Readying for the Thunder Down Under : Will Lightning Strike Conner Again or Can He Bring America’s Cup Back?

Iain Murray has never met Dennis Conner but, then, neither did Will Rogers.

“I don’t know the man personally,” said Murray, the 28-year-old skipper of Kookaburra, the Australian syndicate defending the America’s Cup. “It’s fair to say he’s a legendary part of the sport we’re in. He’s been doing it ever since I was a small kid. It’s inevitable that I do meet him, I guess.”

As inevitable as thunder after lightning. A week from today, Murray is scheduled to meet Conner, 44, at the starting line of the first race in the best-of-seven Cup finals. Murray picks himself to win, 4 to 2.

“The races are going to be very, very close,” Murray said. “We’ve studied the way he sails his boat and the technique he uses at the start, but the rest is up to him.

“I think it will come down to who wins the start, and who gets around the bottom mark first the first time. If we’re expected to win four straight starts, that’s possibly a little optimistic.

“There could be wind shifts or whatever, but 4-2 sounds good to me.”

Conner, skipper of the Stars & Stripes, essentially agrees, except on the outcome, which he has not yet predicted.

“There’s a big advantage to being ahead, especially at the (first) leeward mark,” Conner said. “The lead doesn’t change very often because these guys don’t foul up.”

As the top gun of this competition, Conner again finds himself knowing far less about the opponent personally than the opponent knows about him.

“Iain looks like one pretty cool customer over there, obviously running a very good program,” Conner said. “Looking at him on the boat, he doesn’t look like he gets ruffled by much.”

But Conner is less concerned about Murray than Peter Gilmour, who steers Kookaburra through the starts. Through the protest-plagued defender trials, Gilmour acquired a nickname: Crash.

“Peter will make the most of any situation, or you could call him aggressive,” Murray said. “But certainly Peter likes to take the race to his opponent. He likes to be the controlling person.

“Peter has the knack and the expertise to maneuver the boat into that position where people are being controlled, and a lot of people don’t like it. When they’re being controlled, they’re often pushed into a position where they make a mistake, and that has happened on a number of occasions.

“I must say, there have been several collisions at starts involving Peter, and in all of those collisions Peter has been exonerated and found to be in the right.”

Conner’s style is to avoid prestart confrontations and get off the line with speed and clear air. Gilmour, 27, probably will try to engage him, like a boxer tying up a slugger in a clench.

“It’s certainly a factor,” Conner said. “(Gilmour) looks awfully good. I think he’s the sailor of the future over here. From what I hear, it sounds like Iain wants to go into more the management and design area, and Peter will be the heir apparent.

“He certainly looked like he intimidated some of the other boats.”

How to thwart Gilmour’s strategy?

“We’ll just go off the line ahead of him,” Conner said. “It’s quite simple.”

Concerning the Kookaburras in general, Conner said: “We don’t know as much about ‘em as we’d like, but we’ve sailed a fair amount with Australia IV, so the only gauge we have is how we went against Australia IV and how Australia IV went against the Kookas. But it’s hard to judge for sure because Australia IV keeps making changes.

“Sometimes we go along with Australia IV and we’re dead even, and sometimes we have an edge. But we don’t know if they’re sandbagging. They’re not there to help us. Just looking at the times, it looks like it’s gonna be a good, close boat race.”

Conner has another week to set up Stars & Stripes ’87 to meet the opponent’s strengths and the anticipated weather conditions. He planned to study Kookaburra’s performance against New Zealand’s KZ7 in trial runs this weekend.

“We haven’t really decided what we’re going to do to the boat,” he said. “If the Kiwis go out and sail against the Kookaburras, we’ll watch what goes on and maybe we can tell if we have any weaknesses compared to the Kookas. But right now we don’t have anything major in mind.”

Conner said the Kookas can learn from the Kiwis “what to expect in a tacking duel” by comparing Stars & Stripes’ performance against KZ7, especially in the fourth race--the race New Zealand won--when there were 131 tacks.

“The Kiwis are better than the Kookas at tacking,” Conner said. “The Kiwi boat’s a very good boat. I’m glad we don’t have to race ‘em anymore. They had the potential to beat us.”

When the Kookas went out to trial with KZ7 Friday, Conner joined in, uninvited, but nobody tried to shoo him away as he sailed about 100 yards away from the pair for 15 or 20 minutes.

Stars & Stripes tactician Tom Whidden said: “What we did to Kookaburra was awesome. We started five boat lengths behind, and when they tacked we crossed them easily.

“But I’d take that with caution. We were closer to the beach where the wind does funny things. Downwind, they were a little faster, but we expected that.”

Murray said that his boat is “more refined” than Stars & Stripes. “Our recent developments have been refinements while Dennis has made wholesale changes to extract better performance,” he said. “We’ll match him in the heavy conditions and be better off in the light air.”

There will be routine work on Stars & Stripes.

“We’ll try to sharpen the trailing edges of our appendages to cut down on turbulence, re-fair our rudder to make sure it’s symmetrical, go over the mast, make sure that nothing’s about to break,” Conner said.

“We’re gonna work on our gennaker (sail)--when to put it up and when not to. There’s still a fair amount of testing to be done there on what angles it’s effective and the break-even point between when you should have your gennaker and when you should have your spinnaker, not only by the angle to the wind but by wind velocity.

“We have to test that and how to jibe it. The techniques are still new to us. It has to pass inside (the headstay, a cable supporting the mast) as opposed to around the outside, so you’re almost crocheting the halyards (lines up the mast that hoist the sails). Maybe you put it up on two halyards. We have to study that.

“From a psychological standpoint, we have to be careful not to let the enthusiasm of winning the Louis Vuitton Cup (that is, the challenge trials) betray us. We have to make sure our guys are not losing sight of what we really came here to do. Three years of effort is on the line here in the next couple of weeks.”

Kookaburra must announce by Monday night whether it will sail Kookaburra III or Kookaburra II in the finals. Conner said it doesn’t make much difference to Stars & Stripes.

“I’d like to see ‘em sail the slowest one,” he said.

America’s Cup Notes

Is Dennis Conner running for local office? The Stars & Stripes skipper is seen everywhere around town making friends these days. One night this week he appeared at a charity auction of wooden duck models and bought four for his father-in-law for $1,800. On Friday night he opened the Fremantle Antiques Fair. The previous night he threw a dinner party for his crew and staff at Chez Orleans, appearing in a tuxedo, with boat shoes and no socks. . . . Kookaburra, trying to mend public relations fences, held a media open house Friday to announce a new $1-million sponsorship by Foster’s Lager. A day earlier, syndicate boss Kevin Parry, still boiling over his run-in with rival Alan Bond, wired from China to shut off all media contacts for the crew. Foster’s wired back, “No crew, no $1 million.” The crew was there. The only TV crew admitted, however, was from Channel 7, one of Kookaburra’s sponsors. Channel 2 and Bond’s Channel 9 were barred. . . . The Data General race prediction panel of experts has three members favoring Stars & Stripes, two Kookaburra, and one rating them even.