The America's Cup

I'm always meaning to rearrange my books or, rather, arrange them in some sensible way so that all the books about the First World War or sports or whatever are bunched together. I've never done it. Some deep instinct makes me resist doing it now and now I think I know why.

In a beautifully arranged library, there are few surprises. Things are where they're supposed to be. In my library, I go looking for something on the history of Poland and bang up against the right book are the letters of Groucho Marx. Of course that means that my knowledge of the history of Poland is indefinitely postponed. I was searching this week for a book which I knew must be on a certain shelf but where it was supposed to be was a book so laden with dust that you had to tilt the spine towards the light to read the title.

It has never been taken down since I first bought it, but its title as much as anything else I can recall fanned in me the impulse to become a foreign correspondent. It's called, 'We saw it happen'. It was a collection of reminiscences of correspondents of the New York Times in the not-very-distant past, but here were stories from the men who were there: following Gandhi on his tour of Lancashire, writing up the funeral of the Empress Dowager of Japan, accompanying Admiral Byrd on his expedition to the Antarctic, being – almost by accident – in Vienna on the morning Hitler invaded Austria.

That seemed to me to be the life. To be there. And, of course, the editor of every newspaper on earth is brought up to believe that nothing is credible unless it's written by a reporter on the spot. Hence the more profitable the newspaper, the prouder it is of the range, the exotic range of its datelines. After all, the man or woman who's there is bound to write the truest story. Right?

Well, no, as a matter of fact. Something happened 30 more years ago which, with some stories, has turned the reporter on the spot into a mole trying to cover a marathon. I think the first news event of international importance that was covered by American television coast to coast was the Japanese peace treaty conference held in San Francisco in September 1951. The State Department, which was in charge of assigning press credentials and seats had put most of the foreign press corps, certainly the British contingent, into the back two rows of the upper balcony or gallery of the San Francisco opera house. This is the sort of nest for which opera glasses were invented. I, for one, had no opera glasses.

When this great plenary session opened, the British correspondents were whispering and hissing between themselves, who's the little man second from the left? Who's the man on Dean Acheson's right? There was a big man on the front row of the dignitaries on the stage and he was a colourful character in the literal sense that, as I recall, he was wearing a pale, sky-blue suit and brown shoes. I don't know why I became so fussed about knowing his identity. I must have had an approaching deadline.

Anyway, I remember that this session was the first big coast-to-coast television transmission and I tumbled down the stairs of the balcony and went out to a coin telephone box and put in a call to my wife in New York. She was watching all right. Who's the big man in the sky-blue suit? She was shocked. Governor Warren of California, of course! Hadn't I seen him mop his brow and joke with secretary Acheson? 'How's Acheson looking?' I asked. She was incredulous. She could have told me if I'd asked the tensile strength of the whiskers in Acheson's moustache. 'You're there, aren't you?' she shouted. A good question.

If you'd been a naive outsider in those days, I mean somebody not in the business of reporting news, you might have thought that editors everywhere would have a second and an economical thought – fewer deadlines, nothing like so many trips abroad for special correspondents who could, and can, turn one assignment into a junket. But it seems that through all those intervening years, the pride in having a reporter there has overcome the editor's thrifty impulse to send the man in the next room and set him in front of the box. Of course, the theatre critic has to go to the play. A presidential press conference had better be attended in person, but only, I think, if that person intends to ask a question.

But in sporting events, especially, I'm amazed at the headlong way in which newspaper men and women are despatched to the far corners of the earth to cover, as the saying is, something that you and I, snug in our living room, could describe far more accurately than the reporter on the spot. A golf tournament, more than any other, paralyses the man who would try to cover it on his legs. He can conscientiously go out and follow two players through many holes or backtrack and dart around and catch this man for a half hour and then after a long walk catch up with another champ, but there is no way, short of sprouting wings, that he can follow or sense the drama or the non drama of a play that is being acted out over 200 acres.

When I read the newspaper accounts of the final day of, say, the British Open, I grieve for the brave tricks and evasions by which the man has to pretend he saw it all. He wasn't there. I, three thousand miles away, was.

