SDYC Ready to Make Final Legal Move in America’s Cup Fight

Within about two months, the two-year legal battle between the Mercury Bay Boating Club and the San Diego Yacht Club over the America’s Cup will be history. And no one will be happier than Tom Ehman, executive vice president of the SDYC’s Organizing Committee.

“I’m sick of the whole thing, and I think everybody else is, too,” Ehman said Thursday at a press conference announcing that the SDYC had filed its final legal papers with the New York Court of Appeals.

The SDYC’s action is in response to an appeal filed in December by the New Zealand’s MBBC. The Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments from both sides in Albany, N.Y., on Feb. 8. A final decision is expected in March or April.

The MBBC, representing Michael Fay, has asked the state’s highest court to overturn a September 1989 decision by the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court that said the SDYC’s catamaran, Stars & Stripes, was an eligible yacht when it won the America’s Cup in a match race off San Diego a year earlier.

Ehman said “I can hardly imagine losing this one,” the sixth battle the SDYC and MBBC have waged in the courts dating back to September 1987.

“If we do lose, we’ll probably take our lumps and get on with it,” Ehman said.

Latham & Watkins attorney Mark Smith, who helps represent the SDYC, said the losing side at this level will have virtually no recourse.

“The only remaining option is to ask the (seven) judges to reconsider, and that is rarely done,” Smith said. “There is no basis for jurisdiction in any federal court.

“I’m just glad it’s finally over with. I hate what it’s done to this event.”

Ehman said the 43-page brief, prepared mostly by Smith, “convincingly refutes every argument advanced by Mercury Bay Boating Club.”

“I don’t think there has ever been a more detailed analysis of what the America’s Cup is all about than in this brief,” Ehman said.

Smith said he did not directly respond to the MBBC’s latest arguments in his brief, mainly because he didn’t think they carried much weight. Smith also said he is not worried about the “friend of the court” brief filed in the MBBC’s behalf.

Mercury Bay has gathered a number of other yachtsman and former America’s Cup skippers, including Ted Turner, to support its argument that the SDYC should forfeit the America’s Cup.

“I don’t think it really adds too much to the discourse before the court,” Smith said. “(The MBBC) doesn’t have any new arguments at all. It looks to me like it’s taking a poll. It’s a bunch of people coming in and saying that we prefer that New Zealand win. We could go out and get a bunch of people that say, ‘We prefer San Diego win,’ but we’re not going to do that.”

Ehman said he is already making plans for SDYC to be host to America’s Cup in May of 1992.

“We expect a record number of challenging nations and we have already agreed to the rules which would prevent this maverick challenge of the Mercury Bay Yacht Club, or something similar, from ever happening again.”