Off Newport

SPORT

Watching yacht races is a bore. Consequently, the sport normally attracts about as many spectators as a good game of ticktacktoe. Colossus of yachting is the series of races for the America's Cup. Consequently, watching America's Cup races would be a colossal bore except for one fact. So many people think they want to see the America's Cup races that almost no one does. Last week, 50,000 people and about $1,000,000,000 worth of privately owned boats were bouncing up and down on the Atlantic Ocean, off Newport, R. I. Nearly out of sight of most of this huge de luxe flotilla, which was policed far off the course, Harold Stirling Vanderbilt's Ranger was racing Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith's Endeavour for the hideous 86-year-old silver pitcher which is the most prized sporting trophy in the world.

First Race. The America's Cup goes to the yacht which first wins four races. Races are 30 mi. each, alternating between 1) a straight course into the wind & back and 2) a course around an equilateral triangle with ten-mile sides. Last week, after spectators had delayed the start 45 min., Ranger and Endeavour crossed the line, with Endeavour a length ahead but Ranger well to windward. The breeze was light and the boats' job was to work 15 mi. into it, round a buoy and run back before the wind to the line they had just crossed.

For the first twelve minutes of the race, neither gained. Then the breeze began to freshen, Ranger picked up speed, and both sailed off on a long port tack. Sopwith smartly changed Endeavour's head-sails but when he began to catch up, Vanderbilt changed Rangers. About halfway to the buoy, when both boats went about for the second time. Ranger was half a mile ahead.

Strategy in yacht racing is for the boat that is losing to change her tactics. In the last half of the first leg of the first race last week, Sopwith started a tacking duel in the hope that better handling on Endeavour would reduce Ranger's lead. If anything, Ranger's tacks were executed a shade more smartly. She rounded the mark with a six-minute lead.

Faced with the task of gaining six minutes on Ranger in a 15-mi. run down wind, Sopwith then tried a desperate alternative that offered at least a chance of catching up. He sailed far off the course to gamble on a better breeze. The hope, forlorn at best, was frustrated. When Ranger crossed the line, in a deafening uproar from the spectator fleet. Endeavour was barely visible in a gathering fog. She finished 17 min. 5 sec. later, beaten more thoroughly than any boat in an America's Cup race since James Bell's Thistle was beaten by Volunteer in 1887.

Second Race, around a triangle consisting of a ten-mile beat against a mild southwesterly breeze followed by two broad reaches, was more one-sided than the first. Ranger, outmaneuvered at the start, trailed Endeavour for the first hour, then took the lead and held it--10 min. ahead at the first mark, 16 min. ahead at the second, 18 min. ahead at the finish. Skipper Sopwith, discouraged, asked for a one-day postponement.

If watching yacht races is a bore, being present at Newport when America's Cup races are in progress is nothing of the sort. Of some 1,000 pleasure craft off Newport last week, biggest was Woolman Julius Forstmann's 333-ft., 3,000-ton, German-built Orion. Liveliest party of a week crammed with the liveliest parties the richest folk in the U. S. know how to give was Mrs. Henry Drummond-Wolff's ball for her debutante daughter Marsyl Stokes. Night before the first race, the Newport Chamber of Commerce, grateful for an event which brings about $750,000 worth of trade to their substantial little city, gave a banquet to Skippers Vanderbilt and Sopwith, presented each with an identical silver bowl. Photographers asked their wives, first feminine crew rivals in America's Cup history, if they would pose together. Said Mrs. Vanderbilt, whose job on Ranger is "keeping the log": "Surely, we will be big about it." She and Mrs. Sopwith, who is official timekeeper on Endeavour, then shook hands.

America's Cup racing dates back to 1851, when the schooner America owned by a New York Yacht Club syndicate, beat a whole fleet of British yachts in a race around the Isle of Wight. Since then British yachts, including Endeavour II, have tried to win it back 14 times, have never come closer than in 1934 when Endeavour I won the first two races, lost the next four because of faulty handling. Minor mystery of America's Cup racing is why U. S. newspaper readers, who not only know nothing about sailing but cannot hope to understand the complex terminology in which it is reported, read more stories about the America's Cup races than any other sports event of the years in which they happen. Major mystery of the America's Cup is why British challengers have never been able to win it. For Ranger's easy victories in the first two races, yachting experts last week were reduced to the oldest and most obvious explanation: Ranger was the better boat and she had the better skipper. Designed by young Olin Stephens, who sailed her across the finish line in the first race, and seasoned Starling Burgess, who designed the two previous U. S. Cup defenders, Ranger was built last winter at Bath, Me., for $300,000. She won 13 preliminary races against two other U. S. candidates for defense of the Cup, then lost her first race last week two days before the Cup series started--to old Endeavour I. That Endeavour II was faster than Endeavour I was a conclusion reached by Skipper Sopwith after two weeks of "comparative sailing" off Newport last month, strengthened by a series of races that followed. That Ranger was not only faster than Rainbow, the 1934 defender, but one of the fastest yachts ever built was the conclusion of yachting experts after the start of the Cup races last week. Most of Rangers sails are hand-me-downs not only from Rainbow but from her predecessor, the 1930 defender Enterprise. Said Skipper Vanderbilt after the first race last week: "Our mainsail was wonderful. It was the 75th time that it had been used and that contradicts the theory that a sail must be new to be good."

A onetime stunt pilot, who barnstormed in the U. S. in 1911, Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith made a fortune building airplanes during the War, has since enlarged it rapidly by huge contributions to Europe's current armament boom. A self-made yachtsman, he took up sailing in 1928, was by last year considered one of Great Britain's ablest amateurs. If Skipper Sopwith sails a boat somewhat as he used to pilot a plane, Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, cool-headed New York Central Railroad director, sails as shrewdly and as calmly as he plays bridge, at which he is famed for having invented the "Vanderbilt Convention." His crew on Ranger, many of whom are veterans of Rainbow and Enterprise, is probably the best "drilled of its kind in the world.

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