Cup Must Battle Other Sports for Media Space

John Curley, executive sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, has this nightmare and it goes like this: “I’m afraid of being faced with a situation where we have a headline, ‘Conner Loses the America’s Cup, See Page 5.’ ”

He is not alone, as sports editors throughout the country try to gauge where the upcoming America’s Cup races in San Diego between New Zealander Michael Fay and American Dennis Conner fit on a plate already brimming with athletic fare.

Sailing’s most prestigious contest, scheduled to begin exactly a month from today, has the misfortune of being just one more item on a list that already makes September one of the busiest times of the year for American newspaper sports staffs. Competing for attention will be the U.S. Open tennis tournament; the Olympic Games, which start Sept. 17; baseball pennant races; college football, and, probably the biggest magnet of all, NFL football.

‘Timing Is Brutal’

“The timing is just brutal,” said Bill Knight, sports editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which covers an area rich in sailing tradition. “We’ve got the (NFL) Seahawks, the (University of Washington) Huskies, two of our people will be at the Olympics. . . . We’re stretched pretty thin.”

To varying degrees, it’s a refrain being repeated in many newsrooms big and small throughout the land. But linked to the questions of how newspapers and other media will cover the America’s Cup is a more subtle issue as well.

When Conner won back the Cup in Fremantle last

year, millions of Americans stayed awake into the wee hours watching live television coverage of the event provided by the cable network ESPN. For a sport that traditionally had been associated with the rich and the elite, a point repeatedly emphasized by the blue-blazer haughtiness of the New York Yacht Club, the impact was both surprising and positive.

Harmonious Chord

It certainly appeared that the Cup races had struck a harmonious chord with America’s middle-class sports fans, folks who know their baseball and football but who probably wouldn’t recognize a spinnaker from a halyard. What they know and appreciate, though, is an athletic contest, especially one heightened by nationalistic overtones.

That development, coupled with foreign attention that traditionally followed the Cup, has in the ensuing year led people such as Tom Ehman Jr., chief operating officer of the Sail America Foundation, to state that the Cup regatta, as an international event, is now on a par with the Olympics and the pinnacle of soccer, the World Cup.

The test of whether such comparisons are hyperbole or not won’t occur this September, with a weeklong one-on-one match race supplanting a months-long multinational regatta. What is at stake, though, is whether the contest will again attract the American neophyte Cup fan, who, race officials say, is critical to the long-range future of the sport.

And that’s where the information middlemen, the media and their perceptions of the race, come into play.

“The whole ridiculous nature that it’s been has cooled our ardor for it a little bit,” says Bill Griffith, assistant sports editor of the Boston Globe, who noted that reaction among his paper’s readers--many of whom are sailing buffs--to this America’s Cup so far has been “total apathy.”

“Usually we get complaints from sailing people that we’re not doing enough coverage,” Griffith said. But now, he suspects, “they see gamesmanship as opposed to athletics.”

Almost from the moment the Cup returned to the United States last year, the event has been wrapped in a cocoon of confusion, controversy and chaos. First there were lengthy and bitter discussions between the San Diego Yacht Club and Sail America over where the defense would be held, a matter that wasn’t settled until after an arbitrator was brought in to calm the fray.

Unprecedented Challenge

Then there was Fay’s unprecedented challenge, which further muddled matters for months as the issue reverberated in a New York courtroom, bringing to public attention the arcane rules and regulations that govern the race.

Then it was only a few weeks ago that a New York judge finally cleared the way for the race to go ahead, and it was only 10 days ago that the dates for the contest were set.

Like most other editors, Griffith thinks the Cup story will rate front-page play in the sports section for the first race, but if it turns out to be a one-sided drubbing by Conner’s catamaran over the Kiwis’ monohull, “then it will be difficult to get the second race on the page.”

The Globe, which sent two reporters and a photographer to Fremantle, will cover the match with one sports writer. Normally, Griffith said, he would have sent out a columnist as well, but the confusing nature and late scheduling of the contest has preempted that option.

Aware of Difficulty

People at the Sail America Foundation, the organization putting on the races, and in the Stars & Stripes syndicate are well aware of what they’re up against.

As recently as three weeks ago, officials at Sail America were saying they expected as many as 3,100 reporters and media representatives to cover the competition. But now it’s apparent that the number of reporters, both from the United States and abroad, will be closer to about 700. While still a formidable herd, it is smaller, for example, than the 2,300 media people--1,000 of them reporters--that descended on San Diego for last January’s Super Bowl.

“A lot of papers have said that they’ll just pick up (coverage of the race from) UPI and AP stories,” said Tom Mitchell, spokesman for Sail America and himself a former television news director at a San Diego station. “We won’t have the whole mass group” of international writers and media like that which accompanied the regatta last year in Australia.

Stayed Home

The main reason for that, say officials, is that last year the various nations competing for the Cup--Italy, Britain, France, Canada and five U.S. entries--were accompanied by reporters from those countries. But with the contest this year solely between one boat from New Zealand and one boat from America, many of them decided to stay home.

