Murray Quietly Leads Kookaburra : Aussie Skipper Stays Low Key in Bid to Keep Cup

FREMANTLE, Australia —  Iain Murray, the elusive skipper of Australia’s Kookaburra III, has been apprehended and is undergoing intensive questioning.

He is seated at a small table, surrounded by reporters armed with small tape recorders, which might as well be rubber hoses.

Murray is ordered to discuss his least favorite subject.

“Myself?” he says.

He thinks about it a moment.

“Ambitious. Introverted.”

Murray looks around.

“If these things get much closer, I’m not going to be all that comfortable,” he says with small amusement.

Even aboard his 12-meter, Murray can’t escape. There is a remote TV camera to record his every facial expression. So far it has recorded only one.

“You know it’s there, but my concentration is so tunnel-vision that I really don’t notice it at all,” he says of the remote-control camera.

Studying Murray, you want to lift up his shirt to see if he is under remote control.

But the man is less complicated than a robot. He’s just a quiet guy who wants to win the America’s Cup, and his concentration toward that goal is total. One minute giving an interview is one minute stolen from his preparation.

Peter Newman, who moderates the press conferences, introduced Murray Friday by saying, “Iain promised me a smile . . . last October.”

Murray is locked into a racing mode, especially on the water.

“These new 12-meter monsters we sail are much more difficult to sail than a 1983 conventional-keeled boat,” Murray says. “They don’t want to track well and they don’t want to keep going as fast as you want them to. So the role of the helmsman is fast approaching a different thing to the role of the skipper.

“The helmsman very much relies on his tactician and the other people around him to supply him with very accurate information of what’s happening in the race. The helmsman’s concentration is required to keep the boat going straight and on track. He’s oblivious to a lot of other things that are happening.

“Once the race is in progress, it’s where the other boat is and how you’re performing against them. We have to modify our race around them. Obviously, you’d like to be in front and know if he’s going lower or faster than you. We might want to sail low and fast with him.

“If we’re in a tacking duel, there’s a lot of concentration as to whether we’re on the right (wind) shift or not. Are we tacking at the right times on the shifts and in the wave troughs? Where are we in relationship to the lay lines on the course? Which spinnaker are we going to need down the next run? Where’s our best position relative to the other boat down the next run?”

Some of those decisions come instinctively to Dennis Conner and his tactician, Tom Whidden, who were sailing 12-meters when Murray, 28, was 15.

But Murray relies heavily on his tactician, Derek Clark, and on his main sailing mate, Peter Gilmour.

“A number of different things have to be discussed and worked out,” Murray says. “Derek goes through most of those, probably eliminates three-quarters of the options, gives me two or three to comment on, and we make a decision.”

The decision is virtually a computer readout. Without formal training, Murray has accumulated a deep data bank of sailing know-how that is the heart of the Kookaburra effort.

Murray grew up in Sydney, a city that is synonymous with sailing, but his parents were not sailors. His grandfather, though, was “one of the rogues that used to sail around Sydney harbor,” Murray says.

Although painfully reticent at his early press conferences, Murray’s success soon made it clear that his rivals were not dealing with a dimwit. He has total recall of minute details from events years ago and--a recent revelation that came as a pleasant surprise--a droll sense of humor.

Murray has a pet named Cliff.

“That’s his mongrel dog,” an Australian reporter informs American colleagues. “Oh, I guess I shouldn’t say . . . “

“Mongrel’s perfect,” Murray says.

Cliff recently went for a ride on Australia IV, which was the Kookaburras’ chief rival in the defender trials.

“I hope he was on his best behavior and didn’t lift his leg on the forestay,” Murray says.

Murray also has a wife named Alex and two sisters, all of whom also sail, but not often with him.

“(Alex) is a pretty good sailor,” Murray says. “We have sailed together, but when I’ve sailed with her or my sisters, it’s generally been a frustrating outcome for me, so I tend to avoid it. I’m not very tolerant of people that close to me.”

He is even less tolerant of errors in his 12-meter program.

“It’s always been an ambition,” Murray says. “To actually sit here and say I’m going to be the skipper of the boat defending the America’s Cup was our objective three years ago. It’s not a shock, but. . . . “

Murray’s mind drifts back to the defender trials at Newport, R.I., in 1983 when he sailed a less agile boat, Advance. Some suggested the boat should have been rechristened Retreat.

“After the third race in Newport, we knew we were in big trouble,” Murray says. “It really wasn’t that bad. A lot of things didn’t go right there.”

He was already working up another campaign by the time he returned home. The first people he talked to were from Alan Bond’s syndicate.

“At the Australia Cup in 1983,” Murray said, “I came over to participate in the regatta and spoke to John Longley at the Royal Perth Yacht Club. He said, ‘Come over and see us and let’s talk about 12-meters.’

“I went to have lunch with him downstairs from their offices on St. George’s Terrace. We all had mince on toast and cappuccino. We didn’t really say whether I should join them or what I had to offer. We just spoke about the philosophy of 12-meters.”

John Bertrand already had said he would not skipper another America’s Cup program, but Bond’s group apparently did not consider replacing Bertrand with Murray.

“They weren’t doing a lot at the time, and I really wanted to get on and get my teeth into something,” Murray says. “After talking with them for an hour, I went away.

“Discussions further took place in February of 1984, when I was over here on Kevin Parry’s request doing a feasibility study. I spoke with them then, and they said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work out there, come back to us and talk.’ ”

Of course, it worked out very well with Parry, who was a keen rival of Bond’s in the Australian world of big business and a man whose ego would lend itself to funding an America’s Cup campaign.

But the secret of the Kookaburras’ success is that Parry was smart enough to let Murray run it. The interesting part is that they are two opposite personalities.

Murray describes Parry as “a tremendously tough sort of typical West Australian self-made millionaire” and adds:

“He’s unbelievably honest and straightforward. Perhaps that’s been his undoing on a few occasions of late. If he’s got something on his mind, he’s not going to hold it inside, and he doesn’t hold any punches back. He lets go with ‘em all.

“Who could say whether it’s all worth it to him? It comes down to Kevin Parry to say whether the money he’s spent in this project has been justified. If you look at the share register, Parry Corporation’s on the move. Whether that’s attributable to us or not. . . . “

For a time, there was the misconception of a rivalry between Murray and Gilmour, who sailed Kookaburra II through the trials. But their long-range plan was always to sail in the same boat at the end, with Gilmour steering for the starts.

“We’ve been good friends a long time,” Murray says. “I tried to have Peter as tactician in 1983, but he was committed to his Olympic campaign. When this thing started, he was the first guy I sought.”

Gilmour has said that Murray, despite his low-key persona, is a strong, respected, well-liked leader.

“I try to relate to the crew as much as I can,” Murray says. “It’s difficult when they see me up there in lights. But if there’s any training or hard work to be done--from working on the keel or whatever--I try to lead by example doing things like that.

“I think they appreciate that I’m willing to get in there and do as much of the dirty work as they do. I haven’t tried to distance myself from them at all. Any decisions that have been made have involved them. I’ve tried to look after their good will.

“There are five people off Advance on Kookaburra III, so the people that have sailed with me have been very loyal.”

The loyalty of long-term relationships is a trait also valued by Conner.

“(Murray’s) record speaks for itself,” Conner says. “To put a program together, to go out and beat (Bond’s group) five straight, is quite an achievement.”