SAIL ON, SAILOR : Yachtsman Blackaller’s Unique Spirit Won’t Be Forgotten by Family, Friends

My cousin Tom Blackaller, the champion sailor and America’s Cup contender, died of cardiac arrest at Sears Point Raceway Thursday, getting ready for an auto race this weekend.

Tom was a character straight out of a Damon Runyon story: funny, charming, disarming, blustery as any northwest wind that ever screamed through the Golden Gate and slammed into the St. Francis Yacht Club.

On ESPN’s Sports Center Thursday night, announcer Tom Mees said it was ironic that this 52-year-old sailor died while preparing for an auto race. Nothing could be less ironic. If Tom Blackaller owned a mule and you owned a Miata, the two of you would end up racing. And he’d win.

“The John Madden of sailing,” Times staff writer Rich Roberts called him a few years ago. That’s as close as I’ve seen anyone come to capturing Blackaller’s personality in so few words--although others might insist on their own analogies.

When Blackaller’s former crewman, Gary Jobson, interviewed him during ESPN’s coverage of the 1987 America’s Cup, he asked Blackaller about the technological advances in 12-meter racing. “Technology has passed the 12-meters by,” he said without hesitation. Then, pointing over his shoulder to some small boats docked nearby, he said, “Gary, you and I could take one of these Tornados and beat both of these boats (Stars and Stripes and Australia II) around the course. You heard what the helmsman of Stars and Stripes called his boat. He called it ‘my truck’. My Truck!”

We always called him Tommy, because that’s who he was. Everyone in the family knew he was the most combative of the bunch, but even the most passive of us could connect with his eagerness to test himself.

I remember watching Tommy and his dad build an El Toro racing dinghy in their backyard. On this eight-foot wooden boat, everything had to be perfect. Tommy was going to sail it against the other junior skippers at the Inverness Yacht Club on Tomales Bay, and when he was through with them, he was going after the kids from Sausalito and Richmond and San Francisco.

One of the girls at Inverness had named her El Toro “Ador-a-bull.” Naturally, Tommy had to name his “Horr-i-bull.” By the time he had reached his 20s and was on his way to winning world titles in the Star Class, he graduated to “Good Grief.”

Blackaller was trained as an engineer and actually worked in the field for a while, before turning to sailmaking and racing full time. His technical approach to sailing was unquestioned; still, he seemed to be “sailing by the seat of his pants.”

In the battle to represent the United States in the 1987 America’s Cup, Tom Blackaller vs. Dennis Conner was a rivalry that asked, “Whose side are you on: The Swashbuckler or the Company Man?” Underneath the caricatures and the image-making, you always had the feeling neither one could do without the other, egging him on.

Blackaller came close to beating Conner at Fremantle, but Stars and Stripes went by USA, then the New Zealanders, then the Australians to win the 1987 Cup. Conner became the Man.

Not long ago I met a woman from USA’s sponsoring yacht club, the St. Francis in San Francisco, who told me how appalled she and some of the other members were that Blackaller had been married in Australia a week before the competition, that he would think of distracting himself so.

It made me wonder. Then it made me laugh. I hope she got the joke.