The America's Cup can do without this and, most assuredly, so can the Alinghi team members who have received menacing letters.
Completely unrelated I know, but when news broke that the Auckland police had been called into investigate the threats, my thoughts went back to September 1988 and the end of the Big Boat v Catamaran match, which was acrimonious to say the least.
Booze-fuelled San Diegans at the back of the press conference arena egged on Dennis Conner, prompting him to burst out: 'Get off the stage, you're a loser' to Bruce Farr.
It was meant to be a private aside but the mikes were still on and several hundred people heard it, including Stanley Rosenfeld, who was sitting next to me. "It's very, very sad," murmured Stanley and it was.
Stanley died a week ago aged 92 and, rather like Olin Stephens, he graced the America's Cup with his presence for a decent portion of the last century. With his father Morris, he recorded over two-thirds of the Cup's history in the most wonderful photographs.
There was a dignity to Stanley's demeanor, an enviable ethos to his work and a set of values that the Cup seems to have lost.
How he would have been mortified to learn that extremists were threatening violence towards Alinghi sailors, their families and the team's property.
While Larry Ellison has discreet security surrounding him in Auckland, pharmaceutical billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli has been able to walk about the Viaduct Basin with his wife Kirsty, pushing their baby along in a buggy largely unnoticed.
Such days of innocence have probably ended.
Police spokesman Jeoff Barraclough said the threats were regarded with the utmost seriousness. "There is a difference between nasty letters and threatening letters," he said. "These ones are definitely threatening."
Suspicion has focussed on a group calling itself TTTAL - Teach The Traitors A Lesson. This is a reference to the unravelling of Team New Zealand in early 2000 after its second successive Cup win.
The arrival of billionaires such as Craig McCaw and Larry Ellison turned the recruitment market on its head - their OneWorld and Oracle teams signed up 300 sailors and designers in a matter of two months, with Team New Zealand especially targeted.
At first Team New Zealand skipper Russell Coutts stood firm, planning a shoreside role as TNZ's boss and making Dean Barker skipper, but eventually Coutts accepted Bertatelli's offer to create a brand new Challenger team from scratch and be its guiding light. The exercise has proved stupendously well-crafted with Coutts taking Alinghi into the Challenger final against Ellison's Oracle BMW.
Although he was one of the last to leave Team New Zealand, reactionary parts of the New Zealand media dubbed Coutts and the likes of Brad Butterworth, Warwick Fleury, Simon Daubney, Murray Jones and Dean Phipps, who went with him, traitors.
How such words ought to be regretted now. Initially this caused difficulties for some of the Alinghi children at school before they decamped to Geneva; with the team back in Auckland for nine months now, this latest episode is much more sinister. There is one talk-back radio show host in New Zealand who knows how to whip up emotion. If his show is ever quiet, he just has to throw two questions out into the ether ('are the All-Blacks in decline' and 'what will happen if Alinghi go head to head with TNZ'?) to get his phones ringing.
Whipping up such emotion at this time would be ill-considered, to say the least. However it is portrayed, there has been a troubling backdrop to the current Cup.
Saatchi & Saatchi have branded Team New Zealand 'Loyal' in a huge campaign, deliberately designed to tug the heartstrings, and the purse-strings, of ordinary Kiwis and their business leaders.
Another ad man, Dave Walden, launched the discredited BlackHeart campaign, which took pot-shots at OneWorld and Alinghi on advertising hoardings. 'High on the hill stood a lonely yachtsman, yodel-leh-eh-hoo' was one prominent hoarding seen by every Cup sailor every day on their way to work on Halsey Street.
BlackHeart's sanctimonious stance tarnished fast when it was discovered that the vinyl skins for its ad hoardings were made in Australia.
Detectives have been allowed access to BlackHeart's membership database as part of the current inquiry. Walden tried to put clear daylight between his campaign and the recent menacing threats. "We are not a dastardly organisation. We are not a bunch of nutters. We are the yachting version of the Barmy Army," he said.
An uncomfortable Walden posted a full denial on BlackHeart's website of any involvement in the threats and was at pains to say he was offering full co-operation to the police. He also denied that the campaign helped create an atmosphere which has spawned this new menace.
"I don't think you can blame a group of patriotic New Zealanders for creating a climate where nutters decide to do something like this," he said. "The climate was created when they (Coutts, etc) left Team New Zealand."
Since the Cup came to New Zealand in 1995 it has been attacked by a Maori activist and, in the last series, threats were made against TNZ's head, the late Sir Peter Blake and his family. They were put under 24-hour guard, a matter that was never made public.
TNZ's current chief executive, Ross Blackman, is horrified at these latest precise and menacing letters. If the perpetrators are caught, then "the full force of the law should be thrown at them," he said.
Coutts, understandably, has not been overly keen to comment on these new developments. Earlier in the year when we talked about this sinister undercurrent, he believed that most Kiwis didn't like the talk about traitors - they thought the Big Boat and bowsprit issues in the 1988 and 1992 Cups offended their notion of sport.
Let's hope that, rather like the Greenpeace ramming of the French America's Cup boat last year, the reaction to these threats serves only the alienate and isolate the extremists and leaves the sailors free to go about their business of a hard fought contest on the water.
Tim Jeffery, 8 January 2003
