Rowing Celebration Feature: Gordon Sikes ’16
January 25, 2022 | Heavyweight Rowing, Men's Rowing - Lightweight
The first in a series of profiles to celebrate the major anniversaries of Princeton rowing.
Linda Sikes is riding in the passenger seat of an old pickup truck on a January afternoon in western Maine. The temperature outside is around eight degrees; come nightfall it will drop well below zero. Her son, who is driving, works outdoors all winter.
Linda is 77 years old. The winter doesn’t slow her down any more than it does her son. Toughness, it appears, is a Sikes trait, whether born or married into.
Her son is named Gordon. He’s one of eight in the family who has been named “Gordon Sikes.”
“If you say Gordon Sikes in western Maine, nobody knows me,” he says. “If you say ‘Tiger,’ they all know me.”
His nickname stems from what Linda said to him when he was two days old and she brought him home from the hospital.
“She picked me up and said ‘okay Tiger, let’s go face the world,’” he says. “It just sort of stuck from there.”
It’s easy to think that “Tiger” refers instead to the Princeton Tigers, given who one of the other seven Gordon Sikes was. This Gordon was Linda’s father-in-law, Gordon Sikes, Princeton Class of 1916. If you’ve ever been to the Shea Rowing Center, the name might be familiar. There’s a Gordon Sikes Room on the second floor.
It’s named for one of the most foundational people who has ever been a part of Princeton rowing. The first lightweight rowing coach – unpaid at that – for the Tigers, he built a program that became a national and international power in the days before World War II. Of the first 20 races that he coached, Princeton lightweight men’s rowing won 10 and finished second seven times.
His work as a rowing coach was secondary for him. In fact, he’d spend 45 years as a Princeton employee, mostly as the director of the Placement Bureau, which today is called Career Services. When he finally left Princeton, no other person had ever worked at the University longer, in any capacity.
“He loved Princeton,” Linda says. “Every year after the P-Rade, he’d have the Class of 1916 party in his back yard at 36 Olden Ave. For many years, their home is where the party was held.
He was a very generous, kind, interesting man with a great sense of humor. He very much liked to meet people, and when he did, he didn’t just want to meet them and shake hands. He wanted to know all about you when he met you.”
So who was that Gordon Sikes? For starters, he, too, was tough. Very tough. When you look at his picture, you see a young man with a steely jaw and piercing eyes, a young man who is immaculately dressed, with perfectly combed hair. If you knew he was involved in rowing, you’d guess he was one of those big, strong men who powerfully pulled an oar.
Fate, though, did not allow for any of that.
Gordon Sikes was born in 1896, to parents who ran a furniture company, and he wasn’t much more than two or three when he contracted polio. At the time, there was no cure for the disease, which often left those afflicted paralyzed. Sikes was sent to Switzerland in hopes of more aggressive treatments, staying there for more than two years, but he would spend his life unable to walk without crutches and braces.
“I still have the luge sticks he used to get around in Switzerland,” Linda says. “He used them when he’d use a sled to get around.”
When he attended Princeton, he replaced the sled with a Model-T, using it to gain mobility in somewhat the same way that the students of today have scooters and skateboards. And despite all the difficulties his disease had saddled him with, he decided to try out for the rowing team, becoming a coxswain.
The Princeton crews that he directed more than 100 years ago competed for several of the cups that are still contested today. As a senior, he coxed the Tigers to a defeat of Navy, Penn and Columbia on the Schuylkill to win the Childs Cup and the Navy-Princeton Cup, after which the Daily Princetonian credited Sikes with “steering an admirable course.”
Perhaps the highlight of his undergraduate career came that year against Harvard, when Princeton and the Crimson both crossed the line recorded in the exact same 9:12.5. According to a section on Lake Carnegie’s greatest races from the book “Rowing At Princeton”:
Gordon Sikes, Princeton’s Director of Student Placement and its longtime amateur coach, was the Tiger coxswain for that 1916 race. As he recalls, the judge was Alfred Noyes, then teaching English at Princeton in the days before he became England’s Poet Laureate. As the crowd held its breath, the former Oxford oarsman reared his great frame from the improvised judging stand, a small flat boat anchored in mid-lake. He announced the verdict with a roar and a flourish: “Princeton, by the width of a butterfly’s wing.”
His bout with polio prevented him from being a frontline soldier after graduation, but he still sailed across the Atlantic and spent the rest of World War I in Paris, where he served in a supporting role for the troops. When he came back to the United States, he began his coaching career as a volunteer with the Tigers.
At the time, there was only one varsity program. Lightweight rowing was introduced nationally in 1919 by Penn coach Joseph Wright, for whom the trophy for the lightweight men’s national champion is named to this day. Princeton, with Sikes as its volunteer coach, rowed one lightweight race in both 1920 and 1921 before rowing a fuller schedule in 1922.
He’d coach the lightweights from 1922-31 before moving to the heavyweights from 1932-37. He became Princeton’s first coach to take a team to Henley when the lightweights traveled there in 1930 (he’d return with them in 1933 and 1934 as well), and he also won two Wright Cups as national champion (in 1926 and 1930).
He’d come back again to the lightweight program in 1943, 1946 and 1947, and he’d remain a huge supporter of the team until his death on Dec. 27, 1982, at the age of 86. The Gordon Sikes Medal was created in 1958 and has been awarded to a senior lightweight rower at Princeton each year since. The award is given to that senior member on the lightweight crew who, in the judgment of the members of all varsity lightweight crews which have raced, has throughout the year shown the best sportsmanship and done the most for rowing.
Gordon Sikes has been gone now for nearly 40 years. Both of his children have also passed away. They’re all buried in Princeton cemetery, close to the town that was his home for his entire adult life. Even after he retired from his position in 1962, he was still very active in the area, both with the rowing program and in several other avenues in town.
Linda Sikes has nothing but fond memories of her father-in-law. Even as she and Gordon Sikes Jr. settled in Maine, they made regular trips to New Jersey, often five or six times a year.
“They had that house on Olden Lane,” she says. “They had two properties. One of them was on Battle Road. The deed went all the way back to William of Orange. He was so proud of that.”
She was there when the Alumni Council honored him for his "selfless service" to his Princeton: "He directed all of Princeton's rowing activities—but always freely. He kept his amateur standing. He's still eligible to row in the Olympics or the Royal Henley regatta."
“The family loved this man very much,” she says. “He was a patriot, a man of his time, a man of the future and always there for his crews. We’d go to every regatta we could. And we traveled with him a great deal. We went to Nova Scotia with them to go canoeing. His wife would have to help him into the boat and then lift him out by his belt when he was done, but he was a great canoer. They were such a great team. They’d throw such wonderful parties, and he’d tell such incredible stories. I enjoyed my father-in-law a great deal. When I met his son, he took me to Princeton to meet his parents, and his father was just so interested in my Maine accent.”
She still has that decidedly Maine accent. And that Maine attitude, one that keeps her from flinching even a little bit in the biting cold there in January. It’s just how it is. It’s just what nature has dealt her, and so it’s what she deals with, moving forward, no hesitating, no making excuses, no giving in.
Clearly, it’s a Sikes family trait.
— by Jerry Price
