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Ellison, who won the Hobart in 1995, had two goals for the 1998 race. First and foremost, he wanted to take the record away from Plattner. After Bill Gates, Plattner was Ellison’s most important competitor in the software business, and sailing had intensified their rivalry and added a deeply personal dimension. “It’s a blood duel,” Ellison would say, without the slightest suggestion that he was anything but deadly serious. He boasted that his yacht Sayonara, which didn’t race in the Hobart the year the record was set, had never lost to Plattner’s Morning Glory. Ellison and Plattner were not on speaking terms, but they had found other ways to express themselves. During one regatta, Plattner—incensed by what he felt was unsportsmanlike behavior by Ellison—dropped his pants and “mooned” Sayonara’s crew. Ellison’s other goal was to beat George Snow.
Snow, a charismatic Australian who had won the Hobart in 1997, and Ellison could hardly have been more different from each other. The crew on Snow’s yacht, Brindabella, was almost all amateur. On Sayonara, with the exception of two guests—one of them Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s eldest son and heir apparent—everyone was a professional. Ten of Ellison’s twenty-three crewmen were members of Team New Zealand, which had won the America’s Cup in 1995 and planned to defend it in 2000.
Ellison had always been upsetting traditions and bucking the odds. After his mother decided she couldn’t take care of him, he was adopted by an aunt and uncle. Ellison never got along with his adoptive father, Louis Ellison, a Russian immigrant who took his name from Ellis Island and worked as an auditor. Growing up in a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago, Ellison wasn’t interested in school or organized sports or anyone telling him what to do. “I always had problems with authority,” Ellison would explain. “My father thought that if someone was in a position of authority that he knew more than you did. I never thought that. I thought if someone couldn’t explain himself, I shouldn’t blindly do what I was told.”
After dropping out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then the University of Chicago, where he learned to write computer software, Ellison drove a beat-up car to California. Although he had little trouble getting hired, staying so was a different story. He stumbled through a raft of computer-related jobs until he heard about a new kind of software that could store and quickly manipulate large databases. Seeing its potential, he launched a business in 1977 that would become Oracle. The company doesn’t produce the kind of software that consumers buy or even know much about, but every organization that stores significant amounts of data needs it. For most of its first decade, sales doubled every year, so quickly that Oracle appeared to be on the verge of going totally out of control. Ellison’s personal life was equally rocky. He married and divorced three times, and he broke his neck in a surfing accident.
In 1990, Ellison was almost booted out of his own company after Oracle disclosed that some of its employees had booked millions of dollars of sales that hadn’t actually materialized. But by the mid-1990s it seemed that Ellison’s high-stakes, step-skipping management style was entirely appropriate for an industry that was changing faster than any traditional organization could. Ellison was confident that no company was better suited than his to capitalize on the burgeoning Internet. After all, the first generation of e-commerce blue bloods—Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo!—all relied on Oracle software. Thanks to them, and their gravity-defying stock prices, Ellison believed that the value of Oracle’s shares would also explode. And he thought that would enable him to achieve his ultimate ambition—to replace Bill Gates as the world’s richest man.
Ellison had always been interested in sailing. As a child, he imagined being able to travel to exotic places on the yachts he saw on Lake Michigan. Soon after he moved to California, he bought a thirty-four-foot sloop, although he gave it up because he couldn’t afford it. In 1994, Ellison’s next-door neighbor, a transplanted New Zealander named David Thomson, suggested the idea of building a maxi-yacht. The largest kind of boat permitted in many races, maxis are about eighty feet long. Ellison said yes, but he imposed a couple of conditions. First, he wanted it to be the fastest boat of its kind. Second, he wanted Thomson to do all the work. Thomson was a private investor affluent enough to live in Ellison’s neighborhood, but he wasn’t in a position to spend 3 or 4 million dollars for his own maxi. Deciding that it would be fun to oversee the design and construction of Ellison’s boat, Thomson readily agreed to his terms.
Typically, when someone decides to build a boat, he or she wants to be involved in the plans, but Ellison made it clear that he didn’t want to know about the details. When Thomson walked over to Ellison’s house with a set of engineering drawings, they spent only a few minutes talking about the boat before Ellison turned the conversation to his newest plane, which they discussed for more than an hour. Thomson did send Ellison occasional e-mail updates. At the end of one, Thomson, who had heard that Ellison was going to the White House for a state dinner honoring the emperor of Japan, asked about the protocol for such an occasion. “What will you wear? Do Americans bow to the emperor?” At the end of the e-mail, Thomson wrote, “Have a great time. Sayonara.”
Seconds after he pushed the SEND button, he sent another e-mail: “Sayonara. That’s not a bad name for a boat.”
Ellison didn’t answer Thomson’s White House etiquette questions, but to the name suggestion, he punched out an instant reply: “That’s it.”
Sayonara was completed in Auckland in May 1995, just a few days after Team New Zealand won the America’s Cup—a victory that the tiny nation commemorated with four ticker-tape parades and an outpouring of nationalistic pride rivaling the celebrations that followed World War II. Thomson had recruited almost half of Sayonara’s crew from the winning squad, and they flew to San Francisco for Sayonara’s inaugural sail shortly after the last parade. Thomson hired Paul Cayard to be the boat’s first professional skipper. Cayard, who was the lead helmsman for Dennis Conner on Stars & Stripes, the boat that lost the Cup to the Kiwis, had competed in a total of five America’s Cup regattas and in 1998 won the around-the-world Whitbread Race. To round out the crew, Cayard recruited several other members from Stars & Stripes to sail on Sayonara, creating a dream team of American and Kiwi yachtsmen.
