America’s Cup Runneth Over With California Challengers

In October, when our fall warms to summer on the far side of the world, a dozen yachts from half-a-dozen nations will slog through a four-month elimination series. The survivor of this Indian Ocean shootout will then sail its lone challenge for the America’s Cup.

And among all the rah-rah predictions being printed from Pawtucket to Perth, there’s strong agreement on a firm possibility: The America’s Cup final could well be California versus Australia.

Said one veteran skipper of the 12-meter wars: “I think the chances of the America’s Cup coming to California are greater than they are for it staying in Australia.”

Fifty Percent of the Challenge

Said another: “There are six U.S. syndicates going after the America’s Cup and three are from California. Numerically, that’s 50% of the challenge. But on experience and talent, California represents about 80% of the national effort.”

Even the defending Australians--through informal votes of their sailing experts--believe the shortest odds among international challengers from Italy, France, New Zealand, Canada, Britain and the United States favor two syndicates, those from San Diego and Newport Beach.

So, with boats in the water and crews in hard training for that January final off Western Australia, this is California’s lineup:

- Sail America Foundation of San Diego. Its boat is Stars and Stripes ’87 beneath the burgee of the San Diego Yacht Club. She will be skippered by dour Dennis Conner, 43, of San Diego, undisputed super sailor. He won the America’s Cup in 1980. He lost it to Australia in 1983. He wants it back.

Losing the cup, he said recently, left him only two choices: “I could sit and read about it (victory by another) . . . or go out and try and win it back. Obviously I want to win because I was involved in the loss and I’d like to atone for it.”

‘Come Out Shooting’

- Eagle Challenge of Newport Beach. Eagle will be the contender representing the Newport Harbor Yacht Club. Rod Davis, 29, Olympic gold medalist and two-time winner of the respected Congressional Cup, will be her driver: “Sailing an America’s Cup series is like the gunfight at the OK Corral. You come out shooting and you don’t stop until the other guy goes down.”

- Golden Gate Challenge of San Francisco and the St. Francis Yacht Club. Skipper of the project--with command of its 12-meter USA still undecided--is Tom Blackaller, 46, big, puissant, a bluff talker. He sees the American counterattack on Australia as “six efforts going down six paths and one or two of these efforts are going to produce some dynamite boats.”

The Chicago Yacht Club will enter Heart of America--but lack of general respect for this inland, underfinanced campaign has made it the Rodney Dangerfield of American syndicates. The Yale Corinthian Yacht Club of New Haven, Conn., will campaign the dowager Courageous--yet she is one of the oldest 12-meter racing yachts afloat.

Then there’s the New York Yacht Club.

This group has been attached to the America’s Cup almost as long as its spout. A NYYC schooner won the first race in 1851. A NYYC boat would win every America’s Cup for the next 132 years. Then, in 1983, with champion Dennis Conner at the helm of Liberty, the NYYC lost to a bunch of brash but technologically superb beer drinkers aboard Australia II.

The cup runneth down under. Australia went wild. Conner wept. The only consolation was that his enormously inferior boat had barely lost to a vastly superior opponent.

The U.S. had emphasized sailing talent while the Australians had turned to aerodynamicists who put winglets on a keel built for stability and maneuverability.

“They had a yacht designer who took advantage of experiments in other areas,” Conner said. So this time, his boats are being designed by three naval architects supported by computer analysts and aerospace technology. “I’m making sure we are tapping into all available resources, trying to learn from their (Australian) system.”

And so say all the California challengers.

Physicist Heiner Meldner, a computer specialist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near Berkeley, is on a six-month leave of absence from Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) research and assisting design work for Golden Gate Challenge. William McVinnie, supervisor of structural analysis for Chrysler, has invested $250,000 of his company’s computer time in researching hull designs for Eagle Challenge. Conner is using a team from Science Applications International Corp., a company involved in nuclear submarine research for the Department of Defense.

American syndicates are measuring biorhythms of the actual course--the weight and velocity of its winds, their holes and prevailing habits, the power and pattern of swells and caps--with hydrophonic buoys moored off Perth. Sensors mounted on hulls and battens are providing telemetry as part of each syndicate’s search to optimize everything from ballast set to the separation of needle holes in sail stitching.

The race, Blackaller has said, will go to the swiftest and the computer literate. The swiftest, add others, may well have to be the richest. For high-tech translates to high-cost.

