ATHLETICS: Did You Know?

ATHLETICS: Did You Know?

Dedicated Alumnus Howland Ware Put Howard in the Elite Sport of Rowing

By Kelvin Childs

For more than a decade – from 1960 to 1972 – Howard University competed in the elite sport of rowing, with a pioneering team that struggled to gain credibility before it won its first meet in 1964.

The first all-Black men’s crew team in the nation resulted from the vision of Howard alum Howland M. Ware (’42, B.A.). Ware was inspired in 1950 when he saw the Eastern Sprints, the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges’ annual championship, according to Sports Illustrated in 1964. He told the magazine, “It was so exciting. I just figured Howard had to have a crew.”

It took several years – and several thousands of dollars of Ware’s money – to make it happen. He resolved that “even if I have to pay for it myself, they will have a rowing team at Howard,” according to Ebony, which profiled the team in a 1962 photo essay.

Ware sponsored the team with $10,000 – adjusted for inflation, about $104,000 in today’s dollars. He bought uniforms and a used scull from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for $200, which would be about $2,100 today. Oars then cost $70 a pair and needed to be replaced from time to time.

Back then, sculls and oars were made of wood; modern ones are typically made of carbon fiber. New eight-person sculls today cost between $25,000 and $50,000, and basic oars can range from $350 to $700 each. High-end sculls and oars can cost many thousands of dollars more.

Ware aggressively recruited players from the track, basketball, wrestling and football teams and ferried them to 4:30 a.m. practices on the Potomac River. But success was slow to come as the novice rowers learned the sport for the first time while facing experienced competition. There were embarrassing moments, such as sculls losing direction when rowers missed a stroke – called “catching crabs” – or a vessel capsizing while onlookers laughed.

A 1962 editorial in The Hilltop detailed that Ware gave additional $5,000 in the previous year for two more shells, “oars, a megaphone, a motorboat, uniforms and equipment,” with the Student Council spending $2,400 on another shell and alumni also buying one.

The team was inaugurated as a private club, partly because of the startup and ongoing expenses. But the editorial noted that the team went 0-5 the previous year, “with a two-length loss to Brown University their narrowest margin of defeat.”

The losses didn’t help the case for the team becoming a varsity sport, bringing legitimacy and University funding. The editorial mockingly stated that Howard’s Physical Education Department and Athletics for Men were “not completely sure of its probable life span and have failed to take out adoption papers and accept paternity.” But it acknowledged that the Brown team took four years to become a winner, and Ware called for patience. Probation was lifted and varsity status granted in 1962.

To its benefit, the team gained Stuart Law as a volunteer coach during its second season in 1961. Law, an attorney and George Washington University law professor who played the sport during his days at Yale, was all about winning.

Sports Illustrated noted that under Law’s coaching, “the Howard crew has improved steadily.” It wasn’t yet winning meets but was outpacing stronger teams like American University in 1963. In 1964, “it beat Purdue, rowed a dead heat with American University and Drexel and lost to Fordham by only two seconds.”

On May 3, 1964, the Bison men won the Washington Regatta, besting American University, Georgetown University and George Washington University – even though on the start, according to the Washington Post, Howard rower Bernard Thoms pulled so hard he broke the blade off his oar. Officials delayed the match until Thoms got another oar.

The team made another milestone in 1970 when Candy Caruthers became its coxswain – the party who shouts instructions to the rowers, who are all facing away from the direction the boat is going. Caruthers was the first woman on the team and its first woman coxswain, according to Smithsonian Magazine. But the team disbanded two years later. Original patron Ware died in 1979.

Ware, an active member of the Mu Lambda Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., was a real estate broker in Washington, D.C. He was a prominent donor to Howard and enthusiastic supporter, and Howard’s alumni honored him twice: in 1959 with the Distinguished Alumni Award for service to the General Alumni Association, and in 1971 at the Alumni Federation and Awards Dinner after the Homecoming game.