AMERICA’S CUP ’92 : Hired Gun Just Doing His Job

It is time to salute Paul Cayard, Il Moro di Venezia’s red, white and blue skipper.

He has become the central figure in the 1992 America’s Cup racing, which resumes today when Il Moro jousts with America 3 and its skippers-by-committee.

Indeed, Paul Cayard has become to the 1992 event what Dennis Conner was to the 1987 racing off Fremantle.

That the America’s Cup world should spin around the Italian skipper is appropriate, because it was an Italian skipper who was the first European to land in America. That would, of course, have been Christopher Columbus, a hired gun who won the booty for Spain.

Cayard, too, is a hired gun. Bill Koch, chief of the America 3 syndicate, has made light of this, saying he would never sail on an Italian green card. His suggestion was that Cayard is somehow unpatriotic. Koch need not worry about such a possibility, because he is not good enough at the helm to be hired by anyone but himself.

This is just an example of the controversy which seems to swirl around Cayard.

I have no problem with this hired gun stuff. I know, he has hired out and come back to compete against the United States. Big deal. Our security is not exactly threatened by the whereabouts of a 141-year-old vase with no bottom.

Paul Cayard is a pro doing his job in a sport . This is fun and games stuff, not exactly nuclear secrets.

That Cayard is representing Italy is nothing compared to such perilous possibilities as Tony Gwynn playing for the Dodgers. It’s still the world of fun and games, but that would be much more bothersome to the multitudes hereabouts.

So ease off on Cayard for getting paid to do the job a professional is paid to do.

And what has he done?

He virtually talked the Kiwis onto a plane back to New Zealand. Il Moro was absolutely dead in that challenger final series. It was trailing 4-1 in a best-of-nine series before Cayard started blowing.

He hammered at the issue of New Zealand’s bowsprit, which had seemingly been resolved. He went before a jury and he won, causing the Kiwis to lose that fourth victory in what was declared a non-race.

In the aftermath of that decision, after so much of Cayard’s huffing and puffing, New Zealand sailed the remainder of the series in his disturbed air and never won another race. He had taken on a superior boat and beaten it by making its afterguard tentative and bewildered.

This was vintage Dennis Conner.

Find a way to win. Period.

As good as he is at reading wind shifts, Conner is even better at reading minds . . . and getting inside them. He had the Aussies so bamboozled in 1987 they almost thanked him for picking their pockets and absconding with the Cup.

Cayard is doing the same thing here.

He became a sympathy figure after Il Moro blew the start with a colossal blunder in the first race Saturday. He stepped up and took the blame. He was sincere and apologetic. If Richard Nixon had been as up front, Gerald Ford never would have been president.

Anyone who knew a damned thing about it knew that it was not Cayard’s fault, at least not entirely. Getting off the line on time is truly a team thing. However, Cayard, the captain, chose to sink his own ego.

And he popped to the surface with a smile. He always seems to have this sort of knowing half smile, except he is usually the only one who knows why he is smiling. He talks in this sing-song rhythm, accenting his points in such a way as to leave no margin for argument. He smiles and sing-songs and he is believed.

He was believed when he said he made a fundamental mistake Saturday . . . and he was smiling.

And then he went out Sunday and won the closest race in the history of America’s Cup finals. He got the jump at the start and then fought off challenges from a faster boat, very serious challenges on at least three occasions excluding that incredibly close finish.

The finish was masterful. Cayard, on starboard, forced A 3 skipper Buddy Melges to duck behind him and then held off A 3’s charge to that elusively invisible finish line. The billowing of his spinnaker gave him the victory.

Experience in close finishes with New Zealand, two races decided by one second, may have been enough to give Cayard that very small edge he needed.

I don’t know what the Italian translation might be, but you can call him Cardiac Cayard in these waters.

“I must say that Paul did a brilliant job,” said A 3’s Koch. “He is perhaps the second best sailor in the world.”

Dennis Conner, Koch reiterated, is No. 1.

However, Paul Cayard is on his wind too.