AMERICA’S CUP / RICH ROBERTS : Women Get Lecture, New Boat From Koch

They were late getting home, so to speak, and every daughter who has a strict father knew what to expect.

“He came down on us pretty hard,” Leslie Egnot said.

But if you’re going to have a patron, why not have one worth about two-thirds of a billion dollars? It just needs to be understood that his patience has a limit. When you have a 3-12 record, does he give you the keys to a new boat?

“We’ve been trying to be very nice, gentle and encouraging with them,” said Bill Koch, the man behind America 3’s all-female crew in the America’s Cup. “But after a while, you need to hit somebody over the head with a 2-by-4 to get their attention. I was just tired of them making all the mistakes.”

So after the women blew a race against Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes by 68 seconds--never mind that a lot of people have lost to Dennis Conner--Koch climbed aboard the boat and got their immediate attention.

“I said, ‘If you don’t think you can win, get out of here. Leave. We only want people here who believe they can win,’ ” he said. “I swore at them. Raised my voice. Got emotional.”

Koch cried a lot when it cost him $68 million to defend the Cup with a men’s crew in 1992, and the tears will flow like wine from his connoisseur’s collection if the women don’t make the most of the new boat he’s giving them for the subsequent rounds.

With one race remaining in the third of four round-robins, they are 3-12 with the old America 3boat that won in ‘92, although they have led in several races and been competitive enough to make believers of early skeptics who thought they didn’t have a chance.

Peter Isler, the world-class match racer and TV commentator whose wife J.J. is starting helmsman and tactician on America 3, said, “If the (new) boat’s fast, they not only could win the defender trials, they will win.”

Koch isn’t that confident, but he was sufficiently encouraged by the women’s improvement in nine months of training to order a new boat last October.

“We thought America 3would be competitive, but there would be less than a 50-50 chance they could win,” Koch said. “With a new boat, we thought we could increase those chances to about 70%.

“The question of their winning will be, can they stop making mistakes? I believe they can. We’ve already proven that they’re strong enough--they can go 39 tacks on one leg--and that they handle the boat just as well as the men can. So now it’s down to a head game.”

Egnot, 31, born in South Carolina and raised in New Zealand, won the helmsman’s job in the first round in January and has evolved into command of the boat, although Koch has not yet awarded her the skipper’s title he carried in ’92.

“Tactically, we’re doing the best job we can,” Egnot said. “We have no excuses for the mistakes we’ve made, but we’ll learn, and we won’t make the same mistakes again.”

The women have made two points: they are strong enough and they are tough enough. Bowman Susanne Nairn, 27, displayed a scar under her right eye from a skirmish with the 100-pound spinnaker pole.

“I had 12 stitches,” she said. “We were using our new racing pole, and I didn’t know how much it was going to recoil under a load. I didn’t have my face out of the way.”

Nairn is the smallest crew member at 5 feet 3 and 135 pounds, but Koch and Worthington found enough 165-pound female bodybuilders and Olympic rowers for the muscle positions on the 16-person crew.

Their rivals have acknowledged their strengths, particularly their ability to tack the boat upwind, and Tom Whidden, Conner’s tactician, expressed concern about how strong the women will be with their new boat. Conner and PACT 95 already have been sailing the only new boats they’ll have.

“Knowing Bill Koch, he’s probably got a very nice boat (coming), so naturally we’re concerned,” Whidden said.

PACT 95 skipper Kevin Mahaney withheld judgment. “Like Christmas, until you unwrap the packages, you don’t know what you’ve got,” he said.

Said Nairn: “We learn a new thing every day. Maybe by the time the end comes around we’ll have learned enough to beat the masters of the game.”

Notes

The women wind up the third round-robin against Stars & Stripes today. . . . The fourth round-robin starts next Thursday. . . . All 10 syndicates will hold open houses at their compounds Saturday. Details: (619) 221-1995.