There's an old America's Cup campaign boat sitting beside a boathouse in Wichita, Kansas, and right now, nobody quite knows what happens to it next.
Its name is Jayhawk. Its own owner called it a dog. And the boathouse it's called home since 1994 is caught in the kind of unglamorous lease dispute that might mean it quietly disappears. The America³ Foundation has leased the Wichita Boathouse from Wichita since 2009, a 99-year deal at a dollar a year, and it's just told the city it can't afford to hold up its end. There's roughly US$400,000 in deferred maintenance the foundation was contractually meant to cover and hasn't. The Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, which shares the building, already has a deadline to be out by 30 October. Wichita's city council is deciding what happens to the boathouse now. This isn't even its first brush with the wrecking ball, it was nearly torn down for a corporate headquarters development back in 2005 before the city found another use for it.
Which raises the question of how Jayhawk ended up sitting outside a boathouse in Kansas in the first place.
Rewind to 1992. Bill Koch, a Kansas-born, MIT-trained fluid dynamicist with serious money and no interest in doing things the traditional way, decided the America's Cup could be won with data rather than instinct alone. His team built four boats rather than betting everything on one, testing them against each other to find the fastest. Jayhawk was among them, and Koch didn't hide his opinion of it. According to America's Cup's own official history, he called it a dog.
Koch skippered Jayhawk himself in the early defender trials against Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes, while Buddy Melges sailed its sister boat Defiant, and the fourth boat, America³, stayed under wraps until the second round robin. It was a real contest too: contemporary wire reports from January 1992 have Defiant beating Conner outright in one race, and Jayhawk pushing him hard in the next before losing by just over four minutes. Jayhawk wasn't the fastest of Koch's four boats. But it was never just there for show.
America³ eventually proved the quickest, beat Conner for the right to defend, then saw off Italy's big-budget Il Moro di Venezia challenge 4-1 to keep the Cup in San Diego. And as Kiwis with their fingers in America's Cup pies, there's a Kiwi thread through that same summer worth acknowledging too. New Zealand's NZL-20, backed by Sir Michael Fay with Sir Peter Blake brought in late, ran Il Moro closer than anyone in the Louis Vuitton Cup Final, in a series still remembered in New Zealand for a bowsprit and gennaker ruling that remains one of the more argued-over chapters in the country's Cup history.
So that's the story behind the boat parked outside a Wichita boathouse that's currently fighting for its own survival. Whatever Wichita's city council decides about the building in the coming weeks decides Jayhawk's next chapter too, whether the dog that helped Koch find his winning boat gets a future, or has to find somewhere else to go.
