Sport: Hit with a Bung Starter

When it was time for the two fishing smacks to make their getaway, the sea and wind was both in what they call a dead calm, which just about agrees with my sentiments in regards to this here race. If they want the fans to go out there and see them again next Tuesday, they better put on a double header for one admission.

Just as Ring Lardner warned, back in 1920, sports reporters who covered the America's Cup discovered that a yacht race rarely measures up in excitement to any old sixth at Belmont. Worse yet, most of the 241 reporters and photographers (44 papers, four press associations, 23 magazines) who uneasily went down to the sea in ships were landlubbers with no tongue for salty jargon.

They learned. Both the A.P.'s Will Grimsley and U.P.I.'s Leo Petersen had their own sailing experts in tow, and

Petersen spent nights studying yachting manuals and reference books. Other newsmen picked the brain of Yachting magazine's Managing Editor Bill Taylor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the event in 1934. Moaned Taylor: "The same questions from the same guys, over and over.'' The landlubbers also got help from amateur newsmen who had persuaded their home-town editors to send them off to the races because they were salty sailors. Blonde, blue-eyed Betsy Wolfe, 22, sleek as a twelve-meter yacht, and an old crewing hand, turned out so well for the Schenectady (N.Y.) Gazette that her salary was raised from $6 a story to $100 for the final week. Covering for the Canton (Ohio) Repository was Lawyer

Jake Hess, 32, a naval reservist who wangled two weeks of active duty during race time aboard a Navy tender that happened to be tied up in Newport.

Once they figured out what yachting was about, the newsmen still had to cope with the sea. They gulped Dramamine pills, borrowed folding chairs from a local funeral home, and perched their typewriters on anything handy—including loaded depth-charge cans—aboard a flotilla of seven Coast Guard boats. Nearly all escaped seasickness, although a CBS announcer in a blimp came down with a bad case of mal d'air.

Yet to reporters accustomed to sprints and serves, pitches and passes, it was rarely more exciting than watching grass grow. Between yawns, the New York Herald Tribune's, Columnist Red Smith got off a series of wryscracks that hearkened back to Ring Lardner and 1920: "Next to being smitten on the brow with a bung starter, there is no more effective soporific than watching a pair of sailboats race for the America's Cup. It is a spectacle calculated to make the tea break in a cricket test seem wildly exciting."