Wake Me When Kiwis Have Won It

Don’t look now, but from where I sit, isn’t one of the biggest anticlimaxes in the history of sport building up in the Indian Ocean waters off Perth and Fremantle?

I refer to the very present likelihood that the “international” boat to challenge the Australians’ possession of the America’s Cup will be--a little chorus of Waltzing Matilda, professor, please--New Zealand!

Oh, glory be! What a long-awaited intercontinental confrontation that will be! Get your tickets early! Notify all the package tours you’ll be bringing a party of several hundred. Check the airline schedules for overbooking.

The handbooks will expect a land office business. This may be the biggest betting proposition in years. It will probably top the action on the Freedom Bowl by hundreds of dollars.

How could the Aussies have been so careless as to permit a mounting of a challenge right in their front yard? OK, so they’re 1,000 miles apart but in that part of the world that makes you next-door neighbors.

Is the world going to beat a path to the savannas of western Australia to see a family squabble?

I’m told the merchants and innkeepers Down Under have been planning and building for years, or ever since the Australians took the Cup back from Newport, R.I., for the great tourist influx of thousands of well-heeled Yanks bent on seeing the Auld Mug restored to its rightful resting place, the good old U.S. of A. I’m told casinos are waiting, the wine is iced, the discos are blinking and Perth is ready to become the French Riviera South.

To see New Zealand win the America’s Cup? Gimme a break!

No, this is not what everybody was waiting to see. What everybody was ready for, all over the world, was the try for revenge of the rich American yacht club set, those chagrined great Gatsbys who were as jolted by the upstart Aussie impertinence as they would have been if their footmen had run off with their wives.

We took it in good grace, of course. We Americans always do. We screamed about an illegal keel, blamed the wind, the waters, sunspots and, probably, the CIA.

What it probably was, however, was just another evidence of decline in good old American know-how.

But we thought we knew how to correct it all right. The good old American way. With money. Lots of money. Americans have great faith in money. It can cure the sick, raise the dead, change water into wine. It can’t even cure herpes, as a matter of fact, but don’t let that get around.

So, the Americans turned to their two good old icons--money and computers. Look out, Australia, here we come! Megabytes and all.

Nobody apparently bothered to think about athletes. This was going to be a contest between the dollar and the pound, the franc, the lire. And we all know how that will come out.

If ever a load of over-engineered, under-sailed boats ever hit the water since the Spanish Armada, this was it. You don’t want to know how many millions of dollars went into this naval task force. About as many as went into the Battle of Midway.

I don’t want to say that the New Zealanders showed up in a couple of old kayaks with bark sails and a compass but I think you have to bear in mind that the population of the whole country--which is just a chain of islands in the Tasman Sea--is about the population of Philadelphia.

But I would guess when you come from a nation that is a series of landfalls 1,000 miles long, you get to learn to sail.

When the great dollar fleet arrived in the roads off Fremantle, hardly anyone paid any attention to the little token fiberglass entrant of the Kiwis from that funny little offshore country abeam of New South Wales.

As they won race after race in the early jockeying, the news stories were all about the squabbling among the lordly American entries, some of whom brought as many as three contenders in their syndicates.

You had to tap yourself on the side of the head to be sure you had read the story correctly. The leads were given over to the trials and tribulations of the big-buck Yank yachts--the English, Canadians and Italians were overmatched early, as expected--and then, almost as an afterthought, the story would conclude, in effect: “Oh, by the way, the New Zealand boat won again.”

You had the image of the Americans saying, “Very cute, but you don’t belong there. Wait’ll we get to the semifinals, we’ll knock you off.”

Well, they’d better hurry. There are only four boats left--and one of them is 33-1 up to now, and it’s from New Zealand. Some of those computer-chip products of American drawing boards couldn’t beat a canoe when they got into that chop over there.

It all reminds me of the old schoolyard games where the rich kid would show up with the bat made out of the finest honed ash, the glove cut from the world’s most expensive leather, a real baseball, not a tape-wound shot, real cleats on his shoes and a monogrammed uniform--and the sons of the poor would proceed to run and hit and throw rings around him and send him home with his glasses broken and his nose bleeding.

I think until you can compute heart and pluck and ingenuity and resourcefulness under fire onto a drawing board, your fancy new boat won’t do you much good. It may be that all the good British sailors jumped ship Down Under a hundred years ago. It may be you still need sailors more than you need sails.

Still, you have to feel sorry for all those restaurateurs stuck with all that squab under glass, the hostelries with the suites ready for the yacht club big rich, the croupiers, even the souvenir sellers. If the Kiwis win it all and take the cup defense back to Christchurch, the rest of the world may say, “Keep it.”

But, even if they launch another megabuck invasion to get it back, they may be embarrassed again. Three guys from Borneo may come down in a dugout canoe with a tapa cloth sail and beat them at their own game again.