Blake book reveals anguish as Cup team torn apart

Review By EUGENE BINGHAM


Sir Peter Blake - An Amazing Life reads for the first three-quarters like a rollicking story of the great sailor's amazing adventures at sea.

But in the last few chapters, the book's pace accelerates and its emotional power punches as author Alan Sefton delves into the breakup of Team New Zealand, angrily dismisses rumours about secret millions being squirrelled away, and ends with Blake's tragic death in 2001.

The Team New Zealand turmoil was primarily over how power was to be transferred from Blake and his trusted lieutenants to Russell Coutts and a new guard after the 2000 America's Cup defence.

While the rest of the book deals with Blake's life in a balanced manner, including questioning his judgment in ocean-race campaigns, the chapter dealing with the Team New Zealand stand-off is a one-sided account. That it is written by Sefton, implicated in the affair by the Coutts brigade, detracts from the strength of the account.

But the book is boosted by the fact that Sefton has been able to draw from documents written by Blake at the time.

One of the most telling papers is a letter written in October 1997, the first of several resignation letters he was talked out of acting on. Sefton uses the letter in full to aptly set out what Blake's thinking was.

According to the letter, he placed great stock in team harmony and an environment where there were no hidden agendas.

But it had become obvious to him that some people were working against him.

"For three of our very key sailors, Russell Coutts, Brad Butterworth and Tom Schnackenberg, their egos are seemingly out of control. And there is not much doubt that they don't trust me any more," Blake wrote.

Blake said he was not prepared to put up with it and could not understand what he had done to deserve it.

"I am exceedingly disappointed that people I thought of as good friends could have so little allegiance and respect ... "

Sefton uses another document, this time notes Blake prepared for an April 1999 meeting with the trio, to illustrate the depth of Blake's frustration and the seriousness of the rift.

The team was imploding and the team's image was being torn apart, Blake wrote.

"Can you tell me what I have to do to get this to improve, apart from shooting myself?"

Twice, the book says, Blake had the backing of the board to sack Coutts and Butterworth, but did not do so because he knew they were so crucial to the team.

As Sefton explains it, Blake's authority was being subverted by their attempts to wrest control of any future defences.

Blake was also furious about how Coutts and Butterworth were undermining team sponsors through their private enterprises, such as the Coutts-led match-racing crew, Team Magic.

The book also confronts claims that Blake and the other Team New Zealand executives, Sefton and Scott Chapman, were siphoning off huge sums of money to the detriment of the sailing programme.

Sefton says that Blake was the highest paid team member, "His salary package negotiated with, and approved by, the sponsor group". Coutts was second highest paid, followed by several of the design group.

Sefton and Chapman were among the top five earners, their salaries bumped up by an incentive bonus based on new sponsorship revenue, the book says.

The book promises to quash rumours and deal in facts, but Sefton does readers no favours by taking the opportunity to have a swipe at some people in the crucial chapter. These exchanges sometimes come across as in-house cheap shots. For instance, he alludes to how one unnamed figure in the Family of Five group of sponsors later showed alleged disloyalty. Readers not in the know will simply be confused.

To his credit, in earlier chapters about the 1995 campaign, Sefton does heap praise on Coutts and his abilities.

Sefton, a former journalist who held the job of executive director in the 2000 Cup campaign, has also used the book to take aim at his ex-colleagues, including the Herald and Holmes.

He sets out how he believes the media were strung along by Coutts and Butterworth and how stories were planted, including one that suggested the Blake family house was owned by Team New Zealand when in fact the home was held in the name of a family trust.

What Sefton does not mention is that he and Blake were in spin mode just as much as Coutts and Butterworth through the period.

He does not record, for instance, that when the Herald revealed the first inklings of the rift in February 2000, Blake vehemently denied there was any problem and accused the newspaper of being anti-New Zealand.

But for all the bitterness that emerges over the Team New Zealand affair, there are many tender aspects.

Sefton quotes Blake himself as saying that while his 1994 Jules Verne Trophy victory was the most exciting and personally rewarding sailing experience of his life, the America's Cup sat on a pedestal all by itself.

Threaded through several chapters are references to Sir Edmund Hillary and the book should leave readers in no doubt that Blake, conqueror of the seas, should rightly sit alongside Hillary as one of the truly great New Zealanders.

An Amazing Life

Author: Alan Sefton

Publisher: Penguin Books

RRP $49.95