MX 12-Meter: $12 Million Mousetrap to Catch the Cup

Malin Burnham is looking for something wild and crazy and Dennis Conner calls it a better mousetrap. To be a bit more precise, they are both looking for a space age yacht.

Call it an MX 12-meter.

It all has to do with that antique chunk of hardware known as America’s Cup. As we are all well aware, it is currently perched at the Royal Perth Yacht Club in Australia. The Aussies rather rudely absconded with it a couple of years back.

Conner, of course, had the misfortune to be the skipper who lost the Cup after it had been a U.S. possession for all of its first 132 years. He would rather the U.S. lose Texas to Castro than give up America’s Cup to anyone.

As might be expected, Conner wants to retrieve the Cup when it is next up for grabs. That will be the winter of 1986-87, when it is summer on the Australian coast.

Therein lies the quest for an MX 12-meter.

The Australians surprised the yachting world with their revolutionary winged-keel in 1983. Conner, with the conventional Liberty, was figuratively trying to beat a missile with a biplane. That he lost was not surprising. What was surprising was that he forced the Aussies to the final race of a best-of-seven series.

“We didn’t lose the Cup because of Dennis,” Burnham said Tuesday morning. “Even the Aussies concede that the better boat beat the better team.”

Burnham, a rather renowned yachtsman himself, is the president of the Sail America Foundation, which will try to raise the money the better team will need to come up with the better boat as well.

Sail America launched its fund-raising campaign Tuesday morning at a news conference which at times seemed more like a Fourth of July party.

It was an unabashed patriotic celebration, complete with red, white and blue balloons, a brass band and champagne. At particularly stirring moments, such as when a hotel chain gave Sail America a check for $500,000, the crowd would chant: “Bring back the Cup . . . Bring back the Cup . . . “

Obviously, it is going to be expensive to retrieve the Cup from Australia. The tab will be $12 million.

At Tuesday’s gathering, it was almost as if the Cup was already packaged and headed for San Diego. City Councilmen Bill Cleator and Uvaldo Martinez arrived at the festivities with baskets filled with envelopes.

“These,” Martinez said, “are invitations to a party.”

The party, he explained, would be held on July 4, 1991, that being the date when the U.S. would begin an America’s Cup defense off the San Diego coast. The envelopes were addressed to 197 members of Australia’s parliament. Little did it matter that the U.S. has to retrieve the Cup before it can defend it.

And it will take an MX 12-meter to do it.

In the 1983 defense, the U.S. lost because it didn’t realize what it didn’t know. The Aussies caught everyone off guard with their leap in technology.

“When we finally saw that winged-keel, it was the craziest looking thing,” Burnham said. “If we’d seen it before the races, we would have laughed it off the dock. How many other crazy ideas might there be that nobody’s ever looked at? We’re looking for a crazy idea that isn’t so crazy.”

Conner concurred.

“We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’re going to have to go with technology and ingenuity instead of small changes based on practical experience. There have to be other ideas as good or better than the winged-keel.”

To develop those better ideas, Sail America has put together a mixed bag of a design team. It includes yacht designers, but also a La Jolla firm which deals in Star Wars technology for the Department of Defense. Even NASA is involved.

“We’re using all of the resources we can possibly use,” Burnham said. “We’re trying to collectively tap the best minds in America.”

I suppose it is logical to figure that NASA ought to be able to help get a Cup out of Australia if it could get a golf cart to the moon.

All of the hype and hoopla, not to mention the expense, is going to create a bit of pressure as the challenge nears. It sounded Tuesday very much like it was a matter of when Dennis Conner comes back with the Cup rather than if.

“After what I went through two years ago, there can’t be any more pressure than there was to defend a 132-year-old Cup,” Conner said. “You’ve got to take the pressure and turn it into a positive factor. It helps you realize how important winning the Cup is to you and all your friends.”

Conner was surrounded by friends Tuesday, each one of them confident that he would go to Australia and retrieve what was lost.

There was, in fact, only one passive observer Tuesday. He sat on the branch of a eucalyptus tree and casually munched on the leaves. He seemed more bewildered than disinterested.

Conner is usually quite secretive about his plans, but he did not seem to mind having this particular Aussie looking over his shoulder--especially since this particular Aussie happened to be a koala bear.

I asked him what he thought about Conner and Co. attacking his homeland with an MX 12-meter, but he had nothing to say. Maybe he thinks he’ll get to keep America’s Cup in his enclosure at the zoo.