Does anyone care who wins the America’s Cup?

The long-awaited result of the top-secret Project Ginger turned out to be a scooter for klutzes. It’s called the Segway Human Transporter, and has a gyroscopic balancing system that makes it almost impossible for people to fall off. Unfortunately, it’s powered by batteries, so it is not the breakthrough that technology freaks saw in their fantasies—a perpetual motion machine. Some say such an invention is impossible, since it depends on defeating the apparently unassailable first law of thermodynamics.

I don’t know much about thermodynamics, but I do believe a perpetual motion machine will be invented before mankind crosses an equally daunting frontier of human endeavor—making sailboat racing an entertaining spectator sport. Like crackpot inventors and their machines, visionaries of the sailing realm putter away on a hopeless quest to overcome a law of nature—the one that holds that, except for a few specially adapted individuals, human beings cannot be persuaded to sacrifice precious hours of their lives watching sailboats proceed slowly around buoys.

The quest invariably picks up steam when the America’s Cup rolls around, so ideas on how to spice up the spectator appeal of the 2003 series are being floated. These mainly involve adding gates or marks to the course to keep the boats closer together in order to keep the drama at a peak. Problem is, only a few yacht racing buffs—we’re the specially adapted ones—can find the drama. Everyone else finds boredom.

Nothing is likely to change that. You could put Britney Spears—topless—at the helm of an America’s Cup boat, and achieve no more than a brief TV ratings spike among adolescent boys and an increase in the number of jet skis in the spectator fleet.

But don’t fret for the Cup. It may be the most costly sporting event per spectator or viewer ever staged, but the money will keep flowing because much of it comes from investors, including dot-com billionaires, and sponsors who are in it more for ego than marketing results. What’s more, the America’s Cup does have considerable entertainment value—if you discount the sailing part.

Consider some tidbits from the contemporary annals of the America’s Cup:

The sellout. Greed is as common in sports as jockstraps, but it’s more impressive in the America’s Cup because it has long been presented as a noble competition among countries and their yacht clubs with overtones of national pride and even patriotism. The last that was seen of national pride was when it was leaving New Zealand in the duffel bags of Team New Zealand’s helmsman, designer and other crewmembers as they jumped ship to collect signing bonuses from Cup contenders aiming to take the mug from their homeland. New Zealand’s twice-successful Cup effort, it will be recalled, was known as a people’s campaign, supported in part by donations from ordinary citizens of an island nation that had taken the America’s Cup to its bosom as a symbol of its heritage of sailing pluck.

Nuking the Cup. Environmental groups, including Greenpeace, are angry over the decision by the French Cup campaign, Le Défi, to accept $34 million in sponsorship money from the nuclear power conglomerate Areva, which is owned in part by the French government. One spokesman characterized it as “the kidnapping of the sailing competition by the nuclear lobby.” There’s a history here. New Zealand was outraged when France tested nuclear devices in Polynesia in 1996. French government spies once blew up a Greenpeace ship in Auckland Harbor. Protests during the Cup races are feared.

Cupgate. You want America’s Cup drama? Here it is, along with espionage and larceny. The OneWorld syndicate of Seattle is suing Sean Reeves, a former member of its organization, claiming he stole design secrets and tried to sell them for $6 million to Larry Ellison’s Oracle Racing. Shocking, but wait, it gets better, or worse. Reeves countersued, charging that OneWorld illegally obtained secrets from Team NZ, when it broke up in the run for the money. Then a member of Dennis Conner’s syndicate volunteered that Reeves had tried to sell him Team NZ secrets, such as details of the design of the vaunted millennium rig. Two entertaining side notes: Reeves’ job with Team NZ was rules adviser. And, settlement efforts are under way because, a OneWorld spokesman said, the affair is bringing the America’s Cup into disrepute. Imagine that.

While this is all quite diverting, it must be turning off the few remaining fans of America’s Cup sailing. Why would anyone, except those with egos or jobs on the line in what has become the Cup industry, care who wins the America’s Cup?

A lot of people used to care. That was the bright side of America losing the Cup to the likes of Australia and New Zealand. In New Zealand two years ago, it was almost quaint, but certainly refreshing, to see a whole country, everyone from the Auckland banker to the South Island lumberjack, following yacht races as though they were soccer games, rooting for their boys on Team NZ with unabashed enthusiasm and, yes, national pride. Whether that enthusiasm will survive the departure of some of the boys for the bucks remains to be seen.

The finest moments in the 151-year history of the Cup occurred in 1987 in Fremantle, Western Australia. The dramatic sailing conditions—there was no problem finding the drama in the punishing Indian Ocean waves and boisterous Fremantle Doctor seabreeze—had a lot to do with this, of course. But so did the joyous embrace of the Cup by the Australian people.

I won’t forget a conversation outside of a pub, in the indescribably brilliant midday sunlight of Western Australia, with two young men who had driven their truck more than 2,000 miles from their sheep station to Fremantle to better experience the America’s Cup fever that gripped their country. They had never been on a sailboat, had seen the ocean only a few times, but thanks to their satellite dish and the TV coverage of the races, could name all of the arcane maneuvers of sailboat match racing. They knew of only two cities in the United States, New York and San Diego, the latter because it was the home of Dennis Conner who, though he was trouncing their countrymen on the race course, they held in the sort of awe usually reserved for the pope. They and their fellow Aussies knew they weren’t going to keep the Cup, but that took away none of their pleasure in cheering on a team of their countrymen giving their all in a hard fought sporting contest.

We’ll see a perpetual motion machine before we see something like that again.