My dad and I were going through some trunks in the attic when I was a teenager, and I remember we found his uniform from World War II, neatly folded and stored for who knows what reason. I’d been too young to know him as a flier, but I knew this uniform: there were pictures around the house showing him in it, usually surrounded by a bunch of tired-looking guys standing under the wing of a bomber.

And there, underneath the folded jacket, was his hat. It was a classic “50-mission” hat: khaki with a brown leather visor, and the top was shapeless in the middle where his earphones had crushed it during long missions. In those old photos, he wore it insouciantly, cocked on his then red hair with a devil-may-care rake.

Today, kids think they’re cool by wearing baseball caps backwards (oh, puh-leeze!), but in those days, the visor was crucial to keep the sun out of your eyes in the cockpit because the sun was always where the enemy fighters lurked. Fifty-mission caps were the mark of a seasoned veteran, a survivor, a man who had been to hell and come back.

“You know, I wore this a few times when I came home from the war,” he said, and his voice trailed off. “But then it wasn’t right.”

I knew he’d also worn a leather bomber jacket until it literally came apart, so I asked why he’d stopped. 

“Oh, the bomber jacket was fine, but pretty soon, all kinds of guys who’d never been in a plane started buying these caps at the surplus stores, and they’d beat them up to look like this one. I guess I didn’t want people to think I was just another phony.”

So that was it: Once the 50-mission cap became a fashion accessory, the real heroes didn’t want to wear it any longer.

Flash forward 40 years, and I’m sitting in an airline lounge, waiting to make a connection somewhere. Across from me is a tanned guy wearing a polo shirt embroidered with the number 12 above a slash and then US-62. Aha, I thought, a 12-Meter guy … maybe even an America’s Cup guy. 

But I just couldn’t come up with a Twelve that was US-62.

When he stood up, I stopped him and asked, “What Twelve was that?”

He looked at me blankly and then saw I was looking at the logo.  “Oh, I have no idea what that means … my wife bought this for me. I think it has something to do with sailing.”

I couldn’t wait to get to a computer to Google 12-Meter US-62.  And I quickly discovered it doesn’t exist. There’s no such Twelve. What we had was a fashion statement. Faux.
Since that time, I’ve become adept at spotting the ways that sailing has infiltrated the world of haute couture. 

A couple unloading their luggage to check into a hotel had a brightly colored duffel bag with big sail numbers stitched on the sides.  Faux. In another airport (I fly a lot!), I tried to start a conversation with a fellow carrying a briefcase of carbon fiber sailcloth bearing the name of an international sailmaker. Turns out he bought it on eBay because he’d heard that the dark gray carbon wouldn’t show dirt. Faux.

I looked up a company that made sailcloth duffel bags and discovered part of the appeal in their sales pitch: “How does carbon fiber sailcloth compare to regular materials for a duffel bag? Well, for one thing, it’s extremely cool.”

They don’t mean “cool” like it keeps your clothes from wrinkling in the heat: they mean “cool” like it’s something Steve McQueen would carry if he were a sailor. 

The cool of sailing seems to extend everywhere. There is an expensive, rephrase that, an incredibly expensive luxury car (OK, it’s a Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible) that actually has planked teak decking on the panel that hides the top when it’s down. No one is ever going to step on this very yachty teak deck. It’s all about sailing cool. Faux.

At a mall, a sailing watch caught my eye in a case and I stopped to look. It had the usual count-down starting timer with five red balls for minutes but they didn’t do anything! It was a fake! It wasn’t even waterproof. Of course, it would look great at a cocktail party.

I saw a red Mount Gay hat on eBay recently. In fact, I saw lots of them. Once the province of elite ocean racing sailors, they’re now everywhere. You can pick from Annapolis Race Week, Antigua Race Week, Big Boat Series, Bitter End Pro-Am. Cripes, you don’t even have to endure the busted knuckles and late-night partying to earn one. Just have the winning bid. Faux.

So this brings us to deck shoes. 

I’ve been wearing deck shoes of one kind or another for half a century. Topsiders, Sebagos, Docksiders, now some from West Marine that are comfy on my increasingly flat feet. I wear deck shoes all the time (not to bed, unless Mount Gay rum is involved). I wear them around the house, doing yard work, with my tuxedo and white dinner jacket. Oh, yeah, I wear them on the boat, too.

