The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Medal

Written by David Halberstam

Narrated by Christopher Reeve

At the 1984 Olympics, the United States rowing team— for the first time in nearly 30 years— had a serious chance to win an Olympic medal in the single sculls. Four genuine challengers emerged for the opportunity to represent the U.S. They competed fiercely in a sport that held no promise of financial reward. What drove these men to endure a physical pain known to no other sport?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam focuses on these four competitors— Tiff Wood, John Biglow, Brad Lewis, and Joe Bouscaren— in the single sculls trials in Princeton. While one man will win and gain the right to represent the United States in the Olympiad, the losers will have to live with the bitter knowledge that they were not the best, only close to it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phoenix Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 1, 1986
• ISBN: 9781614675235

David Halberstam

David Halberstam was one of America's most distinguished journalists and historians, a man whose newspaper reporting and books have helped define the era we live in. He graduated from Harvard in 1955, took his first job on the smallest daily in Mississippi, and then covered the early civil rights struggle for the Nashville Tennessean. He joined The New York Times in 1960, went overseas almost immediately, first to the Congo and then to Vietnam. His early pessimistic dispatches from Vietnam won him the Pulitzer in 1964 at the age of thirty. His last twelve books, starting with The Best and the Brightest and including The Powers That Be, The Reckoning, and The Fifties, have all been national bestsellers. Thirty-eight years after Mr. Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam, War in a Time of Peace was the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in April 2007.