For those reporters who do end up in San Diego, they will find themselves at the old police station on Market Street, part of which is being renovated into the “Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Media Centre.” The company is spending about $500,000 to remodel and operate the new center, which will contain a 17,000-square-foot working press area, an outdoor cafe and a press conference area in the station’s old courtyard.

The event next month will begin on Wednesday, Sept. 7, with the second race on Friday and the final race, if necessary, on Sunday. The unusual midweek start owes both to the competition from other sports and the dictates of television.

“This is primarily a television event,” Mitchell says, because the current tentative course 20 miles out to sea will make it difficult for spectators to watch the races without a television, even on the 3,000 to 4,000 boats expected in town to view the contest.

Won Accolades

ESPN, which won accolades for its coverage from Fremantle, will again televise the competition. In order to drum up interest, the cable network last Monday began the first of several shows aimed at both previewing and promoting the race, a routine that will continue each Monday for the next month.

The network hopes that its production, which is to include multiple cameras and microphones on the boats, as well as camera shots from helicopters, will be so good that it will entice fans who now may be turned off by the off-water legal war and uncertainties that have dogged the event.

“It’s been difficult to gauge up to this point the interest in this because it’s been so uncertain,” said Chris La Placa, spokesman for the network. “We haven’t had a whole lot of time to develop a (Cup) series, particularly when compared to something we’ve known is definitely going to happen for some time.”

‘Just the Finals’

“The thing is, we don’t have a whole series of documentaries and profiles and previews working up to the finals. We just have the finals, and they could be over in two races,” La Placa said. “In Fremantle, we had six to eight months of strong buildup and thus the audience had an awareness. So to that extent, there are some inherent disadvantages.”

But La Placa and Cup officials believe that this contest has received so much publicity--from the courtroom to the vast differences between the two vessels--that most sports fans are aware that the race is definitely on.

“I think there will be such sheer curiosity about the boats and that will win the day, and people will find it very exciting,” says Lesleigh Green, spokeswoman for Stars & Stripes. “I think there’s a lot more interest in this than even we thought,” Green said, explaining that last Sunday, the syndicate held an unadvertised open house and still 7,000 people showed up to look at and touch the boats and fixed-wing sail on one of the catamarans.

Focus on Boats’ Designs

It does seem clear that media interest in the contest centers on the disparate design of the two crafts.

“This time it’s going to be a freak show,” said John Wolin, a sports editor at the Miami Herald, which is sending its boating writer to cover the event. “Miami is a boating place so it’s an important issue for us. You just wish it wasn’t happening when it is.”

And Wolin feels that just because there is intense competition for limited space in his paper’s sports section that shouldn’t make the Cup races any less interesting. “Just because there’s a lot of competition doesn’t mean it’s no longer important,” he said. But at the same time, he said, if Conner’s catamaran wins the first race by two hours, then the event is instantly deflated.

Similar Concern

Curley, the San Francisco Chronicle editor, has a similar concern, and that has to do with the best two-out-of-three format. “The preliminaries, which you don’t have this time, help build the drama,” he said. “We’re pulling for a best-of-seven series . . . if it stays the way it is, our concern is that the catamaran will have won and everything will be done and over with before people get a chance to get acquainted with the event again.” (The two sides announced Friday that they could not agree on a best-of-seven series. Without mutual agreement, the Deed of Gift governing possession of the Cup dictates a two-out-of-three regatta.)

Curley said his paper is sending its sailing writer and probably a photographer to San Diego, but had there been more time to plan and budget resources better it would have augmented them with another writer or a columnist.

For when it comes to fall, Curley and his colleagues readily acknowledge, it is necessary to serve readers’ major interest, and that’s football. “Nothing rivals interest in the (NFL) 49ers in this area. If this match comes down to a Sunday and this casual fan watching the America’s Cup or the 49ers, a great number of these fans will take the 49ers over the beautiful yachts in San Diego,” Curley said.

If that’s the case in an area with a strong nautical following such as San Francisco, it is even more prevalent in places such as Dallas.

‘In a Real Dilemma’

“We’re in a real dilemma,” says Dave Smith, executive sports editor of the Dallas Morning News. “Usually there’d be no doubt we’d cover it. But it seems to fall on the bottom of the list right now. We would have covered it in November or August, but there couldn’t be a worse time for us than September and October.”

“People here, the last thing on their minds in September is the America’s Cup . . . it’s the (NFL) Cowboys and college football that they’re thinking about,” Smith said.

That’s not to say that people in Dallas are blase about the Cup. Last year, when Conner was recapturing the Cup, Smith said, the paper received a lot of feedback about its coverage, but that so far this year, there is no evidence of rekindled Cup interest.

“The America’s Cup is a lot like Wimbledon and the Kentucky Derby, where people get caught up in it because of the tradition,” he said, “but now that tradition, because of all the troubles surrounding the Cup, is being taken away.

“The Conner folks are trying to appeal to a broader-based following, but these type of people don’t understand all the confusion over a catamaran and a monohull. The people who understand this are really the sailing experts, and there’s not a whole lot of them in Dallas, Texas.”