When they met on Sayonara’s deck in Alameda, across the bay from downtown San Francisco, the newly assembled crewmen were impressed by what they saw. Everything on the boat was black or white except for the red that filled the o in Sayonara’s name painted on the side of the hull. White hulls typically have a dull finish, but Sayonara’s reflected the shimmering water like a mirror. The 100-foot mast, which bent slightly toward the stern and tapered near the top, was black, as were the sail covers, winches, and instruments. Like most modern racers, Sayonara had a wide stern and a broad cockpit, on which stood a pair of large side-by-side steering wheels. Sayonara was narrower than most other maxis and, at twenty-three tons, lighter than most of its peers. The unpainted interior was carbon-fiber black. While there is nothing pleasant about a windowless black cabin, paint has weight, and the lack of it only emphasized the commitment to speed.
The front third of Sayonara was an empty black hole except for long bags of sails. There was a similar-looking black cavern in the back of the boat. Only the center section was designed to be inhabited by sailors, and even there the accommodations were spartan. Pipes, wires, and mechanical devices protruded from the walls, and nothing was done to cover them. Just as David Thomson had promised, Sayonara was a pure racing machine.
Within three years, Sayonara had become virtually invincible, winning three straight maxi-class world championships as well as the Newport to Bermuda Race, America’s most prestigious offshore race. Ellison couldn’t have been more pleased. “I could have bought the New York Yankees, but I couldn’t be the team’s shortstop. With the boat, I actually get to play on the team.”
Getting to know the crew was part of the fun. Ellison discovered that many of them shared his interests in planes and fast cars, and he enjoyed being with men who were driven and competitive but wanted nothing from him beyond the chance to sail on Sayonara. Ellison was so pleased by his crew and so confident of their abilities that in 1997 he arrived at the maxi championship regatta, which was held in Sardinia, with Rolex watches for every crewman. They had been engraved SAYONARA. MAXI WORLD CHAMPIONS. SARDINIA 1997 long before the racing began.
During that regatta’s penultimate race, Hasso Plattner’s Morning Glory was winning until the halyard that held its mainsail broke and the sail collapsed. Seizing on the opportunity, Sayonara, which had been in second place, took over the lead. For the rest of the race, it “covered” Morning Glory: whenever Morning Glory tacked, Sayonara also turned so that it always stood between its opponent and the finish line, making it virtually impossible for Plattner to regain the lead, even after his crew rigged a new halyard. Covering is standard racing procedure, but it infuriated Plattner. Even worse, by winning that day’s race, Sayonara clinched the championship. Ellison didn’t have to sail on the last day to win the regatta, and he decided not to. Plattner considered Ellison’s behavior unsportsmanlike. “I have only the worst English words to provide for them,” Plattner said later.
Ellison and his girlfriend, Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, had arrived in Sydney a week before the 1998 Hobart. After Melanie heard that a major storm might coincide with the race, she thought the Hobart was one challenge Ellison could live without. Just hours before the start, she and Ellison walked from their hotel along the perimeter of the harbor and into the lush Royal Botanic Garden. There she tried, as she had several times before, to talk Ellison out of going on the race.
“It’s idiotic,” she said just before they got into a car that would take them to Sayonara’s dock. “There’s no reason you have to do it. It’s much too dangerous.”
“It’s not a dangerous race,” Ellison replied. “It’s hard. It’s demanding, but only a couple of people have died since it started. There’s a perception of danger—that’s one of the reasons it’s such a cool race—but it’s actually not. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Later, Ellison would think back and wonder why he hadn’t listened to Melanie. But by then it would be too late.
2 (#ulink_be9e880b-b5d0-577f-8bfc-f3bd4f98d600)
THE HOBART IS far from the sailing world’s longest blue-water contest, but it has a reputation for being one of the most treacherous. Bass Strait, the 140-mile-wide stretch of water that separates Australia’s mainland from Tasmania, is one of the world’s most turbulent bodies of water. The two landmasses were once attached, and today the gap is much shallower than the oceans to the east and west. When waves that have been building for hundreds of miles pass over its shallow bottom, they tend to break like surf on the beach.
Many yachtsmen believe that every seventh Hobart is subject to a special curse. Particularly severe storms savaged the fleet in 1956, 1963, 1970, 1977, and 1984. In 1977, fifty-nine yachts dropped out of the race. In 1984, 104 out of 150 boats retired in gale-force winds. The pattern appeared to end in 1991—or maybe was just delayed until 1993, when only thirty-eight out of 110 starters made it to Hobart. Regardless, some of the sailors remembered that the original pattern would make 1998 one of the bad years.
But the potential for a dangerous storm wouldn’t cause CYC officials to consider postponing the race. Like yacht clubs everywhere, it abides by the five fundamental rules set by the International Sailing Federation. Rule number four declares: “A boat is solely responsible for deciding whether to start or to continue racing.”
Brett Gage, a senior forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, arrived at his sixteenth-floor office in downtown Sydney at four o’clock on Saturday morning, nine hours before the start of the race. As in previous years, the bureau had agreed to provide special weather forecasts to the Cruising Yacht Club, and Gage had a lot to do: he had to decide on the prerace forecast, assemble a collection of weather data into information packages for each yacht, and then rush to the CYC so he could individually brief as many skippers and navigators as possible.
