Eagle’s Sponsors, Crew Charting a Course to America’s Cup

This Eagle won’t land until March. But its threat is poised, bold and defiant, with a target firmly set. Eagle, all 23 slick tons and 12 Spartan meters of aluminum racing yacht, will sail against Australia to win the America’s Cup for Southern California.

No doubt about it, say the businessmen and mariners of the sponsoring Newport Harbor Yacht Club. Nothing can sink us, say donors and dockwallopers of the organizing group, Eagle Challenge. Their optimism is gale force.

Said Gary Thomson, president of the syndicate: “I’m looking now for a location, maybe a shopping center, maybe a nationwide business, that would be interested in displaying the America’s Cup.”

Said George Tooby, the 72-year-old San Marino sailor who began organizing this American counterattack while the crew members of Australia II were sleeping off their 1983 victory hangovers: “We have a boat (Eagle) that’s so fast we’ll be able to overcome any mistakes.”

On the other hand, it could be a mite too early to tell very much about anything.

For between now and January, 1987, six equally slippery America’s Cup challengers will be launched by similarly passionate syndicates in San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Eagle must climb over these just to earn the right to sail against more than a dozen yachts from Canada, Italy, England, New Zealand and France. And only when those have been beaten can it square off against Australia and the advantages that come with being title holder and home team.

The challenge will cost $8.5 million. More than $1 million has been spent so far on designing Eagle and it’s only half-built. There must be the February warm-up of the World Cup Championships in Perth, Australia; the final transfer of a race operation from up here to Down Under (it costs $100,000 to ship the boat alone); a 3 1/2-month elimination series. . . .

And at the end of it, in April, presuming victory, little more than 8.4 pounds of silver that is the America’s Cup--more of a skinny pitcher and to some, the ugliest piece of tableware not held captive by the Victoria & Albert Museum.

“I did ask myself, ‘How can we justify spending $8.5 million on a yacht race when there are hungry people in the world?’ ” Thomson said. He’s the epitome of the gentleman sportsman as a skier, pilot, sailor, 13-letter man in high school and commissioner of wrestling for the 1984 Olympics. “But we’ve had a study made (by the Center for Economic Research at Chapman College in Orange) that says winning the cup and bringing it back to the United States will add more than $1 billion to the Southern California economy.”

It’s an investment that pivots on the defense of the trophy. That extends over years and always takes place in the home waters of the winning club. Some challengers have been in Australia since last year. Eagle Challenge already has bought the Captain Freemantle Motor Lodge in Perth for its team. So if Eagle wins the pot, predicts the study, an estimated 24 teams must come to Southern California to compete in the 1991 America’s Cup series.

Mounting Expenses

These syndicates will spend $350,000 a month on mooring and maintaining boats and accommodating crews. About 1,600 workers will be needed. So will additional boat yards, sail lofts and machine shops. Add the spending of 1.6 million additional tourists and you have the billion-dollar bonanza.

“But more than the money,” said Thomson, “winning the America’s Cup will involve the thrill of victory and the pride of America. So often we (America) get kicked in the teeth by these Mickey Mouse countries and there’s not much the nation and individual Americans can’t do about it.

“But here, with this, the average American, Joe USA, can share the satisfaction of bringing this cup home.”

Such mile-high patriotism has surrounded the 27-inch trophy since 1851. That’s when it was the Queen’s Cup (subtitled the Hundred Guineas Cup) for the Race of All Nations, a one-time sailing event staged in England as part of the Great London Exposition.

Commodore John Cox Stevens of the New York Yacht Club beat the British at their own game, brought the trophy home and eventually offered it as the prize for an international sailing contest. The cup was renamed after Stevens’ winning yacht, the America, leading some to wonder what would have happened if his boat had been launched as Mr. Coffee.

The America’s Cup was America’s for 132 years, thanks, in large part, to a tricky ground rule (not rescinded until 1956) that required challengers to sail from their hailing ports to the scene of the contest. The net result of this was chunky challengers, lightweight defenders and lopsided competition.

Until 1983 . . . when Australia II, revolutionized by a winged keel and skippered by John Bertrand, beat the bell bottoms off the United States and Liberty captained by Dennis Conner of San Diego.

The New York Yacht Club, which sponsored Liberty, went into immediate mourning. So did Tooby, a member of the New York club, the St. Francis Yacht Club of San Francisco and the Newport Harbor Yacht Club.

“For 132 years the cup had belonged to the New York Yacht Club and had been defended by the New York Yacht Club,” Tooby said. “Now, with the Australians having sneaked in with a tactical (winged keel) surprise, the cup was up for grabs.

