Dennis Conner
He doesn’t want to talk, but won’t let that stop him Sir Michael Fay reveals America’s Cup secrets
The Godfather of New Zealand’s initial forays into the America’s Cup has lifted the lid on some of the greatest secrets and scandals of the country’s early challenges for the “Auld Mug”.
As Team New Zealand prepare to launch their defence of one of the world’s oldest sporting trophies, Sir Michael Fay has opened up in a wideranging and exclusive interview about our colourful and at-times controversial Cup history, including:
Fay oversaw a succession of on and off water dramas while heading the three campaigns, but none was potentially as life-threatening as fears he revealed were held for the seaworthiness of the 120-foot long KZ 1 in its doomed “Big Boat” challenge against Stars and Stripes’ catamaran in 1988.
“We thought the keel would fall off anytime . . . seriously,” Fay told the Weekend Herald.
“We thought, ‘Oh well, maybe it will only have to last two races, so it should hang in’. Sometimes you have to take your chances.
“But it would have been a thing that you would have wanted to get off in a hurry if it started to go over. It would have been something to see if that thing had tipped over.”
As well as heading the syndicate — who challenged Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes for the Cup — he was also a member of its 40-strong crew.
Conner was dubbed “Dirty Den” due to his bitter feud with Fay and successive New Zealand challenges going back to the first during the summer of 1986-87.
He also infuriated the Kiwi syndicate and sports fans alike by deciding to defend the Cup against Fay’s “Big Boat” by racing a much smaller and faster catamaran.
Fay said the boat choice meant the on-water result in the series — which his team lost 2-0 — was a formality before the first race. But the challengers still kept the damage to KZ 1 a tightlykept secret during the series as “[Conner] would have had us to tacking left waiting for us to go over.”
KZ 1 is now on display at the entrance to Auckland’s Viaduct Basin in the CBD.
Fay — who put in the controversial challenge on behalf of the Mercury Bay Boating Club — was later awarded the America’s Cup by the New York State’s Supreme Court. That decision was later overturned on appeal.
The rich lister took charge of the 1986-87, 1988 and 1992 New Zealand challenges.
Blake — who Fay had onboard in a managerial role in 1992 — then headed Team New Zealand when it won the “Auld Mug” in 1995.
But Fay revealed Blake had taken some persuading to be involved in the America’s Cup; an event which is known equally for legal scraps, egos and dirty tricks, as it is for what happens on the water.
“He didn’t like the America’s Cup at all. He hated it. He thought they were a bunch of w ***** s . . . true,” Fay said.
“He was a guy with strong principles and a big presence. But he didn’t like [the America’s Cup]. He did it because he had a deep-down ‘I know how to do this, I know the type of leader I can become and what I can do here’. And he did it.”
Fay — talking as Team New Zealand prepare to defend the trophy — said Blake was the “dimension” the syndicate needed, and in 1995 he headed the successful challenge in San Diego which saw New Zealand become the smallest country to win the America’s Cup.
“Peter came into the 92 campaign. I thought, ‘Well, I have had three goes at this’, I would have loved to have stayed on, of course, but I thought Peter is the guy who really needs to take this over.
“I would have loved to have been the guy who did it, but I think I had done my bit.”
As Team New Zealand prepares to launch its defence of the America’s Cup, the financial godfather of our earliest challenges, Sir Michael Fay, has revealed previously never talked about secrets of on- and offcourse dramas. Neil Reid reports
Sir Michael Fay was inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame both for his leadership and financial backing of New Zealand’s first three challenges for the Auld Mug.
But the merchant banker and richlister has revealed that if it wasn’t for a significant hiring who never fronted for his first day of work, he would never have taken the helm of New Zealand’s first challenge off Fremantle in the mid-1980s.
Fay and business partner David Richwhite headed a small group who answered a financial SOS to back the challenge put in under the name of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron (RNZYS) for the regatta.
But while he was happy to dip into his and his business’ significant wealth, being the team boss had never been on his agenda; something which Kiwi yachting legends had previously told him was a role he wouldn’t be suited to.
“[I was told]: ‘Michael, you can’t run America’s Cup. You are not a sailor,’” Fay tells the Weekend Herald.
“We came up with a name of a Kiwi who was overseas in big-boat sailing.
