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Why George Washington's Rump Matters to American Sports
Washington hurled an iron bar beyond competitors' limits and threw a slate 372 feet across the Rappahannock, a feat that helped shape America's sports-mad culture.
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George Washington was 6-foot-2 with a rear end so large that tailors struggled to find cloth to cover it. His biographer Ron Chernow described his body as "oddly shaped." The novelist Gore Vidal saw "a huge rump" that made him sit like an All-Star catcher. That lower body was the engine of his arm.
On a 1773 afternoon at Mount Vernon, Washington walked onto a field where younger men were pitching a heavy iron bar. Without removing his coat, he grasped the missile and hurled it far beyond their best marks. "We were indeed amazed," recalled Charles Willson Peale, the artist who painted Washington's portrait.
The Mechanism: Lower Body Power
Washington's wide, flaring hips and muscular thighs gave him a base that modern power pitchers and catchers would recognise. He leveraged that base to fire a muzzle-loading cannon of a right arm. Thomas Jefferson called Washington "the best horseman of his age." On a half-Arabian named Blueskin or a chestnut gelding called Nelson, Washington was an equestrian statue come to life.
Washington also threw a piece of slate across the Rappahannock River, a distance later measured at 372 feet when pitcher Walter Johnson replicated the feat with a silver dollar in 1936. Johnson trained by throwing a silver dollar against his barn door at home in Germantown, Maryland. On the 204th anniversary of Washington's birth, Johnson cleared the river on the last two of three attempts.
The Sporting Culture of the Revolution