Chaos Reigns as Rules Go Overboard in Cup : America’s Cup: Instead of staging winner-take-all race, officials make everyone a semifinalist.

It’s the morning of the NBA Eastern Conference finals, Orlando and Shaq matched against Chicago and Michael. The loser is gone. Adios. The winner goes on to meet Western Conference champion San Antonio.

But wait. . . .

Here comes a news release:

“For the betterment of our great game, all three teams will advance to a 12-game series. San Antonio has the best record, so it gets a two-win head start going into the series. Today’s game is important because the winner will enter the series with one victory and the loser none. We think this is an exciting new concept.”

This is what unfolded Tuesday in the America’s Cup defender series.

The reason?

All the parties involved, including the San Diego Yacht Club’s defense committee, decided the controversy over Dennis Conner’s mid-round change of a damaged keel had affected the competition.

Conner had a semifinal victory annulled because he was caught with a keel that was seven millimeters too short.

“The San Diego Yacht Club can agree to do it in a different way than they started out,” Chuck Nichols, president of America’s Cup ‘95, told the Associated Press.

“The America’s Cup is not like the Super Bowl. We have a duty to get the strongest defender to the America’s Cup.”

At dawn Tuesday, the yachting world was abuzz at the prospect of a winner-take-all showdown between Conner’s Stars & Stripes and Bill Koch’s Mighty Mary. This was to be the final race of the semifinal series, the winner to face PACT 95’s Young America for the right to defend the Cup in May. The loser would be gone.

The implications were delicious. Conner and Koch are archrivals who have bickered off the water as much as on. Conner has been Mr. America’s Cup seemingly forever, and Koch was the maverick who knocked him out in the 1992 defender finals and went on to successfully defend the Cup.

By the time these two adversaries were on the water, the rules had been changed. The defender finals had become the semifinals revisited. All of the on-the-water sailing and off-the-water shenanigans of the last 18 days had eliminated nobody.

Conner, it turned out, was the beneficiary. The women (and Lonesome Dave Dellenbaugh) of Mighty Mary administered a mighty 5:59 whipping in the less-than-climactic climax of the semifinals, their largest margin of victory ever. With that humiliation, Conner would have suffered his earliest ouster in 21 years of America’s Cup competition . . . if the finals had not abruptly been turned into a y’all come affair.

Instead, Young America will have a two-win head start and Mighty Mary a one-win head start over Conner in the final series.

* HIGH-TECH TRIUMPH

Young America rewarded for taking technological risks. D1