“I got him down to New Zealand, showed him what we were doing and negotiated over three days a 17-page contract with him, including his package as CEO. And he was due into Fremantle [where the 1986-87 America’s Cup campaign was waged] on February 16, 1986.”
The would-be boss and Fay signed the deal.
But he never showed up for his first day at work. And more than three decades on, Fay and his fellow team principals still don’t know why. “He never turned up,” Fay says. “We didn’t hear from him ever again.”
While the hunt for their AWOL team boss was going on, top brass from the Bank of New Zealand were waiting answers over its backing of the team.
The sponsorship led to the creation of the BNZ Challenge; which included a fan club, and the charttopping single Sailing Away – sung by a group of Kiwi celebs – which helped raise more funds for the syndicate.
“I rang [my wife] Sarah first, and then I rang David, and said, ‘This wasn’t a plan, team, but we have got BNZ in here. Hell’s teeth, I am going to have to stay the year.’
“So, my family moved over to Fremantle and I worked over there for a year. You couldn’t plan this, could you?”
With that, Fay became an almost accidental team boss. His role as the figurehead of the earliest incarnation of Team New Zealand matched the random way that our first challenge was launched.
IT ALL started with a story Fay read in a Sydney newspaper on a March morning in the New South Walescapital in 1984.
It was the eve of entries closing for syndicates wanting to challenge for the Auld Mug off Fremantle, Western Australia, and missing in the article on confirmed contenders was any mention of a challenge from New Zealand.
The Cup had gone Downunder after the Alan Bond-backed Australia II beat Dennis Conner’s Liberty in the
1983 America’s Cup at Newport, Rhode Island. The result ended the New York Yacht Club’s (NYYC)
132-year hold on one of sport’s oldest trophies.
In the years prior to the shock result, Fay had wondered if New Zealand could launch a challenge. He and Richwhite both had a history of sponsoring yachting events.
“But there was an agreement there solidly on the waterfront that it is too hard, it is too far away,” Fay recalled.
“Then it was, ‘Hang on a minute, it is in Perth now. What about it?’”
Fast forward a year on from Bond’s success and after reading the article in a Sydney newspaper, Fay got on the phone to Richwhite.
Previously the RNZYS had indicated it would require someone to back any challenge to the tune of about $7 million.
“I said to David, ‘Why don’t we have a go? We can put something in and then we can think about it. But at least we have a foot in the door.’ “He said, ‘Go for it’.”
But he never did after running out of time before the cut-off, and no one else from New Zealand entered either.
In fact, the yacht later to be named KZ-7 made it to the start line in Fremantle in late 1986 after Sydneybased Belgian businessman Marcel Fachler put in an entry, stumping up the $16,000 fee, without even asking the RNZYS for permission.
“He just turned up [in Auckland] a few days later with a press release and said to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron ‘I have put a challenge in, in the name of your club,’” recalled Fay with some mirth, talking from his base on Great Mercury Island.
Feeling “guilty” about not putting in an entry himself, Fay says he didn’t hesitate when he was approached to help with the bid. “I said yes, with a bad conscience,” he says.
What followed was a six-month period of “due diligence”. Fay investigated financial and potential financial resources, talked to local yachties and designers, and people offshore who had been involved in previous campaigns.
“And it was a conclusion of, ‘Yes, let’s give this thing a go.’”
The main caveat that Fay had stipulated was that leading Kiwi designers Bruce Farr, Laurie Davidson and Ron Holland — who he said were “three of the five best in the world” — would work together on the syndicate’s boats.
“These guys were competitors back then,” he says. Their later creations were made from fibreglass; a first for an America’s Cup entry and were dubbed the Plastic Fantastics. “Kiwi Magic” was later painted on the radical KZ-7 before it was shipped to Perth.
“PEOPLE SAY to me, ‘Oh my God, there is more controversy [in the America’s Cup], goodness gracious me,’” Fay says.
“[But] the America’s Cup thrives on controversy. This is the America’s Cup and it has been like that since day one [in 1851].”
And it didn’t take long for Fay and the Kiwi syndicate to taste just how bitter things can get off the water.
As KZ-7 powered its way to the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger series’ semifinals, America’s Cup fever caught on across New Zealand.
Unlike the crews of today’s boats, the Kiwi sailing crew weren’t flush with cash. “The sailors didn’t get paid. They got a bed and three meals a day.”
