Arbitrator Will Decide America’s Cup Dispute

A retired judge with no interest in sailing will determine who chooses the site of the next America’s Cup defense.

The Sail America syndicate and the San Diego Yacht Club have agreed upon Charles Froehlich Jr. of Escondido as arbitrator of their dispute over the selection of the Defense Committee that will pick the site for 1991.

Froehlich is scheduled to listen to arguments June 10-12. His decision will be binding.

Froehlich retired from the state Superior Court bench at Vista in 1980 but maintains a private law practice in San Diego and is affiliated with Alternative to Litigation as an arbitrator. Both sides like him because he doesn’t care about sailing.

“I have sailed, but I don’t have a sailboat, and I’m not close to the sailing community in San Diego,” Froehlich said Monday.

He said that he followed the America’s Cup “about the same as anybody” last winter. “But I don’t really know what the dispute is about.”

At the heart of the dispute is that Sail America has not indicated where it would prefer to defend the Cup. The club suspects that Dennis Conner favors Hawaii, where his team trained and tested before winning the Cup at Fremantle, Australia. So the club felt obliged to protect its local interests, within the limits of the agreement it had with Sail America before Conner’s victory, and named a committee of seven local residents.

Sail America objects that the club ignored other more open-minded outside nominees submitted by the syndicate and that the committee, as constituted, will not consider any site but San Diego.

Sail America spokesman Robert Hopkins said: “We feel that they didn’t respect either the spirit or the letter of the agreement.”

If Froehlich decides that the club acted properly, the site selection will be a foregone conclusion--San Diego.

But if Froehlich finds that the club violated the agreement, the committee will be restructured and the club will be obliged to hold the defense wherever the committee chooses.

Each side has selected a lawyer to argue its case, Ken Poovey for Sail America and Patrick Shea for the club.

Selecting a site is only the first of the Defense Committee’s functions, but the club is willing to turn over all other responsibilities to Sail America, acknowledging the syndicate’s expertise.