Much better than it looked. In 1987 Melges led the Chicago Yacht Club’s America’s Cup challenge in Fremantle. Even by the standards of the day, Heart of America was relatively ‘lightly’ funded, building just one 12 Metre compared to the four new boats of Melges’s old Star boat rival Dennis Conner. The campaign attracted masses of support back home; the team posters (which still trade on Ebay) sold like hotcakes at $100 apiece, $500 when signed by Melges himself, and T-shirt sales ran off the charts. Ironically Melges took the same design path as Conner, building a long, heavy boat that would excel in the stronger winds of the Cup Match… if it could make it through the lighter early rounds. Conner scraped through and the rest is history; Heart of America did not. By the time they hit their stride – and they really did – as the breeze increased later in the Louis Vuitton Cup the boys of the Midwest were simply too far behind to make up the points deficit. When Melges did win the Cup, in 1992 as part of Bill Koch’s America3
programme,
the budget was more like $75 million with a squad of some 250 people… pleasingly including 8 sailors from Heart of America
and super-keen, so of course we did. In the morning a team headed down to ‘the barge’, our makeshift base at the time. Stu fired up the crane. We launched the boat, loaded the sails and went sailing. The management was not happy! I’m not sure if it was a power struggle,
or if people were worried about us using up resources, but it didn’t matter – they were angry. Buddy was equally furious. Essentially, he couldn’t understand how someone could be allowed to tell him that he couldn’t go sailing. Even in a pro- gramme where we were going to be aver- aging less than three days off a month there was nothing he ever wanted to do more than just go sailing. I recently touched base with Mike and
asked him why he thought Buddy is so successful both on and off the water. Mike commented that on the water Buddy never needed instruments and there was nothing about angles and numbers. He just felt the
46 SEAHORSE
boat and ‘tried to fool Mother Nature’, adding, ‘He is the single most naturally gifted sailor I’ve ever sailed with.’ I posed the same question to Stu, asking
him to speculate where the magic came from. His response was ‘I never met his father but I’m sure he had a great way with boats and taught him the way to work hard and sail right. ‘It must have been a down-home Mid-
west upbringing; always knowing what’s right from wrong. On the water he stressed the need to get our heads out of the boat and look up the racecourse. Same story over again – “present the boat to Mother Nature.”’ Essentially he was trained at the school
of quicklier – Buddy’s trademark word describing how one should sail.
And then there are the cows Cows – another lesson Buddy loves to share. There are certain things every junior
coach teaches their sailors: look for any and all signs to see the wind shifts; the ripples on the water, the boats up the course, a cruising sailor on the horizon, flags on shore, the clouds, the jet trails, the smoke from a chimney. ‘And of course the cows,’ Buddy would add. ‘The cows?!’ you might ask. Well, evidently they stand with their rear ends to the wind to aid in fly removal. Who knew? Buddy knows. As a matter of fact, I was soon to learn
that a mandatory stop on Buddy’s tour of Zenda is a visit to his nephew’s dairy farm, where there are a lot of cows. The question of how the wizard gets his
magic evolved in my mind to ‘does Buddy win because he loves the sport or does he love the sport because he wins?’ I’m not positive, but I think it is the former. Stu speculates that the reason Buddy
sailed so much was that Gloria kicked him out of the house so she could have some peace and quiet. We do know that she
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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