David Hill: Russell Coutts? Which team does he play for?

The news may send many Aucklanders lurching for their lattes, but there have been times this summer when the America's Cup has not been on the front page of our provincial paper.

On several days it was relegated to page 2 - even to page 3. On one shameful occasion (admittedly the day Tom Cruise arrived in our town), the cup was shunted down to page 5, next to the facial eczema spore count.

It's always difficult to accept that the centre of your universe isn't necessarily the centre of your neighbour's universe, and that there are people for whom the name Viaduct Basin evokes the image of a bathroom fitting.

But I have to say that quite a few people down here don't even seem to know which syndicate Russell Coutts is sailing for. I do realise we're not alone with that problem; it's not only Parliament that needs party-hopping laws.

I can understand why most Aucklanders are obsessed with the America's Cup. Auckland is the place which I once heard a foreign visitor call the City of Scales, and fishy things are certainly happening around the event.

It's fascinating to see people competing so intensely for the ugliest trophy on the planet. (Has anyone considered that the infamous hammer attack on it may have been an artistic protest as much as a political one?)

I admit that the cup fascinates me, too. It reminds me of those young Dogon males dancing to attract a wife on Michael Palin's Sahara: elaborate dressing-up; shuffling on the spot; sudden moves that whip spectators into a frenzy; the whole thing only tenuously connected to everyday life.

So I have been watching. I haven't had much choice. The America's Cup is Princess Di with a hairy chest, and the media have swooped on it.

It makes great viewing and reading, even for those of us who feel that the only point of the sea is when it meets the land, and that newspaper coverage of the event would be more at home on the financial pages.

Sometimes I haven't been able to read or watch, of course. This contest is the cutting edge of sailing technology, which means that masts keep falling off and boats sinking. Even when competitors stay afloat, that cutting edge has frequently been blunted because the wind was (a) too light, or (b) too strong.

Given my ignorance of yachting, my belief that tacking was the way they held the sails together, why have I watched? Because I like cartoons, and those graphics are brilliant - more exciting even than Buzz Lightyear.

I watch also to appreciate television's inspired choice of host. Just one glimpse of John McBeth's ears tells you everything about wind speed and direction.

But mostly I watch to see and hear Peter Montgomery. Pete has single-handedly (look, a yachting term) shattered the stereotype of dour, monosyllabic male New Zealanders.

Pete is definitely not Southern Man. Actually, I'm not sure which compass point best defines him.

His excitement is not so much contagious as pandemic. I imagine him sipping his morning cup of tea and yelling, "I'm adding one - no, one-and-a-HALF spoons of sugar. I'm - oh no! - I'm stirring it ANTI-CLOCKWISE!"

Certain cup moments have failed to grip me. The Louis Vuitton races (wasn't he the chap who made avant-garde French films?) seemed to last as long as Cook's voyages. And I've never fully escaped the feeling that all the meteorology, hydrology, psychology and so on is being applied to something as gloriously irrelevant as the medieval obsession with how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But the cup has made me stand tall - it's the only way I can see over the heads of those gathered round the televisions in downtown shop windows.

And I'm as appalled as anyone at the thought of the trophy joining other bank-vault objects in Switzerland, where they can't even see the sea.

However, if the Herald does end up carrying the dreadful headline "Coutts wins cup", down here in the provinces the shock will be blurred for a number of us by our still not being completely sure if he won it for us or the other lot.

* David Hill is a New Plymouth writer.

nzherald.co.nz/americascup

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