America S Cup

There is video footage taken when oneAustralia cracked apart and sank during the America's Cup race in 1995. There are national awards presented yearly to top sailors at fancy banquets. There is even a machine that simulates the experience of sailing - without the user ever getting in the water. The sport of sailing has no shortage of drama, history or gadgetry, but until yesterday when Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. announced that a Sailing Hall of Fame would be established in Annapolis, the sport had no single place to tell its full story.

"America's Sailing Capital," that would be Annapolis, right? Annapolis, as in the home of the Naval Academy, as in the only North American stopover on the 2005-06 Volvo Ocean Race, as in the home of author and broadcaster Gary Jobson, yacht designer Bruce Farr and more regattas than you can shake a spinnaker at. It says so right on the hand-carved, gold-leaf sign right at the Spa Creek bridge. No less than a city council proclamation in 1995 backs up the claim with legislative might. "If anybody can deny us this title, let them come forward or forever hold their peace," declared then-Mayor Al Hopkins after the vote.

ATHENS - Gary Jobson has a bad comb-over. And that's a good thing. Sixteen months after a diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the Annapolis man known as sailing's greatest ambassador is back, providing commentary of the Olympic regatta for NBC. "I had scans just before I came over, and I'm clean. My stamina's getting better. I'm skinny, but I just about have enough hair to comb over," he said, laughing. Jobson is producing and hosting a 30-minute nightly Olympics sailing program for NBC, which is being broadcast at midnight on the Bravo network.

Gary Jobson's ship has come in. The Annapolis yachtsman, author and television commentator will be honored for his tireless promotion of sailing when he is inducted Oct. 16 into the America's Cup Hall of Fame. The selection of Jobson and Australian Alan Bond - both America's Cup winners - was announced yesterday by the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, R.I. They will join the 53-member Hall, which includes Dennis Conner, Russell Coutts, Ted Turner and the late Sir Peter Blake. "It's a huge honor," said Jobson, 52. "When I look at the list of members, I feel quite humble.

Gary Jobson is having a "good day," his first really good day in a long time. The sailing celebrity - America's Cup winner, ESPN commentator and producer - walks swiftly around downtown Annapolis on an afternoon as bright and sunny as his mood. He talks eagerly about the book he's writing about racing. And, he jokes about his thin, wispy tufts of white hair, telling a guest he's sporting "the hatched-chicken look," the result of chemotherapy. For the last few months, the sailing world has been without its mainstay as Jobson, one of the nation's most recognizable sailors, has canceled appearances around the country for the first time in years.

For more than a decade, Gary Jobson has crisscrossed the country raising money for research to find a cure for leukemia and lymphoma. Now, the television voice of the America's Cup and soul of the Maryland sailing community is being treated for lymphoma. Jobson, 52, learned he had the disease last week and began an aggressive six-month regimen of chemotherapy treatments last Friday. "It was a rough weekend, but he's feeling better," his secretary, Kathy Lambert, said yesterday. "His spirits are up."

The Inner Harbor was alive with the sounds of drum beats, jazz music and laughing children at the sixth annual Baltimore Waterfront Festival, a four-day event celebrating the Chesapeake Bay that ended yesterday on a sunny note after Saturday's dreary rain. Among yesterday's highlights was the America's Cup 12-Meter Regatta match-up between yachts Courageous and Freedom, two America's Cup winners from Newport, R.I. Each yacht won one of two 35-minute races in the Patapsco River near Fort McHenry.

THE AMERICA'S Cup - one of the sporting world's oldest and most prestigious trophies - is about a lot of things, among them wealth, rule-bending, obnoxious behavior, a visual spectacle that beats watching paint dry (most of the time), and more wealth. It does have one nonnegotiable element: salt water. And yet the Swiss won it. They won't even be able to defend it properly - they've got nowhere to race. Even if they dumped all the salt in Utah into Lake Geneva, they still wouldn't have an ocean.

WHILE THE America's Cup action in New Zealand heats up both on and off the water as a battle of billionaires, Eastport is home to its own fleet of America's Cup Class racing yachts. Every Sunday about 11 a.m., the Chesapeake Bay Model Racing Association converges for a day of racing at the Chart House. Here the America's Cup action is on a smaller scale - a much smaller scale. The fleet, which sometimes numbers up to 20 boats, is composed of 36-inch, radio-controlled replicas of the boats that are match racing in Auckland.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand - How do you spend upward of $100 million on a sailboat race? That question is foremost on the minds of the syndicate backers here, where budgets for America's Cup yachts have climbed to staggering levels and money flows like water. Four of the nine challengers are spending more than $60 million each, and nearly all privately grumble that the others are spending more. "There are a lot of different ways to distribute your money, and only one of them is right," Bill Erkelens, the chief operating officer of Larry Ellison's Oracle-BMW team, said, explaining why he would not give out his team's numbers.