But if you look around, everyone is wearing deck shoes. They were once the province of sailors, who loved them even more when they had salt stains and looked a little ratty. She Who Must Be Obeyed draws the line at having the soles held on with duct tape, so I have to keep that pair in my shop for secret use.

But deck shoes are everywhere. Rednecks down here in Florida wear them to go ‘gator hunting, pilots wear them in the cockpit, and they’re de rigueur at cocktail parties a thousand miles from the nearest boat. 

And now Ralph Lauren is offering the Barx deck shoe, which is too queasily close to barf for my liking, but his advertising notes it is finished with “sporty, nautical details.” By nautical details, I don’t think he’s referring to the big nick on the side of one of my deck shoes where I kicked the anchor loose from the bow roller. Lauren adds the Barx is “a preppy sneaker taking style influence from the boat shoe.” 

Preppy?  Yipes!

Like my dad before me, I guess I’m going to have to retire those 50-regatta Topsiders to a trunk in the attic. There are just too many imposters around these days.

I was pedaling along, nose in a newspaper, when a raised voice penetrated the electronic din of whirling exercise machines: “Hey, Bill, what’s going on in the America’s Cup?”

It came from a fellow on the stationary bike next to mine who turned out to be an acquaintance from boating circles. I had to tell him that America’s Cup competition had degenerated into a years-long court fight between two billionaires to be followed by a racing series between the billionaires and their teams sailing enormous multihulled machines. I added, trying to put at least a little positive spin on things, that the racing would be held in Valencia, Spain, instead of a place called Ras al-Khaimah, where one of the billionaires wanted it held but was thwarted when a court ruled that the America’s Cup Deed of Gift frowned on a venue in the United Arab Emirates because it was in the wrong hemisphere.

My acquaintance, looking perplexed, said, “I guess I’m sorry I asked.”

He’s a powerboat owner, not a sailor, but was once a big America’s Cup fan. In our conversation, he recalled details of some of the great Cup matches of the late 20th century, named the sailing stars of that era’s Cup races and said he kept an America’s Cup memento displayed in his house—a framed print of a painting by Dennis Conner.

“It’s a shame that’s all gone,” he said.

True enough, but an understatement. I’m not going to waste space here flogging the billionaires. They can’t help themselves. Hard-charging billionaires need all the gratification money can buy and the fact that they’ve been able to turn something as revered as the America’s Cup—I’m sure there are still teary-eyed denizens of yacht club bars somewhere referring to it as the Auld Mug—into a toy for their own amusement is but another manifestation of their ability to succeed at just about anything.

But I am going to spend a few hundred words reminding myself and any readers who would like to join me (granted, at the risk of wallowing in nostalgia) of what sailing has lost. By sailing I mean the community of sailing, the loose affiliation of all of us, individual sailing enthusiasts, our clubs and sailing centers, the companies that make the things we use in sailing. For this community, the America’s Cup was once a cherished icon of dramatic sailing history and extraordinary sailing skill and technical innovation. Today it stands for nothing that matters to sailing or to anyone except a few stakeholders.

There is an abiding sense of bewilderment over the non-sailing world’s lack of interest in what we do and in the rewards and challenges that attract us to the water and the craft we use to enjoy it. We hear ad nausea about France, where the masses understand sailing and follow sailing competition avidly and winning sailors are national heroes. Well, the French are different in a lot of ways and, besides, they don’t have NFL football games to keep them occupied on weekends for half of the year. But it is nevertheless strange that in America, a country that embraces such a broad and diverse array of interests, sailing is perceived as an esoteric, if not silly, pastime pursued by privileged people in things called yachts. Until it all went to hell, the America’s Cup was changing that.

There was a time when America’s Cup reporting was regular fare on the sports pages of American daily newspapers. Magazines, not sailing magazines, mind you, but general interest magazines, covered Cup racing. Time magazine, 99 percent of whose millions of readers had surely never set foot on a sailboat, put Dennis Conner on its cover. There he was, on the front of the February 9, 1987 issue of Time, gripping the wheel of the 12-Meter Stars & Stripes, in spray-wettened white foul-weather gear, zinc oxide-coated lips arched in a smile, the headline “Going For It” set into the dazzling, cerulean Australian sky behind him. Peeking over his shoulder from a tiny thumbnail photo in the upper right corner was Mikhail Gorbachev. The leader of the Soviet Union got second billing to a yachtsman.