More than 5000km away in Fremantle, the feelings towards the Kiwis from rivals were anything but cheerful. KZ-7 won 33 of its 34 Louis Vuitton Cup round-robin races, with opposition team bosses scratching their heads as to how a rookie crew, from the smallest country to ever challenge for the America’s Cup, could be dominating.
The feelings from at least two rivals – French Kiss and Conner’s Stars & Stripes – was that the Kiwis were cheats.
Before KZ-7 lined up against French Kiss in the Louis Vuitton Cup semis, the French syndicate lodged a protest over whether the Kiwi boat was within the then 12m limit of the Cup racing class.
The protest was knocked back. “But that didn’t get us away from the guerilla warfare,” Fay recalls.
Kiwi Magic blitzed the French 4-0 in the semifinals before lining up against Conner — representing the San Diego Yacht Club (SDYC) — in the Louis Vuitton Cup final.
Conner took aim in a sensational way over the fibreglass construction of the Kiwi boat, stating: “There have been 78 12-metres built, all in aluminium. Why would you want to build one in glass . . . unless you wanted to cheat?”
SDYC challenge boss Malin Burnham also weighed in over the legality of the Kiwi boat.
The vitriol of the heated verbals fired Kiwi Magic’s way first shocked Fay, before he told himself: “Hey, you are going to have to toughen up here.
“Did it cost us energy and time? I think it did. Did it disrupt us? Obviously, that is what it was designed to do. Did it make it harder? Yes.”
After losing their off-course protests, Conner and Stars & Stripes proved too strong on the water; winning the Louis Vuitton Cup final 4-1, before going on to regain the America’s Cup.
While Fay looks back on KZ-7 as a “brilliant boat”, he said Conner’s crew handled the conditions off Perth much better.
“Could we have gone better? Yes,” he said. “We didn’t peak at the right time. For us it was a baptism by fire.”
The America’s Cup thrives on controversy. This is the America’s Cup and it has been like that since day one [in 1851]. Michael Fay
THE CREW of KZ-7 returned to New Zealand to a hero’s welcome.
Privately, Fay and others behind the Kiwi challenge viewed Fremantle as a huge missed opportunity.
Fay was adamant that any chance at having another crack at the America’s Cup was now some years off, with the SDYC not likely to defend it for at least three years.
What he hadn’t counted on was a deep dive by then Auckland lawyer Andrew Jones into the America’s Cup’s Deed of Gift founding document, which allowed a syndicate to lodge a challenge setting out the class of boat that it intended to race.
The challenger had to give 10 months’ notice of the event.
The deed stated that if the two
parties couldn’t come to “mutual consent”, a three-race series must take place.
“Andrew rang me up and said, ‘Michael, we can challenge, we don’t have to wait and be mucked around.’ I thought he had been drinking too much and said, ‘Have you lost your marbles, mate?’
“He said, ‘No, I will send it down. Read it.’ I said, ‘Wow, wow, wow, you are right.’
“I went to see David in our offices and said, ‘I want you to read something. I will come back in half an hour. Read it carefully and just think about it.’
“I came back and said, ‘We have two choices, David. We can go ahead with this challenge. It is going to be difficult and aggressive. Or I could be talking to you now [in 2021] saying I could tell you a great story about the America’s Cup, how we nearly challenged in a big boat. We only have two choices mate.’
“We said, ‘Let’s give it a go’.” The challenge was put in under the name of the Coromandel’s Mercury Bay Boating Club.
The move further soured relations between the Kiwis and the grouping of Conner, Burnham and the SDYC.
“I don’t think we would have challenged our best friends like that.
But we weren’t best friends,” Fay says.
The SDYC initially refused the challenge, but a ruling by the New York State Supreme Court stated the challenge was valid.
In response — with the Kiwis to race the giant 120-foot-long KZ 1 — Conner and the SDYC decided to take on the Kiwis with a much smaller and much faster catamaran.
It was a move which Fay and his syndicate’s designers had asked themselves whether Conner would do earlier, but Fay had responded to them: “They wouldn’t do that. It would kill them off in the PR campaign.”
“Well, that was bad judgment on my behalf . . . they did it all right.”
In May 1988, Fay took the SDYC to court seeking a ruling that the holder’s yacht was an invalid boat to defend the Cup. This time the courts fended off Fay, setting up a mismatch of huge proportions.