His biggest complication was the weather itself: nobody could agree on what it would be. At a preliminary briefing at the CYC on Christmas Eve, Kenn Batt, another forecaster from the bureau, had described several possible scenarios but said he wasn’t sure which one would actually develop. Batt and Gage based their forecasts on three global, computer-generated weather-forecasting models as well as an Australia-based model that projected only local conditions. The U.S.-based global model, which some Australian forecasters thought tended to overstate the severity of storms, was predicting an intense low-pressure system, one that could produce hurricane-force winds. The two other models, one produced by a weather center in continental Europe and the other by a center in Britain, were forecasting a much less dangerous storm. During his Christmas Eve briefing, Batt had said a low-pressure system might develop south of Australia and move north at the same time the fleet headed south or that it could fizzle out on Christmas Day. “All the computer models are saying different things,” Batt had said, provoking an outbreak of laughter. “But a strong low could be in the cards, and it could kick up strong winds and a pretty big sea.”
Predicting weather in any one place requires an evaluation of the patterns for the rest of the world. The three main forecasting models are based on millions of observation points spread around the globe. For each of more than 100,000 grid points, data on wind speed, barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity are gathered from weather stations and balloons as well as from drifting buoys and are combined with estimates for twenty-nine levels of the atmosphere for every grid point, creating more than 3 million data points. Information for every one of them, plus additional data from planes and satellites, is fed into super-computers for each of the models, which make more than 20 million calculations per second for more than an hour, to produce global pictures of the shifting temperatures, pressure, and high-altitude jet streams that create weather.
The models Batt was examining predicted very different levels of barometric pressure. The discrepancies were crucial: variations of pressure are what produce wind. At any given moment, the world’s atmosphere has more than one hundred regions of low pressure, and air from everywhere else is rushing toward them. The lower the pressure, the swifter the wind. In Southern latitudes, when the air approaches the center of the low, because of the earth’s rotation, the wind circles in a clockwise pattern (called the Coriolis effect), creating the kind of swirling clouds familiar from satellite images. If the force is powerful enough, it develops into a “tropical cyclone”—which is the same thing as a “hurricane” in America or a “typhoon” in northern Asia.
Early Saturday morning, as Gage sipped his first cup of coffee and scanned the latest satellite photographs and computer outputs, it was clear that a low was still forming, but the models continued to disagree about its intensity. The information packages he began to put together included predictions for barometric pressure as well as for wave heights and tidal changes, a satellite photograph showing that there were hardly any clouds over Australia, and a “strong wind warning,” indicating that twenty-five-to-thirty-three-knot winds should be expected. (A knot is one nautical mile, 1.15 statute miles, per hour.) But Gage knew it could be much worse, and he was afraid the race would start before he could make a definitive judgment. At 7:30 A.M. he ran into another problem: the bureau’s high-speed photocopying machine broke down, forcing him to finish running off the sheets of information for the packages at the CYC.
Kenn Batt, who was helping assemble the packages and who planned to conduct some of the briefings at the CYC, remained at the bureau, hoping to obtain updated information. Batt, who was forty-eight, had been a member of the bureau for twenty-five years but had begun forecasting long before that. As a teenager growing up in Hobart, he began producing forecasts for the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, which he posted on a bulletin board every weekend. He knew weather and he knew sailing: Batt came from a family that had been racing for four generations, and he had sailed in seven Hobarts.
Just before 9:00 A.M. Batt received the latest output from the European and British models. They predicted lower pressure than they had before, though still not as low as the American model. Calling Gage, Batt said, “Don’t hand out the packages. We’re upgrading the forecast to a gale warning,” which indicated expected winds of thirty-four to forty-seven knots. “We’ll fax the warning through in a couple of minutes so you can incorporate it into the package.”
By the time Batt arrived at the CYC, Gage had set up a table and hung weather maps from a nearby wall. During the next three hours, representatives from eighty-six yachts picked up weather packages. Some of the yachtsmen just took them and left. Others asked lots of questions. “You’ll have a nice run this afternoon,” Batt told one of them, “but there’s a front building down south. We’re not sure which way it’s going, but it could develop and become really nasty. We could have a 1993 situation.”
3 (#ulink_329bc0a7-a6ee-5be0-b52b-125c0390f702)
LACHLAN MURDOCH AND Sarah O’Hare, his fiancée, began Saturday at Lachlan’s harborside house, surrounded by lush gardens and palm trees. Although Lachlan was just twenty-seven, for the previous four years he had been the chief executive officer of News Corporation’s sprawling Australian operation, which included almost two-thirds of the nation’s newspapers, more than one hundred in all, as well as magazines and a movie studio. With his press-lord powers and wealth, along with robust good looks and a reputation for racing around Sydney streets on a Ducati motorcycle, Lachlan was a major Australian celebrity. When Vogue’s Australian edition published a lengthy profile, the headline on the magazine’s cover was: LACHLAN MURDOCH: THE MAN AUSTRALIA WANTS TO SLEEP WITH. Sarah also had a following. A model, she had appeared in splashy magazine advertising for Revlon and Wonderbra and had modeled for many of the world’s most important designers in Paris.
Lachlan had already met most of Sayonara’s crew during several practice sails. As a guest, he wasn’t required to participate, but he had shown up for all of them, arriving early enough to help lug food and ice down the dock and separate cans of soda from their plastic holders. Lachlan had always recognized that people tended to define him in terms of his father, and he frequently tried to find ways to make the point that he didn’t expect special treatment. Although he knew he would be Sayonara’s least-experienced sailor, he hoped to let the others know that he wanted to do more than simply stay out of the way.
The Murdochs’ stock was already strong on Sayonara. Rupert sailed with Ellison in the 1995 Hobart, and the media mogul had also shown up for the practice sails. During one of them, he lost the end of a finger after a line he was holding pulled his hand into a block. “I’ll be fine,” he had said as he calmly held what was left of his bleeding digit over the side of the boat so he didn’t bleed on the deck. The missing piece was put on ice and reattached at St. Vincent’s Hospital a few hours later, and when he arrived at a crew dinner that night, he declared, “Right, now I’m ready to go to Hobart.”
