “In many ways he directed the film, in large and small, expected and unexpected ways.”
Mazzio began with an eyeopening trip. “Arshay took me on a ride around the West Side where on you cannot get out of your car.
“I asked how did you get to school and Arshay said, ‘That’s the (bleeping) problem.’ You see kids 10,11, 12 who have to make decisions for survival.
“They are growing up in conditions that are worse than Third World. Of inequality, of safety — forget income.
“They experience trauma, which we now know is inheritable, and we see that play squarely into their choices.
“For me, the families in this movie were so kind and generous in terms of enlightening my understanding of intergenerational trauma.
“I didn’t understand the perniciousness of that; it’s only one generation away.”