Our Cup Runneth Over

America’s Cup is back. Well done, Dennis Conner.

Talk about slam dunks and grand slams. Conner and his Stars & Stripes crew breezed through the final three rounds of the America’s Cup races with a 12-1 record, sweeping Australian defender Kookaburra III 4 to 0 in the final.

K-III skipper Iain Murray and his countrymen should feel no disgrace. Freemantle, Perth et al. put on a grand show, and the Aussies were splendid hosts. Australia won yachting’s treasured cup in 1983 with a technologically superior 12-meter boat. Conner won the cup back this year with a crack crew that trained like astronauts and with the backing of a multimillion-dollar NASA-like organization.

Anyone who has watched the superb television coverage of the races on the ESPN cable network knows that racing these 65-foot, 25-ton sailboats is not going out for a casual afternoon sail from the Marina. Tycoon Ted Turner, the 1977 cup winner, complained that “the weekend sailor has been shoved out” of the America’s Cup competition by Conner’s perpetual professional-style campaigns.

That may be so, but never has such an obscure sport become so popular virtually overnight with so many Americans who never knew a spinnaker from a halyard. They stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to view races as one-sided as 100-to-25 basketball games. Conner himself was one attraction as he sought to avenge the 1983 loss and overcome his Dennis the Menace image. This time Conner set the standard for excellence in sailing strategy and execution.

Consider, too, that the finals boiled down to Aussies and Yanks--two T-shirt, beer-drinking societies battling for the prize that once belonged only to aristocrats with names like Vanderbilt and Lipton.

So now California can add the cup to its Superbowl and World Series trophies. It will come to the San Diego Yacht Club, Conner’s home base--at least until the next races in 1990. Whether the races will be in San Diego is not certain, however.

The club and Conner’s sponsors will meet soon to work out a system for hosting the next races. Summer winds are light in San Diego, but winter races are possible. Many think that San Francisco Bay would be the absolutely ideal site. The determining factor, however, may be money and the ability to offer the best on-shore facilities for the competitors. That might even be Newport, R.I., the site of so many past races, or Newport Beach, Calif.

Count on it: U.S. cities will compete for the cup races much as they vie for national political conventions. Corporations will try to outspend each other to back a winning boat. There will be complaints about the corrupting influence of all that money. But then, one sun-splashed summer day a few years from now, those sleek thoroughbred boats will begin slicing through the waves and jousting for the best starting position. Americans from Banger to Boise will watch in fascination, armed with a whole new nautical vocabulary and blessed with a new national sport. Yacht racing, of all things.