Add to this the expense of freighting boats and accommodating personnel for a campaign 18,000 miles from home . . . and at a time when syndicate incomes are down due to the existence of six U.S. challengers that have dissipated the sponsorship dollar.

This month, in an effort to soften a threatened shortfall, five of the country’s America’s Cup contenders (New York Yacht Club being the independently wealthy holdout) agreed to an Olympic-style financial appeal with all syndicates sharing new donations and fund-raising overheads.

“This is the first time for multichallengers and huge budgets,” Davis of Eagle Challenge said. “In 1974, Jim Driscoll spent $700,000 to win with Intrepid. But the game has escalated to the point where new stuff beats the old stuff and you have to go for it.”

Eagle’s new stuff (with two boats at its dock: a used 12-meter for a trial horse plus the new challenger) will cost $8 million. San Diego’s Sail America (with four boats in the water and another on the way) expects to spend up to $15 million on its attempt. Golden Gate Challenge (another two-boat skinflint) has budgeted $10 million.

Add California’s $33 million to the $31 million being spent by New York, New Haven and Chicago and you have (in the estimation of hydrodynamicist Daniel Savitsky of the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J.) a sporting expenditure significantly higher than what the U.S. Navy spends on a new hull form.

That, however, is the dark side of defeat.

A brighter result of 1983 and our once-in-a-lifetime loss, agree syndicate officials, has been the United States’ transition from a one-boat defender to a six-boat challenger.

It has broken a monopoly. Today’s American entries truly represent America and several hundred local sailing clubs (more than 100 are supporting the California efforts) instead of one blue-blazered club and one elite area--the New York Yacht Club and Newport, R.I., traditional home of America’s Cup defenses.

It also has exposed an enthusiasm for revenge unrivaled since the British stormed Concord. And such heating of patriotic blood, believe some, could elevate the America’s Cup to the wide world of televised sports with all the public knowledge, excitement and interest of the Indy 500 or the Super Bowl.

“The America’s Cup was an entity, the exclusive province of well-to-do industrialists, silk hats and coats and ties on the water” said Ron Young, general manager of Golden Gate Challenge. “Then (in 1977) came (America’s Cup winner) Ted Turner. He was Rhett Butler, fun, brash, outspoken. He caused the average Joe to hear about the America’s Cup.

“Then (in 1983) came the Aussies who out-Turnered Turner. They caused the average Joe to know and care about the America’s Cup.”

Tom Blackaller’s Golden Gate Challenge is working out before the pride and the press of San Francisco.

Rod Davis and Eagle Challenge have been sailing and sweating in full view of Southern California.

Dennis Conner . . . well, he’s been in Honolulu for the past six months, exercising his America’s Cup fleet from a guarded harbor in a less-than-paradisiacal suburb famous for scrap yards and Dirty Dick’s topless bar.

He’s keeping largely to himself. He’s refusing invitations to sail against other syndicates because he considers his American allies to be the enemy. He’s sorting media requests into two piles--those where an interview might assist Sail America’s aims, and those who probably won’t get to talk with Conner.

San Diego, however, doesn’t feel denied by its absentee skipper. If Conner can work better without domestic distractions, if Conner believes ocean conditions off Oahu are close to Western Australia, then, one San Diego sports writer said, Conner is to be believed. Few other sailors have enjoyed such trust. Except Nelson, Farragut and John Paul Jones.

“See that white water over there?” Conner demanded. He was on the bridge of a team tender and pointing to a boiling crest southwest of sunny Diamond Head. “That’s not a reef, that’s weather.” He pointed back to Mamala Bay. “See, in here you’ve got light winds. Out there, 20 knots or more. That’s why we are here.”

Churls have developed a more humorous reason for why Sail America is working out of Honolulu. They say an island is the only way single-minded Conner can prevent desertions in the face of a discipline that’s reminiscent of a drab spot north of his San Diego. Camp Pendleton.

At 5:45 a.m., six days a week, the 42-person group, crew and support members, are doing aerobics. They work a minimum 12-hour day and sail for 21 days each month. Meals are in a mess hall. Yet they are old hands at this tough sailing and seem to thrive on the privations of working for ruthless Conner. Who cares if wages are only $75 a week with room and board in two condominium towers that, owing to a construction defect, are known as the Leaning Towers of Pearl?

Without fail, Conner returns to San Diego the first week of each month. “I have a business (Dennis Conner Interiors), 50 employees, a wife and family and a need to balance between hobby and reality.”

Security is a team paranoia.