During the race itself, Rupert had spent most of the first night seated on “the rail,” the outside edge of the deck, with his legs dangling over the side. When he got up and offered to serve coffee or tea, several crewmen took him up, each specifying his cream and sugar preferences. Rupert shuttled up and down the steps delivering steaming mugs until a Team New Zealand sailor named Kevin Shoebridge cut him short: “Rupert, for fuck’s sake, I said no sugar. Make me another.” Rupert laughed as much as anyone, and in Hobart he won more points when he slapped a credit card on the bar, declaring, “I want to get the last laugh with you guys, so let’s try to put a dent in this.”
While growing up on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Lachlan worked for company-owned papers during school vacations: first as a reporter at the Express-News in San Antonio, Texas, and later as an editor at The Sun in London. One year after he graduated from Princeton University, he became the publisher of The Australian, the only nationwide general-interest daily paper. Soon after the 1998 Hobart, Lachlan expected to start spending most of his time in New York and to take responsibility for the company’s publishing operations in the United States, including HarperCollins, the New York Post, and TV Guide.
But Lachlan wasn’t his father’s clone, and he didn’t try to be. He was known to burn joss sticks in his spacious offices in Sydney and New York, and the discs sitting near a wall-mounted CD player in Sydney were cutting edge and eclectic. When Lachlan rolled up his sleeves, his left forearm revealed a striking Polynesian-design tattoo. Even when presiding over meetings, Lachlan was relaxed and unguarded, throwing his legs over the arms of couches and punctuating lots of his sentences with question marks the way teenagers do. He spoke softly in an accent that reflected his peripatetic upbringing: there were hints of Australia and England, although the dominant strain was American. Like his father, Lachlan had an informal approach to management. But while Rupert could be gruff and intimidating, Lachlan was almost always welcoming and gentlemanly. Friends used old-fashioned words like “earnest” and “gallant” to describe him.
Lachlan also had a serious appetite for adventure. In that way he was like Ellison, although their specific tastes were somewhat different. Whereas Ellison chased speed, Lachlan liked danger, the sense that he was putting himself on the edge. While at Princeton, where he majored in philosophy, he spent several hours a day climbing sheer rock faces. More recently he had discovered that his motorcycle provided the same thrill but required less time. “There are people who in their makeup need to take risks,” Lachlan told friends. “Every once in a while I just have to do things that require me to make judgments about how far I can go. It’s not that it’s dangerous as much as it’s unprotected, if you know what I mean.”
Lachlan chose his friends without much regard to what they did, although he also spent time with his father’s friends, a Who’s Who of global business titans. In fact, one of Rupert’s friends, Michael Milken, was the reason Lachlan was sailing to Hobart on Sayonara. Lachlan and Rupert were among the guests at the onetime junk bond king’s annual Fourth of July party in 1998. As lunch was being served in the backyard of Milken’s house overlooking California’s Lake Tahoe, Ellison, who was also a guest, asked Rupert if he wanted to sail another Hobart on Sayonara. When Rupert said he couldn’t, Ellison asked Lachlan. “It wouldn’t seem right if we didn’t have a Murdoch on board. Do you want to come?”
Lachlan jumped at the chance. “Absolutely. I’d love to.”
Lachlan had learned to sail from his father, who raced small boats in his twenties and thirties. (Rupert still sailed, but it was mostly on a vast yacht designed to be comfortable rather than fast. “It’s so big, it’s not really a sailboat anymore,” said Lachlan, who bought his own boat in 1995, which he named Karakoram for the mountain range that includes K2.) Lachlan sailed as much as he could. “For someone who has a job that keeps their mind kind of ticking over all the time, it’s a great way to force yourself to think about something other than work.” He had raced his own boat in the 1997 Hobart, and he thought he would learn a lot from crewing on Sayonara.
After leaving his house Saturday morning, Lachlan arrived at a restaurant near the CYC in time for a crew meeting. It was conducted by Chris Dickson, who had replaced Paul Cayard as Sayonara’s professional skipper a couple of years earlier. In a room where the walls and tables were painted with nautical scenes and old sails hung from the ceiling, Dickson spoke from two pages of typewritten notes, conducting the meeting as if it were a corporate planning session.
“Meals. We have three dinners, and we should figure on a three-day race. If we do it in two and a half, that’s great; but we should plan on three days.
“Bunks. Larry and I have assigned bunks, so if you need us in a hurry, you’ll know where to find us.
“The start. There will be a hunded and fifteen boats at the starting line. We do twice the speed as the small boats, and we don’t want to have a collision. If you’re not busy, keep your head down. We have to keep the noise down. The warning gun goes at twelve-fifty.
“Brindabella. We have to keep an eye on them. They’re very strong, and it’s clearly the boat we have to beat.”
When he was done, Dickson introduced Roger “Clouds” Badham, a consulting meteorologist who made his living providing forecasts to yachtsmen and was so highly regarded that America’s Cup contenders regularly competed for his services. Clouds, as he was called by everyone, ran through the specifics of his forecast, which called for pleasant weather on Saturday and worsening conditions thereafter. Then he looked up from his notes and spoke plainly: “It’s going to be tough out there. There’s a pretty good chance it could be really tough—and if it is, you could be in for a nightmare of a race.”
