A Most Beautiful Thing

July 1, 2020
Spirited account of a pioneering all-black rowing team. Cooper sums up his surreal experience in the late 1990s: "We're a group of black kids from the turbulent West Side of Chicago, surrounded by a group of Midwestern white kids all sharing praise and respect in the middle of a lake." The author begins with a keen sense of place, chronicling how he grew up in a neighborhood beset by gangs and addiction, with which his own mother struggled before rebuilding their relationship through church-based recovery. Cooper felt frightened at his gang-plagued school until, improbably, he became intrigued by a program to introduce the elite sport of crew to black teens. Though the group eventually spread to other local schools, Cooper's narrative follows the team's improvisational, fish-out-of-water first year, during which the young men struggled to cohere as a unit. Many teammates came from harrowing backgrounds, including rival gang members, which concerned him. Cooper makes abundant use of dialogue, which can sometimes feel reconstructed, if true to the characters, but the passages devoted to reconstructing the matches precisely capture the nitty-gritty of rowing and how it felt especially challenging and foreign to urban blacks: "I look around at everyone's faces and start to believe this might actually work." The author demonstrates how his peers were simultaneously pulled by the promise of achievement and the lure of the street. Eventually, Cooper became team captain. Reflecting on their increasing cohesion, he recalls, "our focus is more on how this unlikely lifeboat is changing our lives outside of it....[H]aving black kids race in this sport has already been an enormous accomplishment." The narrative feels both familiar and memorable due to improbable context and well-rounded characterizations, and the moving story is now a documentary narrated by actor and hip-hop artist Common. Engrossing as a sports memoir but also relevant to any conversation about privilege and race.

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