BY THE time the rival boats lined up for the best-of-three series off San Diego, Conner was already known as “Dirty Dennis” by Kiwi sports fans.
What played out in the woefully lopsided event in September 1988 — both on and off the water — only added to that notoriety.
Conner’s state-of-the-art catamaran was about half the length of KZ
1 and featured a sail system created after input from airline designers and Nasa.
Fay said the Americans “were always going to win on the water”.
And for the first time, Fay — who was a member of KZ 1’s 40-strong crew — has revealed that he feared the giant boat would suffer catastrophic damage due to an unrepairable crack through the middle of its keel which was discovered before being shipped to the US.
“We thought the keel would fall off anytime . . . seriously,” he says. “We thought, ‘Oh well, maybe it will only have to last two races, so it should hang in.’ Sometimes you have to take your chances.
“But it would have been a thing that you would have wanted to get off in a hurry if it started to go over. It would have been something to see if that thing had tipped over.”
Stars & Stripes won the first race by
21 minutes and 10 seconds, then the second by 18 minutes and 15 seconds. The Americans’ dominance — and Conner’s arrogance — was such that during races he toyed with KZ 1 by stopping his boat and watching the Kiwis slowly close some of the gap, before racing away again.
Before and during the series, Conner was also firing barbs at the Kiwi challengers.
Fay recalled “the attack was going on in a really tough way”.
Fay revealed there had been a lighter moment in the Kansas City Barbeque restaurant and bar — worldfamous for being a film set for 1986 Hollywood hit Top Gun.
He and team members went there and were greeted during the night by Conner.
“He said, ‘I don’t like you Michael, actually I love you and I am going to give you a kiss,’” Fay recalls.
“He went backwards, came over, and fell on top of me. I am on the floor of the bar with this bugger on top of me trying to kiss me . . . saying, ‘I really love you, Michael.’”
But comic relief was few and far between.
Relations between the two camps reached an all-time low when, during a press conference, Conner exclaimed: “I’m sailing a cat . . . somebody else is sailing a dog.”
He then said of Fay: “It’s hard to believe but I really like him.”
Fay responded: “What do you do to the people you don’t like?”
Conner also clashed with Farr, KZ 1’s co-designer, with the American infamously telling him: “You are full of s***. Get lost. You are a loser, get off the stage.”
IF FAY and his crew thought the onwater dramas were over for KZ 1 after the defeat to Conner, they were wrong.
The Kiwi challengers took the SDYC to court, claiming the event had been turned into a mismatch.
Ahead of the two parties’ courtroom showdown, KZ 1 was placed on a large barge and then shipped to New York by an ocean-going tug.
But it was “arrested” by the crew of a Cuban gunboat and escorted under guard to the port of Cayo Mao — 965km from Havana — as the ship sailed near the country’s waters, with Cuban authorities fearing what was on the back of the barge was actually a high-tech weapons system.
The boat and the tug crew were released a day later.
“The mast was sticking out, it was strapped to the front of the boat, and the Cubans thought it was a missile launcher of some sort on their radar,” Fay says.
“They let us go when they realised it wasn’t a rocket launcher . . . it was just a bunch of Kiwis dragging their boat around the coast.”
KZ 1 eventually made it to New
York.
Ahead of the court case it sailed around the city’s harbour; with world-famous broadcaster Walter Cronkite — cited during his career as the most trusted man in America — taking the helm.
“He became a great friend of mine. He was on our side all the way through,” Fay says.
Six months after the mismatch on the water, the Mercury Bay Boating Club was awarded the America’s Cup by Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick in New York State’s Supreme Court.
The SDYC appealed the decision, which was backed by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court in September 1989.
The New York Court of Appeal would later confirm the reversal of Ciparick’s initial decision to hand the Kiwis the Cup.
The SDYC had successfully argued that they opted for the smaller catamaran as they didn’t have enough time to build a yacht the same dimensions as KZ 1.
They also argued that Fay’s team had already started building the vessel before they had lodged the challenge, something Fay says was “100 per cent incorrect”.
“When we got that initial win, we thought, ‘Wow, this is fantastic,’” Fay says.
“But we knew as we went on the court with more politics around, and bigger agendas, that we might not hold it.”
FAY AND his consortium of backers had a final crack at the America’s Cup in 1992.
