Races Are for Winning

CORNELIUS SHIELDS ON SAILING by Cornelius Shields. 240 pages. Prentice-Hall. $7.95.

The wind is important; so is the cut of the sails as well as the skill and care of the men who designed and built the boat. But to Corny Shields a racing sailboat--the only kind in which he is interested--is driven mainly by the skipper's will to win. As just about the most successful racing skipper of this century (TIME cover, July 27, 1953), Corny Shields has, inevitably, the most indomitable will to win. "Racing," he admits frankly in this autobiography and sailor's guidebook, "is the aspect of sailing that has gripped me the hardest." Then he adds, perhaps intending to be disarming: "I'm supposed to be a 'competitive' person; at least, I've always enjoyed competitive sports and matching skills with others." The fact is that Corny Shields, now a ripe 70, would die if he didn't win.

Triangular Discipline. For the sailor who wants to win, Shields provides the formula. The aspirant must begin a year or so before he is born, by picking his parents right. They must raise the child with at least a summer home on river, lake or sea front. They need not be rich, though that helps. (Shields picked a rich father.) The aspiring skipper of America's Cup yachts must begin sailing--and sailing to win--early in his grade school years.

By his high school years, the Shields protege will be spending every weekend day, every summer, racing around triangular courses in Penguins or Blue Jays or Lightnings. When he graduates to larger craft, he will need his weekdays off (no summer work for him) to perfect his skills in rigorous sail drills. He had better not go away to a prep school, because he should spend every winter weekend in frostbite racing, which may give him as many as eight starts a day--eight chances to show his will to win at the starting line, at the windward mark, and again at the leeward mark. Then, perhaps, the fledgling sailor may be considered qualified to crew for the likes of Corny Shields, in International One-Designs, or America's Cup 12-meters, or in ocean-going yachts in the biennial Bermuda races.

Never Question. If it sounds like as tough an apprenticeship as that of midshipmen in Captain Bligh's day, it is. Shields would not have it otherwise. He is dedicated to the idea that the important thing in sailing is racing, and the important thing in racing is winning. If any man is interested in sailing merely to enjoy the sensation of having his boat driven by the wind, Shields is not for him, and he is not for Shields. As a Johnny-come-lately to ocean racing (in 1946), Shields was appalled to find that on the 635-mile course from Newport to Bermuda, which takes four to six days, skippers allowed their crewmen to relax. Not Shields. He insisted on enforcing the same tense, split-second discipline that he knew from racing for a couple of hours around three buoys in Long Island Sound. The wonder is that Captain Bligh Shields had no mutiny. But by then he had won, along with his international championships, the right to be the autocrat of the cockpit. Nobody who questions a Shields order is ever allowed on a Shields boat again.

The soundness of the Cornelius Shields method and the sureness of the Cornelius Shields touch were proved in 1958, two years after Corny had had a crippling heart attack and had been told never to race again. Columbia had been faltering in her early starts. Corny took command, though he put his son "Glit" at the wheel when photographers were around, and in Columbia's final trials he whipped her into a successful America's Cup defender.

For a sailor who wants to emulate Shields, this book provides the hydrographic chart of his career and his methods. Except for a dizzyingly technical chapter on starting-line tactics, most of it is understandable to any weekend sailor. Shields takes the green landlubber by the hand and gives him stern but sage advice on everything from picking his first boat (it must be a small one) to ocean racing. And since Shields recognizes that everybody cannot be a winner, he deals well with the second most important question: how to be a good loser.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.