Team NZ's schmoozing rottweiler

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The eternal pessimist, Grant Dalton, is standing at the edge of the Team New Zealand sail loft surveying what he calls "not a bad view from the office".

He has suggested up here as not a bad place to take a photograph. He's had enough of pictures of him looking up at that boat. But he's annoyed that the loft floor has yet to be painted - it is still the blue of its previous residents, the One World team and it should be silver.

Details like this are what Dalton notices. He is, he says, incurably inquisitive. He's picked up the photographer's camera and is squinting through it. He asks lots of questions about how the photographer will be taking the picture. He has no particular interest in photography: "No, just nosy."

At the end of the interview he will pick up my tape recorder, have a good peer at it, attempt to turn it off for me. Just being helpful, he says.

Just can't help himself is more like it.

I thought that he would be a jolly, outdoorsy, ra-ra, rark-'em-up sporty sort, even though he long ago shaved off that awful moustache - the kind jolly, outdoorsy sporty sorts, particularly boaty sorts, like to sport.

I thought he'd be one of those lads who lived for the summer and sun and salt water, but he prefers winter, likes it when dark comes early. He finds it cosy. He likes quiet and home, which is "about two kilometres up the road" in Parnell where his family has "been on the cliff since 1898" and where he grew up.

He says he's not clever, not like his designers whom he calls the "pretty intellectual boys". Of "all the things I was smart enough to be" his first job was as an accountant.

He is thoughtful and, despite only being smart enough to be an accountant, is clever - although not in a showing-off way, and he only talks a bit in that corporate management speak.

He is a sailor who says that there's nothing "weird" about those interminable round-the-world solo races he made his name doing but who is "not that keen on sailing, it's just an instrument".

Weird, according to Dalton, is "running a marathon, that's weird, that's tough". He knows this because he's done it. He gets up at 5.05 every morning to train for Ironman events, "that's maybe not that early". No, of course it's not. It's obvious the man is a slacker.

He thinks for a bit about whether he is obsessive. He asks himself, sotto voce, "Is that a bad word? Probably not" - then says that he does have an obsession for "competing to win. I like to win. Everyone likes to win".

When I say I'm not sure they do, he ticks me off and says that I'm wrong. "People instinctively want to win. A mother wants to be the best mother she can be. She does want to win. It just manifests itself in different ways. Mine is in the open. It's on the sports field."

That's corporate talk and of course he is a corporate type. He's the managing director and it just happens that his firm is one that races a boat instead of, say, produces widgets which will show up on balance sheets as profits.

His job, or part of his job, is to persuade people to give him money so that he can spend it. What he will buy with that money - although this is all in the future and in the lap of the design gods and the wind gods and the team he has built - is a cup known as the Auld Mug, or, often, the poisoned chalice.

Although Dalton says he is eternally pessimistic, he could be expected to be a bit chuffed with himself today. The boat is outside the shed wearing its new silver, black and red livery, the colours of Emirates Airline which represent the fact that Dalton has pulled off a major sponsorship deal. Which means that the team is now 85 per cent funded. And which in turn has allowed him to "push the button" and confirm that New Zealand will be mounting a challenge for the America's Cup.

To which you might say, and I would definitely have said, "Ho-hum, here we go again".

Dalton, though, has a knack of talking things down, and this has the strange effect of making the chase for the silly old mug sound almost a reasonable thing to do.

No doubt he's read all of those management tomes and knows how to do the reverse psychology thing, but it's also partly his nature.

He rather likes the description of the cup as the poisoned chalice. "I think one of the dangers of the America's Cup is getting too emotionally caught up in the mystique of the America's Cup. It can potentially cloud your vision. To me the America's Cup is the end result of something that can be better than perfect. It could be whatever ... it could be your tape recorder."

He is under no illusions that there is one rather large detail which he and the team can do nothing about - except being better than perfect. And that is the pitch for the hearts and minds of New Zealanders.

"There is," he says "a mistrust of Team New Zealand. Because they didn't deliver. Kiwis took them to their hearts again ... and they didn't deliver."

He is the pessimist in a game where you'd imagine you'd have to be the optimist to play at all.

"It's almost a defence mechanism, you know. You kind of expect sponsors to say 'Yes'. Well, they don't. So if you assume they're going to say 'No', which they normally do, you work a lot harder on the deal.

"If you couldn't get some sort of equilibrium in the sponsor game, the impact of the rejections would just crush you."

He likens the sponsorship game to "panning for gold, every now and again you get a nugget". The thought of the undisclosed value of the Emirates nugget has him grinning widely beneath his sponsored cap.

Before I went to see Dalton I'd heard him described on the radio as a rottweiler who was very very good at schmoozing. He's unsure about this: "I don't know whether that's good or bad."

But he knows that the sponsors pay his salary which pays the mortgage, so he looks after them. He's a walking talking ad. From head to toe he wears the sponsor's colours, and when we sit down in the boardroom he grabs a model plane and sticks it right in front of him - where it might figure large in the photograph.

He says if being good to the sponsors who have been good to him is schmoozing "I don't know, maybe it is".

I'd been told that I was not to let him swear because he swore all the time but it wasn't his fault. He'd picked it up from hanging around with those naughty rough sailors. HE IS reputedly a world class-swearer but he was obviously on his very best behaviour because he resorted to funny, old-fashioned cussing. He said "crikey" and "struth" and "heck".

He did let slip one "bloody" but only because I interrupted his train of thought. So that was my fault.

For all that, he can do mean. Perhaps it is the rottweiler in him that growls when Larry Ellison's name comes up.

"I can do ugly. I've got no problems with ugly. When it gets a bit rough on the streets I'm fine with that. I think you have to win it fair, and Kiwis respect fair, but they don't mind ugly. They don't mind a bit of biffo as long as it's fair biffo."

He likes fair. He's done away with corporate cars because he doesn't like the hierarchy they help create.

He does likes anything which involves going fast and beating people. His boat is a speedboat. For relaxation, or his idea of relaxation, he races cars. "It's a real release," he says. "It's good fun."

Then the man driving the America's Cup challenge insists that he drive me back to work in the brand new courtesy car, because he's a good sort of rottweiler really. He says it's because he's been dying for a chance to drive it. He wants to see if it's got any guts.

For quite a long time the detail guy couldn't figure out how to make the thing go. Which could have been slightly embarrassing, except for the fact that nobody laughed harder than Dalton. And he didn't swear once.


Further reading: nzherald.co.nz/americascup