They Put Up High Stakes on High Seas

A man about to embark on a perilous international mission for his country should look the part.

Especially if he’s a sea captain. There’s an old joke about the guy who came home decked out in Corinthian garb to announce to his mother that he was now the owner of a motorboat and a captain. She said: “To you, you’re a captain; to me, you’re a captain, but to a captain, are you a captain?”

I don’t know about you, but to me, a man who challenges the sea for God and country should look like a captain to a captain. Like, he should have one eye and a patch for the other, and one leg and a stump for the other, a parrot on the shoulder and a sword in his belt.

He should look like a guy whose nickname would be Capt. Blood, or Blackbeard, and he should be bellowing curses at his crew of cutthroats as he sails his hell ship on the barbarous Spanish main shouting things like:

“Get a man aloft in the top gallants, ye yellow-livered scum. And get a glass on that sail on the horizon. See if she be a man o’ war or a French prize full of gold and perfume. Break out the six-pounder and send a shot across her bow, or I’ll have every man jack of you swinging from the highest yardarm of the Queen’s navy!”

Somehow, Roderick Hopkins Fox doesn’t fit this purple image. He has all his eyes and legs and he doesn’t have any wildlife perched on his shoulder. In his white ducks, canvas shoes, zippered jacket and baseball cap, he doesn’t at all bring to mind Sir Francis Drake or Lord Nelson, or even Bull Halsey or John Paul Jones. He doesn’t look as if he’s about to flog anyone, or storm a galleon for plunder or Maureen O’Hara.

And yet, Skipper Fox is, in a sense, a first lord of our admiralty about to embark on a high-seas adventure as important in its way as any of Sir Walter Raleigh’s.

In terms of money spent, the America’s Cup is a naval engagement fully of the magnitude of the Battle of Trafalgar--or the discovery of America. It cost Drake less to turn back the Spanish Armada than it will cost Fox to win back a battered old silver mug good only for pouring tea.

It is not likely that Columbus’ caravel cost what any one of the 60-foot boats racing off the coast of Perth this fall will cost.

Supremacy on the high seas used to depend on the number and muzzle velocity of shipboard cannon and the men who fired them. Now it comes down to a 24-mile course in an unarmed boat little bigger than a canoe and manned by 11 men, none of whom have earrings in their ears, scars on their cheeks, rags wound round their heads or knives in their teeth.

They are not the refuse of British gaols, they are stockbrokers, lawyers and real estate salesmen. They don’t carry cutlasses, they carry American Express cards.

Rod Fox is the skipper of this not-so-motley crew that a Long John Silver would reject out of hand but who may be America’s best hope to regain rule of the sea, which we lost suddenly and shockingly to a bunch of audacious Aussies in our home waters three years ago.

Britannia no longer rules the waves, and neither do we. No matter how many nuclear subs we have, we were bested on all points of sailing and seamanship by an upstart ship’s company from Down Under in 1983, and to restore our pride in seamanship is going to cost money in amounts Lord Nelson never dreamed of.

Columbus was after the gold and jewels and a route to the Orient. Capt. Bligh was after breadfruit, and Drake was after empire. But Skipper Fox is asked to recapture national esteem.

His flagship, Eagle, is one of a half-dozen 12-meter yachts vying for the honor of representing the United States in the ambitious effort to reclaim the “auld mug” in the winds off Fremantle next January.

It will cost $8.5 million to outfit and ready Eagle for the Cup challenge--sails alone cost $750,000--and the syndicate has already raised $5 million. Eagle, a sleek 12-meter racer with a huge, flag-bedecked American eagle painted along its hull, can be seen plying the waters off Long Beach these days, its crew endlessly hoisting spinnaker or tacking to weather in the constant search for the perfect sail or rig to make it the fastest thing in the sea without fins.

Skipper Fox is a sailmaker by trade and if he doesn’t look like a latter-day Bligh, he does have his crew in a weight room near the marina at the crack of dawn each day, trying to get as fit as his boat.

The boat, a computer-studded, mast-shrouded hunk of aluminum that barely has room for her 11-man crew, is constructed for one purpose: to go fast, turn quickly and win in short bursts. The ancient Phoenicians probably had more boat under them than these modern ocean racers.

They would probably be landlocked flower pots were it not for the America’s Cup frenzy, but the stakes are actually higher than just the silver mug.

When the Aussies wrested the Cup from the 132-year clutch of the New York Yacht Club, they put the old pitcher back in circulation, and they did ocean racing everywhere a favor.

So long as the NYYC kept the Cup, its defense was locked into the choppy seas off Rhode Island. Even if, as happened, a West Coast boat or crew successfully defended it, it remained where it had been since we won it from England in 1851.

Now, the defense goes where the Cup goes. This time, Perth. Next time, to the home port of the winner there.

Fox, crew and syndicate hope it will be the Eagle’s nest, Newport Beach, on the West Coast.

The Cup challenge has been estimated to be worth hundreds of millions to Australia in the projected hotel and tourist boom around Perth. The projection is, it could be worth even more to an American victor.

There’s buried treasure for this crew, too. And of the half-dozen American syndicates, plus the French, Italian and English hunting for it, none is considered more formidable than the screaming Eagle and its Captain Fox, holder of the Olympic gold medal in the Soling class and America’s seaman first class.

But he’ll have to get a powdered wig, a three-cornered hat and buckle shoes if he wants to take his place in history alongside the earlier illustrious heroes of naval warfare.

John Paul Jones would begin to fight, arrayed alongside a captain in a frayed polo shirt with his shoes untied. Captain Bligh would clap him in irons, and Errol Flynn would decline the part.