THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512100048
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Long : 126 lines
Lloyd Griffin Jr. is a 71-year-old Elizabeth City dentist who normally doesn't have much to say except ``open wide.''
Nor has he smiled a lot since 1955, when he missed his timing in a difficult 360-degree airborne turn on water skis. This is going to hurt, Griffin thought, as he cartwheeled into a bad landing.
Hurt it did - and does. For 40 years Griffin has lived with the constant ache of the serious back injury he received in that waterski spill.
But in spite of the pain, Griffin has kept right on being one of the nation's winningest racing sailboat skippers. In recent weeks several of his friends have rallied together to nominate him for the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.
Griffin's honors as a world class sailor have been little known outside the special privacy of regatta competition. He has spent much of his racing life avoiding publicity, and in Elizabeth City he is known mostly as the close-mouthed dentist whose wife, Mary Hadley Griffin, runs the Elizabeth City Shipyard.
``A friend of Lloyd's heard about the Sports Hall of Fame and he called up and said, `Whatever it is, let's get Lloyd in it - it's about time a sailor was represented in a Hall of Fame,' '' Mary Hadley said last week.
``We're sending off all of Lloyd's regatta racing records and hoping for the best.''
Jim Sumner, a curator at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, said it's not easy to come by membership in the Sports Hall of Fame.
``The private board that runs the Hall of Fame meets once a year and some of the nominees have been on the list for as much as 10 years,'' Sumner said.
Three residents of Elizabeth City are in the hall - Jethro Pugh, the professional football player; Bobby Vaughan, Elizabeth City State University's retired basketball coach, and Wimpy Lassiter, the late champion pool player.
``The Sports Hall of Fame is a private organization but we share museum space with them to display their sports artifacts,'' said Laura Nemecek, an official with the Department of Cultural Resources in Raleigh.
Most of Griffin's more recent triumphs have been at regattas on the Chesapeake Bay or in the offshore Southern Ocean Racing Circuit out of St. Petersburg and Ft. Lauderdale in Florida.
But otherwise, he stays out of the spotlight.
Throughout their 35 years of marriage, the Griffins have kept their distance as an essentially private couple who create their own ambience around Elizabeth City.
When Mary Hadley decided several years ago - when she knew nothing about the shipwrights' art - that she wanted to build racing sailboats, Lloyd joined her in buying the semi-moribund Elizabeth City shipyard and the associated Riverside Boatworks.
The partners succeeded the hard way. ``Mary Hadley's the boss,'' said Lloyd from the start, ``I just work for her.''
First they started building Jolly Boats, 18-foot one-design competition sloops. They they branched out into custom power boats and large offshore racing sailboats.
Mary Hadley's imprimatur was all over the larger ocean racing sloops that they built in the Riverside boat yard. Dr. Griffin named one of them ``Boss Lady'' and another ``Cash Flow'' with non-accidental innuendo.
As competitors soon found out, the Griffin family, including Mary Hadley and sons and Lloyd III and Ralph, made a gung-ho crew on the ocean racing circuit.
Some of their boats were successful, some weren't. There were a lot of heartaches and trips to the bank to juggle money. But Mary Hadley learned her boat business, while Big Lloyd and Little Lloyd and kid-brother Ralph kept up the racing pressure.
``Cash Flow,'' the Griffin's latest 40-foot ocean racer, cleaned up last year in Yachting Magazine's race week at Solomon's Island, Md., with Big Lloyd at the helm.
Along the way, Little Lloyd became an Elizabeth City councilman whose easy reelection and hard-nosed disposition has helped him amass considerable political clout. Son Ralph has moved in as Mary Hadley's strong right arm and associate boss at the shipyard.
Big Lloyd is best known for his outstanding record in one-design racing - backaches and all.
He started in the Flying Dutchman class - 20-foot racing sloops that can plane like a speedboat. In 1969 he was nominated as one of the try-out skippers in the Olympic Games Flying Dutchman races in Tokyo.
But Dr. Griffin preferred Jolly Boats, a nimble, 18-foot version of the Flying Dutchman. The reason was simple: he could build the Jolly Boats at the Riverside Boat Works down the street from the Elizabeth City Shipyard. Most of the Flying Dutchmen are built under license in England.
In his own Jolly Boats, Griffin consistently came home with first-place trophies from 1959 until 1977 - an almost unparalleled record.
Griffin was World's Jolly Boat champion in 1971 and again in 1973. For the decade of the 1970s he consistently swept to the U.S. national Jolly Boat championships.
Racing in all classes of boats since 1959, Griffin rolled up an extraordinary record of 75 first place trophies in national and international competition.
Jolly Boat racing is hard on sore backs. To keep the little boats from capsizing the skipper and single crewman have to ``hike'' out far to windward as living counterweights. Only a dedicated sailor could love the wild and wet ride to a championship.
But being under water comes easily to Griffin. During World War II in 1944 he joined the Army as a member of an underwater demolition team - one of the most hazardous of wartime jobs. He also made the All-Europe Army football team, and when he came back to go to Wake Forest University in 1947 he played on the baseball team and later played semi-pro football for the Albemarle Polly Pirates.
Griffin graduated from the University of North Carolina dental school in 1955, the same year he had the bad spill water skiing at Elizabeth City.
Meanwhile, at Mary Hadley's shipyard the green-hulled Cash Flow flexes her docklines at Pier One, where the Griffin family is busy tuning up the sloop for the southern races this winter.
As families go, they are all strong-willed individualists who relish epic disagreements - until the five-minute gun sounds before a race. Then, as the seconds count down and Big Lloyd heads ``Cash Flow'' toward the starting line, the Griffins undergo the transformation that means trouble for the competition.
Big Lloyd's orders snap and crackle across the water like the billowing genoa jib and the mains'l as they are sheeted home. Soon "Cash Flow" has her shoulder down and Mary Hadley and her sons are on the weather rail howling for more wind.
And Big Lloyd, playing the helm like a violin, momentarily forgets the back pain and allows a tiny grin to touch his face as boats of lesser sailors trail off astern. ILLUSTRATION: COLOR PHOTO COURTESY OF LLOYD GRIFFIN JR.
Lloyd Griffin Jr. of Elizabeth City has lived with a backache since
a water skiing accident 40 years ago. But that hasn't stopped him
from sailing, or from being nominated for the Sports Hall of Fame.
by CNB