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As an undergrad, I coxed for Charlie Butt's Harvard Varsity Lightweights. Charlie is infamous for waiting until very late to set crews, a habit I ended up picking up from him when I became a coach. This was not much of a problem, except when weight was a concern.
In the Fall of 1989, nobody expected weight to be a concern. The heavier guys were celebrating because they were lighter than they usually were for the Head of the Charles (which had a 170 lb max), and so did not expect to have to suck as much weight as usual. They were wrong.
That year, Charlie set boats for the Head on Wednesday - after practice. We did the calculations, and my crew, the Second Varsity, had an average weight of 169, with no one below 160 (the average weight required at the Head). We ended up having to shed 9 lbs a person in three days, and the whole boat was miserable. The crew asked me to complain to Charlie, so I showed him the weight chart. Charlie's response to me was: "Charles, you have a veritable meat market in there." Then he walked away.
Friday night was the annual Varsity Crew banquet. My crew sat together grumbling at what idiotic heavyweight had scheduled a banquet for the night before a weigh-in. All the food at the table got passed to me. The waitresses could not even understand why the guys wouldn't even drink water. After dinner, we made a boat trip to the sauna.
My crew just barely cleared the weigh-in on Saturday. While they were doing that, I was waiting in the registration line. Ahead of me was Charlie's legendary father, whom I met for the first time ("Tell Charlie to return my calls!").
Come race day, we had put the 72 combined pounds back on. Conditions were rough (the "Charles River Headwind Rule" was in effect: no matter which direction your crew is heading and no matter how many bends you go around, there is always a headwind). I guess the extra weight helped, because we finished 7th in the Lightweight Eight event, which we were very pleased about since we were the Second Varsity. The First Varsity finished 31st - but that placing included a one minute penalty for being late to the start. Even without the penalty, the V would still have finished 13th, several places behind us.
Harvard's Second Varsity traditionally races at the Head under the name "Charles River Rowing Association." By beating the Varsity, which raced as "Harvard University," we ensured that the following year the order would be all screwed up. It took Charlie several years to figure out how to get the crews back into the proper order.
Thanks to the odd finishing order, I also won a bet with Charlie at that Head. There is a tradition at Harvard to mix up line-ups every Friday in the Fall, and send a flotilla of crews out for "Friday-at-the-Races," which amounts to doing several Head pieces in theoretically even line-ups. Charlie always liked to give me crews which needed special technical attention, so I rarely won the Friday contests. Nine days before the Head was no exception. However, on that Friday, my crew of improbables had won Friday-at-the-Races by several minutes. On occasions when a crew truly dominated the way we had, there was an additional tradition to award prize shirts scrounged out of the coaches' office. But between Charlie and Heavyweight Coach Harry Parker, they could only dig out eight shirts. So they suggested that since I was already wearing a Princeton shirt that day that I had enough of a prize. I gave Charlie a nasty look, and he said that if I could win two weeks in a row he would find me a shirt. We both knew full well that there would be no Friday-at-the-Races the next week because of the Head, and that I would be in the 2V for the Head, a boat which would presumably be slower than the V, the coxswain seat in which belonged to Andy Cameron.
After the Head, I went to check results with Charlie at Cambridge Boat Club on Sunday night or Monday morning, and my crew had indeed beaten the V. Charlie grudgingly admitted that I had won the bet and later that week found me a prize shirt (which turned out to be a souvenir shirt made by the Harvard Heavyweights on a trip to Hong Kong in the early 1980s), which remains buried somewhere in a room filled with rowing shirts, rowing clothing, and other rowing memorabilia at my parents' place (my parents can't wait for me to get a house someday so I can cart all this stuff away).
There was also another shirt I took away from that race. That Fall, we had long-sleeved crimson racing shirts made up for the Head with white diagonal sashes sown on. One of the shirts was defective, and had the sash going the wrong way. My stroke, Steve Gantz (a few years later stroke of the US Lightweight Eight), pulled it out of the box. It seemed silly for him to have it, so he figured I should, since I was facing the other way in the boat anyway. I happened to wear that shirt again when I went to watch the 1997 IRAs (I had visited my parents and pulled it out of the old shirt pile), and several bewildered people commented on it that day. Now they know the full story.