5

Dedicating a Competitor for the America’s Cup

OCTOBER 1986

 

About seventeen years ago I attended with my wife a state dinner at the White House, in fact for us the first. I was not intimidated by the presence there of our host, the President of the United States, whom I had met here and there, when he was engaged in climbing the grimier rungs that lead to that high office. But the prospect of being presented to him by the Chief of Protocol was positively unnerving. Getting dressed a half hour earlier, across the street at the Hay Adams, I said to my wife, “You do realize that the Chief of Protocol is Bus Mosbacher, who won the America’s Cup?” To which she replied, “You evidently don’t realize that you have told me that five times in the last five days.”

That night it was with great awe that I took the hand of Bus Mosbacher, staring at him as I suppose I’d have stared at Christopher Columbus, or Galileo. You see, in those days I used to do ocean racing quite regularly, and hard though we tried, we never managed, somehow, to come in with the winners. I remember, after my fifth Bermuda Race, being asked by a reporter what was my ambition during these races, disconsolately replying, “My ambition is to beat at least one boat.”

I managed, in the receiving line, to shake the awesome hand that guided the tiller that in 1962 had defeated the Australian challenger; and then to greet the president; and then to greet the guest of honor, who, by ironic masterstroke, was the Prime Minister of Australia, Mr. John Gorton. I remember thinking that surely President Nixon should have presented the Prime Minister to Mr. Mosbacher, rather than the other way around.

It was I think thirty years ago that I became a member of the New York Yacht Club and my sponsor, pointing to the Cup at 44th Street, said to me, “Do you know, more money has been spent attempting to win that Cup than was spent on the Spanish Armada?” Well, no, I hadn’t known this, nor did I know what was the anticipated reply to such an observation.

I remember groaning, at Cape Canaveral in July of 1969, when one of those awful people who wrote editorials said that for the cost of Apollo II, which was going up the following day to land on the moon, we could build 4,082 lower-middle-income dwelling units.

But one cannot parse life’s enterprises in any common coin. If Vladimir Horowitz had exercised his fingers on a sewing machine instead of on a keyboard, stroke for stroke, he might have stitched a blanket that would keep 82,000 Eskimos plus Mary McGrory warm on a cold winter’s night.

The sailing sport is an appanage of a class of enthusiasts who are aristocratically concerned with excellence at sea. For them no sacrifice is implausible. I think it’s a sign of great spiritual health that even as men risk their lives to ascend a mountain peak, others devote a part of their lives and the produce of a part of their lives to designing, and manning, the fastest vessel of its size in the world.

We will have the Cup back, but we will do this without severing diplomatic bonds with that young, robust, alluring country whose Prime Minister our sometime Chief of Protocol took such splendid care of back in 1969.

It happened that seated next to me at the White House banquet was a young Australian diplomat on the staff of the Prime Minister who served as his speechwriter. This he confided to me after a few bottles of wine, White House protocol having neglected only to remember to make draft beer available to that evening’s guests. And so, as Prime Minister Gorton waxed into a robust and affectionate speech about U.S.-Australian relations, his speechwriter’s face was caught in contortions of bliss as he heard pronounced, one after another, the words he had written. And toward the end of the toast he dug his elbow quietly into my side and whispered, “Listen! Listen! Listen now ...” Whereupon the Prime Minister, reaching for his glass to conclude his toast, declaimed to his distinguished audience, “Continue as you are, my American friends, friends of liberty, and friends of progress, and we”—my Australian speechwriter closed his eyes now in transport, in anticipation of the rhetorical coda—“we will go waltzing, Matilda, with you.”

Well now, the sentiment was lovely; the cultural embrace between the two peoples, enduring.

But on one point, there remains the need for a little clarification.

The America’s Cup belongs back here, because we are very lonely without it. Indeed I myself have pledged that until we have it back, I shan’t waltz at all, let alone with kangaroos.

So that, one day in February of 1987, at about four in the afternoon, in the waters off Perth, the Australians must know what it was that Cinderella experienced. It is a pity that such a reintroduction into realism must be done to Australia by so large a company of spirited people, above all the crews of our many contenders, but also their backers, among others the man who served as Chief of Protocol when the Australian Prime Minister was with us. But you see, the protocols of the America’s Cup are that it belongs in America: so that we are, after all, here engaged in nothing less, and nothing more, than a venture in repatriation.

Here’s to the American challenger. May she bring us back what we have come to regard as an American birthright, so that my wife and I can waltz again, under the Milky Way, when all is right again with our Cup, come home.