Sport: All for Pride

It was like a tag-team fight. For two weeks on the fickle waters of Rhode Island Sound, the four best twelve-meter yachts in the U.S. had at each other in a series of two-boat races that went on through light winds and lashing gales. In not one of the dozen races did the sailors concede anything—except a generous serving of backwind. The only thing officially at stake was pride, but for pride’s sake, U.S. deepwater sailors put on a display of tenacity and tactics that had not been seen in a seadog’s age.

The boat that would defend the America’s Cup against Australia’s Gretel would not be picked until after next month’s final elimination trials. But in the first “observation” trials, two boats came out clear-cut favorites: Ted Hood’s buxom $300,000 Nefertiti, the glamour boat of the warmup trials, with ten wins and only two defeats; and Weatherly, an also-ran in the 1958 cup trials, which finally found her speed with canny Skipper Bus Mosbacher (TIME. July 13) at the helm. Even Nefertiti’s butter-fingered crew could not seem to slow her down. In one race they fumbled a spinnaker overboard in their haste to get it flying, still breezed to victory. Only against Weatherly (seven wins, four losses) did Nefertiti run into heavy going. Twice, by crushing margins of more than four minutes. Bus Mosbacher took the measure of the Marblehead newcomer.

The hard-luck boat of the trials was Paul V. Shield’s Columbia, the 1958 America’s Cup champion, which managed to win only four races, suffered a crowning indignity when her 90-ft., extruded aluminum mast snapped during a race with Nefertiti, pitching two crewmen overboard and sending the heavy boom crashing down inches from the head of Designer Olin Stephens. But nobody counted Columbia out; many of her losses were by a margin of seconds. Even hapless Easterner, which won only one race, was not ready to quit, with Olympic Champion George O’Day at the helm and a full set of new sails in the offing.

On hand to watch it all were Sir Frank Packer’s Australian spies, hovering around the fleet each day in their chartered motorboat. This month Gretel arrives to start her own trial series against Vim, her chartered workhorse, and the Aussies could be sure that Hood, Mosbacher & Co. would be around to observe the fun.