As the America's Cup match goes into another day in deadlock, it's far from groundhog day for Peter Montgomery calling his 13th, and very different, America's Cup.
Halfway through the third race of the 36th America’s Cup, Te Rehutai trails Luna Rossa by 300m and the gap isn’t closing.
Peter Montgomery, the voice of the America’s Cup, is broadcasting from his temporary radio studio - a glammed-up shipping container - on the edge of Karanga Plaza in the Viaduct Harbour when he checks a text on his phone.
It’s Hollywood director Taika Waititi’s uncle, Tuhoro Christie, from Waihau Bay on the East Coast, asking Montgomery if Emirates Team New Zealand is “under a bit of pressure, or we giving Luna Rossa a bit of a thrill?”
Montgomery laughs, but he knows the answer. The Italian challengers are sailing an almost flawless race in their preferred light winds on Racecourse E, ‘the back paddock’ off Bucklands Beach, and not giving a metre to the New Zealand boat. The Kiwis don’t seem to have any answers, and don’t get close to find a passing lane.
“I love the way Luna Rossa tacks and gybes,” he tells his audience. “Team New Zealand have been beaten, and well beaten.”
The Kiwis, though, don’t seem to be fazed by the 37s loss, leaving them down 2-1. “We don’t like to lose the first race of the day,” Team NZ skipper Peter Burling said later. “But that doesn’t affect the way we go into the second one.”
Montgomery calls the start of the next race in his evocative style, as Burling cuts it fine against the countdown clock to the start line.
“Just like Indiana Jones snatching his hat right before that huge wall shuts behind him. That’s really cutting it down to the wire here,” he says.
Burling finally gets the start he wants, leading out to the left-hand boundary before getting a jump on the Italians. Luna Rossa’s co-helmsman, Francesco Bruni, makes a telling error - he misses pushing the button to lower the foil arm after a gybe, and the boat splashes down on the water.
“Luckily we were behind at that moment, because I would feel even worse now," Bruni says afterwards. "It's not going to happen again."
With the advantage of not having to sail in the Italians’ dirty air and being able to spot and chase the wind shifts ahead of them, Team NZ go on to win by an impressive 1m 3s.
“It’s coming down to pretty small margins, and we feel like we’re learning a lot all the time,” a satisfied Burling says.
At 2-2 after Day Two, this best-of-13 series is turning into a classic America’s Cup ding-dong battle – even if that hasn’t looked the case in each race.
A new theory evolves that the boat that gets port entry to the start box – and dictates when the two boats turn back to the start line – always wins the race in this match. Both Burling and Luna Rossa’s other helmsman, Jimmy Spithill, later dismiss this as a coincidence.
But another pattern emerging can’t be denied: win the start, win the race. Especially out on Course E where the wind is always steady, and the lead around each mark never changes.
For a second day, no significant speed differences came to light between the boats. In 8-10 knots of breeze, Luna Rossa was slightly faster upwind, Te Rehutai quicker down.
With the breeze forecast for the weekend much the same, and a move to the more shifty inner harbour courses unlikely unless the winds swing to the south-west, we could be in for more drag races.
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Montgomery is thriving in his 13th America’s Cup - 41 years after covering his first Cup regatta in Newport, Rhode Island, when Dennis Conner's Freedom defeated James Hardy's Australia in 1980.
Next week, Montgomery will be inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame, which has its physical address in the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Rhode Island. He’s only the sixth ‘chronicler’ to join the hallowed hall, usually reserved for Cup sailors, designers, boat builders and syndicate bosses.
It’s not only for his services to broadcasting, and making the America’s Cup understandable for millions of land-lubber fans around the globe. He also helped convince Sir Michael Fay to enter the first New Zealand campaign in Fremantle in 1987. “He still says to this day, ‘You cost me a whole lot of money PJ’,” Montgomery laughs.
Although he retired eight years ago from his regular radio gigs hosting weekend sports shows and roaming the rugby sidelines with a microphone at Eden Park, he keeps getting called back to call the America’s Cup.
“It’s a bit like riding a bike, you remember what to do,” says Montgomery, now in his late 70s.
Anchoring the radio commentary for Gold AM, Newstalk ZB and iHeart Radio, Montgomery’s studio isn’t big, but it’s welcoming. The glass doors are flung open so anyone can stop and listen, and watch the racing on a TV screen out front. Policemen, St John’s staff and ‘city skipper’ volunteers stand under the pohutukawa trees watching Montgomery, wearing colourful spotted socks, in full flight.
