It’s America’s Cup by the Name Only

When the sailing ends on the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland later this month, the sport’s premier prize will belong to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, which has had it since 1995, or the Societe Nautique de Geneve in Switzerland.

Get used to it. The America’s Cup is not America’s cup anymore. The America’s Cup event was named for the schooner America that won the ornate silver ewer in Britain in 1851. The New York Yacht Club fended off 24 challenges from various countries until 1983, when an Australian team backed by entrepreneur Alan Bond wrested it from the NYYC’s representative, Dennis Conner, 4-3. Conner won it back for the San Diego Yacht Club in ‘87, then an unconventional billionaire, Bill Koch, successfully defended it in ’92.

Finally, in ’95 a persistent New Zealand won the Cup on its fourth try and took it back Down Under. Three years ago, there were five flag-waving American teams in Auckland on a mission to retrieve it. This time there were three. None reached the grand finale.

Thus, when defender Team New Zealand faces off with Switzerland’s Alinghi in the best-of-nine America’s Cup match starting Friday, Conner and the other American hopefuls will be wallflowers once again.

Conner, the event’s aging icon, was competing in his ninth America’s Cup. He isn’t sure there will be a 10th.

“There’s too many rules,” he said earlier this month in bowing out of the current competition, which has been marked by even more bickering than usual -- some of it instigated by Team Dennis Conner -- for an event notorious for bickering. “Maybe I’m just an old-timer, but we didn’t used to have these rules. The protocol is so difficult and the nationality thing is so hard to enforce, it’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s time for me to stop. I’m still living in the old days.”

As always, Conner, 60, had to hustle sponsorship. The two other U.S. efforts were funded the old-fashioned way, by billionaires -- OneWorld by Craig McCaw and Paul Allen, and Oracle BMW by Larry Ellison -- whereas Conner relied on sponsorship, primarily from software giant Computer Associates.

Afterward, Conner, whose Stars & Stripes boat was eliminated by Seattle’s OneWorld, 4-0, was quoted by AP: “While I’m somewhat disappointed, maybe more than somewhat, that the United States didn’t do better, I think it was good to have three reasonably strong teams here. I don’t think it was that the U.S. didn’t do a good job. It was just that Alinghi was better.

“It’s sad not to have the U.S. in the final but hopefully we’ll see Larry back,” Conner said. “It’s in my blood, but talk’s cheap and I have to go and raise the money.”

But the failures of OneWorld and Oracle BMW say that money isn’t always the answer. They had the best boats and the best sailors they thought money could buy -- many of those sailors from New Zealand and Australia.

Since the Cup went to New Zealand, Paul Cayard’s AmericaOne challenge has come closest of any U.S. team of reaching the final match. That San Francisco team was beaten by Italy’s Prada, 5-4, in a memorable challenger final in 2000. Oracle BMW and OneWorld were blown out this time.

Cayard, whose dream was to defend the Cup on San Francisco Bay, was employed by Oracle BMW but spent most of the campaign on paid leave, with no explanation from Ellison. Instead, Ellison brought back the fiery veteran, New Zealander Chris Dickson, as skipper after having banished him earlier because of discord with the crew.

Meanwhile, OneWorld was penalized twice for illegally possessing design information from Team New Zealand, but the penalties were too light to be significant in the final won-lost tallies. Alinghi and Oracle simply sailed better.

As a sideline observer, Cayard formed opinions on Oracle BMW’s shortcomings.

“Instability in the management and therefore a lack of leadership,” Cayard said. “There wasn’t one person that everybody respected who, on a daily basis, was making the decisions, setting the tone, setting the pace, creating the right environment to foster everybody’s best effort.

“People need to be motivated beyond a paycheck. When you melted it all down, people were there for the paycheck. There was no person who grabbed at their hearts and took ‘em beyond, and that’s what you have to do to win. You have to go way beyond the paycheck.”

By that same yardstick, Cayard likes Alinghi’s chances against Team New Zealand because of skipper Russell Coutts, another Kiwi who has been under intense fire in New Zealand for “defecting” after winning and then defending the Cup for his country.

“Coutts is a great leader,” Cayard said. “He’s kind of a quiet guy, low profile, but he’s a good guy, personable and cares about his people. They respect him and go the extra mile for him. [He is] like the Dennis Conner of old ... the leader, the skipper, the whole thing.”

Conner has rarely raced on his own America’s Cup boats in New Zealand, and Cayard was his hired helmsman at San Diego in ’95.

Whether even Conner in his prime would have made a difference is debatable. There are plenty of first-rate American sailors, and although they were distributed among five teams, Stars & Stripes was the only all-American boat.

But a comment Conner made after Stars & Stripes was eliminated didn’t sound like a vote of confidence for his crew, led by skipper Ken Read and including several longtime sidekicks.

“I think the boat’s a good boat and it still has more to go,” Conner said at a final news conference. “I am not disappointed in the boat. I am disappointed in our results because we could have done better. It seems like I always have an excuse, but this time I don’t think it’s the boat.”

Conner, who declined to be interviewed for this article, also said there wasn’t enough time to tune Stars & Stripes USA 77 up to speed. USA 77, the better of the team’s two boats, suffered a serious setback slightly more than two months before the challenger trials started. It sank off Long Beach on July 23, was retrieved from 55 feet deep the same day, then shipped to New Zealand for several weeks of repairs.

The America’s Cup is Conner’s livelihood. He is also his own chief fundraiser in a country where sailing is hardly mainstream, so it’s difficult to attract sponsorships. He might raise enough money to show up again, but competing against billionaires could he ever hope to win? Has the America’s Cup passed him by?

And if Conner can’t afford it, and the billionaires can’t get it right, it’s questionable when it will ever be America’s cup again.