The Race for the Gold Cup Has Come Home

Trivia Time: San Diego is home to the oldest trophy in American sports.

What is it?

The America’s Cup, you say.

Wrong.

The America’s Cup was known as the 100 Guineas Cup when the yacht America went to England’s Isle of Wight and won it in 1851. It became America’s Cup, and it has stayed that way in spite of a four-year visit to Australia. Dennis Conner and Co. have brought it home, of course, but it remains much more international than American.

America’s oldest sporting trophy, dating back to 1904, has been in quiet residence here for five years.

It is called the Gold Cup, and it goes to the winner of the annual unlimited hydroplane race by that name. For the past five years, that race has been won by Chip Hanauer driving the Miller American.

Hanauer does not live in San Diego, nor is Miller brewed in San Diego, but owner Fran Muncey lives in La Mesa.

Guess where the Gold Cup has spent five years?

At Muncey’s home.

“Actually,” she said, “it’s been on display at a bank downtown for the last few months. It’s been on display with America’s Cup.”

The Gold Cup may be just a bit anonymous hereabouts because the race itself has not been held here since 1970. Hanauer has won it twice in Detroit and once each in Seattle; Tri-Cities, Wash., and Evansville, Ind.

Once again, this weekend, the Gold Cup is up for grabs . . . but this time, the race has finally returned to San Diego. For Muncey, Hanauer and Miller American, it will be a matter of trying to keep it home rather than trying to bring it home.

“It would be awful hard to give it up,” Muncey said.

Particularly since San Diegans are only now coming to realize that it has been here all this time in the first place.

As Muncey talked Thursday, her boat was on a nonstop 24-hour trip from its Seattle headquarters to San Diego. The crew had worked on adjustments until the last possible moment before heading south.

Muncey, who describes herself as an “involved owner,” could do nothing but wait. This was the cup of tea before the tempest.

It was a day to savor a taste of relaxation, because the boat would arrive like a child demanding 100% of everyone’s time and attention.

“A lot of people think this is glamorous life, this racing,” she said. “But it requires a lot of hard work and total dedication at a very high level of intensity.”

And a very high level of pressure.

“The pressure,” she said, “is the hardest thing to live with. It’s pressure you create yourself because you want to perform well for the sponsor.”

In her 18 years of involvement with the sport, Muncey has not had much experience with anything other than outstanding performance. Her late husband, Bill, won eight Gold Cups before he was killed racing in Acapulco in 1981. Hanauer has won the last five.

“Bill used to say, and Chip says now, that they’re not afraid of death at all,” Muncey said. “They accept that as a possibility. What they’re afraid of is making a mistake in front of everyone. As Bill used to say, ‘In front of family, God and everyone.’ ”

And so the pressure to perfectly mesh driver, crew and boat would be building in the hours to come. It is always there during the campaign, which begins each year in the middle of June and lasts until mid- to late September.

And Fran Muncey is hardly an absentee owner. She has been with the team from the season’s start in Miami through stops in Indiana, Michigan, Washington and New York . . . and it will be on to Lake Mead from here.

“There’s nothing I haven’t done,” she said. “I wash equipment, go after parts, order parts and order racing paraphernalia for our concessions truck. Sometimes I ride with the crew and sometimes I’ll drive the bus or the concessions truck. I don’t work on the engine, but I’m there if the crew needs someone to hold something.

“There’s nothing I won’t do.”

Except drive the boat.

“I’ve only been for a ride once, and that was enough,” she laughed. “Bill took me for a ride back in the early ‘70s, when the cockpits were open and the engine was in the front. We were going 165 miles an hour, and the buoys were going by so fast they looked like a picket fence. It seemed like there was no control, like driving a car on ice. Bill told me to yell if I wanted to stop, and I was yelling and screaming and the fumes were coming in . . . but there was so much noise he couldn’t hear me.”

She hesitated, as if the recollection was exhausting.

“It was the scariest experience I’ve ever been through,” she said. “It gave me a whole new respect for the guys who drive these boats.”

So Fran Muncey will leave the driving to Chip Hanauer.

“I myself prefer sailing,” she said. “Just for fun. I like it.”

Just for fun? She wouldn’t want to add the America’s Cup to her trophy case, would she?