Commentary : New Ideas Are What Cup Is All About

Believe me, this has been the most fantastic America’s Cup of all. OK OK, I know . . . . The arguing. The bad blood. The once and future court appearances. The rest of the world left out.

Never mind all that. It has been fantastic . . . . Period. And, if the committees and designers and owners and syndicates and sponsors will just keep their paws off it over the next few weeks, the Cup as we now see it will be just fine.

Whatever you say about Michael Fay, the guy has brought this contest kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. A traumatic and premature birth perhaps, but he has done two marvelous things: He has made a stand for challengers’ rights--against a seemingly impermeable defenders’ monopoly.

And secondly, despite himself really, he has opened a Pandora’s Box of fantastic design. Designers have blossomed. Ideas that have been held hostage to conservatism have suddenly been given a touch of glasnost.

Look at the boats that have come out of the woodwork: Michael Fay’s aircraft carrier, Dennis Conner’s 747 on skis. Britain’s Peter de Savary’s 60-foot canoe. The Aussies’ 60-foot surfboard. Such a head of steam has been building up while those 1905-designed 12-meter tubs held a monopoly in the postwar years.

Then suddenly, with America’s Cup XXVII, anything went. Anarchy ruled, and--judges, committees and syndicates notwithstanding--the world out there on the water was a beautifully different seascape. And a catamaran, a class of boat that had never been accepted by the yachting establishment, stole the limelight.

Of course, Fay never really intended it that way. Sure, he saw his loophole in the deed of gift. Yes, he realized that an immediate challenge, rather than waiting with others for a 1991 invitation, gave New Zealand its best chance of grabbing the mug. But, behind it all, he was just a sentimental yacht fancier who wanted to get back to the great prewar days of the Grand Old Ladies: the J-boats. Michael Fay was looking backward , not forward.

But he opened the door, and when all that musty air was replaced with fresh oxygen, the moribund minds of boat designers sprang to life, and suddenly we were seeing unheard-of creations on water.

This hasn’t been a debacle. It has been an exercise in unrestricted progress. Unrestricted freedom, after years of suffocating rule by committee.

But guess who is now at the front of the line wanting to roll the tanks in on this Prague spring, to create committees to establish yet another monohulled, ballasted, conservative, restricted America’s Cup class? Why, the Boy Wonder From Down Under, Michael Fay himself. And, behind him, Bruce Farr, KZ-1’s designer. And behind him, Dennis Conner, desperate to get back to the safety of an old lumberer.

Their designers are already taking the cue and coming up with an “America’s Cup Package,” a “restricted monohull keelboat class” with maximum overall length of 85 feet--65 at the water line--sloop-rigged with no more than 16 crew members who must not weigh more than 3,080 pounds if tossed on the same scale. These guys . . . they’re punching holes in their own canoes, making sure they will never again have the chance to design the incredible boats we’ve seen trying to make it to this America’s Cup.

Can’t take a pinch of freedom, fellahs? Don’t you realize that next time, without any restrictions, designers will be hip to what wins Cups, and they’ll design for matches, not mismatches--yeah, sure, in kite boats, outrigger canoes, super-sailing surfboards. But what’s wrong with that? These are the fresh ideas of wind power. New ideas were what launched the first America’s Cup. It was the radical belly-bottomed design of the original “America,” as much as the niftiness of her crew that stole the Cup away from Queen Victoria’s subjects in the first place.

This is my deed of gift for future America’s Cups. First: Don’t change the deed. It’s fine! It survived this one, it can survive anything. Second: Remember Michael Fay’s original instincts: This is a Cup for the guy with the new idea. The challenger, in other words. The guy so hungry to win he’ll sail in a kite-driven submarine if that’s what it takes. Third: A lottery--not a manipulating defender--should decide the challenger of record. Fourth: Designers will be too smart to let such a dramatic difference between the challenger’s and the defender’s boats happen again. But, if it should, re-introduce what the America’s Cup always used to have: handicapping. Fifth: Don’t forget that there is still mutual consent. The world’s challengers and defenders can, if they want, decide to race a Cup in 90-foot ballasted monohulls. Just don’t try and etch personal preferences in stone and tie down future generations.

And remember, designers are 50% of this deal. Sure, sailors are important. They’re the pilots. But half the fun is seeing what the boffins will come up with next.

Yes, America’s Cup XXVII has been a difficult breech birth. But it is no back-street abortion. It is the most important moment in America’s Cup history since George Schuyler had the immense good sense to write a deed of gift that did not regulate contestants to death. That allowed changing times, tempers and technologies to move freely, as ‘twere, between the sheets. The gradual 20th-Century slide into defender-dominated Cups, which hampered new design and any rights among challengers wasn’t Schuyler’s fault. It came just because people had forgotten they had Schuyler’s “Bill of Rights.”

So don’t roll in the tanks, Michael! Don’t start spouting the need for stability and law and order in the Cup, Sail America. Forget the hard words. There are a surprising number of Cup lovers out here waiting with a feeling of dread as they see you and Dennis and all the other class-conscious power brokers of the yachting establishment waiting to bind this contest up tighter than a fly in a cobweb.

But if you can break away from your deeply ingrained habits of committees and rules and telling people they can’t challenge if their idea of a boat isn’t your idea of a boat, then maybe next time the whole yachting world can get in on a truly fantastic Cup full of the wildest ideas, and, believe me, still keep a match race.

Designers, once they know they’re free, know what works.