The Swing of Things

Edited by Tom Ransley

In the latest episode of the American rowing podcast, The  Swing of Things, USRowing CEO Amanda Kraus meets New York Times bestselling author, Daniel James Brown, who wrote The Boys in the Boat.

The following is an edited and condensed extract from the full interview in Season 2 Episode 5 of The Swing of Things. Listen now via your preferred podcast platform.

AK You've spoken about how Joe [Rantz] would tear up whenever he thought of the boys he rowed with, not for their loss (most were no longer alive when you spoke to him) but for the sheer beauty of what they had done together. How did this emotional connection impact on your motivation to write the story? And why did Joe insist on writing about all the boys in the boat?

DB Joe was very firm about that. The day I asked him if I could write his story, the first thing he said was, ‘No, I don't want you to write about me. But you can write a book about the boat’. I didn't know what he meant at first: I thought he meant the shell.

There was emotion right from the beginning; for me, for him and for Judy, his daughter. I probably spent several hundred hours with his daughter, after Joe passed away, because she had kept a voluminous record of his story. She'd spent the last several years of his life gathering bits and pieces of his story.

Every time I talked to Judy, she wound up in tears. Sometimes I wound up in tears. Particularly the part of the story about his hardships growing up during the Depression were really, really touching. But it transcended that. It was also about the emotional experience of bonding with these other guys. And, ultimately later in life, having to say goodbye to them one by one. So, there were a lot of emotions through the whole process of researching and writing the book.

AK And having this conversation during the last couple of months of his life.

DB Yes, I think it was the last six weeks of his life. I was only able to talk to him directly a few times before he was too ill, but as I say what made the difference was that Judy was absolutely determined to save his story. That's ultimately why she came to me. When she asked me down to her house. I didn't realize she, in the back of her mind, was thinking about maybe this is a guy who could write my dad’s story.