One of my favorite movies of 2023 is The Boys in the Boat.[i] It tells the remarkable true story of an inexperienced eight-person rowing team from the University of Washington who competed in the 1936 Olympics against the best in the world, including the rowers from Nazi Germany, considered the best in the world—by far. The Germans had already won the gold medals in the single, two-man, and four-man team rowing events in those Olympics. The only race left was the eight-man team event for a clean sweep of all the rowing medals.

Here is the trailer for the film:

Back then, rowing was considered a major sport, and the public attended, or more likely listened to, the races on the radio, similar to how we might watch the NBA on television today. Like today, sports fans loved the underdog—those little Davids who somehow took on and conquered the goliaths of sports.

The 1936 Olympics are better known for the feats of African-American Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at those games and single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy. Owens delivers one of my two favorite quotes from the film. When asked by a teammate if he intended to show Hitler how good a black man could be, he responded, “No, I intend to show the people back home.” Nazi Germany was not the only nation with a racism problem.

My other favorite line from The Boys in the Boat comes at the very end, when the grandson of Joe Rantz, one of the members of the eight-man team, asks if he thought he one day could race with an eight-man rowing crew as he had done. Wisely, Rantz replies, “We were not an eight-man crew; we were one.”  Here is a short scene from the movie telling of the beauty of rowing. Done right, it becomes “More poetry than sport.”

The Boys in the Boat was adapted from the book by Daniel James Brown.[ii] I love the way Brown describes the importance of teamwork in a rowing team: 

“[T]he greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made up of conflicting stuff…. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time – and this is key – no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort – the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes – is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

“And capitalizing on diversity is perhaps even more important when it comes to the characters of the oarsmen. A crew composed entirely of eight amped-up, overtly aggressive oarsmen will often degenerate into a dysfunctional brawl in a boat or exhaust itself in the first leg of a long race. Similarly, a boatload of quiet but strong introverts may never find the common core of fiery resolve that causes the boat to explode past its competitors when all seems lost. Good crews are good blends of personalities; someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to think things through; someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That’s the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way.”

Teamwork is not limited to sports competitions. It is hard to find any accomplishment that results from an individual acting alone. Whether it is an assembly line manufacturing automobiles, consummating a business transaction, or filming a movie with recognized stars, none of us can accomplish much by ourselves. Someone said, “One man who works with you is worth a dozen men who work for you.” I love the opening scene from the movie Apollo 13,[iii] where a successful launch involves team after team. If any one of those teams gave the “no go,” the mission would have been aborted.

Of course, the real story of Apollo 13 takes place after disaster strikes. We all know the famous line from the movie, “Houston, we have a problem.” The spacecraft undergoes massive damage from an explosion of an oxygen tank, and NASA must figure out how to get the astronauts safely back to Earth. The accurate measure of any team, whether in sports, government, or business, is how it performs under pressure – when things do not go as expected. And in life, few things go as planned. Fortunately, NASA was equal to the task, and the astronauts ultimately returned safely to Earth. Here is just one of the many scenes of the technical crew and astronauts working together to accomplish a needed task:

In my own life, my favorite sports teams I played on were those that did not have the most talent, but playing together as a team, we became more than the sum of our parts. I experienced something similar in my profession. In my career, I was fortunate to handle the legal aspects of dozens of large oil and gas transactions. But I could never have done it alone. It took a team of geologists, geophysicists, engineers, financial advisors, accountants, land personnel, and others to be an effective team. But none of us let our egos get in the way, as we realized we needed each other to be successful, and no team member was more important than any other.  

May we all experience the magic of effective teamwork, whether in sports, work, or personal relationships, as we swallow our egos, recognize, utilize, adapt to, and appreciate the abilities of others, and, working together, accomplish something great.  Or, as Helen Keller once said, “Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much.”

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[i] The Boys in the Boat:

• Production Companies: Tempesta Films, Lantern Entertainment, and Metro-Golden-Mayer (MGM)
• Director: George Clooney
• Writers: Daniel James Brown and Mark L. Smith
• Starring: Joel Edgerton, Callum Turner, and Peter Guinness
• Release date: December 25, 2023

[ii] Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Penguin Books (June 4, 2013).

[iii] Apollo 13:

• Production Companies: Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment
• Director: Ron Howard
• Writers:  William Broyles Jr. and A Reinert (based on the book by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger)
• Stars: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon and Ed Harris
• Release date: June 30, 1995