Background
Charles Edward Courtney was born on November 13, 1849 at Union Springs, New York, United States. He was the son of James Thomas Courtney, a landscape gardener, who had moved thither from Salem, Massachusetts.
Charles Edward Courtney was born on November 13, 1849 at Union Springs, New York, United States. He was the son of James Thomas Courtney, a landscape gardener, who had moved thither from Salem, Massachusetts.
Fascinated by yacht-racing, then popular on Cayuga Lake, Charles at the age of twelve years built his first boat. He learned the carpenter’s trade and with his eldest brother became a builder and contractor. In August 1868 a New Yorker named Tyler appeared on Cayuga Lake with a paper scull and issued a challenge for a race.
Courtney entered the race, putting oars in a home-made sailing craft which outweighed those of his competitors by over twenty pounds, and won in walk-away style. This was the beginning of his career. On June 25, 1873, at Syracuse, he defeated Charles Smith and William Bishop of New York, by almost a quarter of a mile over a three-mile course. In September of that year, he entered the Saratoga regatta and won against twelve entries in record time. After that as an amateur he won eighty-eight consecutive races.
At Saratoga with Frank Yates he rowed two miles in twelve minutes, sixteen seconds, still the world’s record for this distance. At Aurora, in a single scull, he rowed two miles in thirteen minutes fourteen seconds, the fastest time on record for a race with a turn. In practise he rowed a mile in six minutes and a mile and a half in nine minutes. In 1877 he turned professional.
He had never been beaten until he met Ned Hanlan at Lachine in 1878 and lost in a race which was so close that the sporting world demanded another to determine which man was the better oar. Papers were signed for a return race on Chautauqua Lake on October 8, 1879. On the morning of the race, Courtney’s shell was found in his boat-house sawed in two. Courtney was accused, and for a generation an argument, which was never settled, raged between his friends and his enemies. As a professional Courtney rowed forty-six races of which he lost seven.
His career as a trainer and a coach began in 1875 with a class of girls from the seminary at Union Springs. In 1883 he prepared a Cornell four in ten days, which defeated by thirty-two seconds, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Wesleyan. In this race, Courtney introduced sliding seats on rollers. In 1885 he was made head coach at Cornell, after which he practically withdrew from professional sculling.
In 1895 Cornell sent her eight to the Henley regatta, where an unfortunate incident and Courtney’s secretive methods created a bad impression among the English rowing public. Courtney, however, learned a lesson at Henley and afterward lengthened out and improved his stroke, though he always stubbornly denied that he had changed his style in the slightest degree.
In his coaching he tried everything that was suggested or invented; he was the first man to use the camera in rowing, and a Covode pressure-recording machine attached to a rowing machine. As a coach he was a martinet, imposing upon his men rules of diet and training to which few college boys would submit. With all his temperamental ways and czar-like methods, however, he was affectionately known to students and faculty as “The Old Man. ” On his way to Poughkeepsie in 1915 he was thrown against the end of his berth and suffered a serious concussion of the brain, but went on with his coaching until the day of the regatta, when he collapsed. He never fully recovered.
