ESPN to Review America’s Cup

Sailor Gary Jobson, who was the analyst on ESPN’s telecasts of the America’s Cup competition, says that New Zealand’s upstart bid for the Cup at Fremantle, Australia, last winter failed, in the end, because skipper Chris Dickson and “the Kiwi crew choked.”

And Australia, he said, lost its grip on the Cup because of “petty arguments” and “weekend”-type sailing.

Jobson makes his observations in a one-hour Cup highlight show Sunday at 7 p.m. on ESPN. He and host Jim Kelly do not mince words.

That’s not exactly common when athletes talk about other athletes, especially those they still compete against. Jobson continues to sail competitively--most recently against Dickson and other world-class sailors in the Liberty Cup match-racing event at New York.

In that regatta, Jobson defeated Dickson in their head-to-head match before losing to Australia’s Peter Gilmour in the finals, 2 races to 1. He had finished taping his critique of Dickson before the event, although it’s uncertain whether the New Zealander knew what Jobson had said at the time.

He’ll know it now.

ESPN totaled 79 hours of Cup coverage, including the 43 hours live that held even some non-sailors spellbound late into the night. The highlights have been chopped to less than 60 minutes, with commercials, through some brutal but necessary editing. Two or three hours wouldn’t have been too long for sailing buffs, and the show as it stands is too choppy to win an Emmy.

Still, the highlights are there, including some of the press conferences that on some days were more entertaining than the sailing.

The major criticism is that it’s too much a celebration of Dennis Conner, with little credit to others. Tactician Tom Whidden has a couple of spots, and navigator Peter Isler’s name is mentioned.

But John Marshall, who headed the design team that produced the boat Conner needed to win, and the veteran crew that sailed it are virtually ignored.

The production does, however, give proper attention to Conner’s showdown with archrival Tom Blackaller in the challenge semifinals, to Stars & Stripes’ stunning domination of New Zealand and the Aussie Kookaburras in subsequent rounds, and to the factors that undermined the Australian defense.

Jobson pinpoints the time when Dickson “started to show signs of pressure,” and he even blames the boat’s breakdowns on Dickson.

“Most of Kiwi Magic’s problems were the result of Dickson oversteering and turning the boat too fast,” Jobson says. “The New Zealand crew could not keep up trimming the sails. Dickson’s poor maneuvers caused serious mistakes, and the result was broken equipment. The New Zealand spirit was broken.”

Later, as the pressure mounted, Jobson says, “The Kiwi crew choked.”

Alan Bond’s hopes of defending the Cup he had won in ’83 were wiped out, 5-0, in a half-hearted defender final against Kookaburra III, which then was blitzed by Conner, 4-0. Jobson and Kelly rapped the protesting Aussies’ penchant for “petty arguments (that caused them to) lose sight of preparations.”

They also slammed Australia IV skipper Colin Beashel--but not designer Ben Lexcen--for over-tinkering with the boat.

Kelly, whose sailing background was nil before the Cup competition, described one of Beashel’s mangled starts as “the kind of maneuver a weekend sailor might make.”

Said Jobson: “It was clear Alan Bond missed his former skipper, John Bertrand.”

But ESPN, obviously, did not miss the boat.

It would be hard to tell when one local sailing season ends and the next begins, were it not for the Southern California Sailboat Show at the Long Beach Convention Center.

The 19th annual show opened Friday and will continue through Nov. 1, with a new wrinkle. It is now the Sail and Power Boat Show, with 30 powerboat manufacturers joining 35 sailboat builders.

The show will be open weekdays from 3 to 10 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults, $2 for children 6-12.

The first World Cup of Speedsailing series might have been too ambitious.

It started at Long Beach in June and finished at San Francisco last month, with races at Boston and Newport, R.I., in between, but it was far from a national event.

Only 2 of the 24 entries managed to compete on both coasts, and Ken Read of Newport won the overall championship merely by sweeping the two eastern events. He never made it to California.

Clearly, the reversed scoring system was wrong, since it allowed the leaders to pile up points in a few events and skip the rest of the series.

AMERICA’S CUP--Nobody has a clue when New York State Supreme Court Justice Carmen Ciparick will render a decision on New Zealand’s challenge to sail in big boats in 1988. The hearing was Sept. 9, and since then she has allowed the New York Yacht Club to intervene against the San Diego YC’s petition to rewrite the Deed of Gift that allows challengers to call the shots. Ken Poovey, Sail America’s lawyer, said this week: “I don’t have the vaguest notion how it’s going to come out, let alone when.” Diane Wilson of the New York firm representing New Zealand’s Michael Fay said: “We really don’t have any indication at all. It could be a day or it could be a month. Sixty to 90 days is typical time.”

COMING RACES--The Los Angeles YC’s two-weekend Harbor Series concludes this weekend. . . . The Navy YC at Terminal Island has its Navy Day Regatta Sunday, starting three PHRF (one non-spinnaker) classes a half-mile south of the Navy mole at noon. . . . The Little Ships Fleet of Long Beach will have its Inverted Start Race for PHRF entries Oct. 31. Boats rating up to 276 will get the first start 500 yards west of oil island Chaffee at noon, followed by those with progressively descending handicaps at one-minute intervals. . . . Long Beach YC’s 16.8-mile Five Island Race will be Nov. 1 for ocean racers and PHRF classes. The five islands are the oil islands around Long Beach Harbor. The start is at noon, 3.4 miles west of the Alamitos Bay jetty. . . . Shoreline YC’s Winter Warm-Up is scheduled Nov. 7 for three PHRF classes (one non-spinnaker). The start is at noon, 500 yards east of oil island Freeman. . . . The Seal Beach YC’s Sunday Sailors Series runs Nov. 8, 22 and Dec. 6 for PHRF and Catalina classes. Each race will start at noon, a half-mile northwest of the Alamitos Bay jetty.

NOTEWORTHY--Tristan Jones, who claims to have sailed farther in small boats than anyone else, 400,000 miles, will narrate slides of his latest trip through Europe and Asia to Bangkok in two San Diego shows--Monday night at the Kona Kai Club on Shelter Island and Tuesday night at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, both at 7:30. Admission is $7. . . . Sobstad, one of the two leading racing sailmakers--North is the other--has moved its Los Angeles-area loft to 24030 Frampton Ave., Harbor City. . . . Peter Isler, navigator on Stars & Stripes for its America’s Cup victory, has done an instructional handbook, “Let’s Go Sailing,” for beginning to advanced sailors. It’s full of drawings, photos and checklists for various procedures (Simon & Schuster, $6.95).