Whatever Floats Her Boat

Monica Tranel Michini blames it on the Jesuits.

There she was - fresh out of Gonzaga University, a continent away from her Montana home, a Rutgers law student living in Philadelphia, riding her bike over the Delaware River on the Ben Franklin Bridge.

On her way to class, but slightly lost.

“It was just one of those moments,” she remembered. “You know - ‘What’s life all about?’ Maybe I took too much poetry at Gonzaga. I was a philosophy and political theory major. I used to get mad at the Jesuits for putting all those ideas in my head. You think sometimes of all the possibilities in the world - I’m sure it was a combination of growing up on a ranch in Montana and that Jesuit education. Anyway, up on that bridge I started thinking about where I was going in life.

“And what I decided was, ‘I want to be the best in the world at something.”’

The most likely something was rowing, and at rowing she is certainly something.

She is a world champion, a member of the United States women’s eight-with-coxswain crew which until Monday was a prohibitive favorite to win the gold medal. We’re talking big. Even Chelsea Clinton made a front-run out to Lake Lanier for a look.

Then an upset loss to Belarus in the preliminaries downgraded the Americans’ status to slight favorite, though it’s all semantics to Michini.

“It’s not so much whether we’re the favorite, it’s how we handle our own standards,” she said. “We’ve told everybody we’re here to win, but everything that’s happened up to this point is irrelevant.”

In the specific sense, she means - not the what’s-the-meaning-of-life sense.

For instance, it’s entirely relevant that a ripped-up knee dissuaded her from walking on to the women’s basketball team her freshman year at Gonzaga.

“I’d been playing competitive sports since the fifth grade,” Michini said, “and I found myself for the first time without a team. Then I saw these guys sitting out on campus with this boat.”

Gonzaga’s Jesuit Navy was in its natal phase in 1984, a goofy brainchild of Fr. Michael Siconolfi and Nelson Miller. There wasn’t much in the way of support, equipment or technique - which Michini recalled the other day when she bumped into University of Washington crew coach Bob Ernst, who is NBC’s rowing authority in Gainesville.

“I’d never met him, but the first race I ever rowed in was over in Seattle on Greenlake. I was in a four with (cox) and Nelson just told us to pull as hard as we could. ‘All this is about is pulling hard,’ he said. And we won! We beat Bob Ernst’s crew!

“And I guess after the race, Bob said to Nelson, ‘That is the worst rowing I’ve ever seen in my life.’ And Nelson turned around and said, ‘Yeah, but they beat your crew.’ I think that’s when I fell in love with rowing.”

Still, it was an on-and-off love - “I loved working out, but I hated getting up at 5 in the morning; I liked to drink” - until her senior year. Goaded into a commitment, she rowed with a four that took fourth in GU’s first trip to the Pacific Rowing Championships. And when she enrolled at Rutgers, she strolled over to the prestigious Vesper Boat Club and announced she’d like to row single sculls.

“And I flipped and I flipped and I flipped,” she said. “They started calling me ‘Flipper.”’

They don’t call her that anymore. Indeed, they’ve made her the club’s first lifetime member, an honor bestowed only on Olympic and world champions, a condition she met last year when the women’s eight won the worlds in Finland.

Between her Flipper days and Finland, she met her husband Fred - himself a championship rower for Vesper - and rowed every boat in the house: sculls or sweeps, singles, doubles, quads, eights. She has world championship medals in three different boats.

“I love to train in the single,” she said, “and I love to race the eight. It’s big, it’s loud and it’s fast.”

The hot-rod Lincoln of the lake.

To row the eight here, she’s postponed a career (“I haven’t been in Philadelphia since October, so I don’t know if I still have career”) with the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, a U.N.- affiliated group which tries to affect policy making regarding nuclear arms.

It’s delicate work, but then so is rowing the eight.

“It is the team sport,” insisted Michini. “There are no individual stars. Everybody is exactly the same. What’s difficult about the eight is that you all have equal power to screw it up. The only real power you have as an individual is to allow everybody else to shine.”

And this sounds like a stretch, but the best training for the kind of rowing that got Michini to the Olympics may have been done on a cattle ranch near tiny Broadview, Mont., 40 miles north of Billings. That’s where Ned and Virginia Tranel raised the 10 children in a larger, land-locked version of a thin, yellow racing shell.

“It is like one big family - which I can say because I’m from a big family,” Michini said. “And if you know anything about families, you know that they’re never always happy or always sad. If you’re truly close, you fight sometimes and cry sometimes and you laugh and hug each other and are there for each other when you’re down. We fight a lot, but we fight because we care.”

All Michini had to do was decide how much she cared. And when she got to that bridge, she crossed it.

You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Local watch Monday’s results of Washington and Idaho athletes at the Summer Olympics: Men’s basketball: John Stockton, Spokane, had seven points and Gary Payton, Seattle Sonics, eight as the U.S. Dream Team beat Angola 87-54. Baseball: Travis Lee (Olympia) had 2 RBIs in 7-2 U.S. win over South Korea. Men’s soccer: Kasey Keller (Lacey, Wash.) was the goalie as USA beat Tunisia 2-0. Rowing: USA women’s eights with Monica Tranel Michini (Gonzaga) and Betsy and Mary McCagg (Kirkland) was upset by Belarus in their heat (second in 6:28.45, 3.84 seconds back) and are in Wednesday’s repechage. Also, the men’s lightweight fours with Marc Schneider (Everett) finished second in their heat to Canada and also drop into the repechage.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review