Friendly Tip From Conner Won’t Be Taken Lightly by Reynolds

Mark Reynolds has confessed. The Star class winner said he did get a tip from Dennis Conner during these U.S. Olympic sailing trials, but it wasn’t about the weather.

“Saw him last Sunday when we were down here for brunch,” Reynolds said in preparation for today’s final meaningless race out of the San Diego Yacht Club. “He gave me a little advice.

“He said when they were sailing Liberty against Australia II (in the 1983 America’s Cup), they won three of the first four races and took a bunch of champagne out with ‘em for what they thought was gonna be the last race.”

Liberty didn’t win another.

“Dennis told me, ‘Don’t change anything. Keep doing what you’ve been doing,’ ” Reynolds said.

Similarly, Reynolds, with crew Hal Haenel, dominated the Star trials by winning four of the first five races, arousing suspicions that he was receiving private wind forecasts from Conner’s Stars & Stripes syndicate.

The suspicions waned when Reynolds slipped to fifth, ninth and 10th places this week, before limping home 16th Friday, just good enough to claim the ticket to Pusan, South Korea, with a race to spare.

But Reynolds, 32, doesn’t deny that Conner has influenced his sailing career.

“Maybe that’s how that (rumor) got started,” he said. “When I was a kid I used to be around him all the time because my dad was sailing with him. I hung out and listened a lot and worked on all the Stars.

“I completely rigged a few boats. I worked in his drapery factory for a while, hoping that a little bit would rub off.

“I haven’t sailed with him very much--been out on the catamaran once--but the main thing I’ve learned is how to set up boats and pay attention to the details. Dennis is always thinking of little things, and some of those little things he thought of I learned to do to my Star boat.”

Reynolds helped Conner when he won a bronze medal in the 1976 Olympics at Montreal.

“Anything that needed to be (done),” Reynolds said. “Like, he had a blue deck, and he decided that maybe it should be white because everybody else’s was white. He didn’t want his boat to stand out, so he had me paint the deck.”

Reynolds’ approach reveals as much about Conner as it does about himself.

“It’s just an attitude that you don’t leave any stone unturned, and you make sure your boat is better than everyone else’s. If it costs another thousand dollars to make it a little bit better, even if it’s not a noticeable difference, it’s worth it.

“When I worked for him I’d say, ‘Hey, if we put a new traveler on here I think it’d work a little better, but it costs $80.’

“He’d say, ‘Will it make it better?’

“ ‘Yeah.’

“ ‘OK, then we need to do it.’

“That can be a dangerous strategy if you don’t have the money to back it up, but you figure out how to get the money.

“That’s what we did this year with our Star. At the beginning of this year, we were finally able to get the best Star made, and we took it and made it better. We had (San Diego boat builder) Brian Hutchinson completely take all the gelcoat off and start over again, and it’s the fairest, smoothest Star out there.

“Whether that makes a big difference, I don’t know, but I do know that when we’re sitting in our boat we know we did everything, and other guys are saying, ‘Gosh, that boat of Reynolds looks pretty smooth.’ ”

Reynolds is another in a long line of successful San Diego Star sailors, six of whom have won 10 world championships--two by Conner. Reynolds lives a few blocks from the club where the trials are based.

“One thing that’s nice about the Star class is that it’s such a strong class even without the Olympics,” Reynolds said. “I sailed a Flying Dutchman in 1980 and all it is, is the Olympics. We were the favorites, but there was the boycott so we didn’t bother going to the trials.”

Reynolds was a close third in the ’84 trials behind Bill Buchan, the ultimate gold medalist, and Paul Cayard, the current world champion, also a San Diegan. Both competed here. Buchan, 53, stands 11th.

Cayard started slowly last week and made a late run that fell short. He could wind up second in the trials, as he did in ’84.

Coming in, Reynolds and Haenel were one of four co-favored boats, along with Cayard and the two previous world champions, Vince Brun (‘86) and Ed Adams (‘87). Brun, yet another San Diegan transplanted from Brazil, is second in the trials, Adams sixth.

“We were watching those guys all the time,” Haenel said. “In this regatta, there was no local advantage. Heck, wherever there’s a fleet race, we’re sailing against the same guys. Halfway across the world, we’re sailing against them.”

Haenel, 29, lives in Hollywood and, since he joined Reynolds in the spring of ‘86, spent the past two years commuting to San Diego by car or train to work with Reynolds at the trial site.

Reynolds and Haenel were second to Cayard in the worlds at Buenos Aires this year and later won the spring championships of the Western Hemisphere at Nassau.

Crew weight being critical, Haenel, 6 feet 3 1/2 inches and 235 pounds, said: “Everybody beefed up over the winter and thought they were gonna show up in Argentina as the heaviest crew.”

Then, for these light-air races, dieting was in order.

“I lost a little bit,” Haenel said. “I think I’m the same as Hugo (Schreiner, Brun’s crew) and (Steve) Erickson (Cayard’s crew), but we’re all about the same in combined weight, about 430.”

Especially in the Star class, the crew receives almost as much credit for a boat’s success. But do most people really appreciate what the crew goes through?

“Not only do you have to pull the strings, but you have to adjust the weight,” Haenel said. “You’re movable ballast. And in (changing) wind, like Wednesday, you’re up and down, sitting on the low side or hiking out on the high side, grabbing the jib as you go.

“In some boats, the crew calls the tactics. The way we work it, I feed Mark information--keep tabs on who’s going left, who’s going right, if they’re high or they’re low--and he determines which way we’re gonna go.”

The strain is worst, Haenel said, on “your knees, the front or the back of your knees, depending on what the conditions are.

“Half the time you have to lift yourself out of the waves if it’s sloppy, and that starts to wear on the backs of your legs.

“Sometimes it aches on the front because you have to droop-hike. You can’t go all the way out. Mine crunch and crackle a lot, but they’re holding together.”

He will have two months to get them ready for the Olympics.

In the Star class, the winner of a world championship is entitled to carry a gold star on his mainsail. Reynolds was asked if that would be as nice as wearing an Olympic gold medal around his neck.

He thought a long time before he answered.

“That’s a tossup,” he said.