A few weeks later, after Conner had gone for it and won it, Sports Illustrated, the weekly journal of mainstream sports read mainly by football, baseball, basketball and hockey fans, put Conner on its cover along with Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States. They were locked in a joyous embrace of the America’s Cup trophy.
When I came back from Fremantle, Western Australia, after covering Conner’s recapture of that trophy, I was surprised to find invitations from local service clubs wanting me to give programs about the America’s Cup. When I recounted my experiences and showed slides of 12-Meters and their crews battling in the steep indigo seas produced for the Cup races by the formidable sea breeze called the Fremantle Doctor, the merchants, bankers and insurance agents of the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce not only stayed awake, but contributed comments and questions indicating they had followed the Cup enough to recognize the skippers, know that in sailing parlance a grinder had nothing to do with coffee beans and tell a spinnaker from a jib.

Now that seems like ancient, nearly forgotten history, or a myth like Camelot—a time when America’s Cup racing was so compelling it introduced millions of Americans to sailing.
One of the reasons that time was real, and not a myth, was that those Americans were rooting for Americans competing against sailors from another country. (I’m sure many fans didn’t know the Cup was named for a boat, not a country.) Remember that quaint rule, the one that said America’s Cup boats had to be sailed by citizens of the country of the sponsoring yacht club? The instant that requirement was repealed, and Cup teams were no longer identified by nationality, the America’s Cup began its descent to irrelevance.
If Joe Six Pack and the Joe the Plumber and all manner of regular Joes were interested in the America’s Cup in that golden age, sailors were nigh on to obsessed with it. SAILING ’s special America’s Cup issues were some of the biggest and best-selling we’ve ever produced. Now we don’t bother.

As these words are being transmitted to the electronic file for the March issue, the 33rd America’s Cup series is supposed to be a few days from starting. By the time the issue reaches readers, the series could be over—or it might not even have been held because the billionaires are back in court, this time over the burning issue of where one boat’s sails were made. (It speaks volumes about the absurd state of the Cup that the nationality of sailors doesn’t matter, but the nationality of sails is worth going to court over.) The billionaire currently holding the Cup has announced that if the decision goes against him he will forfeit the America’s Cup.

As if we give a damn.

One evening last December, while crewing aboard the supermaxi YuuZoo off the coast of Australia, the wind upped and steadied so that we were moving along at 18 knots with the waxing moon overhead and a shimmer on the water.

The watch captain was keeping an eye on the sail trim, responding to every order from the helm. The winches squeaked and moaned. The angle of the canting keel was adjusted until it looked like a torpedo racing alongside the boat. In the moonlight, a pod of dolphins darted playfully around the keel as though it was one of their own, but most of the sailors on deck seemed not to notice.

As I looked around, my crewmates were dozing or hanging off the windward rail, staring down vacantly at the keel and the rush of water. Only Marco Diena, an Italian heart surgeon from Torino, mentioned what a splendid show Mother Nature was putting on—a gift presented to anyone willing to accept it. Together we rest our backs against a massive headsail zipped in its bag and spread out along the deck.

For more than an hour we listened to the hiss of water as YuuZoo sliced through the surface. Far from land, light pollution was almost non-existent, giving us a rare view of the star-filled universe. We attempted to identify the constellations and the doctor quickly named four or five. It was that kind of sky, so that even astronomically challenged sailors like me were able to find the Southern Cross.

Part of me wanted to jostle the others on my watch and point to the moon, stars, sea, dolphins and the occasional flying fish, but after some quiet deliberation I decided to say nothing because they might not appreciate this perfect moment in the same way. My thinking had been honed by past experience, mostly while fleet racing on the North Shore of Massachusetts. 