Ellison, who had skipped the meeting so he could take a walk with Melanie, stepped onto Sayonara at eleven. By then Robbie Naismith and Tony Rae, two of Team New Zealand’s key members, were doing a final inventory of the sails they were taking for the race. Other crewmen were replacing the floorboards, which had been removed so that a dehumidifier could suck up moisture from the bilge. Chris Dickson and Mark Rudiger were standing in the cockpit discussing tactics. The rest of the crew was milling about the deck, bantering with sailors from nearby boats and trying to relax. Sayonara often attracted lots of attention because of its famous owner and track record, and the crowd was even larger than normal because of Lachlan and his photogenic fiancée. After saying hello to Lachlan and Sarah, Ellison sat down in the cockpit with Dickson.
Dickson was a crucial ingredient to Sayonara’s success. Like Ellison, he was intense and demanding. “We have an uncompromising commitment to winning,” the thirty-seven-year-old New Zealander would say of his approach to managing Sayonara. “We don’t accept excuses for anything. We have an absolutely ruthless approach to doing the best we can.”
Even back when he started winning junior championships in Auckland, Dickson’s friends talked about his competitive zeal and killer instinct. Three times he was named New Zealand’s junior sailing champion. In 1987, he was the skipper of Kiwi Magic, the first New Zealand yacht to compete for the America’s Cup, held that year in Fremantle, Australia. Dickson lost only one of the first thirty-four races leading up to the selection of the challenger; but in the final round of the challenger races, he lost to Dennis Conner, who went on to win the Cup.
Since then, Dickson had competed in two other America’s Cups and the 1993–94 Whitbread Race. It was in the latter that he had the most impact. In previous years, yachts had carried full-time chefs to prepare hot meals that were sometimes accompanied by wine. Dickson brought nothing but freeze-dried food and drinks that were called milk shakes but were actually synthetic concoctions designed to deliver various nutritional supplements efficiently. “By bringing America’s Cup discipline to the race, Dickson changed the Whitbread forever,” said T. A. McCann, who crewed on Dickson’s boat.
Dickson was famous for his capacity to intimidate the world’s greatest sailors and for the way he always asked for more. Once while training for the 1987 America’s Cup, his crew thought they were done for the day until Dickson said, “Let’s do ten more tacks.” Then there were ten more, and another ten. On an America’s Cup boat, every tack—turning the boat so that the wind approaches from a different side—is hard work. The repetition of quickly cranking in the big sails was like an unbroken series of wind sprints. Tony Rae, who was trimming the mainsail and who also performed that job for Team New Zealand and Sayonara, still remembered the afternoon. “Everyone knew that any suggestion that we had done enough would have been rewarded with more work. In the end, we did fifty tacks.”
Before he hired Dickson, Ellison had asked T. A. McCann, an America’s Cup veteran who had sailed on Sayonara for all of its races, the kind of questions he always posed when looking for something: “Who’s the best sailor you’ve ever sailed with? Who’s the best sailor in the world?”
“It’s not even close—it’s Chris Dickson,” T.A. replied. Like everyone who had sailed with Dickson, T.A. had suffered from his wrath, but he believed that was a price worth paying. “He’s a fanatical perfectionist who has a terrible reputation for being hard on people,” T.A. told Ellison, “but he’s the most talented sailor alive today.”
Dickson reminded Ellison of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer and Ellison’s best friend. Like Jobs, Ellison said, “Dickson wants to do everything perfectly, all the time. He’s so brilliant at what he does and so unforgiving of himself that he becomes unforgiving of others.” But while Ellison tried to rationalize Dickson’s rough edges, he was also a bit amazed. “Dickson will yell at Joey Allen,” Ellison said, referring to the principal bowman on Sayonara and Team New Zealand. “That is unbelievable. Joey Allen is the best bowman in the world.”
While Dickson would be responsible for sailing the boat and managing the crew, Mark Rudiger, a forty-four-year-old Californian who rarely cracked a smile, would make many of the strategic decisions. In the 1993–94 Whitbread Race, which Dickson would have won if his mast hadn’t snapped toward the end of the contest, Rudiger was the winning yacht’s navigator. Ellison considered him the world’s best.
Rudiger, who usually hunched to bring his six-foot five-inch height down to other people’s, began sailing across oceans in the 1960s when his parents took him out of school to circumnavigate the world. By the time he was twenty, he was back in California, where he bought a broken-down boat that he raced single-handed. While attending a maritime academy, he began learning about navigation. In years since, the role of the navigator had changed dramatically because of technological advances. With the introduction of the satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS, which determines location by triangulating off satellite signals, one of the most important tasks—determining a vessel’s location—had become a matter of pushing a button. Navigators had begun to spend most of their time making strategic decisions about the best course to sail. Understanding the weather was one of their most crucial jobs.
The weather was what Ellison wanted to know about. “When are we going to get the bad stuff? How long is it going to last?”
“We’re going to have a northerly breeze at the start,” Rudiger answered, “but by nightfall, there will be a change. In fact, it’s going to be a pretty aggressive change. We could get sixty knots.”
“It sounds like another Hobart,” Ellison quipped.
“In terms of strategy,” Rudiger continued, “we have to keep track of what the current does. Tactically, we need to keep tabs on Brindabella. We should be able to beat them on a boat-to-boat basis, but they could beat us on tactics, so we can’t let them get too far away from us.”
“We have to make sure we’re the first boat to get out of the harbor,” Dickson added, “but we don’t have to be first across the starting line. It’s more important that we get a clean start. We can’t have any equipment breakdowns or protests.”
Ellison planned to be at the helm for the start. The crew knew that Sayonara performed best when Dickson was at the wheel—but they also understood that Ellison enjoyed the challenge of driving the boat and that ownership entitled him to some perquisites. In the 1995 Hobart, Ellison didn’t steer at the start, and he was looking forward to doing it himself this time. “Ellison is the boss and that’s it,” Dickson had told the other main helmsmen one day earlier. “He’ll have the helm for the start, and he’ll keep it until he gets sick of it. I’ll be there to give him guidance.”
