The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [64]
“I probably wouldn’t have fit in very well anyplace at that time. I was still out of sync with the world. But I was also younger than anybody else, and, on top of that, I was young for my age in many ways. I really didn’t fit in socially.”
Chuck’s social life, on the other hand, was in full swing; he had pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Warren had little interest in Greek life but pledged his father’s fraternity, Alpha Sigma Phi. It was not a jock house nor particularly brutal, but the rituals of pledging turned him red-faced. The secret motto of Alpha Sig was zeal, humility, courage.11 Warren had plenty of the first two, but courage was his Achilles’ heel. When the pledges were sent to Wanamaker’s to buy extra-large women’s panties and brassieres, he circled the underwear department for a looooong time before facing the snickering coed salesgirls.12
That fall, Leila and Doris struggled to describe Warren’s crew-cut, slightly bucktoothed appearance truthfully on a radio show in Washington called Coffee with Congress.
Host:
Incidentally, is Warren good-looking?
Leila:
He was good-looking as a small child. He’s just boyish—I wouldn’t call him good-looking, but he’s not poor-looking either.
Host:
He’s handsome-looking.
Leila:
No, not handsome, just friendly.
Host:
Let’s take the girls’ angle: Is he a cute boy?
Doris (diplomatically): I think he has a rugged sort of look.13
Despite the drumming and the “Mammy” singing, Chuck came to be fond of Warren, viewing him as a sort of goofy kid brother, although he still could not believe his roommate continued to wear beat-up Keds throughout the winter, and even when dressed up, was likely to wear one black shoe and one brown shoe without noticing.
Like many people who met Warren, Chuck began to feel the urge to take care of him. They had lunch together at the Student Union a couple of times a week. Warren always ordered the same thing: a minute steak, hash browns, and a Pepsi. Then he discovered chocolate sundaes topped with malted-milk powder and had those every day too. One day after lunch Chuck took Warren over to the new Ping-Pong table that had just been installed in the Student Union. After four years in Washington, Warren was so rusty that Chuck got the impression he had never played Ping-Pong. In the first couple of games Warren could just about return Chuck’s serve. Chuck won easily.
Within a day or two, however, Warren played like a demon. The first thing every morning, he got up, went straight over to the Student Union, found a hapless victim, and slaughtered him at the Ping-Pong table. Before long, he was playing Ping-Pong three or four hours at a stretch every afternoon. Chuck could no longer hold his own. “I was his first victim at Penn,” he recalls. But Ping-Pong kept Warren out of the suite and away from the record player while Chuck was studying.14
Ping-Pong, however, did not fulfill Penn’s physical-education requirement. Rowing and sculling on the Schuylkill River were two of Penn’s most popular sports. Gaily painted boathouses belonging to the school’s many rowing clubs lined the riverbanks. Warren went out for the 150-pound freshman crew with the Vesper Boat Club. He rowed on a team of eight oarsmen guided by a coxswain. Rowing was repetitious and rhythmic, like weight lifting, basketball, golf, Ping-Pong, and his game of bolo, all activities that Warren enjoyed—but it was a team sport. Warren liked to shoot a basketball in his driveway because you could practice alone. He had never succeeded at team sports or learned to dance with a partner. He had been the leader of every stunt or business venture in which he had ever been involved. He couldn’t play the part of the echo.
“It was miserable. The thing about crew is, you can’t coast or fake it. You have to put your oar in the water at exactly the same time as everybody else. You