COMMENTARY : America’s Cup Spat Sounds Silly, Indeed

Let’s get this straight: The latest quarrel in the America’s Cup is over when the challengers should show up in San Diego?

That’s it?

It almost makes the catamaran affair seem sensible.

The America’s Cup Organizing Committee, cast as the Gestapo in this comic opera, tells the challengers, “You vill have your boats here by Dec. 20!”

The challengers, who don’t plan to start racing until more than a month later, thumb their noses and pout, “If that’s the way you feel, we may not show up at all.”

All of this must be doing wonders for the image of the Cup, not to mention fund-raising by the ACOC and the syndicates.

But this is what happens when you have an event driven by massive egos and rules written in the 19th century.

The Deed of Gift has to go. Tom Ehman might agree. Ehman is executive vice president, general manager and front man of the ACOC--the guy who takes the heat. He already has taken a lot for over-producing the IACC World Championships in May. They didn’t need $75,000 worth of fireworks and Peter Duchin’s 80-piece society orchestra from New York to hold some practice sailboat races.

But that’s part of being sailing’s most progressive thinker--an advocate of on-the-water umpiring, pros in the Olympics and renaming the U.S. Yacht Racing Union to get the yacht out and build the sport’s appeal to the masses.

Ehman wears fireproof underwear. He’ll survive. It’s the Deed that should be burned.

It was composed by George L. Schuyler in 1887, when he gave the Cup to the New York Yacht Club. Now the principals twist the archaic document’s ambiguities whichever way serves their purposes, rather than relying on Schuyler’s naive confidence that “mutual consent” would settle any disputes and lead to “friendly competition between foreign countries.”

The San Diego Yacht Club found no glory in defending the Cup against New Zealand with a catamaran. It will suffer another self-inflicted shot in the foot if it allows its agency, the ACOC, to persist in holding the challengers to the Dec. 20 agreement reached last March. It was a compromise of the Deed’s terms requiring a challenger to declare the basic dimensions of his boat 10 months in advance, but the rule was written 104 years ago when the world was a different place, nautically, economically and politically.

The way it stands, each challenger--there are presently 10--must have its final campaign boat in San Diego by Dec. 20 and sail it throughout the competition, even into the Cup match in May. No substitutions.

However, the defender may sail one or more boats and bring a new one to the starting line against the surviving challenger in May.

Is that fair?

Ehman says it is, because “many of (the challengers) are better funded and have many more boats than the defenders.”

Is that their fault? Should the Chicago Bulls bench Michael Jordan to give the Lakers a chance?

What’s the big deal about Dec. 20 now? Why force the poorer syndicates to pay an extra month’s rent they can’t afford? Who will tell the beleaguered Russian and Yugoslav syndicates not to bother if they can’t make it by Christmas?

Paul Cayard, skipper for the richest syndicate, Il Moro di Venezia, takes up the cause of the little guys when he says, “If they arrive on Jan. 15, 10 days before the first race, is Tom Ehman, on behalf of SDYC, going to slam the door on that dream?”

Admittedly, extending the date also would help the rich syndicates, such as Il Moro, New Zealand and Nippon Challenge, by allowing them more research and development time for more boats. One must wonder how the one-boat challengers, such as Australia’s Iain Murray, feel about that.

By threatening to boycott the Cup, Ehman says, “The challengers are simply trying to gain even more of an advantage over the defenders than they already enjoy.”

But if the Americans feel intimidated by being outnumbered by 10 challengers to their two defenders, perhaps it’s time to encourage broader national participation by amending the policy that prevents a club from winning the Cup from another club of the same country.

Conner had to lose it for New York before he could win it for San Diego. If football were played that way, the Giants and Bills would have been playing to win the Super Bowl for Green Bay.

The protocol reached by competitors in ’88 to avoid such nonsense didn’t go far enough. What the Cup needs is an unbiased international body to administer the Cup, rather than a yacht club that is more interested in keeping it than staging an even contest. The SDYC and ACOC should get a divorce.

Meanwhile, the challengers will meet Oct. 3 at St. Tropez, France to talk it over. Apparently, they couldn’t meet at anyone’s yacht club because some of them don’t exist. That’s also a stretch of the Deed, which states challenges must be issued by “any organized yacht club . . . incorporated, patented, or licensed by the legislature, admiralty or other executive department . . . “--the inference being, not clubs created as flags of convenience for the Cup.

When’s the last time New Zealand’s Mercury Bay or Murray’s Darling Harbour had a meeting?

But the SDYC and ACOC could defuse the challengers’ meeting and save themselves a lot of grief by telling them it doesn’t matter when they show up, just so they have a boat picked to meet the defender on May 9.

Meantime, burn the Deed.