John Roughan: Cup saga's highs and lows match wild 20-year ride

Well, who is going to write the book? I don't mean the coffee table quickie, or a dour investigative paperback that makes a couple of headlines and dies disgruntled in the bargain bins 10 weeks later. Who is going to do the book the story deserves?

It has to be entitled New Zealand's Cup and it has to be about more than yachting. It's an allegory of our national life for 20 turbulent years.

The story could start at Fremantle in the spring of 1986, the beginning of that mad, thrilling sharemarket splurge that tipsters would remember ruefully as the KZ7 summer.

Three years earlier the Hawke-Keating Government had come to power with liberal designs for the Australian economy and a Perth entrepreneur, Alan Bond, had won the America's Cup. Soon New Zealand too had acquired a liberalising Labour Government and an enterprising banker who wanted to win the cup.

Anything seemed possible. I recall going to Perth with a pack of media, courtesy of British Airways, to come home on Concorde which was making its first flight to this part of the world. We had a Saturday to ourselves and decided to spend it at Fremantle.

Weekend petrol sales in West Australia at that time were restricted to rostered service stations and pub licensing hours were still limited, but Fremantle had dispensations for the cup. One or two of our number headed for the bars but most of us decided to knock uninvited on the door of the New Zealand challenge.

Fortunately Michael Fay was there for the weekend and the door was readily opened. We were soon kitted up with life jackets and bouncing around the Indian Ocean with Fay guiding and Harold Bennett, who can call off races now, at the wheel of the tender.

There was a sparkle in Fay's eyes as he watched the yachts and retailed newly acquired lore. Their class was a whale of a design, he said, but you could tell he loved them.

The book must embrace, besides boats, the bubble companies, paper floats and a winebox of tax dodges old and new, all part of the exhilarating first phase of economic change.

Financial and trade controls disappeared, tax law was slower to catch up. Each week seemingly another sector was deregulated. Enthusiasm exceeded experience and the Lange-Douglas Government was soaring to a second term.

At Fremantle, KZ7 was on a roll until it met the master, Dennis Conner, on a quest to recover the cup for San Diego. Later that year Wall St slumped briefly and New Zealand's bubble burst. The country realised the new economy, like the America's Cup, was not going to be easy business.

Quite suddenly the times turned sour. David Lange tried to wrest the helm from Roger Douglas. Privatisation, never a popular idea, appeared in the 1988 Budget as Douglas tried to prove he was still in command.

Michael Fay built a big boat to sail within the letter if not the spirit of the Cup rules. Dennis Conner replied in kind with a catamaran. He snarled at our best-known designer, Bruce Farr, and became a public demon.

Somewhere along the way he also launched the Holmes programme unwittingly by walking out on Paul's first broadcast. Is there any fixture of modern life that didn't start with the America's Cup?

It has always been treated as a talisman of the country's attempts to compete in the world with skills and products of higher value.

In the early 1990s, when Ruth Richardson was paring the welfare state to the bare essentials and Don Brash had stifled inflation, we still couldn't quite win the prize. We blew an economic recovery by investing in real estate

Financial asceticism was not inspiring, in politics or the private sector. It wasn't until the merchant banker passed the challenge to a hands-on veteran of the business, Sir Peter Blake, that it became New Zealand's Cup.

As soon as he had won, Blake made two moves that ran completely counter to the economic principles on which the economy had been refashioned. He declared there would be no competition to defend the cup, as there had been in the United States and Australia. New Zealand's sponsorship resources were too limited. And he wanted a single regatta base built at public expense.

Neither decision was necessary. Plenty of boat yards and marinas around Auckland would have welcomed syndicate bases and that private investment might have been more viable than the Viaduct will prove to be in the long run.

As for limited local sponsors, Team NZ already had a loyal "family" of them. Sailors who fell out with the syndicate ought to have been free to find offshore backing if they could and contest a defenders' series.

As things turned out last weekend, that might have been helpful.

In the years leading to the first defence, the Bolger and Shipley Governments looked in vain for a formula that would prompt the private sector to a better performance without curtailing competition and picking winners.

By the time the first defence came around, in 2000, the present Government had come to power and proclaimed itself willing to pick winners. Helpfully, the black boat whitewashed the challenger, vindicating for a while the idea that Team NZ did not need a defenders' series to tune up a match-winning boat and crew.

How the tide has turned.

It has been a pleasant few years believing the next black boat was a preordained winner like the last, and that the economy was coming right while commodity prices were up and the dollar down. That tide turned a few months ago.

At the end of the book you might feel we have come full circle and we are a little wiser for having the cup. What an exhilarating ride it has been.

Continuous coverage of today's America's Cup race will begin on nzherald.co.nz at 12.30pm.

nzherald.co.nz/americascup

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