There has been consideration, said a crewman, of installing scramblers should anyone attempt to monitor Sail America’s telemetry. The racers go to sea with identical sail numbers to confuse observation. During one trial, the 12-meters were pursued by a photographer who dodged around the yachts, Greenpeace-style, in an inflatable motor boat. Shooting done, he flashed a pair of swim trunks decorated with the New Zealand flag.

Still, Conner said, secrecy has been loosened of late. Even if rivals could inspect his hull design, he explained, there’s not enough time between now and Perth to change their own boats. So he doesn’t really mind that Life magazine has published a drawing of his hull with its supertanker snout, a flat, rounded, vertical fin beneath the bow.

“But we’re certainly keeping an eye on the competition, you bet,” Conner said of his own Cup Intelligence Agency. “And when they (other U.S. contestants) start sailing in earnest, working the kinks out, we’ll be there watching.”

It was a Thursday morning, a time Conner sets aside each week for the media. He was on the bridge of Betsy, the team’s 64-foot tender, with his weather eye lifted at “your average icky day.”

Two lithe, taut, blue-gray boats--Stars & Stripes ’85 and ‘86--were being towed towards landmark Diamond and Koko heads for upwind work on Maunalua Bay. A printout in the aft cabin reported conditions: Strong winds across 6-foot seas.

Conner spoke confidently against the Australians, other syndicates, their edge, his assets, yesterday’s defeat and tomorrow’s promises.

“We (Sail America) are either on target or ahead of everything we planned two years ago,” he said. “I’m optimistic and happy that the world sees us as the team to beat. Australia says we’re 3 to 1 . . . the U.S. magazines have us equal (to Australia) or in front of and it makes you feel good.

“But the media’s not going to win it for you. You have to go out on the course yourself.”

He has accepted that the Australians are good, but not that good.

“The biggest thing is experience,” he said. “I have eight, nine, or 10 times as much as the most experienced skipper. I’ve raced against the top Americans. I’ve raced against the best in the world . . . the record speaks for itself.”

After his 1977 victory, Ted Turner said that winning the America’s Cup matched the luxury of standing beneath a hot shower while tearing up $1,000 bills.

After their 1983 triumph, the Australians yelled that they planned to drive a steamroller over the vaunted, venerable trophy and rename it the America’s Plate.

“Turner was unstuffy but the Australians were downright populist,” said Ron Young, general manager of Golden Gate Challenge. “They came here with a boxing kangaroo for a symbol and the underdog spirit of men from Down Under.

“They showed us what they had learned, that middle- to low-income people design, build and sail the boats. It might be yachting in New York and Connecticut but it’s not yachting in Chicago and San Francisco. It’s sailing.”

With emancipation in place, Young, a marketing professional and the man who once used Jefferson Airplane commercials to help elevate Levi’s from work clothing to designer desirables, set about selling Golden Gate Challenge to San Francisco.

Target: $10 million to finance the syndicate. Method: Development of full consumer interest and financial support by exorcising the effete aspects of yachting. The results: “We’ve raised $4.9 million, been on television 67 times in the past six weeks and were seen by 26 million people across the Pacific Basin. I’m willing to bet you a good cup of coffee that by July, we’ll have the most populist, broadest-based American effort.”

Mayor Dianne Feinstein has christened syndicate boats and appeared in its videotaped pitches. Cyril Magnin (a name weighty enough to grace a San Francisco street) is honorary chairman of the challenge. The company that does Bruce Springsteen’s T-shirts is marketing Golden Gate Challenge T-shirts. “And the return for effort looks like this.” Young’s finger traces a quick takeoff and a steep climbout. “It’s been a pretty significant effort.”

Much of Young’s promotion is predicated by the presumption that Golden Gate Challenge will indeed win the 1987 America’s Cup and that San Francisco will obviously host the defense in 1990.

Enticing Spinoffs

That leaves him free to work enticing spinoffs:

- The community that hosts an America’s Cup defense, according to a Chapman College study, can anticipate 4,000 new jobs, 1.6 million tourists and a $1 billion windfall.

San Francisco Bay would be entrenched as the world’s greatest natural arena for viewing a sailboat race.

Young and skipper Blackaller are in accord. Viewing a sailboat race five miles offshore is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Spectators and television cameras need to be close to the action, to see a mainsail trimmer go overboard, to be educated by color commentators . . . to be given, say Young and Blackaller, the same seat and service as a Super Bowl fan on the 50-yard line.

