Court Battle Doesn’t Make Good Case for America’s Cup

God must be a yachtsman, or yachtswoman.

How else to explain Monday’s miracle, in which a New York judge cleared the way for America to sail against New Zealand in September for the America’s Cup?

If you haven’t been following the ongoing drama, allow me to provide a simplified version.

America won the Cup back in 1987, beating Australia. America was very proud. One soup company even billed itself as “America’s cup.”

America planned to defend its title in 1991. Why so long between regattas? I don’t know. Apparently there’s a lot of cleaning up to be done on the boat between races.

New Zealand, not wanting to wait until 1991, challenged America to race this year for the Cup. Why New Zealand? Because they thought of it first, I guess.

“Fine,” America said to New Zealand. “We’ll race you. But look at your boat! It’s twice the size of normal America’s Cup boats. Did your carpenter misread the blueprints? That’s cheating.”

“Stop whimpering and get yourself a big boat, too,” New Zealand responded.

But America chose a slightly different tack. It got itself a boat with twin hulls.

“Hey, no fair,” howled New Zealand. “Two hulls are faster than one.”

“So sue us,” America said, and New Zealand did.

And Monday the judge ruled, in essence, “Shut up and sail.”

The two crews will do just that, competing on the “sail now, sue later” plan. After the race, the judge ruled, New Zealand can come back to New York and sue America for assault with a twin hull.

While the sailors sail, then, the case of New Zealand vs. America will be sitting on the docket of the bay.

The race itself will be merely a colorful halftime ceremony in this Courtroom Cup, a brief recess in a griping legal drama.

The race should be exciting, though, a classic duel between a monohull and a stereo hull.

New Zealand objected to the twin hulls, but confusion arose because the America’s Cup rule book, known as the Deed of Gift, is a vague document, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. Sort of like a campaign platform.

For instance, the Deed of Gift stipulates, I believe, that the Cup be contested every four years, or every 29 months, whichever comes first.

If baseball were run by the same system, the World Series would be contested between whichever two teams happened to phone each other first.

“We insist on 150-foot basepaths, rather than the standard 90,” the Dodgers would say.

“Sure you do, ‘cause you’ve got all the speed,” the Pocatello Spudpickers would sniff. “OK, we’ll give you the 150-foot basepaths, but we insist on a 30-foot high mound, and we get to use 13 outfielders, two of them on horseback.”

“Fine. See you in October.”

“Right. October of 1994. That’s the soonest we can squeeze you in.”

Who knew, when the Deed of Gift was drafted, that the world of international yacht racing would become such a contentious, nit-picky, cutthroaty world?

New Zealand claims the rules say the competing boats be “like or similar.” Sounds fair, but what does it mean? The American and the New Zealand boats are “like and similar” in that, during a race, they both get wet.

The American boat requires a crew of five, including skipper Dennis Conner. The New Zealand boat, only slightly smaller in total acreage than New Zealand itself, requires a crew of 40, including 25 people whose only purpose on board is to move from side to side on the boat, en masse, to shift the weight of the craft.

These 25 crew members, I believe, are referred to as boat potatoes.

The New Zealand yacht has regular sailing-type sails, the kind that are made of cloth and billow in the wind. The American boat has a rigid sail that operates like a set of Venetian blinds, and is probably a pain to keep dusted.

But all you really need to know about the America’s Cup is that it was a crackling good sporting contest that took a wrong turn about 20 years ago and sailed off the edge of the world.

It is now contested by lawyers and schemers and loophole threaders who would rather pull a fast one than sail a fast one.

The winner this time around will probably be determined in a New York courtroom, by a judge who probably doesn’t know a blorge glip from a foozenmast.

The race itself threatens to be one-sided and boring, unless both sides agree to allow the use of torpedoes. The New Zealanders claim that they simply can’t compete with the twin-hulled American monster.

“If it’s a mismatch,” a New Zealand spokesman has warned, “it will destroy the future of the America’s Cup.”

Now there’s a sobering thought.