“So I called Johan (Valentijn, the Dutch-born designer of Liberty) the very next morning and told him that I had an impulse to take a run at it. And we created a kind of a plan.”

As part of that plan--immediately named Eagle Challenge--Tooby called on Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth to be honorary chairman of its board of trustees. “He was Time magazine’s Man of the Year, he had clearly organized the Los Angeles Olympic Games into a financial success,” Tooby said. “He was the man I wanted.”

The Newport Harbor Yacht Club agreed that its burgee should fly above the challenge. “Newport Harbor was my first club, I always raced for Newport Harbor and in this very traditional sport you can’t race for two clubs,” Tooby said.

Valentijn, 37, was given a carte blanche to follow his dream of designing a boat or boats that would be more science and technology than art or tradition. Thomson, 43, the Olympian administrator and successful businessman, was invited aboard. So was skipper Rod Davis, 29, of San Diego, a five-time world champion sailor, double Congressional Cup winner, a gold medalist during the 1984 Olympics . . . and a man admittedly hungry to eclipse Conner as the United States’ premier America’s Cup campaigner.

Tooby has considered his team and the 1987 event. Australia’s introduction of the winged keel--a radical design change by the addition of horizontal stabilizers, or small wings, to a standard keel--has proved the distinct edge of applied technology.

“I would think this could be the most exciting race since that first one,” Tooby said.

Financially, it may involve more individuals and corporations than United Way. For with high-technology boats the vogue--to say nothing of the expense of carrying a challenge halfway around the world--the players and means of world-class yacht racing have moved from the blue blazers and Newport, R.I., to the three-piece methods of Madison Avenue and Wall Street.

Under Thomson, a former lumber company executive, Eagle Challenge has raised $4.5 million of its total budget. Carlson Travel Group of Minneapolis and the Irvine Co. of Irvine have jointly contributed $1 million. The range of the balance, said Thomson, has been from a $300,000 check from a Los Angeles attorney to a $5 bill from a Santa Ana schoolboy.

A Crew Eagle clothing and souvenir line is being sold by direct mail. A Club Eagle has formed with $10 memberships being sold by 56,000 Boy Scouts in Orange County. And the top two salesmen will journey to Australia with the challenge.

“To me, we’re a bunch of guys trying to put something back into our Southern California community,” Thomson said. “We’re trying to create a new heritage. And just like the Olympic Games: We’re in a unique position to contribute in ways we never dreamed possible.”

Last week, Thomson and team shattered another America’s Cup habit: Secrecy. Eagle Challenge was thrown open to inspection by the media. Trade papers and television networks sailed aboard Magic, the 12-meter test tube used to evaluate much of the technology being developed for Eagle.

“We’re coming out of the closet,” Thomson said. “Why? Money. We can win this cup if we have enough money. We also want the community involvement and that’s something you don’t get by hiding and being secretive.”

Valentijn took reporters into Eagle’s closet with one example of boat-building science scoring over art. When he designed Magic as a 1983 America’s Cup hopeful, he said, it was built with a conventional keel. “At 10 knots (wind speed) she would almost flop down,” he said. “At 20 knots she would sail under the water more than on it.”

After the victory of Australia II, Valentijn equipped Magic with an identical winged keel. “The difference was black and white, night and day. Magic is now a very competitive 12-meter boat of higher stability and enormous maneuverability.”

Eagle is approaching completion at Williams & Manchester Shipyards, Newport, R. I. In March, it will be trucked to Marina Shipyards in Long Beach, mated to its winged keel and launched. It will be, said Valentijn, a product of the computer age.

“The work we have done, nobody has done before,” he said.

That includes hull analysis by computers at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, Boeing in Seattle and the California Institute of Technology. Several 22-foot models of Eagle have been built for water tank testing near Escondido.

There are indications that there will be radical improvements in its keel design. Promoter Thomson calls it a “major breakthrough.” Designer Valentijn says it is “lots of little things.”

“There’s always that correlation factor between the model and real life. Yesterday, a designer worked in a small room to plan a boat that was 90% art and 10% science. Now it’s 75% science and 25% art.

“Only time will tell . . . in April, if it is all coming together.”

Skipper Davis isn’t quite so cautious: “There are 14 (challenger) boats on one side of this coin and 4 (potential Australian defenders) on the other. The numbers tell you who has the advantage. You survive the challenge series and you win the cup.”

Thomson is hopelessly positive: “It’s not if we win, but when we’ve won.”

And a syndicate newsletter is a page from Pollyanna Goes to Perth. It lists a calendar of events for the Eagle Challenge:

“October-January 1987: Challenge Series Races.

“January 31: America’s Cup Competition.

“April: Eagle begins America’s Cup victory lap around U.S.A.”