A Zoom Panel Session for “A Most Beautiful Thing”.
By Gigi Picard ’22
Sports Editor
On April 6, 2021, filmmaker and former Mount Holyoke rower Mary Mazzio ’83 spoke at a panel to discuss her 2020 documentary “A Most Beautiful Thing” alongside Arshay Cooper, who wrote the memoir that inspired the film. The documentary is about the first African American high school rowing team from the west side of Chicago, which Cooper joined and eventually led. Facilitators of the panel included current Mount Holyoke rowers Jaya Nagarajan-Swenson ’22, Claire Gabel ’22 and Casey Roepke ’21. Former Mount Holyoke rower, Cynthia Thornton ’83, was another panelist.
The documentary is based on Cooper’s memoir of the same name about the team and what it was like growing up on the west side of Chicago. When asked what inspired him to write the memoir, Cooper responded that he wanted to counter the news people get, which can be misleading.
“I wanted to write and give people an opportunity to unlearn some of the things they have learned, how the structural limitations have destroyed unity and communities like the west side of Chicago many years ago,” Cooper said.
Mazzio initially didn’t believe Cooper’s story — until she read his memoir. After reading it, she reached out to Cooper on Twitter which is how their relationship began. Cooper had actually been tweeting to Will Smith and Steven Spielberg to get his story noticed, but no one got back to him except Mazzio.
Thornton wasn’t surprised that Mazzio reached out to Cooper based on her experiences with Mazzio at Mount Holyoke. “Not everybody wanted to be seen with me. That never bothered [Mazzio],” Thornton said. “Not everybody wanted to be my friend because I was Black except [Mazzio].”
When Mazzio and Cooper went to Chicago to visit the neighborhood Cooper grew up in, she asked, “How do you get to school safely?”
There was no secure way of getting to school, according to Cooper. Children from ages 9-12 had to decide how to get to school safely. That’s when it “dawned on [Mazzio]: When you can visit the typography of a place like the west side, you understand immediately the systematic obstacles that [Cooper]’s talking about, [such as] the profound inequality of safety — inequality of safety with respect to police conduct [and] inequality of safety with respect to gang affiliation.”
Describing his experiences, Cooper said he would “step out of the door to walk to school [and] at times, you were skipping over pools of blood, you [were] hearing gunshots the night before when you sleep. You run for your life at times. … You experience what most soldiers have experienced at war before you were 15 years old. So you can’t think about the future. You can only think about survival.”
But when rowing came into his life, it became the “first place [Cooper] was able to find hope” after the YMCA was torn down. Cooper found rowing “therapeutic” and a place where he could meditate while on the water and stay out of the neighborhood for a bit.
Later in the discussion, Cooper talked about how the rowing team invited the Chicago police to join them. He mentioned that it was important for the police to “know their names” because their slogan is “to serve and to protect.” Cooper wanted to give the police the “opportunity to learn and unlearn who we were.” While it was awkward at first, they learned a lot about one another and made connections despite their differences.
Thornton talked about her own story when she faced racial profiling in New Jersey. She had left an event, and a cop pulled a gun on her while she was wearing an evening gown with sequins. At the time, Thornton thought that if she got killed, the bullet would go down her neck and exit her body, but at least she was wearing something pretty for her casket. “You are most generally safer when they see someone white with you,” she concluded.
In her final remarks, Mazzio said she started seeing “extraordinary philanthropy behind this movie” to combat racial bias.
The website for “A Most Beautiful Thing” states that 50 percent of the box office, merchandise, license fees and film screening profits from the film will go toward the work of Cooper and rowing inclusion efforts, trauma research and the NAACP.
The film was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award, an NAACP Image Award and the title of Best Documentary by the International Press Academy. The film is narrated by Academy Award- and Grammy-winning artist Common; executive produced by NBA stars Grant Hill and Dwyane Wade along with Grammy-winning producer 9th Wonder and directed by award-winning filmmaker and Olympic rower Mazzio. Amazon Studios is working on adapting the story into a scripted series.
Editor’s note: Casey Roepke ’21 is a current member of the Mount Holyoke News.