Twelve years ago I pulled up outside Auckland International Airport's departures entrance and pushed a Texan by the name of Carter Perrin out of my beat-up Volkswagen. Then I threw his bags after him, said adios, and drove back to town.
Carter had been in New Zealand for some months, living out of an apartment at the Heritage Hotel and spending most evenings drinking vodka and soda at various city bars. It had, in fact, been his second stay in the City of Sails - the first was in 1999 when he sailed for the Young America syndicate in the Challenger Series for the America's Cup. He was a trimmer of some renown, but more than that he was a typical Texan, as brash as a drunken cowboy with a rack of ribs personality and a penchant for a good time.
He had left after that first cup in Auckland and I confess to not having given him much thought after that. But a couple of years later he had returned. He had swaggered down Nelson St one evening to find me standing on the stoop of an inner-city bar and announced his presence with a drawling lamentation. "You don't remember me do you?" Before I could answer or, more likely, because he saw I could not, he bellowed, "It's me. Carter." Then he asked me if I had lost weight, to which I replied "no". At that he shot me a grin and said, "Well, you should." It's fair to say I liked him immensely, and we've been friends ever since.
I tell that story because at that time the America's Cup was the biggest show in town. Team New Zealand had yet to become synonymous with failure and taxpayer money (winning makes it easier to remove the fingerprints from the zipper of the public purse), Kiwis had been galvanised in their support of the campaign by the defections of Coutts and Butterworth, not to mention the warbling words of Dave Dobbyn, and, well, the Auld Mug was ours. We thought it was, at least. We thought the team was too. We also saw some value in having a crack at world sport's most ostentatious cock fight. That was until a landlocked pharmaceutical baron up and took the thing off Team New Zealand with a boat named Alinghi, which sounds like something that requires medical treatment. Ever since we've been down on the cup. We've been down on the costs. We've been down on the crew, and the skipper, and the money and the courtroom drama and the Taurean stubbornness of Grant Dalton, and the great San Francisco choke job of 2013. We've been down on all of it because we haven't had it. And, more importantly, we haven't had it here.
Now we can at least have some of it. All indications point to Auckland as a preferred venue of the America's Cup qualifier series in 2017 and, as the Herald's Dana Johannsen reported last week, that would mean syndicates would likely base themselves in Auckland over the 2016/17 summer. It would be madness not to get behind a campaign to bring that event to the City of Sails. Auckland's waterfront is now a venue truly worthy of world exposure, and crying out for the scenes to rival that three-year period at the beginning of the new millennium.
The reams of criticism of the America's Cup as an investment and as a sporting contest are as vast as the space between Britney Spears' ears, but it doesn't require much of a memory to think back to a time when the Viaduct Harbour was filled with fans and the members of Team New Zealand were paraded up Queen St like all-conquering heroes. The America's Cup was, in those unmistakable words of PJ Montgomery, "New Zealand's Cup" and we were all happy it was so.
You don't have to like the America's Cup but to dismiss the event and the quest outright is as short-sighted as the Titanic's lookout.
Auckland certainly looks better now than it did when it was the home of the America's Cup, but it has rarely felt better. That was a time to treasure our city's waterfront position, to embrace an event that has tortured its competitors for 150 years, and to be a part of something that undoubtedly made us feel good about ourselves.
In October I met up with Carter Perrin for the first time in 12 years, at Chicago's Soldier Field. He no longer sails but he still takes an interest. I asked him about an America's Cup without New Zealand. "You can't be serious." He said, channelling John McEnroe.
That was all he needed to say.