Arshay Cooper’s mother was a drug addict, his brothers were in gangs, his poor family lived in a blighted neighborhood on the troubled West Side of Chicago and was surprised to find a gleaming boat in his high school lunchroom back in 1998. A TV monitor showed an Olympic team of all white rowers, and although Cooper and other students from rival neighborhoods at Manley Career Academy did not even know how to swim, they took up the offer of free pizza and heard that rowing was the ultimate team sport, and that it held the promise of opportunities to travel, get an education and find refuge from chaos on the water.

Cooper became captain of the first all-black rowing team in the nation and his self-published memoir caught the eye of filmmaker and Olympic rower Mary Mazzio.  Mazzio’s documentary, narrated by Common, tells the story of how Cooper and teammates returned to rowing after two decades off the water and trained for the highly competitive Chicago Sprints regatta. Now a new edition of Cooper’s memoir, retitled as A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team (Flatiron Books), has been published to coincide with the film. (To view, please see: https://www.50eggs.com/-most-beautiful-thing/) Cooper talked about rowing, life and writing with The National’s Caroline Kaplan, recent Division 1 rower and former Chicagoan.

Q. Bring us back 25 year ago, when you were a teenager at Manley High School.

A: I was growing up in Chicago, in a neighborhood that neglected, mistreated and was violent towards its people. A place that is missing so much, but it still has a lot of young and resilient, talented young people who just need opportunity. I had a lot of hardships as a kid.

Q: How did it feel to revisit your past and write about your experiences?  You explain so well how the boat works on the water in rowing: As we look backward, we also are moving the boat forward.

A: It was rough but good to write about the beauty of the water. The impact that it made, the changes, and the brotherhood that saved me from some hardship. That was a beautiful part of writing.

Q: What happened after you self-published your memoir Suga Water in 2015?

A: I had been helping folks build a framework for a diversity focused boat house and traveling to recruit kids of color to the sport of rowing. Someone who heard me speak gave my memoir to Mary Mazzio. She read it and tweeted out "Arshay, Oh my God love this story.”

It was crazy.  I looked her up and was, Oh, she's not only a filmmaker, but she was an Olympic rower. I called her and said, 'Hey, we got to work together.' She was like, 'yes!' 

I showed her where I grew up, high school, the water and everything. I talked to the guys and I was like, 'Hey, I found someone. I think it's time to tell our story to the world, and I think it's a great story to tell.'

Q: So, the documentary brought you back to the boat, and to writing?

A: The cool thing is that when I self-published Suga Water, I hadn't rowed in a long time. To work on the chapters while filming and training for the Chicago Sprints, reminded me, and the guys too, about that feeling of just being on the water, at the boathouse and preparing to race.

Q: What was it like for you to gather Preston, Alvin and Malcom and train and race again?  

A: It was awesome, besides the pain!  You know we're not 15 and 16 years old -- we aren't even 20.

Just rebuilding chemistry, getting in shape. Feeling the calm of the water. It was healing again, therapy.

We'd just go back and forth reliving all the things that we truly got over and fought through in our lives.

So, Preston was one of the guys on the team back in high school. He was a great rower but left the team early. He started getting involved in gangs.  He was always saying over the last 20 years, 'I wish I could go back and do it again.'

We were at the barber shop with all the old teammates. I remember saying 'Preston, I think this film gives us the opportunity to go back and do it again. Now people can finally see our families, our communities, our kids, our neighborhoods. And he was like, 'yes. Let's do it for the young people.' We all had different reasons to come back to the sport and do it, but it was really just to make an impact.

Q: In your book you write really persuasively about accountability for one's community. How important it is for white people to hold racist police accountable for their actions? Has your idea of accountability changed in the recent months with a revolution amidst a pandemic?

A: Yes, the world has changed. I feel like now after the George Floyd situation, people are no longer in denial about their privilege or about racism. It (racism) wasn't clear to me until I started rowing. I was just a kid who grew up in Chicago and went to school every day. We had to pledge allegiance to the flag. We had to recite the Preamble to the Constitution. I went to baseball games and sung the national anthem.

