A Clean Sweep

New Zealand's superfast Black Magic dusted off the U.S. Defender, skippered by Dennis Conner, 5-0

By E.M. Swift

Issue date: May 22, 1995

With dry eyes, or half-closed ones drowsy with boredom, San Diegans waved goodbye last Saturday afternoon to the most prestigious prize in yachting, probably -- let's hope, anyway -- for good. Big bad Dennis Conner had been beaten in the America's Cup for the second time in 12 years, this time by the Kiwis. Conner is the only American skipper in 144 years to have lost the oldest trophy in sports, and now he has done it twice.

At least in 1983, when Liberty was edged 4-3 by Australia II, Conner went down fighting. This time the man whose credo was once "no excuse to lose" went down fund-raising. "Never give up while they've still got green in their wallets!" seems to be Conner's new credo. Other athletes go to Disneyland after they win. Conner accompanied sponsors to the Magic Kingdom on May 10, a lay day, despite trailing the Kiwis' extraordinary yacht, Black Magic, three races to none. Meanwhile, back in the Team DC compound his crew was desperately taking apart the mast, testing new sails, doing everything it could think of to make its rented boat, Young America -- which Conner had leased from rival syndicate PACT 95 for a reported $300,000 six days before the first race of the America's Cup -- go faster.

One would think Mr. America's Cup himself would have wanted to be there to lend a hand. Not that the crew was surprised that he didn't. During the first lay day, when his team trailed 1-0 and had a new shipment of sails to test, the 52-year-old Conner went golfing with sponsors while helmsman Paul Cayard and the rest of the crew took Young America out on the water. The fact of the matter is that Conner was little more than a spectator on his own boat all spring. Cayard, tactician Tom Whidden and a top-notch crew handled the racing. America's greatest sailor had become an overweight CEO.

No matter. With New Zealand's win the Auld Mug is headed for bluer waters and better hands. The Kiwis, who first challenged for the Cup in 1987, built a 42-1 record on the water beginning in January and crowned their achievement by drubbing Young America in Conner's own backyard, five races to none. Did we say races? These shellackings were more like two-boat parades. At every rounding mark on the 18.5-mile course, Black Magic led like a float carrying the grand marshal, while Conner and crew chugged along behind as if sweeping up kelp and confetti.

The closest the U.S. team came to the Kiwis in any race was in the clincher on Saturday, when Young America finished 1:50 behind, a distance of roughly two fifths of a mile. The most lopsided loss came in the second race, on May 8, when the finest International America's Cup Class (IACC) boat the U.S. could design finished some 42 boat lengths, or 4:14, in arrears of Black Magic. It was the worst defeat suffered by a defender since 1871, when the British yacht Livonia defeated the American boat Columbia by 15:10.

In Auckland, where 92% of the televisions were tuned in, the America's Cup became known as the Slaughter on the Water. In the U.S. it was the San Diego Yacht Club's version of the Maginot Line defense. Cayard admitted he had never been in a match race in which the yachts were so badly mismatched. "I'm not to the point of crying, but I've never been in a race where I felt I had so little control over the outcome," Cayard said after Young America fell behind four-zip. "I basically feel I'm delivering the boat around the race course." Delivering it as if he were paid by the hour.

The debacle was an eye-opener for everyone. The three U.S. syndicates, which had spent some $55 million in the defense effort and were backed by such industrial powerhouses as Boeing, Cray Research, Ford and Hewlett- Packard, had built three boats that were roughly equal in speed. Equally slow. That tiny New Zealand (pop. 3.5 million) could build a boat that sailed rings around America's best was mind-boggling. The America's Cup is, after all, a design-driven competition. The fastest boat -- as opposed to the best sailors -- nearly always wins. "We never guessed the entire defense effort was so far off the pace," Whidden said last week. "We can't even engage these guys in a race."

From the very beginning the Kiwis did everything right. Led by 47-year-old Peter Blake, who is probably the most accomplished blue-water yachtsman in the world, Team New Zealand offered a case study in how to run a winning America's Cup campaign. You start with a leader who's universally respected. Blake has sailed in five Whitbread Round the World races, and he utterly dominated the 1989-90 event, winning every leg. In '94 he took four days off the record for circumnavigation of the globe, accomplishing the feat in a 92-foot catamaran, Enza New Zealand, in just under 75 days. Yet aboard Black Magic, Blake, who had put up the $75,000 America's Cup entry fee out of his own savings, served as the mainsheet traveler: A bona fide national hero and the syndicate boss, Blake assumed the role of a grinder of winches.

That set the tone. There were no hidden agendas among the Kiwis, no superstars and no frills. Their budget was between $14 million and $15 million -- less than that of each of the three U.S. syndicates. Little marketing was done for Team New Zealand until the last couple of weeks, when a half-million dollars was raised from the sale back home of 100,000 pairs of the lucky red socks Blake wore during races. "The 1992 [Kiwi] campaign got into the selling of clothing, and we saw that as a distraction," says Blake. "Plus we didn't have the money to get into retailing." Conner, by contrast, raised more than a million dollars from his two souvenir stores, selling, among other things, hundreds of watercolors that Mr. America's Cup himself had painted.