Whether aboard Sonars, Etchells, Vipers or Farr 40s, in weekend races around the cans there were sailors whose sole purpose for being out on the water was to win, to get across the line in the least amount of time. If a humpback whale breached off the starboard bow, let it be damned. No time to look. More often than not, when these races were over, the more hyper-competitive headed straight back to the yacht club to wait for the standings and, if necessary, to lodge protests.

The atmosphere was seldom as intense during chowder races, those mixed-bag competitions that pit high-tech screamers against sluggish cruising boats and anything else that floats. My wife and I often entered these races, if only to stay involved in the local club activities, coaxing our heavy old sloop along, usually near the back of the fleet, knowing our chances of winning could come only through corrected time based on our high PHRF rating.

Perhaps if we owned a speedier vessel, our desire to get from point A to point B as fast as possible would have blossomed different. As it was, we would often tire of the destination-only mentality and slip away. In doing so, we racked up our share of DNFs, but it was always worth it.

Instead of following the prescribed course, we would bear off on a tack where the sun could bathe the cockpit with warmth. Then we’d ease the sails, tie off the tiller, pop a couple of cold beers and crank up the tunes.

Having repeatedly abandoned races on sunny days in New England, we jokingly began telling our sailing friends who asked about our unremarkable finish times that we would be better off with a calendar than a clock. That attitude hasn’t changed much over the years and seems to grow stronger as the world’s pace gets faster.

Some days we can’t keep up with everything we’re supposed to do—jobs, house, kids, community, e-mail, voice mail, snail mail, text messages, FaceBook, Twitter —so that when we get out on the boat, it’s a refuge, a place to get closer to the natural world, a setting where time, at least the notion of it measured in seconds, minutes and hours, seems to stop.

Aboard the supermaxi, the sails were military trim. We were competing in the Sydney-to-Hobart Yacht Race—a serious competition in which fortunes and reputations are at stake —so the whole exercise was about efficiency and speed.

When we entered a treacherous expanse of water called Bass Straight, which separates mainland Australia from the island state of Tasmania, we pushed YuuZoo to 26.6 knots. In the opinion of most sailors, that’s cranking. And during that flat-out burst, everyone aboard was joyously on edge, focused on how the boat, all 90 feet of carbon fiber, was handling the wind and waves. Our exhilaration and concentration was understandable and it was an experience I’ll never forget. Not many folks have gone that fast on a sailboat. It was an ah-ha moment for all, the kind every cruising sailor should pursue if only to better understand the thrill of racing.

But the previous night, with its moon and stars and dolphins, had its own ah-ha moment, one I sensed was not fully appreciated by the entire crew, perhaps because most eyes were on the prize, the destination and not the journey.

Certainly sailing means different things to different people. And, as is often said, it’s all good. Time on the water is just that, time on the water. But measured time has a way of slyly going by if you don’t occasionally absorb what’s around you and live in the present.

Obviously you can’t stop to smell the roses when you’re aboard a race boat, but you can choose to toss the stopwatch overboard now and then and slow down long enough to marvel at your surroundings. When you live life in moments instead of minutes, it’s a whole different world.

An editor of a magazine published in England called to ask me for some comments for an article about the 16-year-old Australian girl who, amid controversy over her demonstrated incompetence as a bluewater sailor, has set sail on a quest to claim a record as the youngest person to sail around the world alone.

I gave her my comments, which in short form were that I think the young lady is involved in a silly stunt and I hope she has a safe passage. Then I went home and read a book about George Mallory.

When Mallory climbed Mount Everest in the 1920s, many people thought that what he was trying to do—reach the highest point on the planet—was impossible for a human to accomplish. Airplanes had not even flown that high. The earth at 29,028 feet above sea level was terra incognita, an alien place that even some thinkers of scientific bent believed was as hostile to life as the moon. Mallory and his party walked hundreds of miles in Tibet just to reach a suitable place for a base camp on a slope of Everest. When he climbed into 40-below-zero (Fahrenheit) air driven by shrieking gales, he wore ordinary winter clothing bought at a London haberdashery and wool mittens knitted by his wife. He tried three times to reach the summit and may have made it in 1924, but no one knows for sure because he never returned. He and his climbing partner were last sighted close to the top. His body wasn’t found until 1999.

