THE AULD MUG

On Saturday, September 27, 2003, at the MCG, in the middle of the football mayhem, some other genuine sporting heroes were saluted by the crowd.

Twenty years down the track an appreciative crowd saluted the men from Down Under. The crew who not only won the America’s Cup on Australia II -- but ended a 132-year winning streak for the New York Yacht Club.

Makes some footy club Grand Final droughts seem fairly minor.

There was skipper John Bertrand who brought Australia II back from the dead when we were down 1-3 in a best -of -seven contest. And he won 4-3. Remember this was our seventh challenge in twenty years. Our seventh since Sir Frank Packer with Gretel in 1962.

There was the money man (many would say the “funny money “ man Alan Bond) who finally prised the “auld mug” loose at his fourth multi-million dollar attempt. His money or yours, I am not sure.

Only England’s Sir Thomas Lipton of tea fame had tried harder with five expensive and failed attempts.

And there had been that eccentric French millionaire of ballpoint pen fame, Baron Bich. He once insisted on skippering his own boat and got lost in fog on Newport harbour and was ignominiously towed home.

Yesterday’s worthy tribute brought back such memories. I had covered the America’s Cup – all the disastrous, debilitating, losing ones – since 1967.

I’ve been married into the family of the wonderful, gifted, perennial loser

“Gentleman Jim” Hardy.

I even wrote my first novel about the 1974 America’s Cup. It was called Death at Newport and in 1986 it outsold Jeffery Archer in hardcover in Australia. Believe me when I say I KNOW about the America’s Cup.

The MCG salute made me flashback to that day – twenty years to the day – when Australia stayed up through the night to see if Bertrand and Co could do it across the world in Newport. Could finally end 132 years of sporting supremacy. And if you are honest you’ll admit that many of you went to bed when Australia II was nearly a minute behind with less than half the final race to go.

Ben Lexcen (formerly Bob Miller) had hit his bunk in despair. He was convinced his revolutionary winged keel had not done the job.

My flashback yesterday was, incongruously, to the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China. I had been making some internationally award-winning broadcasts from Beijing and Shanghai in 1983.

The phone jangled me awake in the pre-dawn hours. It was my then wife Jacki Weaver in Melbourne.

She was so excited she could barely speak. This most non-sporting of women gabbled that Australia was about to come back from the maritime dead and was about to win the America’s Cup.

She held her phone to the TV set and through the static -- from Newport, Rhode Island, through Melbourne to Shanghai – I heard the victory cannon sound to signal that the New York Yacht Club had finally lost The Auld Mug after 132 years.

I cried – because I had covered so many heart-breaking, headline-making, losing campaigns from Frank Packer to Alan Bond.

Gretel II, Dame Pattie (the “damn pity”), and the Southern Cross.

Names like Packer and Bond and Bich and Bertrand and Bus Mosbacher and Ted Turner and James Hardy filled our files but it was the quotes that probably best sum up those exquisite and aching times.

Especially because the New York Yacht Club committee were such a bunch of crusty old fogies in their tomato-red trousers and crested blazers. They had never even contemplated losing the Auld Mug.

Over the years they interpreted the rules in such a biased fashion that Frank Packer said “ complaining to the New York Yacht Club about a race is like complaining to your mother-in-law about your wife”. And he was right.

“Gentleman Jim” Hardy down 0-3 and with protests rejected was asked on his way to the dock one morning how he had slept.

“Like a baby. I woke up every hour on the hour and cried”.

Dame Pattie Menzies, wife of the former Australian Prime Minister, was asked how she felt having a 12-metre yacht named after her.

She told me it was quite a shock to pick up the local Providence RI newspaper to discover she had been hauled to “have my bottom scraped”.

The press centre for every America’s Cup was appropriately in The Armoury on Thames (pronounced “Thaymes”) Street. Appropriate because a lot of verbal bullets were fired there – mainly from Australian journos frustrated by the stifling, stuffy, press conference rules set by the NYYC.

The skippers would front after every race but all questions had to be in writing and all questions had to go through a pompous, ponderous, protective moderator.

At times it was Fawlty Towers meets Dr. Goebbels.

I ache that I wasn’t there when we finally made them unbolt it from their Manhattan club foyer.

It was an awesome sporting achievement. Down 1-3 in a best of seven against a country and a club that, for more than a century, made and changed the rules to favour themselves.

And a bunch of Aussies did it.

I do not like Alan Bond. He was once caught, at age 21, on premises with housebreaking equipment. In later, supposedly more sophisticated, years, he just broke into bigger houses.

But, with the America’s Cup, Bond, Bertrand et al, were truly sporting heroes.

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2003