To Sum It All Up, America’s Cup Was Snores Galore

G’day, mates . . . and g’bye.

America’s Cup is still America’s. More precisely, America’s Cup is still the San Diego Yacht Club’s.

More important, the event remains San Diego’s.

New Zealand has come and been conquered. It came with a gimmick challenge but lost to a gimmick boat.

This whole regatta, both days of it, went as New Zealand feared it would and San Diego hoped it would.

Drama? Pass the soap opera.

Excitement? Pass the caffeine.

Surprises? Pass the Cracker Jack. New Zealand brought a magnificent 133-foot yacht for the occasion, but made the mistake of racing it. Michael Fay should have put an engine in it and used it as a spectator boat.

Against another such yacht, New Zealand might have been competitive . . . but it was not matched against another such yacht. Putting the Kiwis’ monster monohull against the Stars & Stripes’ catamaran was like taking a limousine to Indianapolis. It was a comfortable way to get there, but don’t take it out on the track for heaven’s sake.

The Kiwis will go to court to protest that such a mismatch was unfair and illegal, and that is too bad. They made a renegade challenge according to the musty, dusty Deed of Gift, and they got outsmarted by a maverick defense, which also seems to be within the parameters of the deed.

To win this on the water, the Kiwis needed tremendous good fortune. In fact, they could not win it on the water. Stars & Stripes would have had to lose it by tipping over or breaking the mast or, as Dennis Conner warned, simply getting lost.

Getting lost? A dolphin will get lost in the Pacific Ocean before Dennis Conner does.

Consequently, Conner simply had to keep his cat from coming apart, and this untimely challenge would be swatted aside like some pesky canary.

With a substantial lead Wednesday, Conner chose to sail his fragile craft in a most conservative manner . . . and got ripped by the Kiwis for unsportsmanlike conduct. They suggested he should have won by a far bigger margin than 18 minutes 15 seconds.

This was, of course, a new twist on the American definition of sportsmanship, which dictates that a soundly thrashed foe not be subjected to undue embarrassment. By the Kiwis’ definition, Oklahoma would play its first team for 60 minutes against Otterbein.

This sort of bickering set the stage for the formality of Friday’s finale. And it was a mere formality, because Conner was a little too smart and a little too conservative to recklessly endeavor to defeat the Kiwis by as much as they seemed to want to be defeated.

New Zealand engaged Stars & Stripes for maybe the first 15 minutes, but I don’t suspect this caused any increased blood pressure on the catamaran. By the time they hit the first mark, Stars & Stripes was already ahead by 10 minutes . . . and it had not gotten to the two legs where it figured to have the greatest advantage.

Conner continued to skipper conservatively, not even bothering to put up one of his billowing billboards for the Sunday sail to the finish. By the time Stars & Stripes was on the homeward leg, it could only have been beaten by a torpedo.

It was time to break out the champagne, and the outcome was such a foregone conclusion that the Stars & Stripes crew had the bubbly on board. The first cork was popped almost simultaneously with the puff from the cannon that marked the finish.

Certainly, there would have been more excitement if there had been more anxiety. It would be party time, at least in the America’s Cup Village behind Seaport Village, but this was as predictable as a New Year’s Eve party. Everyone knew it was coming.

And so it has come, and ever so swiftly gone. America’s Cup ‘88, premature and therefore much smaller than its older brothers, will be a most interesting footnote in the history of these regattas.

What Michael Fay has done has been to disprove the saying that there is no second in America’s Cup competition, at least not a second-place finisher that anyone remembers. Because of the nature of this challenge and defense, New Zealand will be a remembered loser.

Of course, the most famous loser of all was Conner himself, the first American to give up the Cup when he lost five years ago off Newport, R.I. He got it back from Australia last year, and now he has kept it.

Fortunately, something has been learned from this debacle. The mechanism for an orderly defense for 1991 has been put in place. What Stars & Stripes has done is assure that San Diego will get a real America’s Cup regatta.

This is not to say there will not be controversy in the interim. The ambiguity of the rules and the nature of these competitors make smooth sailing all but impossible off the water.

And there is still that same old fly in the lotion. That would be Michael Fay. He insists upon his day in court, and this week’s racing won’t really be over until he is legally satisfied that a catamaran really was a legal defender.

Since the next regatta cannot begin until two years after Fay’s legal maneuvers are completed, it is impossible to predict exactly when America’s Cup XXVIII will start. The same man who forced an early regatta now threatens to cause a belated one.

Meanwhile, anyone interested in a couple of low-mileage racing yachts should contact either Michael Fay or Dennis Conner.