A Real Grind Down Under

After the race, skipper Tom Blackaller let me sail our 12-meter, USA , back to the harbor in Fremantle . Western Australia . It was like a gratuity from a wealthy man or an early birthday present. I was suddenly out of the grinders' pit, where I had spent the last 11 months at the winches, and behind the wheel of the America's Cup boat from San Francisco .

Tactician Paul Cayard didn't want to drive. It was Dec. 30, and we had just lost our third straight race to Dennis Conner 's Stars & Stripes in the semifinals of the challenger series. One more loss and we would be out, and Conner would be facing New Zealand in the challenger finals for the right to meet the Aussies for the Cup. Cayard sat on the deck in the very aft part of the cockpit, eyes closed, trying to sort out the hundreds of tactical decisions he had made through the long afternoon. The toughest part about America's Cup competition is that the boats aren't created equal; before meeting us in the semis, Conner and crew had widened the wing-lets on the Stars & Stripes keel, giving them a nasty speed edge that they wielded like a chain saw Cayard's job was to coax our boat in front of Conner's Today it hadn't happened.

I have to give Cayard credit—he worked damn hard, like a before-the-mast slave and not at all like a rock-star sailor who only shows up on race day. Cayard had been there in Anderson's Boat Yard on the outskirts of Sausalito during the toughest, longest, most miserable days of the program last summer, when we scraped two-man longboards covered with sandpaper across the aluminum hull—"fairing" it's called—making it as smooth as heaven-spun silk. We started with 36-grit sandpaper and finished with 600-grit, going at it 18 hours a day seven days a week This was as much a part of the America's Cup as riding the fine roller coaster over the thick abrupt waves off Fremantle .

Blackaller didn't want to drive the boat back to Fremantle , either. His hands had been nailed to the wheel since we had left the dock seven hours earlier, and he was ready for a break. Blacky strolled the foredeck, inspecting the mast and boom fittings, looking over the Indian Ocean toward Madagascar, looking at nothing in particular.

What was this old warrior thinking? Was he wondering if the results had been worth his time? For any competitive ocean racer the America's Cup is the ultimate quest, but now he was very near to losing a third campaign, losing to his nemesis, Conner. Blacky had a page full of excuses if he wanted them: shaky crew work, inadequate funds, faulty boat design. But the responsibility for the final result—win, lose or sink—rested on his shoulders.

TDB, Thomas David Blackaller Jr., was permanently etched on the chalkboard at the USA compound that listed the crew for the next day's racing. Blackaller, 47, was the heart of our syndicate and the money-raising effort to pay for our two boats and a million dollars worth of sails; he had also skippered USA in all but one of the races in our 23-14 Cup campaign.

USA was the most revolutionary boat in the 12-meter fleet, a loony beast with a unique front rudder, an aft rudder the size of a barn door and a secret keel nicknamed the Geek. (I can now reveal that the Geek was a 22,000-pound, torpedo-shaped hunk of lead that was suspended below the hull by a small blade of stainless steel.) The boat wasn't finished until June '86, which didn't give us much time to learn the techniques for making her go fast. We might have overcome that obstacle by practicing like maniacs. We didn't The reason was simple: Blacky hates to practice; he likes to race and nothing more.

Still, he and his beautiful wife, Christine, would have looked good in a parade up Market Street, the Cup bolted to the front of a Cadillac.

While Blacky and Cayard were thinking, I was driving. After all this time as a grinder—working the winches that trim the jib and the spinnaker—I only now noticed how compact the boat looked from this vantage point. From here the grinders' pit looked smaller than a phone booth, and the bow seemed only a few yards away. I should have ventured back here earlier.

Sailing was a new sport to me. I had won a gold medal rowing a double scull in the '84 Olympics, and over the last year I had learned to apply my strength to the winches. This adventure had started with a phone call from a rowing friend, Bruce (Sheik) Epke, who called me at my home in Corona del Mar , Calif. "Come on up and do some sailing." Sheik had said. "We need a grinder." So I learned to grind, which wasn't too difficult. The hard part was surviving the on-shore work marathons and what, to the uninitiated, resembled on-the-water chaos.