We had a splendid example this past week of how the best story can be written by a man who wasn't there. I have in these talks mentioned once or twice the great, and alas, the late, Red Smith, the most knowledgeable, graceful, natural sports writer of our time – a man who till the day before he died at 75 wrote like an angel, a very spry and comical angel. He's been succeeded by a younger man, naturally, who turns out to be fit to fill his shoes. Dave Anderson knocks all around the country. He's there all right for all the big sports events – the Kentucky Derby, the US Tennis Open, the baseball World Series, the Super Bowl – always on the spot. But the spot is rarely the tennis court, the press box, and almost never, I think, a spot from which he could file a play-by-play report.

He goes off into the locker room and he has a talk with the man who blew a two-inch putt or the hero whose touchdown was disallowed or even with the trainer of the man who didn't win the big horse race. I guess he'd been up at Newport to soak in a little of the briny atmosphere of the America's Cup races but on the final day last Monday, he had a better idea. He stayed in New York. He went over to the New York Yacht Club, one of those very solid, very quiet, very elegant club buildings that are planted in the forties, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. At first sight, the marble lobby and the thick red carpet, its staircase might belong to any other club for downtown businessmen and mid-town lawyers, but the staircase leads up to the America's Cup room – a large and handsome room gleaming with model ships, models of every yacht that has sailed in the America's Cup races.

The New York Yacht Club, as you can imagine, is not a haven for the impoverished. It is so grand, so restrained, so confident of its standing among the sports clubs of the world that is needs none of the conspicuous baubles that show you're up to date. It can afford not to have a television set or even a radio so that during the finest or the most excruciating final hours of this year's races, the oldest members and the youngest and the fidgeting in between were gathered, or rather scattered, in a seemly fashion through the bar and the America's Cup room. Most of them would amble up to that room at least once to take an anxious look at the cup itself, bolted all these years to its table and giving off so much dazzle in the shafted sunlight as to make you sneeze.

All very impressive and quaint but what was Dave Anderson doing there? Well, since he was from the New York Times, of course he'd been allowed in. I suppose he wandered and then sat down and scribbled on a pad, not always openly and coarsely, sometimes I imagine in his pocket. Anyway, he'd decided this was the place to cover the fateful race and what he saw and reported was in the result so much more memorable than even the beautiful shots of the yachts skimming and tacking and leaving V-shaped fountains in their wake. Certainly, to be remembered when the breathless commentators had ceased their panting and explaining and even when the nervous and then the ecstatic multitudes in the Royal Perth Yacht Club had vanished from the screen.

It turned out that the tension necessary to any sports story was provided for Anderson by the very fact that there was no television or radio. First a little steward came into the dining room and called for attention. The race had started, he announced, Liberty was ahead by eight seconds. They waited another three-quarters of an hour for the word that Liberty was now 18 seconds ahead. The old members were beginning to fret. They mumbled sad meditations on the risks of changing the boat at the last minute, of changing sails without changing ballast and other technical laments.

As the hours crawled by, members went out to make phone calls. Even the doorman thought it was a nerve-racking ordeal. The rest had better be told in Anderson's words.

A reporter said, 'I just called my office, they say the lead is down to a length and a half.' 'Only a length and a half?' a member said, blanching. 'Is that close?' the reporter asked. 'That's a heart attack!' the member replied. 'I was in Newport last week',one member mused, 'and that boat just screams.' Soon a red-coated doorman entered the bar, 'Australia by 21 seconds at the fifth mark,' he said, 'only one leg to go.'

In a nearby wooden booth, a young executive was listening to his wife describe what she was watching on cable TV at home. 'It's almost over,' he was saying, 'now. Australia's way ahead. Way ahead!' His four listeners shook their heads. One began walking towards the bar. 'Get me a drink too,' another said. In a few moments, the young man in the grey suit in the telephone booth gritted his teeth and glanced up at his friends, 'Australia just crossed the line,' he said softly. Suddenly a hush silenced the three dozen men and women in the bar. 'What?' somebody asked. 'Australia just crossed the line,' the man repeated. 'Damn!' somebody grumbled.

When it was all over, one man remembered the question Queen Victoria asked 132 years ago when America came in sight, 'Who is second?'.

Another member took up the famous bit of dialogue and said what the Queen's attendant had said to her, 'Ma'am, there is no second.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.