Why Conner’s Crew Is Better: It’s About Time

Roland Puton runs a wristwatch company. He is chief executive officer of a firm that manufacturers the most expensive watches in the world--watches that cost so much, they should be equipped to tell you the time, date, weather, stock market closings and up-to-the-minute traffic reports.

Monsieur Puton put in a personal appearance at the Sail America syndicate’s camp here, just a few hours after captain crunch, Dennis Conner, and his Stars & Stripes crew had watched Kookaburra III go down for the third time.

It has become an America’s Cup tradition that these fine-looking, five-figure watches be distributed to each member of the challenging and defending crews. Conner went so far as to tell the assembled cocktail-party crowd that these timepieces, not trophies or any other rewards, were truly “the ultimate goals” of those who sailed here, to which M. Puton did not, thankfully, reply: “My dear sir, you are too kind.”

One by one, then, the Stars & Stripes crewmen--plus crew woman--stepped forward to receive their prizes. When Jon Wright, 38, of Philadelphia, the mainsheet trimmer, rose to the platform, Conner giggled. Wright already had taken part in the 1974 Cup finals aboard Courageous, the 1977 trials on Independence, the 1980 finals on Freedom, and on the defeated 1983 finalist Liberty. Now, this.

As Conner watched the watch being presented to Wright, he said: “Anytime Jon wants to get out of sailing, he can always go back to Philadelphia and open a jewelry shop.”

It was about this time--give or take a few minutes, for those of us with Disney characters on our watch faces--that it began to occur to Tom Whidden, 39, Stars & Stripes’ tactician, just how many crewmen owned more than one of these wristwatches. “That was the first time it had really sunk in, for me, how much experience this crew had,” Whidden said later.

It also pretty much tells the fate of Iain Murray and the Kooka crew.

Sunk.

Having been beaten by the San Diego clipper three times in three days, the Australians are finished. Washed up. Total wrecks. Maybe boomerangs can come back, but the Kookaburras can’t. They might as well pack their white pants and go. G’day, mates. Or bad day, come to think of it.

The only saving grace at this point is that they literally are not dead in the water. Some nut called in a bomb threat while the third Cup race was in progress, giving Murray and his painfully young crew one more headache they hardly needed. A Kookaburra kook.

As Buddy Melges, who skippered Heart of America in the challenge series, said wistfully after the race: “If a man’s not safe in a sailboat in the middle of the ocean, where can he be safe?”

Murray didn’t have a crew as experienced as Conner’s. He didn’t have a boat as fast as Conner’s. Suddenly, he was being told that the one thing his boat might have that Conner’s didn’t was the one thing he could do without.

Springing into action, Kevin Parry, the kingpin of Kookaburra’s syndicate, asked officials to call off the race, which Stars & Stripes was winning handily on the final leg. They declined. Instead, they elected to send a rubber chase boat to Kooka’s side, first asking Matt Bloom, one of the American boat’s officials, for permission.

“I said, ‘Sure. What possible difference could it make? We’re a quarter-mile ahead,’ ” Bloom said, not quite so dispassionately as it sounds.

Murray got through the day without being blown from the water--the only boom he encountered was at the foot of a sail--and later made several charming, selfless comments about everything that happened, winning friends for himself and Australia, if not races.

When his yacht passed by the jetty on the way back to Fremantle harbor, the sloop that provided an escort was named, in very large letters, That’s Life.

Wise beyond his age, Murray, 28, long ago learned to accept what occurs, then move on. Although he knows how disappointed his compatriots are at not having won a race, much less been able to retain possession of the America’s Cup, the Kookaburra skipper insisted that no one among his crew had given much thought to how it feels to lose the Cup, simply because “no one on the boat has ever won one.” An entirely different crew did the deed in 1983.

It is getting to a point where the older salts aboard Stars & Stripes are beginning to address the Aussies in “there, there, son, everything’s going to be all right” terms.

Take, for instance, Adam Ostenfeld, 35, Conner’s been-everywhere, done-everything starboard tailer, who remarked after the third race: “I think they might be lacking a little in experience, but they’re good kids.”

Ostenfeld was not being condescending. Neither, though, was he offering any compassion. When asked if the America’s Cup finals might not have been more dramatic and entertaining had Stars & Stripes been knocked off once or twice, or at least challenged right to the finish line, Ostenfeld said: “I’ve spent the last eight years trying to win the damned America’s Cup. If we win 4-0 and all of them by 6 minutes, that’ll be fine with me.”

A sculptor when he’s not a sailor, Ostenfeld intends to go back to the studio and go out of the water a winner. That is, if Conner allows it. Conner, he said, will try to get him to re-enlist, any way he can. “You’d better make sure you’re not drunk when he gives you a contract to sign,” Ostenfeld said.

Sounds like the Army, someone said.

“The Army?” Ostenfeld replied. “More like the Mafia.”

From guys like that, even the middle of the ocean isn’t safe.