In fact, by most standards, Ellison had become an excellent helmsman. He had been coached by some of the world’s best teachers, and his personality was well matched to the job. He was rarely intimidated, and he handled chaos better than most people did. Even Dickson had confidence in his boss’s skill—or as much confidence as Dickson had in anyone but himself.
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ROB KOTHE’S ALARM clock sounded at 3:30 A.M. on Saturday morning. The owner of the Sword of Orion began the day by filling a mug with his favorite drink, Sustagen, a vitamin-fortified chocolate mix, into which he sprinkled a teaspoon of ground coffee beans. Walking into his study, he logged on to his computer and called up data from the same global weather models Kenn Batt and Brett Gage were studying. Kothe had been doing the same thing every day for several weeks, and with good reason: in ocean racing, judgments about where the winds and currents are strongest are pivotal.
A tall and gangly fifty-four-year-old, Kothe didn’t have much hair on the top of his head, although he did have a broad snow-white mustache and a goatee, which extended out over a long, pointy chin. He was relatively new to sailing. He had bought his first boat in 1997—the year he raced his first Hobart—but he believed he could make up for his lack of experience with the same sort of relentless striving that had made him a successful entrepreneur. Understanding the weather was the area where he believed he could make the biggest contribution to his crew’s race, and he spent the next three hours comparing the models, printing out charts and data while straining the largest of the coffee particles from his drink through his teeth.
It was obvious that he hadn’t been sailing for long. When he tried to pass himself off as an old salt, splicing nautical terms into the conversation, he ended up sounding more like a newcomer who was trying a bit too hard. The overall impression was that of a mad professor, and for that reason many CYC members called him Kooky Owner, or simply K.O. Some, in fact, had never heard his real name. For a while he tried to get the young men he recruited for his crew to stop using the name; later, he sought, again unsuccessfully, to alter the meaning by signing e-mails as “Kompetitive Owner.” The Sword’s crew eventually shortened the name to Kooky.
Kooky had an abiding hunger for the kind of glory that winning the Hobart could bring. “I was the smallest kid in school until I was nine, and I felt bad about that,” he said more than four decades later. “It gave me a point to prove.” He grew up in Eden, a port city south of Sydney where his father worked as an accountant for many of the fishing fleets based there. Although he didn’t sail as a child, Kooky spent a lot of time hanging around the docks and he remembered following the Hobart races. Two days before the 1954 race, when Kooky was eight, his parents gave him a new radio. “I listened to the whole race. Back then I could recite the names of everyone who had won.”
Kooky had been deeply committed to adding his name to that list ever since.
Kooky was fundamentally different from other skippers. Whereas most of them had been sailing for many years, he hoped to go from novice to Hobart winner almost immediately. And although sailing is a team sport, Kooky, who knew less about sailing than everyone else on his crew, wasn’t a natural leader. A true entrepreneur, most of his achievements had come from individual pursuits rather than group efforts, and his drive wasn’t matched by a talent for managing others. For example, after he hired Darren Senogles, a twenty-eight-year-old sailor known as Dags, to take care of the boat, Kooky called him so frequently that Dags told him, “If you keep calling me, I’ll never have a chance to get anything done.”
When he recruited his crew, Kooky didn’t mislead anyone about his sailing credentials. Instead, he talked about how he had flown gliders in airborne regattas over Australian deserts when he was working as a pharmacist near Canberra in the 1970s. “In gliding, you figure out what the wind is doing, and you win by learning how to take advantage of it, just like in sailing,” he said. “It’s the solo version of the same thing.” He also described gliding as an extremely competitive sport, recalling that one of his friends had been killed in a collision and claiming that midair contact sometimes left planes with tire marks on their wings.
Since those pharmacist days, Kooky’s career had evolved through a sequence of oddly logical stages. Pharmacology got him involved in animal tranquilizers, which led to tranquilizer guns. His understanding of the propulsion component inspired him to manufacture lifeline-throwing guns, which he profitably supplied to navies and merchant fleets around the world. After going through a divorce in 1992, Kooky decided his businesses were doing well enough that he could finally find the time to pursue the Hobart. For a couple of years, he crewed on other people’s boats, but since his dream had everything to do with winning the race on his own yacht, he soon bought a forty-foot sloop and joined the CYC.
Before the 1997 Hobart, he told his crew—which included Dags—that he would buy a better boat if they did well. They did, and the day after they finished the race, Kooky, always an early riser, began stalking the docks to shop for a new boat at 5:00 A.M. Before the morning was over, he had decided to buy Brighton Star for $220,000. It had originally been launched as the Sword of Orion, and Kooky decided to restore its former name.
The Sword’s shape was very different from that of classic sailing yachts. Its bow dropped straight down from the deck to the water. The back half of the boat was strikingly broad, creating a large cockpit area eight feet across. A seven-foot-diameter steering wheel extended from one side to the other, enabling helmsmen to have the broadest possible perspective. Like Sayonara and most of the fastest racing yachts, the hull was composed of strong but lightweight skins on the inside and outside, surrounding an interior of foam. The Sword’s skins were made of Kevlar, a synthetic material so strong that it’s used to make bulletproof vests.
Kooky went to fairly extreme measures to improve the boat and its crew. The Sword came with a handsome barometer, which was housed in a brass case; Kooky replaced it with a plastic one to eliminate a couple of pounds of weight. He had hinges moved from one side of the cabinet doors to the other because he thought shifting the weight of the hinges toward the front of the boat might improve the yacht’s handicap rating. If something broke in a race, he was pleased: “Now we can get a better one” was his usual reaction.
