John Roughan: Unspoken clue to riddle of the America's Cup

Leave the country for five minutes and you always miss something important. Notice that? I went to Europe for two weeks at the end of September and missed the entire Blackheart campaign. Every word of it.

When I left I'd never heard the term, when I returned nobody wanted to use it in polite company. It was about as popular as an eruption of pus from the national psyche, which I suppose is what it was.

But at least it seemed to have lanced the boil, or so I thought until all the bad blood from the previous defence bubbled back to the surface over the past few weeks.

The exchanges, fully published in the paper and rehearsed on radio and television, have been fascinating less for what they say than avoid saying.

As soon as Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth had vented their version of the fraught negotiations for the transfer of Team New Zealand, the former trustees accused them of maligning the memory of Sir Peter Blake. Interestingly, Coutts' and Butterworth's published account had contained no adverse mention of the late Blake.

And trustees, though they continued to rail about the pair's treatment of Sir Peter, never quite explained it. The row has been a riddle in which both sides, and their interviewers, seem to know the nub of the issue but nobody wants to tell the public.

They can come clean; we are not fools.

Not long ago Russell Coutts upgraded his Auckland house by several millions.

Last weekend it was reported that Sir Peter's widow put his luxurious schooner on sale with a price tag of $900,000.

When Sir Peter retired from running the America's Cup campaign he was able to go cruising the world full-time for the sake of the environment.

People can obviously get very rich on international sponsored sailing and that, in New Zealand, is a problem. With an economy of this size we cannot always afford to keep top performers in any field.

That may be the reason for this strange national aversion to the idea that national heroes can cash in.

During America's Cup 2000 a rival camp made accusations, which the Blake organisation went to great trouble to suppress, that their operation was creaming it while the sailors lived on sandwich packs and peanuts.

This week, when former directors of Team NZ replied to Coutts and Butterworth, they concluded with a gratuitous denial that they or Sir Peter had personally enriched themselves at the expense of the team.

"No person within the Team NZ organisation, including Sir Peter Blake and all other senior executives, was engaged on terms which were out of line with the market," they said.

I'd think the market rates are fairly good for somebody who has built a sailing organisation that won the America's Cup, given sponsors a brand that has crowds cheering in the streets and cajoled governments, national and local, into sinking public money in a purpose-built regatta base which has spawned Auckland's most fashionable real estate. At least, I hope so.

The remarkable thing is not that Sir Peter probably made a fortune but that in this country it is dangerous to say so. I will probably be pilloried for the suggestion here, but nothing else makes sense of everything we have read and heard on the subject over the past fortnight.

Obviously we lost Coutts, Butterworth and most of the old team because they, too, wanted to make their fortune from the America's Cup while they could.

They could not make it with Team NZ because as far as the trustees, old and new, were concerned, Coutts and Butterworth were not Blake.

They were not businessmen either, by the sound of it. Much of the mud flung back and forth over the fortnight has been about the debts, charitable obligation and possible tax liability which the previous trustees were proposing to hand to Coutts, Butterworth and Co.

After the pair gave up on the transition negotiations and jumped ship, those debts and liabilities plainly did not present an insoluble problem to new trustees Peter Menzies and Ralph Norris. They simply sold an obsolete asset.

Nor do they seem to have faced the other problem that confronted Coutts and Butterworth: a reluctance of the local "family of five" sponsors to share billing with a big international benefactor.

Once Menzies and Norris were in charge, the "family" didn't seem to mind. Pride of place on the black boat next weekend will be a German technology company of Oracle proportions, SAP.

There are no heroes and villains in this story. It is about a small country coming to terms with the tensions of playing out of its economic league.

The America's Cup is one of those institutions known, vaguely at least, virtually everywhere. It carries the prestigious associations, not to mention the beauty of big yachts, that cause advertisers to drool the world over.

If you have noticed the publicity that Oracle and other foreign syndicate sponsors have generated in the international media this summer, you would have struggled to find reference to the actual holder of the America's Cup or the venue.

Team NZ will be sailing next weekend against a boat with a much bigger budget, and that would have been so if any one of the serious syndicates had won the right to challenge.

Every professional sport in this country must beat nationalistic drums to offset the lure of larger economies. It is the reason the Rugby Union denies All Black jerseys to players who go overseas. But it holds few of them forever and does not, now, abuse them when they leave.

The country's continued success depends on replenishing the supply of good competitors keen to wear its colours. When they cash in we can wish them well - and bring on the ones to beat them.

nzherald.co.nz/americascup

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