AMERICA’S CUP / RICH ROBERTS : Cayard Finding Exciting Serenity on Conner Team
Paul Cayard hasn’t had this much fun in an America’s Cup since, oh, eight years ago when he was the late Tom Blackaller’s tactician at Fremantle, Australia.
In 1992, with the helm in one hand and a cellular phone in the other, he was the skipper and hard-driving force of the late Raul Gardini’s Il Moro di Venezia syndicate all the way into the Cup match against Bill Koch’s victorious America 3.
This time, with Dennis Conner, he has all the best of it and none of the worst. He gets to steer the boat a lot and go home early at night.
“It’s more enjoyable, more relaxing,” Cayard, 35, said as the Stars & Stripes team prepared for the defender semifinals starting today.
Except for Conner, Cayard might have been left out. After Gardini committed suicide in 1993, Cayard tried to generate his own campaign in Italy, which by then was distracted by the government scandals that had closed in on his former boss. For a time, he was with a French team that failed to evolve.
“I figured my option would get picked up by somebody,” Cayard said. “Even before I stopped doing the Italian thing, Dennis called me in Italy in ’93 and said, ‘I just want you to know that you’ve always got a place here if things don’t work out.’
“My evaluation of this situation was that I wasn’t going to get as good a deal as it turned out to be. I’m used to being pretty important in any program I go to. I thought, ‘Well, there’s (tactician) Tom (Whidden) and there’s Dennis.’ ”
But with few other options and the boats filling up, Cayard jumped aboard Stars & Stripes. Conner assigned him to a loosely defined all-around role among the 16-man crew with the title of “instigator.” But soon he was steering the boat, not only for the starts but whenever Conner was away and then often when Conner was aboard.
Soon it became apparent that Conner had larger plans for Cayard.
“I thought that I would learn something even if I didn’t have a big role on the boat,” Cayard said. “Dennis has shown a lot of respect for my skills and has invested a lot more of the sailing side in me, and he’s also spoken about a future relationship that we might have.”
Perhaps Conner, 52, sees Cayard as the person to drive his boats as he steps back from the helm to manage his sailing enterprises.
“Certainly, the competitor in him resists that,” Cayard said, noting that Conner won the Etchells world championship on his birthday last year. “But the realist in him realizes that he’s not going to be as good when he’s 60 as he was when he was 40. He also likes making the deals.
Conner is the most recent in a series of men who have shaped Cayard’s life and sailing career. The first was Blackaller, who was a loud, fierce rival of Conner until he died of a heart attack at 52 while test-driving a race car at Sears Point.
“Blackaller was a guy who at a very young and impressionable stage in my life taught me how to compete in sailing,” Cayard said. “What things were important, when to go for the throat. He wore his personality right on his sleeve. It definitely had an effect on his opponents.
Later, Cayard formed something close to a father-son relationship with Gardini, the flamboyant Italian industrialist.
“Raul taught me how to be competitive in a life sense . . . in all the evaluations I had to make in being an American and doing the thing for Italy and what things would be important to my future. He also was a killer . . . very, very competitive. He got caught in a game the way the game had always been played in Italy, and people decided the game wasn’t to be played that way anymore.”
Dreading the disgrace of being arrested at any moment, Gardini put a gun to his head.
Now there is Conner--to some, a persona larger than the America’s Cup itself.
“Dennis is a person not too many people know,” Cayard said. “He’s a very generous guy, and he’s a thoughtful person. I never saw that as a competitor, but working for him, I’ve seen that he’s sensitive to my situation.”
Like Blackaller and Conner, Cayard has been a world champion of the Star class, which seems to be the crucible for great sailors, in some ways more than the America’s Cup. But it’s the America’s Cup that drives them to the greatest glory.
Cayard’s future is there somewhere. It could be with Conner next time, but he also feels the tug of his ties to San Francisco’s St. Francis Yacht Club, which sponsored Blackaller’s challenge in 1986-87. He grew up in the Bay Area before moving to San Diego in 1984.
“If the Cup is lost in San Diego, there is much more reward to go out and challenge for it,” Cayard said. “I have strong roots in the Bay Area. I could see that as an opportunity I might have a hard time passing up.”
America’s Cup Notes
The defender semifinals open today with PACT 95’s battered Young America meeting the America 3women’s new boat, dubbed Mighty Mary. Young America’s mermaid-emblazoned boat races Stars & Stripes Sunday. . . . The surviving challengers--Team New Zealand, oneAustralia, TAG Heuer of New Zealand and Nippon Challenge--also start their semifinals today. Each boat will race 12 times. France, Spain and Sydney 95 are gone, leaving the Cup without a European presence at this stage for the first time in a quarter-century.