Beyond a demanding racing schedule—at least two races and one practice sail every week, sometimes with a professional sailing coach on board—Kooky used e-mails to badger the crew to be on the boat on time and even to exercise more and lose weight. “I’ve been looking closely at crew commitment,” he wrote in an all-crew message a month before the Hobart. “If you want to be on the Hobart boat, this is the commitment needed: 1) You will need to be available for all races from this weekend. No weekends off. Not for discussion. However, there will be a maximum of two midweek practice sessions, possibly only one. 2) Fitness. If you are not already, start running or go to the gym. Cut the alcohol and eat better. Lard is a penalty. 3) Smoking. Last weekend I saw cigarette ash land on sails and I suffered a coughing fit from cigarette smoke. There will be no smoking during short races, from the ten-minute gun. Before and between races, smoking sites will be per long races. In long races, there will be no smoking upwind, ahead of the traveler. In long races, there will be no smoking downwind, behind the cockpit. If you are not able to meet these conditions tell me now while you still have time to find a place on another boat going south.”
Kooky didn’t know any other way. “I’m just an intensely competitive person,” he would say. “I don’t do anything by halves.”
The Hobart has two kinds of winners. Larry Ellison and George Snow hoped to make it to Hobart first to win “line honors”: to be the first to cross the finish line. Others, including Kooky, aspired to win the race based on “adjusted” or “corrected” time. As in golf, every yacht is given a handicap to make up for its different size, weight, and sails. Although Kooky brought an uneven set of skills to his campaign, he rated his chances at winning on corrected time at one in six.
After he finished checking the weather information on his computer, Kooky took a cab for the fifteen-minute ride to the CYC, where he arrived just after eight o’clock. The clubhouse and the docks behind it were already packed with sailors, spectators, and journalists. Kooky’s first objective was to find Dags, who in addition to preparing the boat was one of the core members of the crew. Dags could hardly have been more different from his boss. While Kooky was physically and socially awkward, Dags had the wiry body of a long-distance runner and was a gifted athlete who exuded easygoing personal warmth. Though he looked like an up-and-coming corporate attorney when he wore his wire-rimmed glasses, when he was drinking beer with his contemporaries, he was exuberantly playful and seemed, if anything, younger than his age. But Dags managed the Sword like a seasoned executive, systematically testing equipment and attending to his “to do” list. He was also uncommonly generous. After a long day of sailing during a weeklong regatta, he stayed on the boat much longer than anyone else, cleaning up and getting ready for the next day. By the time he arrived at the house where the crew were staying, he had missed dinner. No one had thought to save any lasagna for him; rather than complaining, he began washing the dishes.
Like Kooky, Dags had high ambitions for the Sword, but the nature of his aspirations was fundamentally different. Dags was less interested in glory than in becoming a great sailor for its own sake. He was a bowman, responsible for changing the sails in front of the mast. Because the bow is more affected by the motion of waves than any other part of the boat, the job requires acrobatic balance and enough dexterity to manipulate a complicated array of lines, sails, and equipment. Dags was a natural.
He hoped the Sword would be a stepping-stone to even more competitive yachts. It was not his first boat: he started racing to Hobart when he was just fourteen, and he had already competed in ten races. Now Dags wanted to find out whether he had the skills to sail at the very highest level—in the Whitbread or the America’s Cup or on a boat like Sayonara—and he was willing to sacrifice a lot to get there. A few months earlier, he had quit working at his father’s home-building company because it was getting in the way.
Dags sailed on the Sword almost in spite of its owner. There’s often an implicit bargain between owners and crewmen. Talented sailors want to be on high-performance yachts, which are necessarily expensive. By providing a first-class boat and covering the ongoing expense of acquiring new sails and the latest in performance-enhancing equipment, owners attract crewmen who can’t afford their own boats. The other part of the equation is that much of the recognition, as well as the trophies, goes to the owners.
“He’s just a glory hound—that’s all he wants,” Dags said of Kooky. But if the glory came from racing victories, Dags would also benefit. A few months before the Hobart, the Sword was the surprise winner of a major regatta. If it continued to do well, Dags would be invited to join an even better yacht.
Still, better than anyone, Dags understood that Kooky wasn’t a perfect skipper and that the owner’s lack of experience and follow-through were problematic. A couple of weeks earlier, Dags had asked every member of the crew to help provision the boat with food and drink and various other supplies. Kooky’s task had been to refill the propane tank that was used for cooking, but when the two met on the dock on the morning of the race, Dags wasn’t surprised to learn that the tank was still sitting in a locker, virtually empty. That’s typical, Dags said to himself. Here we are, with just a few hours before the start, and I have to run around trying to fill the propane tank instead of checking everything on the boat one last time.
Larry Ellison paid whatever it took to get the world’s best sailors on Sayonara. Kooky avoided making outright payments; Dags was paid to take care of the boat, but he sailed on his own time. Like many owners, however, Kooky used his buying power with marine suppliers to bolster his team. A sailmaker named Andrew Parkes started sailing on the Sword after Kooky told him, “I’m going to be buying a lot of sails, and I would like you to be part of my crew.”
A month before the Hobart, Kooky had met Glyn Charles, an Olympic sailor from Britain, and asked him to join the crew. A boyishly handsome thirty-three-year-old with a mop of curly dark hair, Glyn had been in Australia for several weeks working as a sailing coach. Since he hoped to represent Britain in the Sydney Olympics, he was also spending time sailing small boats back and forth across the harbor in order to develop an intimate understanding of local wind patterns. Small boats were Glyn’s passion. They were what attracted him to sailing, and unlike many sailors who move to bigger boats as their skills increase, Glyn reveled in the total control he could have over a small one. At the time, he was ranked fourth in the world for the Star Class, a twenty-two-and-a-half-foot two-man boat.