Fay returned to San Diego with NZL 20 and a man who would later write some bold new chapters in our America’s Cup history; Sir Peter Blake.
Blake had signed on as team manager, something which Fay said took some negotiating.
“He didn’t like the America’s Cup at all. He hated it. He thought they were a bunch of w ***** s,” Fay said.
“He did it because he had a deep down ‘I know how to do this, I know the type of leader I can become and what I can do here.’ And he did it.”
Radical design work on NZL 20 again raised suspicions among some of its opponents.
The boat featured twin keels, of which Fay said, while a “design breakthrough”, was probably “trying too hard on the design front”.
The most controversial aspect of the boat was its bowsprit, something which led to a protest from Italy’s Il Moro di Venezia when the Kiwis were leading 4-1 in the best-of-nine Louis Vuitton Cup finals series.
The Italians complained the Kiwis were illegally using the bowsprit, which projected from the upper end of the bow. The protest was upheld, with NZL 20 being stripped of a race win. The Italians won the challenger series 5-3.
Fay knew it was time to step away. “Peter Blake was the dimension that was needed by then,” he said.
“I thought Peter is the guy who really needs to take this over. I would have loved to have been the guy who did it [won the America’s Cup], but I think I had done my bit.”
Blake ended up guiding New Zealand to its first America’s Cup win; with NZL 32 slaying Team Dennis Conner’s Young America 5-0.
As the Kiwi surged its way to both the Louis Vuitton and America’s Cup series wins, tens of thousands of Kiwis also splashed out on pairs of red socks, which were a symbol of good luck for Blake and produced en masse as a fundraiser for Team New Zealand.
Blake, again, was at the head of the successful 2000 defence, where NZL 60 beat Prada 5-0.
The event also led to the radical transformation of Auckland’s Viaduct area, something which Blake’s decision to delay the event by five years had allowed.
“And all through this the Kiwis took the event to heart, big time.”
But when the next defence rolled around in 2003, Team New Zealand was all at sea; Blake had moved on and some of its previous stars had signed with rival teams.
WITHIN SECONDS of the start of the opening race in the best-of-five America’s Cup series against Alinghi — which featured former Team New Zealand crew Sir Russell Coutts, Brad Butterworth, Warwick Fleury, Murray Jones, Simon Daubney and Dean Phipps — it was clear all was not well with the defenders.
Crew members on board NZL 82 resorted to using buckets to clear a flooding cockpit. Rigging also failed, before skipper Dean Barker withdrew.
The boat again retired in race four after a mast snapped. And in the final race of the 5-0 series loss, a spinnaker pole broke.
While not directly involved in the campaign, Fay attended several meetings as Team New Zealand’s management transitioned to the post-Blake era after 2000.
He said there was no mistaking that the failure to tie down the likes of Coutts, Butterworth and Jones had cost them; assets he said had been crucial intellectual property.
The “irony” of the America’s Cup again hit Fay hard in 2003, when both he and former bitter rival Burnham were inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame.
“We had to get up and say nice things about each other,” he laughed.
Fay was later on hand at both the 2007 and 2013 America’s Cup finals losses.
The only America’s Cup featuring New Zealand he hasn’t attended was the 2017 event in Bermuda, where the Kiwis reclaimed the Auld Mug.
As Team New Zealand prepare their latest defence in March, Fay said he never imagined his and the country’s involvement in the America’s Cup would have so many twists and turns.
“It has a magic of its own and it just does its own thing; you just have to go with the flow.”
Asked if he had ever tallied up how much the consortium he had headed had spent on our three earliest campaigns, he laughed: “Yes, but I forgot about it instantly. I don’t want to know.”
When asked if it was in the tens of millions, he replied: “Keep going.”
When asked if it was hundreds of millions, he then replied: “You would be getting closer. But we don’t talk about things like that.”
He is quietly confident Team New Zealand will retain the historic trophy in March, proudly calls himself a fan, and says of all the accolades which could be directed his way, the one which would give him the most joy would be to be remembered as someone who gave it a crack.
“I am glad we gave it a go, hell yes. I would have hated not to have been involved so early on and not have such great experiences,” Fay said. “I came home a bit battered and bruised but I don’t regret one bit of it.”
I don’t think we would have challenged our best friends like that. But we weren’t best friends.
Michael Fay
In Canvas:
Dennis Conner on the America’s Cup, winning and walking out