The America’s Cup is coming to San Francisco.
Now, that can either mean the world-famous yacht-race or the big-ass metal cup that the winner of the race wins.
In this post I’m going to talk about the cup because it was the first of two world-famous, big-ass metal cups that I’ve actually gotten to hang-out with.
The second one is The Stanley Cup, which is the world-famous, big-ass metal cup they win in hockey. I actually had lunch with The Stanley Cup once. No kidding.
I posted about that a few years ago.
San Francisco is all a-twitter because The America’s Cup race is coming here in 2013, which means that the actual cup is too. Heck, I think the cup is already here, judging by a bunch of photos I found at The America’s Cup website.
I won’t repost them here because the cup people will sue my pants off and we’ve already had our “no pants on the train day,” so I’ll just tell you about them..
The pics show the cup posing next to The Golden Gate Bridge, riding cable cars, giving a hippie in The Haight a buck, and so on. It appears to have had a pretty good time. Although I hope it didn’t feed the Sealions at Pier 39 because you can get a ticket for doing that.
There’s even a pic of the cup gazing in wonder up at The Transamerica pyramid, as if it can’t believe there’s something actually taller and gaudier than it is.
The cup is really big, and old, having been made back in eighteen-forty-something. I’m sure if I were able to take it to lunch we’d get a senior discount.
It will be good to see the cup again. We shacked-up for three days back in ’87, when Dennis Conner won it for the USA. I was working as a security guard for a company that provided security guards to places that needed them, and the boss called me one day and said, “We’re sending you down to The San Diego Yacht Club for the weekend to guard The America’s Cup because it will be on display there.”
So I got to stand around for six hours a day, three days straight, staring at The America’s Cup as it stood encased in a huge glass container right in front of me, and when I was tired of staring at the cup, I’d stare at the people who came in to stare at the cup.
The best story that comes out of this concerns our friend Elizabeth, who Dorian and I met in the mid-nineties while working together at a theater up in Ashland, Oregon. We were all talking one day and Liz said she’d been to San Diego, and for some reason I told her about how I had guarded The America’s Cup for the three days it was on display at The San Diego Yacht Club in 1988.
Her eyes got really big as she said, “Whoa, that was YOU?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Uh yeah,” I said. “That was me. Wait.. what do you mean?”
“My dad took me to see the cup when I was twelve years old because he was in San Diego on a business trip and had taken me along. We went to the yacht club and I remember standing there looking up at it in the glass case, and I remember the security guard smiling and talking to me. That was YOU?”
Yeah, that was me. Here we were in Oregon about seven years later and Liz was in college while working part-time at the theater we were involved with.
Small world.
I didn’t remember the twelve-year-old version of Liz from that day at the yacht club, as more than one father had brought his kids in to see the cup, but according to her I was friendly and made her laugh.
So, the cup is coming to town, and I’m looking forward to it. Maybe this time, if The Stanley Cup doesn’t mind, we’ll actually do lunch.
I’ll think I’ll take it to Tommy’s Joynt.
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