Big Softie for a Dog Named Tyrone

February 07, 2012

Dan Walsh knows it’s a good thing he has this great big mutt named Tyrone to pal around with.

It keeps people from being afraid of him in public. It’s not just that Walsh, at 6’7, 220 pounds, is already an imposing figure to see walking down the street. The 2012 USRowing training camp beard and hair are both kind of long and shaggy and make him appear like “a big mountain man that is tough to approach.”

His words.

“But then people see me messing with this dog and the look on my face and they think, ‘Wow, he’s not as mean as I thought’.”

The fact is, as tough and as competitive as he is as an athlete, Walsh, 32, a Beijing bronze medalist, is anything but mean. How can a guy who played in a classical orchestra for 10 years, and lists Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons as his favorite piece to play, be mean?

Especially one that admits freely that he is a “big softie when it comes to my dog, Tyrone. He’s a rescue mutt that is half Rhodesia Ridgeback and half Boxer.” The Rhodesia Ridgeback-Boxer might get away with being seen as mean, they were bred to hunt lions in South Africa, and Tyrone looks a lot a dog with a mohawk.

“I’ll do anything for that dog,” Walsh said.

Fact is, when he has competed in the United States men’s eight the last several years, Walsh pulls off that – leave me alone, I also hunt lions, persona. He’s been on the team now for 11 of the last 12 years and has been a staple in the middle of the boat where power and toughness are desired qualities. He could be easily seen as, well, at least a guy with an edge.

And then there is the fact that his Olympic journey began on a wrestling mat. If Walsh, of Norwalk, Conn., had not injured his shoulder his senior year in high school during the state championship, he might not even be training for a spot in the eight that will go to Lucerne in May with the hope of qualifying for the Olympics this summer in London.

Walsh, who did row all through high school and also during the fall and summer, viewed rowing as a “vacation from wrestling.”

“I rowed all three seasons and then at the end of the summer, I would go to rowing camp and my focus was on wrestling in college. I was looking at schools for both, but I wanted to go more for wrestling,” he said.

“When I was injured in wrestling, it hit me pretty hard,” he said. “I was feeling pretty sorry for myself and couldn’t really move my arm and the doctor told me it was either really invasive surgery or just stop wrestling. Colleges kind of stopped talking to me after the state championships were over. My dad just looked at me and said ‘You’ve really never been sorry for yourself before, so why start now’?

“And over the course of one weekend, I changed course and I turned it around and told myself I was going to make the national team that summer and moved on. It was a pretty quick transition.”

It was indeed.

That summer, Walsh made the U.S. Junior National Team and finished seventh in the pair with coxswain in the 1997 World Rowing Junior Championships. He followed that by rowing at Northeastern University for four years and then making his first senior national team in 2001 while he was still an undergraduate.

Walsh tried for a spot in the eight for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, but fell one spot short and went as a spare. Determined not to let that happen again, he focused on being stronger and faster and rowed to an Olympic bronze medal in Beijing in 2008.

After taking a year off, Walsh came back to the national team in 2010 and rowed the last two years in the eight. He was in the boat this summer that failed to qualify for the Olympics at the world championships in Bled, Slovenia and is determined to make the boat that will get a chance for redemption this spring.

“I am going to do everything I can to help qualify that boat and move it up two steps on the podium this summer,” Walsh said.

SHORT STROKES

After winning a bronze medal in 2008, Walsh and his now fiancé, Keri Yednak, moved to Los Angeles to find work. Walsh wanted to be a “sports model. I hated L.A. I would drive an hour in traffic to go two miles from where we lived, then sit there for four hours to have them say ‘Take your shirt off, turn around, alright, thanks,’ then drive two hours in traffic to go two miles back” . . . The couple gave up, moved to the San Diego area where Yednak found a job in public relations…Walsh and former teammate Luke Walton co-founded the San Diego-based athletic training company Engine Room Fitness . . . Walsh lists his interests as surfing, snowboarding and playing bass guitar, but said all that went out the window with starting a business and training . . . “I stopped playing guitar and surfing and snowboarding when the business started. I haven’t surfed in two years or seen a snowboard since 2009 when I took my buddy out for his 30th birthday. Just one of those things.”

Click here to view Dan’s full athlete bio.

Ed Moran

Features