“San Diego or Newport Beach would be the dullest places in the world to stage an America’s Cup defense,” said Blackaller. “But if contested on San Franciso Bay, I can see 500,000 persons watching the America’s Cup from the (Golden Gate) bridge, the islands, the shores, and really seeing it.”

California Semi-Finalists?

Blackaller thinks all three California syndicates will earn semi-final berths during the America’s Cup contest. And the final?

“The differences will be culled out by how well you’ve put your program together, how well your designs and engineering have worked, how the equipment holds up. I would bet that it’s better than one in three that a California boat will come out in the final. We’ve got enormous experience, tremendous dedication, reasonable funding and underdog motivation.”

Golden Gate Challenge is two aluminum yachts. One is the syndicate’s Evolutionary Boat (E1) that has been in the water since February. The second will be the Revolutionary Boat (R1) to be launched in June.

E1, Blackaller said, is “not radically different, but a basis to see if your revolutionary step, your radical step is going to work.”

R1, he continued, will be the result of 200 hours of three-dimensional flow analysis by computer, water tank data, wind-tunnel research and tests on a 40% scale model. “They all correlate and they all say the revolutionary boat is a breakthrough.”

Each challenge has a signature. Conner’s hallmark is several boats in the water and heaven help carpers and sluggards. San Francisco and Blackaller prefer lighter preliminaries with full emphasis on scientific examination before practical application.

“Our style is to check in, to race against as many people as we can,” Rod Davis of Eagle Challenge said. “We’ll work with friends and we’re going to share our knowledge. We’ll race with Italy, Canada and probably Heart of America in June.

“We prefer to spend more time on designing the boat instead of working the boat up. You can’t design boats on the water. That’s why he (Conner) pops the boats out all the time.”

Added Gary Thomson, businessman, sailor, commissioner of wrestling for the 1984 Olympic Games and president of Eagle Challenge: “Conner’s idea is to build multiple boats . . . we don’t think that’s cost effective.”

Relatively Small Budget

Cost always is close to Thomson’s mind. His syndicate is working with a relatively small budget of $8 million and an estimated $1.5 million must still be raised. Only one boat has been designed and built for its challenge (until last month’s launching of Eagle, the syndicate was training crews on a 4-year-old boat rejected by Conner for his 1983 campaign) and a second boat has been debated but not decided.

Eagle’s sponsorship program, Thomson said, is not exactly sailing along. “Very simply, we’re not giving the bang for the buck.” Sponsors, he added, are saying: “There are six teams out there and we want to make the right choice for the amount of money you want.

“Also, here in California, a lot of businesses we’d rely on--banking, oil, computer companies--are not doing well. They’re in the bag. We’re also an upscale event. So I’ve changed my program around. I’m not going to rely on corporate sponsors.”

His expectations were $5 million from corporations and the balance from the community. “But we got about $1.5 or $2 million (from corporate sponsors), so now I’d say we are going to be (a funding split of) 80-20 for the community.”

Team Strengths Will Prevail

Yet none of these difficulties, believe syndicate members, is insoluble. In fact, they say, team strengths will easily cancel any weaknesses.

There is much faith in Dutch-born designer Johan Valentijn--a four-time America’s Cup campaigner.

They point to skipper Davis who spent eight weeks in Australia this year, competed as a crewman on the Italian entry in the World Championships and said: “I didn’t go there with blinders on.”

To Davis, between now and Eagle’s departure for Australia in September, falls the intense task of melding boat, equipment and crew into a slippery express.

“You just can’t put a new boat in the water and watch it go two knots faster than any 12-meter in the world. It doesn’t work that way. Our plan is to work the deck, masts, fittings and go in (the water) bug free. Our objective is good, meaningful time on the water.

‘The Best People’

“Our strength is not good people, but the best people. Johan (Valentijn) for the boat, (Lowell) North for the sails, (Dr.) Francis Clauser of Cal Tech and one of the world’s most respected sailing advisers in Bill Ficker.”

In a 1985 interview, John Bertrand, skipper of the victorious Australia II, said that he considers Davis to be America’s strongest skipper and severest threat. In a more recent study, however, the Australian Race Predictions Committee ranked Eagle seventh (with San Diego first and San Francisco in sixth spot) among the challengers.

Here’s how Davis is calling Eagle’s challenge:

“I think our chances are excellent. I think we’ve got the best people and if we all do our job right, we win. If we don’t, depending on how badly we do it, we don’t.

“But I feel we’re all going to do the job right . . . and if we have a little better boat and a little better crew, we’ll win by a little bit.”