Why Ukraine?

My father Kazimierz was born in Chortkiv — a small town in what is now western Ukraine. He fled at eighteen, driven out by the Germans and Soviets, and never returned. My mother Jean intercepted German Morse code for Bletchley Park during the war. They met in Blackpool afterward, smiling in photographs, and crossed the Atlantic together. I arrived in New York Harbor at seven years old and looked out the porthole at the Statue of Liberty. America was noisy and overwhelming and nothing like England. But it was ours. When Russia invaded in 2022 my wife Jill traveled to Szczecin in western Poland and went to the train station every day to meet Ukrainian refugee mothers and their children arriving from the war. She made friends, gave what she could, and has stayed in contact with some of those women ever since. We have been connected to this cause from the beginning.

Why children affected by the trauma of war?

Displacement and trauma are not abstract concepts in my family. They happened to my parents. They happened to me as a child arriving in a city that was nothing like anything I had known. I grew up spending summers at Charles River Rowing in Boston — a club that charges one dollar per summer. I have said ever since that whoever endowed it made the greatest gift to kids in Boston of all time. That is what we are trying to give back to the children of Ukraine.

Why row and sail?

My English grandfather rowed and coached at Weybridge Rowing Club on the Thames. His grandson Christopher rowed there too. Christopher's grandson rows there today. Four generations of our family on the same stretch of the Thames. In college I coxed the crew team — including at Henley Royal Regatta, on the same river where my grandfather coached. My aunt was there that day and rode in the referee's launch that follows the crews down the course. Sixty years later I competed in the Head of the Charles in a single scull — having first participated in the second ever Head of the Charles in 1966. I served in the US Navy and navigated by the stars — no GPS. I came to this country by ship. For the past decade whitewater kayaking Class 3 and 4 rivers has been my greatest source of joy. A boat named Tenacity seemed like the right vessel for this voyage.

Why baseball?

My father Kazimierz could not have cared less about baseball. He attended exactly one game in his entire life — and by complete accident witnessed David Wells' perfect game on May 17, 1998. The odds of surviving his thirty RAF bombing missions over Germany were one in four. The odds of seeing a perfect game are one in nine thousand six hundred. Combined: one in thirty eight thousand four hundred. I was at Game 5 of the 2001 World Series with my son — ten weeks after September 11th — and sang New York New York at one thirty in the morning with fifty thousand strangers. That's why baseball.