Cover Stories: Going For the Cup

The America's Cup, yachting's great and garish grail, is a tumorous tureen no handsomer than a camel. In 1983 the news was not only that it was lost but that it was losable. A 132-year winning streak, the longest in all sport, was broken over the ample shoulders of San Diego Skipper Dennis Conner, the best and unlikeliest sailor in the world. He means to win it back this week.

Throughout the century and a third of challenges, lately spaced three summers apart, the dandruffy commodores of the New York Yacht Club (N.Y.Y.C.) kept polishing the silverware and admiring their own mugs. "It's a boat race," Red Smith used to like to write in the New York Herald Tribune, "in the horse-racing sense of the term." Meaning the result was pretty well arranged. If the rules were not rigged, they were at least geared for the defenders, whose original 1851 victory on the schooner America was dubious too.* When an appealing gang of Australians flew the Cup away on a winged keel three years ago and relocated it in a western backwater near Perth, only a few millionaires with wet bottoms were very disappointed. Only Conner cried.

Conner is not a rich man, though. Furthermore, he says he does not like to sail. As a matter of fact, he cannot swim. ("I spend all of my time trying to stay out of the water.") No more enigmatic character presides over any sport. At the top of his game, Conner can eat with Nicklaus, drink with Namath, offend with McEnroe, spend with Marcos and lose with Napoleon. With a straight face, as brown and

supple as an underinflated football, he calls 12-meter racing his hobby. But nearly everyone on the dock seems to believe he has singlehandedly killed it as a pleasure sport. "The weekend sailor has been shoved out," says Ted Turner, Captain Outrageous of 1977. Tom Blackaller, one of the advocates of leisure caught in Conner's relentless wake, mourns, "I'd like to get him the hell out of sailing. I think he hurts it." Conner sighs and explains, "What they're saying is, 'If I were willing to give as much as Dennis does, I could be as good as he is.' That's just an excuse to lose."

No Excuse to Lose is the title of Conner's 1978 tome, which he modestly refers to as the Bible. In 1983 his explanation for the grandest seafaring indignity since Bligh went home in a dinghy was that the best crew lost to the best boat. "Design has taken the place of what sailing used to be," he says. And now that Conner understands this, he doesn't mind. "I don't like to sail," he says. "I like to compete. I guess I don't dislike it, but my sailing is just the bottom line, like adding up the score in bridge. My real interest is in the tremendous game of life."

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