Thursday, March 4, 2010

The Shyster's Cup


Care for a spot of tea?

We recently invited a couple from our complex over for one of Deb’s four-star dinners. That’s where Deb does absolutely everything except sit around and watch me sound entertaining to myself.

Jim and Ruth are great folks, and while they have a couple years on us they’re a lively team paddling with panache into their golden years. At least that’s what I was thinking until Jim dropped what sounded painfully like a senior-moment bomb on the festivities.
The old coot was insisting that the America’s Cup had recently been fought over and won by America. Surely, I figured, it’d been a restless dream brought on by a prescription malfunction. Jim has had some health issues lately (he’s entitled), and judging by the number of pills I take every night I’m surprised either of us had room for desert.

While I’m not one of your typical zealots, able to recall every historical apex of my chosen sports fetish (Dude, was Arnie’s 1974 Augusta seven iron approach to Sixteen money, or what?), certain targets always light up the radar screen. I may not have a firm grasp of time, but the America’s Cup couldn’t possibly have snuck past me. I mean, I own a sailboat, and I’ve occasionally kind of raced it.

Yet sneak past me it did, and it’s just as well. Because long ago the quest for this most ancient of contested grails gave up any semblance of being an honorable, worse still gentlemanly (ick!) pursuit, prone to the tweaking of faux national pride.

At the dawn of my professional career as a cameraman I became involved in the Louis Vuitton Challenger Cup Series in Newport, where it was obvious to anyone with assisted vision that this was a jiggered game played by filthy rich white boys with nothing better to do as long as their respective ladies were comfortably engaged in comas. Yes, Louis Vuitton, he of the multi-thousand dollar handbag, aka loser swag.

Having been indoctrinated into the popular pastime of robber barons, I recall soon thereafter coming across a bizarre ad, run I think in that august weekly, Time, in which the local sailing consortium attempted to fleece from the most gullible of New World patriots financial support for a “defense” of the gaudy tureen claimed to rightfully belong to Joe the Plummer. You go, Denny, you zinc-encrusted gladiator! Protect our national dignity!
Mr. Conner failed miserably, as you may recall, and then succeeded miserably, and then failed yet again, the pudgy, over-baked sea serpent. But you can no more blame the guy for trying than you can any Lycra-encased Olympic “amateur” these days. Somebody’s got to pay for all this technology.

There ought to be a version of Funk & Wagnall that foregoes alphabetization for the logical association of like things, and the Olympic Games would butt right up against the entry for “non-profit” organizations. Because hoser, huge cash money is flowing through those scuppers, like a spring thaw in the Vancouver hinterlands.

Which begs the question, whom are we to root for? The American ex-pat living in Lucern and trained by Austrians, or Chinese kids coached by an American in Uzbekistan? And not that I follow hockey (unless Vinnie reads this, and then it’s Go Rangers!), but there was the coach of my Red Wings leading the Canadians against my America, we done in by the very bastard who, dressed as a Penguin, helped steal that other cup from my Motor City. Holy geez, it’s bound to give a simple man a clinical case of schizophrenia.

Back on melted water, no athlete better personifies the nature of modern sport than Kiwi Russell Couts, who finally wrested the cup from “America” for Team New Zealand, then went turncoat and shopped out his resume to Switzerland, for whom he pilfered the trophy from his own nation. He’s since followed the scent of money to Team Oracle, where his contracted talents contribute to the shuffling of overwrought metallurgy from yacht club to yacht club. What’s a fan to do these days but chant, “Go favorite corporate enterprise!”

Having blinked, I missed the two-race Deed of Gift event that went unnoticed by everyone but members of the engaged law firms. I started googling for the details, and the official America’s Cup site seemed too ashamed to even talk about it. It concentrated on happy thoughts of long ago memories of simpler times when people had servants, and fun statistics like the number of “unique visitors” to its website, which despite my hit I fear fell short of the daily views of Ashton Kutcher’s Tweets. Certainly Demi’s visage still stands a good chance of launching more ships than Valencia did this February.

It was that final arbiter of all knowledge, Wikipedia, that weighed in on the matter, in an amicus that was anything but wiki. This was a ground war waged in the wainscoted halls of jurisprudence, and had little to do with boats. It was all about spoiled little boys who’d grown up, but continue to scream “cheater” at each other from opposite ends of the playground.

It’s ironic that at a time when technology finally exists which would allow the proletariat a view of the once rarified "sport" of yacht racing (with live satellite feeds from micro-cams and gyro-stabilized stealth drones), the game on the water is nothing but an afterthought. But then the pursuit of The Cup has never really been about the sailing, has it, Guv’nuh?