Although he had been planning to leave Australia on December 22 so he could spend Christmas in England with his family and girlfriend, he agreed to meet Kooky at the CYC bar ten days before the race. Kooky loved the idea of adding an Olympic-quality helmsman to his crew. Glyn didn’t like ocean racing, in part because he was prone to seasickness, but he was tempted: he could add the Hobart to his sailing résumé—and also make some money. He asked for one thousand pounds. Kooky started out saying that he couldn’t pay an outright fee. While it was permitted in the class in which Sayonara sailed, it wasn’t in the Sword’s. A little later, though, he offered to reimburse Glyn for various expenses, including his flight to England, and to pay about a thousand pounds for some “consulting work.”
Glyn was still torn. The Hobart sounded a lot like the Fastnet Race, Britain’s best-known ocean race, which starts from the Isle of Wight and goes to the southwest tip of Ireland and then back to England. Glyn had sailed in the Fastnet, and had hated it. On the other hand, he was having a hard time turning sailing into a profession, so he ultimately accepted Kooky’s offer.
But two days before the race, Glyn thought he had made a terrible mistake. He was hit by a stomach virus, and all he could think about was the misery of seasickness. Even though he hadn’t left land, he already felt seasick. When Kooky heard that Glyn was ill, he phoned and told him, “You’ve got to go to the doctor and get it fixed. If it’s a virus, it’s going to go right through the crew.”
Glyn replied, “It’s only food.”
“I hope you’re right. If it’s food, you’ll be all right—but you’ve got to see a doctor.” Afraid that Glyn wasn’t taking him seriously, Kooky added, “If by eight o’clock tonight you haven’t told me that you’ve gotten clearance from a doctor, you’re off the boat. Simple as that. I can’t risk it.”
Later that day, Glyn called Kooky and said he’d been to a doctor and that he was okay.
On the morning of the race, Kooky asked Glyn about the specifics of what the doctor had said. Glyn had a confession to make: he hadn’t actually seen a doctor. Instead, he had talked by phone to a friend who was a physician. Kooky was annoyed, but Glyn, in part because of his enthusiastic mood, convinced him that he felt much better.
By midmorning, the docks were bustling with last-minute activity. Several yachtsmen were high above the decks of their boats, sitting in bosun’s chairs—small, slinglike seats suspended from the tops of masts—checking the rigging. Other sailors were disconnecting electrical cords, removing flags from the tops of masts, folding sails, and off-loading half-empty bottles of wine. Some crews were huddling in their cockpits with maps and the rules for the race. Others were putting on their team shirts and hats and asking passersby to take pictures. Some of the yachtsmen were nervous, but none of them showed it.
Before the Sword left the dock to head toward the starting line, Kooky joined the rest of the ten-member crew for a round of rum and Cokes at the CYC’s main bar. Sailors are renowned for their capacity to drink, and theirs may be the only sport in which having a drink or two before the start of competition is not merely acceptable but, for some, de rigueur. Although it was still morning, the bar was packed—and the mood was raucous, like a Saturday night in a college pub. Since girlfriends and wives were part of the crowd, there wasn’t much discussion about the ominous weather forecast. Instead, most of the talk was about Christmas Day activities and the impossible pressures of simultaneously preparing for the race and celebrating the holiday. Beyond lighthearted ribbing and challenges, there was a steady chorus of “good luck, mate” and “see you in Hobart.” Kooky—who, like skippers of many of the other most competitive yachts, had banned alcohol from the Sword—explained his morning cocktail with a pharmacist’s sense of humor. “We might as well have a small sedative to settle our nerves.” Dags had two.
On most yachts, the skipper delivers a pep talk before the start of the race. After the Sword’s crew assembled back on the boat, the only inspirational words came from Steve Kulmar, another relatively recent addition to the crew. Although he was brought on as a principal helmsman, Kulmar, who ran a successful Sydney advertising agency, had a far more expansive idea as to the role he would play on the Sword. Indeed, since he considered himself the yacht’s most experienced crewman, he expected to make most of the big decisions. That Kooky was the skipper seemed to Kulmar an irrelevant detail.
Kulmar always provoked strong reactions. People either loved him or hated him; he left no room for middle ground. A solidly built forty-six-year-old with closely cropped hair that was halfway to gray, he looked a bit like a stern version of Frank Sinatra. While Kulmar’s eyes weren’t blue, they were distinctive, usually so wide open that they looked as if they were about to burst from their sockets. In the office, where he wore Armani suits and his secretary served him oversized cups of cappuccino, Kulmar’s demeanor veered between toughness and vulnerability. He could be charming and solicitous, qualities that helped his company attract a blue-chip list of clients. The way he hesitated in the middle of a thought made him sound like an intellectual, yet his haircut and intensity gave him the appearance of a military officer and a man who was always on the verge of erupting into a tantrum if anything went wrong. Those tantrums weren’t pretty: Kulmar had a towering ego, and even his closest friends complained about the way he tried to seize control of every situation and how he stamped his feet when he failed to get his way.
Before the Sword left the dock, Kulmar addressed the crew as if it were his own. “The yacht is in great shape. We have an excellent crew, and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t win as long as we push the boat as hard as we can.” His monologue included references to his past victories. In fact, he did have a great record. As a child, he had won several Australian and world championships on twelve- and eighteen-foot boats. As an adult, he had sailed in seven Fastnets and seventeen Hobarts, three of them on boats that won on corrected time. But Dags thought Kulmar’s credential wielding was more than simple egotism. He thought it was part of an effort by Kulmar to take over the boat. And that, Dags thought, was deeply troubling.