When it came to making the boat go fast, the New Zealanders cut no corners. One of Blake's earliest and best decisions was to build two nearly identical boats -- the maximum allowed under current America's Cup rules. The Kiwis were the only syndicate to do so. "We knew we wanted two boats, even when we couldn't afford them," Blake says. It enabled the New Zealand team to test rigging configurations, keels, sails and rudders and learn exactly how much faster or slower each change made the boats go. "We learned nothing about boat speed from the trials -- zero," said Blake, "and everything from the two-boat program."

To ensure that the original design was a good one, Blake hired San Diego resident Doug Peterson to create it with New Zealander Laurie Davidson. Peterson had been a key member of the design team that built America, the 1992 Cup winner. Peterson would have preferred working for one of the U.S. syndicates -- under the rules he had to take up residency in New Zealand for two years to qualify as Black Magic's designer -- but when he phoned Conner's camp to offer his services, he was told they weren't needed.

Blake told Peterson he wanted the sailors to be involved in the design process from the start. Everyone's ideas were welcomed and run through dockside computers supplied by Silicon Graphics. "Everybody participated in decisions," says Peterson, "as opposed to the usual way, which is having a design team over here, and the sailing team over there, and directors telling you what to do. The sailors were told everything."

The Kiwis were a team. They trusted each other completely, and they mistrusted nearly everyone else. They went so far as to bring their own security guards from New Zealand to watch over their Shelter Island compound. And they knew they had something special in their two boats, which weren't built until quarter-scale models had been wind-tunnel tested and tank tested for a year. The first time they took Black Magic on the water, off the boat's home city, Auckland, they discovered they were sitting on a rocket ship. Sailing against New Zealand's 1992 entry, NZL-20, which was one of the better boats from the last generation, the new black boat destroyed it. Recalled Peterson, "That first day [tactician] Brad Butterworth came back and said, `My god, it's like a different class of boat.' "

Whereas the Aussies won the America's Cup in 1983 because of one technological advance -- the winged keel -- Black Magic was a breakthrough because of a combination of factors. It has a very stiff mast set farther aft than that on any of the other IACC boats, almost directly above the keel. Its mainsail is flatter, its headsail larger and rounder. The spreaders on the mast are smaller than those of any of the other yachts. All of these factors allowed Black Magic to sail closer to the wind than any other IACC yacht, which meant it had to cover less distance during the three upwind legs. Against Young America the Kiwis' average gain in each of those legs was a staggering 43 seconds.

The American defenders suspected they were lagging behind the challengers all along, but they were too busy making back-room deals, rewriting the rules, protesting each other's actions and generally dragging the reputation of the event through the mire to do anything of substance about that shortcoming. Conner's original boat, Stars and Stripes, was clearly slower than Young America and the third American yacht, Mighty Mary, but his team's superior sailing overcame that obstacle, and Conner semimiraculously earned the right to defend. At that point he exercised what passes these days for Yankee ingenuity. He jettisoned Stars and Stripes, replacing it with Young America -- a sleight of hand that proved the final straw for Blake and the Kiwis. "If we are fortunate enough to win this event, we're going to clean it up," Blake vowed on the eve of the first race. "We're going to make an event where people will want their sons and daughters to get involved with sailing because they see they can have a fair sporting chance of winning the America's Cup. We're not going to have rules that are different for one side than the other."

That sentiment alone was reason for many, perhaps most, Americans to root for the Kiwis. DENNIS CONNER WAIVES THE RULES, BUT NEW ZEALAND RULES THE WAVES read a T-shirt that became ubiquitous along the waterfront of Shelter Island. At the America's Cup Ball the cheers for the Kiwi crew were twice as loud as those for Team Dennis Conner. None of that went to the New Zealanders' heads. Mindful of Conner's well-deserved reputation for dragging his great belly off the mat, the Kiwis barely cracked a smile until the fifth race had been won.

In March of 2000 the Kiwis will defend the Cup in Auckland. The New York Yacht Club will be the challenger of record, and Chicago, Osterville, Mass., and San Francisco are considered potential syndicate bases. But San Diego realistically is not. After three Cups marred by a renegade challenge, bankruptcy, boorish behavior and boring races, that city and the Cup have proved to be a bad match.

As Black Magic was being towed to the San Diego Yacht Club so its hands could accept plaudits for their victory, a cacophony of air horns sounded throughout the America's Cup harbor just off Shelter Island. On and on it continued, far into the night, more deafening and insistent than the celebration three years earlier, when the Cup was successfully defended by eccentric billionaire Bill Koch. Everyone, even Conner, seemed to recognize that it was time for a change of venue. "I think the people of New Zealand will breathe some fresh air into the event," the defeated CEO said. Fresh air and fresh faces are two things the Auld Mug could use.

Issue date: May 22, 1995