But as a kid who never got in trouble and never got suspended from school, I still had my face pressed down a police car numerous times.  So, it wasn't clear until I got to the boathouse (we shared a boathouse with other high schools like St. Ignatius, Loyola Academy) and started interacting with those guys that I realized they'd never been through the things that we went through.  

For instance, being harassed on a road trip to a Regatta. At the gas station, the cashier would say, 'I'll only allow one of guys in at a time, just to make sure no one steals anything.'  The other teams had never been through those things. For example, people say, 'Oh, there's crime in Chicago. There's black on black crime.'  But there’s crime everywhere, no matter where you are. Everyday there are black people in churches, nonprofits or schools  that are starting non-violence campaigns  and put the gun down rallies. The big issue for me was that cops weren't holding bad cops accountable for police brutality. When you hold your colleagues and your neighbors accountable, change happens, right? So, that’s where I felt like folks need to step up more.

Q: So much of your work involves working closely with others, so what was the often-solitary act of writing like for you?

A: I can't write alone because I’d be on my phone or falling asleep. I get distracted. I spent time writing at Ft. Greene Park. I spend a lot of time writing after I read a book by James Baldwin, or Finding Fish (Antwone Fisher), or  Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates), where I can feel the struggle and pain of some young people who lived like me growing up.

Also, I always write at a cafe after speaking to an auditorium full of young black men and women. Hearing their questions, their hopes and dreams, really gets me fired up -- the creativity and dreams and visions and heartache. Every time I go to a school, I see the tears, the sense of urgency. My writing process really happens after speaking to young people.

Q: How did you handle sensitive material about your mom,  and others you wrote about? Did you change names to protect people?

A: My friends in the boat, and my family, I see them a lot. I had to reach out to everyone and say, 'can I tell your story?' Everyone wanted to, but for certain people I wanted to change their names because the story was so personal. The guys in the boat said 'tell my story, use my name. I want my son to know what I've been through, so they don't have to go through the same thing. I want them to know what their fathers have done in their lives.

My mom has changed because she heard people's stories and testimonies of how they changed. My heart changed while listening to those guys at Victory Outreach, the recovery home my mom was a part of. 

They were so open to sharing their stories with me. We put it on paper so the world can listen.

Q: One of my favorite parts of the book is your discussion of ‘90s television. You say that ‘90s TV taught you how to be a man, and that Damon Wayans and Will Smith felt like brothers and role models.

A: Number one for me was how representation matters. You know, you grew up in a situation where you're poor you don't have much. You've never seen personally successful families but can see them on TV in “A Different World,” “Cosby, “Family Matters,” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” living  whole different lives they're young and black. Will Smith didn't have a dad, but he still had true joy in his life. Wayans was not the most popular person, but he went to college, did well and returned to give to the place that gave him. Those stories were just so inspirational in my life.

Those shows were my church service, they gave me hope. I watched every single day. People don't talk about the fact that young black men have these mentors they have never met. It's a powerful that these guys were part of changing my life and they didn't even know it.

That's why I wanted to share this story to the world, to young black people who don't see themselves rowing. If you can see black dudes rowing, finding it fun and healing, then maybe more young black people will think is cool and do it. Representation matters.

Q: Now you live in Brooklyn with your wife and child. What is your new community looking like these days, and what hopes do you have for it? 

A: My community here is Brownsville, a neighborhood that isn't quite like Chicago, but still all brown. There's poverty here. I want to be a light, someone successful who is a mentor in the community, a volunteer in the local shelters, someone who talks to the guys on the block. To shoot some basketball with them and say, 'Hey, there's a rowing team in New York.' That's something I want to surround myself with forever. When you can represent something bigger than your career and yourself, true change happens. I think it's pretty cool to be that person in a community that lacks opportunity.

Caroline Kaplan is a playwright and screenwriter based in Los Angeles, following a stint with the Vineyard Gazette in Martha’s Vineyard and a year in Thailand with Princeton in Asia. Kaplan rowed Division I for Columbia University, winning an Eastern Sprints Championship over Harvard and Dartmouth, and also won a Club National Championships with New York Athletic Club.  A proud alum of Chicago Rowing Foundation (formerly Lincoln Park Juniors), Kaplan is honored to have shared the Chicago’s rivers and lagoons of Arshay Cooper.