Proudly, my father told Mr. Ledyard that I rowed for Andover, conveniently omitting the fact that I was terrible. Intrigued, Mr. Ledyard said that the Boat Club needed an oarsman, and why didn’t I come on down to try out for them?
The next morning I met Mr. Ledyard at sunrise. (Only years later did I realize that, as a surgeon who by necessity wakes every day by five, and as a kid who always woke early, the early-bird demands of the sport of crew appealed to my inner clock. I’ve yet to meet a single successful surgeon or rower who doesn’t rise with the sun.) Down at the club, I was assigned to a four-man shell. I was the youngest by seven years.
After an hour and a half, we finished our workout. Mr. Ledyard said they could use me: A boat of theirs had been invited to race in the Canadian Henley Regatta six weeks later and I could fill the slot they were missing.
There was one problem, though. “You’re overweight for the boat,” said Mr. Ledyard as delicately as possible.
“How much?” I said gamely, not at all offended. I’d never thought of myself as overweight – some baby fat, sure, but I was fifteen and in decent shape, or so I thought. Dropping a couple pounds in a month and a half was no problem, especially for someone who loved his new sport and had grown acclimated to the rigors of crew.
“Forty pounds,” said Mr. Ledyard.
Standing on the shore of the Detroit River, sweating after a great workout, excited to be invited to join grown men in an official competition (in another country!) – all in all, I had been feeling like a stud.
But forty pounds? The race was on August 5. It was now June 26. Was he crazy?
Although I had one season of rowing behind me, nothing in my life to that point had suggested I was capable of the self-discipline, the torture, I would need to summon to get down to competitive weight. And even if I could find the discipline, was it even physically possible? And if it was physically possible, was it medically smart? I was five feet ten, 185 pounds. The boat, I discovered, was a “lightweight”: You had to be 145 pounds. If I said I would make weight and didn’t, I would fail the boat and the team.
And suppose I did lose the weight … how much of my strength would be sapped ? They weren’t going to want one of their seats manned by a teenager who couldn’t pull with maximum strength.
None of these questions mattered. I was possessed.
For the next six weeks, I trained every day, rowing twice a day. I ran. I did weights. I ate almost nothing but vegetables, mostly ones starting with the letter c. Celery. Cabbage. Cauliflower. Carrots.
After forty days – weighing in the morning of the race – I tipped the scales at 144.5.
Almost 0 percent body fat. You could count every rib. Forty pounds lighter in forty days.
Barely a third of the way into our race at the Canadian Regatta, in St. Catharines, Ontario, one of the metal clasps that lock the oars in place snapped. Our boat was finished.
All that hard work to finish dead last.
But the experience of earning my way to that seat on that boat on that Canadian lake in August of 1970 imprinted itself on me. Yes, I was a sleeker version of the boy I’d been at summer’s start. But the more important development – one that would prepare me for the rigors of becoming a surgeon, perhaps the most competitive of all medical disciplines – was an awakening about obstacles and possibility and fortitude: If you want it badly enough, you can make it happen. I’d gotten into a tough prep school by working hard, but this test of will was different. This had involved doing something that wasn’t pleasurable. This had involved denying myself.
While I may have appreciated, on an abstract level, how this crucible might strengthen me for the future, and perhaps better equip me for professional success later, I certainly did not appreciate how the self-discipline, bordering on ascetic monomania, would implant itself in my life. That is, I may just have succeeded in teaching myself that I could sacrifice so much – perhaps more than I would ever want to, including profoundly important things – to reach my goal.
In the fall I returned to Andover, where the previous spring I’d been the last man on the last boat. I moved up to a stronger boat, and by senior year I was on the first of our “schoolboy eights.” We won the New England championship.
As I prepared to go to college at Princeton, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. One thing I was sure of, though: being a doctor was not among the options.
At Princeton – leaner and more confident than the last time I’d found myself a neophyte at a leafy, Northeastern bastion of academic excellence – I was ready to test out my new self in a new place.
I studied but still I was lost. My driving priority was to get away from the familiar – perhaps overseas. But I had no idea how I would get there.
I continued to row because I liked it, and because a core self-discipline had been seeded in me as a young teen.
Sophomore year it dawned on me that I had to focus. It was unfair that my parents should pay for four years without something tangible to show for it. After a scattered, generally undistinguished freshman year, I became even more conscious of faraway places. The easiest route to a life of that? I had finally figured it out – and it was right in front of me the whole time:
International law.
With the world-renowned Woodrow Wilson School a mere quarter mile from my dorm, there was no better place to study to be an international lawyer.
This was going to be great, I thought. I would call on my legendary self-discipline from here on in to earn straight A’s, work my way to the head of my class, get into a top law school, make law review, win job offers from the most internationally renowned law firms and giant corporations. I’d jet all over the world. I’d live in Paris; all those hours of high school and college French would now come to real use. Someday, when I’d had enough of the bachelor life, I’d marry. We’d live together in Europe and raise a family there.
It seemed like an excellent plan. In the first days back at school sophomore year, I moved into Blair Tower, an all-male dorm and one of the most beautiful, often-photographed buildings on campus. (It’s featured prominently in the movie A Beautiful Mind, about the brilliant, troubled mathematician John Nash. In fact, during my years there, Mr. Nash would often walk by our door, mumbling to himself.) While some of my dormmates were still enjoying themselves – skiing down six flights of stairs, planning the semester’s first road trip to an all-women’s college, tossing Frisbees on the quad – I had to tune everything out so that I could be single-mindedly studious. I went to the local lumberyard, bought plywood, and returned to my tiny double. I got out nails and a hammer. I was intent to study, nothing else, for the rest of my college years.
My roommate walked in as I was hammering the first board over my window.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Gotta work this year,” I said. “See you in nine months.”
I boarded over my window except for four inches, at the bottom, for air.
I stopped staying out late on weekends. I even gave up rowing. Too many hours that could be better spent studying.
I still had to eat, though, and I joined one of the college’s famous eating clubs – Cap and Gown, which had lots of jocks, male and female. A great deal of social life revolved around mealtime, and I found myself becoming more comfortable in such social settings. Many mornings, for the better part of two years, I ate breakfast with a likable, bright squash player named Meg, who would, in later years, serve as an example to me of the virtue of persistence. I followed news of her, postgraduation, because she married a future surgeon, and we crossed paths on occasion. For