Mallory, an Englishman, made his living as a school teacher and climbed mountains as a hobby. Amateur or not, he is regarded to this day as a climber of awe-inspiring technical ability and undaunted courage. Many who studied his climbing career and final effort believed he was the first person to conquer Mount Everest.

Twenty-nine years would pass before it was certain that the feat had been accomplished. Another amateur climber, the Kiwi beekeeper Edmund Hillary, and his Sherpa climbing mate Tenzing Norgay reached the summit in 1953. Hillary said later he wasn’t sure that what he was trying to do was humanly possible until he had actually done it.

It is not a play on words to say that these are towering achievements. So too was Joshua Slocum’s accomplishment in 1898, even though it took place more than five miles lower—at sea level. No one had ever sailed around the world alone before.

It is George Mallory who is credited with saying, when asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb Everest, “Because it is there.”  That’s a quote for the ages, but perhaps what he meant was—because it is there and no one has ever climbed it before.

Brave people like these who ventured into the unknown reaches of an often hostile natural world and achieved seemingly impossible goals own revered, and deserved, places in the annals of extraordinary human endeavor. I only wish they could reside there without the company of so many who sail or climb or otherwise travel in their wakes and footsteps to grab a spot in the reflected glory of those pioneering achievements.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of these subsequent records are worthy. Robin Knox-Johnston’s 1969 solo circumnavigation, the first ever without stopping, put him and his boat Suhaili just astern of Slocum and Spray. There are more than 20 Mount Everest climbing records on the books, and though they are differentiated from the original by distinctions so fine as to be borderline ridiculous (sex, age, nationality, route, time of year, etc.), they all derive from great fortitude, attested to by the fact the slopes of Everest are littered with 120 climbers’ corpses.

Jessica Watson, the Aussie teenage sailor, obviously doesn’t lack for courage. She started her record attempt in spite of being found at fault for a collision with a ship during a practice voyage, being criticized by investigators for poor sailing skills and having to weather a well-publicized effort by Australian circumnavigator Andrew Cape to persuade her parents to make her keep her borrowed sailboat, painted in pink and festooned with sponsors’ logos, at the dock. Success, if she achieves it, will mean celebrity for her but almost nothing to the sailing world. It matters not at all that she would be a few months younger than the current holder of the youngest solo circumnavigator title.

The record would be not only meaningless, but probably short-lived. Californian Abby Sunderland, 15-year-old sister of a one-time youngest circumnavigation record holder, is preparing for a record attempt. Then there is 14-year-old Laura Dekker of the Netherlands, who was stopped by a Dutch court from attempting to set the record in a 26-foot sailboat named Guppy, even though her father not only approves of the record attempt, but has been promoting it vigorously. The court fight and her subsequent disappearance have made her a celebrity without leaving the dock. Police found her in St. Maarten in December. There is speculation she went there to elude child-care authorities and start her voyage from the island.

I don’t know how well prepared the girls’ boats are, but their celebrity-making apparatus is certainly well oiled. They have commercial sponsors, sophisticated Web sites and souvenir products for sale. Dekker (more likely her father) is said to have been negotiating with television companies to sell the rights to make a documentary of her voyage.

Mallory climbed Everest because it was there. He and Hillary and Slocum and the others in their cohort of pioneers aspired to do what was thought impossible or at least had never been done. Today’s record chasers seem more interested in achieving fame and finding its frequent companion fortune.

When Andy Warhol coined his famous phrase, I think he meant that in the age of ubiquitous, pervasive media, everybody would get their “15 minutes of fame.”  That hasn’t happened yet, but it does seem that more people than ever crave those 15 minutes. How else do you explain television reality shows in which adults allow themselves to be viewed by millions in situations that once would have been thought embarrassing, if not debased and utterly shorn of dignity? It may be recalled it was a shot at becoming famous by appearing in a reality TV show that motivated a Colorado father to release a spaceshiplike balloon and call 911 to report that his young son was trapped aboard the high-flying craft.

At least it can be said that the balloon boy spectacle was a fraud. Sadly, children sailing around the world alone in pursuit of fame is the real thing.

It’s not likely to stop. One of these years the world’s youngest solo circumnavigator will be a pre-teen. And then someone will surely say: What’s so great about Joshua Slocum? A 12-year-old can do what he did.