It’s More Than Just a Joy Ride

If I were rich, handsome, a big movie star, an international sex symbol, if I could look good in a rumpled white linen suit with a two-day growth of beard and no socks on, I might have a boat, all right.

It would be a 200-foot power yacht with a crew of eight, maybe a dance floor on the promenade deck, and it would be something I’d moor alongside Donald Trump’s. I’d call it “Besame Mucho” or “The Lonely Heart” and I’d move it through the most romantic ports of call in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean and I’d use it for the same purposes Errol Flynn did.

Or I might have this sleek, gorgeous sloop that would look under a spinnaker run as romantic as orchids in the moonlight.

I’ll tell you one thing: If I put a million bucks into something to put to sea in, it would have lifeboats. Maybe even cannons.

What I would not have is an oceangoing hunk of iron and plexiglass and carbon fiber that would hump over the waves at a bone-jarring 130 miles an hour and require three standing men to keep it from orbiting the bay or cartwheeling through the chop like a runaway truck going down a cliff. Not even Errol Flynn could get a chorus girl on one of those.

Yet, that’s exactly the kind of ship Don Johnson goes down to the sea in. A ride in one of those is like spending 15 rounds in a ring with Mike Tyson, or at least, Buster Douglas. Your kidneys, lungs, heart and hands get a good working over. Your teeth don’t feel too good, either. It gives you the additional option of drowning to add to the normal perils of high-speed racing. You all know Don Johnson as the megastar of the TV series, “Miami Vice.” You know, the one who goes around protecting law and order with the Magnum or Luger strapped to his T-shirt, the most-dangerous-looking cop on TV who always manages to come into a room with the benign attitude of a coiled cobra or a starved coyote. Sonny Crockett was a new kind of fictional detective.

No one has ever been able to figure out why movie stars opt for real-life danger. Some of them have been known to fight bulls. Jimmy Caan roped rodeo steers. Paul Newman risks his celebrated dimples in the corners at Daytona in a racing car. Gable hunted bear. John Garfield used to go down to the gym and box pros.

And Don Johnson gets behind the wheel of a bucking, roaring 130-m.p.h. powerboat in a sea Bull Halsey might run to port from. It used to be film stars’ idea of high daring was a 10-foot putt or not bringing your own water on location. They went on the high seas only in something that resembled the Love Boat. Or the Lusitania.

Don Johnson’s powerboat resembles something the Coast Guard would use to interdict dope smugglers. In fact, Johnson got in a powerboat first while filming his TV series. The boat manufacturer whose Wellcraft had been used filming high-speed chases of Miami Vicers furnished him with a boat to relax in.

“I got hooked,” recalls Johnson. “Making a series is hard, unending work--14-hour days. So, I would go out on Biscayne Bay in my 38-foot Scarab at 2 and 3 in the morning to unwind.”

The poet has said the ocean is a great healer, and for Don Johnson it was. His earlier career--he was a feature film star at 19--had been plagued with alcohol. “Actors have too much time on their hands. I found myself filling up that time by emptying a bottle. I ended up having to give up alcohol by the age of 33, that’s how into it I was. You can become an alcoholic at 20 if you put your mind to it.”

An athlete--a wide receiver--in high school and college, Johnson stumbled into drama. Faced with that bane of the the schoolroom athlete--credits--he had to opt for a drama class to graduate. “I kept falling asleep in the business course. They could tell right away I wasn’t going to be Donald Trump.”

He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he did have a chance to be Robert Redford. He had the looks and he had the skill. At the University of Kansas, he was one of eight students chosen from an all-Midwest competition for a role in a repertory theater project in San Francisco.

Johnson thought the world was just one big long Shirley Temple movie. He starred, if that’s the word, in a flick called, “The Secret Garden of Stanley Sweetheart,” which turned out to be almost as bad as it sounded and hazardous for viewing by diabetics.

It was then Johnson found out Hollywood wasn’t full of happy endings. “I led the league in failed pilots,” he recalls ruefully. “Tom Selleck and I were running neck-and-neck till he got Magnum (P.I.) and I got Vice.”

The Offshore Professional powerboat that Johnson will race off Long Beach this Saturday in a $75,000 competition is no ride at Disneyland. Don’s boat is a long (50-foot) brutish hunk of carbon fiber weighing 17,000 pounds and is powered by four Chevrolet engines and loaded with 500 gallons of fuel. It gets about 0.4 miles to the gallon and is just easier on the kidneys and spleen than a series of Dempsey rights to the ribs. If there’s any chop, you come out of the race about in the condition of a guy crawling out of a wrecked plane.

Johnson drives the boat. Another actor, Kurt Russell, is navigator, and a third crewman mans the throttle. The race Saturday is a 157-mile roar through an 18-mile rectangular circuit. The boat can do 150 m.p.h., developing 1,000 horsepower, but at those velocities tends to think it’s an airplane.

The cockpit has a canopy overhead because the seas crashing over the bows have sometimes been known to decapitate crewmen. However, Johnson reassures the insurance company that the canopy has a hole in the center. If the boat turns over, you can get out. All you need is an orchestra playing, “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Johnson loves it. He was the American Powerboat Assn.’s 1988 world champion and loses no opportunity to get on the open water in a race.

If you don’t have the million dollars or the backing to own your own OPT boat, cheer up. You can get the same effect by sitting in a cold shower in a spining box for an hour and a half while getting someone to hit you periodically with a two-by-four.

Errol Flynn just had the wrong idea. This is what God really intended boats for. “It keeps you sharp and focused,” enthuses Johnson. It had better. Otherwise it will keep you fuzzy and drowned.