The oars drip with history at Leander
Storied boat club gets set to make a splash after 90 glorious years as part of Hamilton history
It seems like yesterday when they’d crowd onto the waterfront to bet on rowing —men, perhaps with handlebar moustaches, thumbing a few shinplasters from a roll of bills and laying money on the odds of one rower against another.
OK, it doesn’t seem like yesterday.
It was the late 1800s, but it illustrates how crucial our water culture has been to this city’s history and how crucial rowing has been to that water culture. Still is. And what’s rowing without the Leander Boat Club?
The boats are out again these days, pre-sunrise, now that winter’s been chased back behind the tundra, and the young people from the high schools are digging oars through the skin of the harbour as the yawning dawn lifts them out of the dark.
They wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the Leander Boat Club, celebrating its 90th anniversary in May. That’s where the boats come from. And the inspiration.
Such Leander legends. People like Robert “Bobby” Pearce, Claude Saunders, “Shorty” MacDonald, Reg Wheeler, Paddy Cline. After them, others like Al Morrow, Con Andreychuk, Mel LaForme, Jacqui Cook — there are so many others.
Leander produced athletes who competed at so many Olympic Games, world championships and regattas, often medalling.
Hamilton judge George Gage, champion rower in his own right and a past-president of Leander, picks over a table in his office, heaped with old photographs, memorabilia, club crests, showing me this, highlighting that (a picture, for instance, of Claude Saunders’ sharp red jacket from the ’36 Olympics in Berlin, still preserved).
The men in the pictures look surprisingly “ripped” for that vintage, the 1930s, but then rowing does that — tones muscle, demands the maximum, of every body area.
“This is the Olympic crew on their way to London on an ocean liner,” George explains, as we study a photo of very properly dressed team members, in their Leander club wear, working out on rowing machines on the deck of the ship, 1948.
“So formal,” he says with a fond smile.
We find a picture from the ’70s, a young George and a young Mel LaForme. Mel, now retired from teaching, is with us, reminiscing.
Tall and sinewy, he looks like he could qualify for the Olympics right now — that characteristic muscularity; when a rower keeps up the sport, the sport keeps up the rower.
Mel’s qualified for four Olympics. Men’s eight in Montreal ’76 and Moscow ’80, spare in Los Angeles ’84, quad Seoul ’88. Being there, thrice, was amazing, says Mel. Moscow didn’t happen. “I was selected but there was the U.S. boycott. We knew there was a chance we couldn’t go. Still, it was a blow.”
It must’ve felt like that for Leander Men’s Eight, who were to represent Canada at the 1940 Helsinki Olympics, called on account of war. One of that Helsinki eight was Bill Bohozuk, of Evelyn Dick case notoriety. Yes, he was a rower, too.
Back then, says George, rowers would “row themselves into shape” at season’s start. But things changed. When he and Mel started rowing, in high school at Westdale and later at McMaster, they were doing all-season-training, cross preparation (like weights and bicycling) and precision performance/ body measurement.
This was under the innovative training of Duncan MacDougall.
“They would take a piece of muscle out of your thigh (for fasttwitch, slow-twitch analysis),” says George. “That hurt like crazy for two weeks.”
Not bad enough, 4:30 a.m. wakeups, but you had to give your pound of flesh, or rather ounce of muscle tissue. Other changes helped increase speed — boats made of composite resin rather than wood. The originators of the Leander could hardly have imagined it.
The first Leander began in 1870 and thrived until succumbing to the “bicycle craze” of the 1890s, says George. A movement to revive it — and the sport of rowing — arose in the 1920s and on May 28, 1927, letters patent were issued under the Lieutenant-General’s seal, in time for the British Empire Games in Hamilton 1930. Leander lived again.
Rowing, says George, is “unequalled in any other experience I know. There is a oneness, a focus. You, the water, the boat. Even in a single stroke; when it’s perfect, you feel it.”
Leander is trying to get former members to get in touch and come out for the anniversary event.