It's fascinating witnessing Montgomery at work. He’s very animated - pointing at the bank of screens even though the listeners can’t see - and a master at getting the most out of the sailing experts he surrounds himself with. He never sits down.
His producer, Louis Herman-Watt, says in this America’s Cup, Montgomery has been “reinvigorated by his millennial sidekick”, Kiwi international match racer Chris Steele.
Montgomery invites Steele to give his expert opinion with a quick tap on his shoulder, then asks him to explain to “the little old lady in Riverton” why Team NZ have tacked away from Luna Rossa.
He calls in guest commentators like American Magic helmsman Dean Barker and round-the-world sailor Bianca Cook, and phones old friends out on the racecourse, like former Team NZ sailor Dan Slater and wind guru Jon Bilger, to recount what they’re seeing.
Over the years he’s had some of the Cup’s great sailors as his wing men – winning helmsmen Buddy Melges and Ed Baird (who’ll also be inducted into the Hall of Fame on Friday), Sir Russell Coutts and Spithill. If it wasn’t for Covid-19, he would have had American sailing legend Gary Jobson doing expert analysis this time, “but this is the first Cup he’s missed since 1964”, Montgomery explains.
“But I’ve really enjoyed working with younger people this time.” A voracious reader, he knows it’s critical to stay current as sailing evolves, especially when you’re trying to paint a picture of never-seen-before foiling monohulls.
“This Cup has been interesting with these incredible flying machines,” he says. “But I’ve been frustrated that with the lockdowns and the whole Covid pandemic we haven’t had the international flavour."
He’s also disappointed by “people who make a sport out of knocking the America’s Cup.” As we sit on the edge of the Viaduct, watching kids leaping into the water, he points out “this was a cesspit in the early '90s, and thanks to the America’s Cup in 1995 and Blake’s vision, Auckland finally has a front door we can be proud of.”
He’s impressed by the AC75s - “when the breeze is up and they’re going, they are spectacular” – but he misses the 12m and IACC Cup boats where you could see the crews at work, particularly the bow and pit men like Team NZ's Joey Allen and Matt Mason.
“Now all you see is the helmets of the guys in the afterguard. What are the rest of them doing?” he says. “The grinders are as aerobically fit as any of the martial arts guys, and all they generate through their grinding is somehow stored. You can see a bunch of TV sets behind Burling, does that allow him to see what’s happening down to leeward?
"There are a lot of secrets that we’re missing out on. That’s the shame to me.”
Montgomery says he had to have his arm twisted to go to the 2107 Cup in Bermuda, but loved the experience because it meant working with his daughter, Kate, as his on-site producer.
“We took it back to the old-fashioned idea of ‘look out in front of you, take 60 seconds to describe what you see, and use your vocabulary to do that'. As the anchor it’s your role to get it out of the person alongside you,” he says.
“What I’ve loved about sailing broadcasting is the places you go, the people you meet, and the challenge of trying to find the right words to paint a picture.”
It’s a skill he gleaned as a kid in Dunedin, listening to shortwave radio commentary on American baseball and Australian horseracing. “I was so fascinated by how they could say so much in the final 250m. They had an ability with their vocabulary to pull words out to match the occasion, and that’s been the challenge for me,” he says.
Walking over to the studio before race three starts, Montgomery smiles recalling how someone called out to him earlier in the regatta and said “Hey, I know you – you used to be PJ Montgomery.”
When a week after returning from Bermuda, he was asked by NZME if he would again do the commentary for the Team NZ defence, he told them: “My first objective in March 2021 is to be alive, and the second is to have my marbles – which implies I still have them. I’m very, very mindful that it comes to us all, in all walks of life, when it’s someone else’s turn.”
But he's still taking his turn. The man famous for the 1995 line “The America’s Cup is now Team New Zealand’s Cup”, hasn’t yet thought of what he might say when whoever gets to seven wins first crosses the Hauraki Gulf finish line.
“I’ll sit down on the day and think about something, and run it by Kate as well,” he says. “I want it to be as natural as it was in '95, a bit like those Aussie racehorse commentators.”
Racing in the America's Cup match continues every day now until a winner is found. The first race won't start before 4.15pm, with up to two races a day.
