Conner Finds a Way--Again

Catfish Conner has nine lives. You can drop him, kick him, surround him and seemingly drown him. But you can’t kill him off.

Heaven knows, Bill Koch and his armada from America 3 tried.

Koch is not done trying, of course.

That’s the rub.

Dennis Conner had his back to Point Loma’s cliffs Monday. He had to beat Kanza in a sailoff for a position in the America’s Cup defender finals. It was do or die . . . absolutely no margin for error. Lose and he was finished.

Koch had a sword to his throat.

Instead, Conner skippered Stars & Stripes to a victory by 2 minutes, 12 seconds. The sigh of relief in the Stars & Stripes camp was hurricane force. It rippled the waters all the way to Italy and New Zealand.

The Monster is alive.

This man Conner is an ocean-going terminator. Just when you think you have him, you’d better take another look.

All Koch had to do was manage to win Monday and he would have had an intramural cakewalk to the America’s Cup races. The two finalists would both be from Koch’s America 3 syndicate. It might have been enough to bore Koch himself and surely would have put the rest of the yachting world into a coma.

However, Conner awakens this morning reborn.

Not only is he alive, but he is no l facing an America 3 armada. He is no longer out-numbered and threatened by Ac,63 manipulating races to affect three-boat standings.

Yes, folks, from now on it is mano-a-mano.

Stars & Stripes skippered by Dennis Conner against whatever boat, and one boat only, Koch chooses in a best-of-13 series beginning Saturday.

Strength in numbers has gone out the hatch for Koch.

This is the way it should be. The America’s Cup defender finals should be a competition, not an intrasquad scrimmage. If Koch had it his way, the finals would have been like standing on a freeway overpass and pretending you were watching the Indianapolis 500.

It was for the sake of competition that Conner’s victory Monday was so well received everywhere but Koch country.

It is probably comparable to all those years when the Boston Celtics winning, winning and then winning some more. Who would have wanted to see the Celtics get KO’d in the semis and the Lakers playing intrasquad games in the finals? No one outside Inglewood, right?

Amazingly, Conner became somewhat of a sympathetic figure through these exercises against Koch I and Koch II, whatever boats they might have been through a given series. America 3 had all the money and all the technology money could buy. Koch arrived with all these boats and Conner had to feel a little bit like the Germans on D-Day.

Stars & Stripes, the boat Conner won with Monday, is his only boat. It’s more than a year old. That may not seem like a candidate for an antique auction, but technological advances are so rapid in this sport that anything that old is more a candidate for carbon dating rather than carbon fiber.

A boat as old as Stars & Stripes is like a 30-year-old gymnast or 40-year-old wide receiver or 50-year-old pitcher. It should be sitting home with slippers and a scrapbook.

And yet here was Conner at the helm of the only boat he had in what was arguably his biggest race in nine years. He would have to make do. I figured he would find a way. I would bet on Conner if he was riding a Clydesdale in the Kentucky Derby, and it would take a Clydesdale to carry him.

The last time he had a race of this magnitude was in the 1983 America’s Cup finals. He lost that race in Liberty, like Stars & Stripes an overmatched boat in terms of technology. The difference this time was that he was in danger of being embarrassingly eliminated before this show left Bridgeport for Broadway, so to speak.

What happened, of course, was that Kanza, Koch and Co. never had a chance.

Conner came off the starting line like he was coming out of a corner with gloves on. He was aggressive and intimidating. Had Kanza been in a boxing match, it would have been stopped. Stars & Stripes led by 4:09 at the first mark. Kanza was closer Sunday when it wasn’t trying against its stablemate, America 3, the boat.

And so Koch will have to choose one of his boats--bet on America 3--and go back after Conner again. This cannot be a comforting thought in the A3 compound. Yachting’s Hannibal Lecter is loose again . . . and he’s hungry.

Not long after the race ended Monday, the P.A. system in the media center said that Stars & Stripes tender Betsy was playing the theme from the television cartoon show “Underdog” rather than “Top Gun.”

Forget it. This underdog stuff isn’t going to stick. Dennis Conner fits in that role about as well as, say, Anjelica Huston playing Mother Teresa. Big Bad Dennis has survived to become his usual ominous presence in America’s Cup racing.