THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 28, 1995 TAG: 9510270055
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 178 lines
THERE WAS A MOMENT last Saturday morning, in the storm-blown waters of Hampton Roads, when college sport was everything it's supposed to be.
Eleven two-person teams, some of them from the powerhouses of college sailing, were hiked-out hard and battling their dinghies across a rough stretch of harbor. Out there in the lead, at the front of the pack, was a boat crewed by a kid from the Virgin Islands and a woman just a couple of months out of a Boston-area high school.
A few weeks earlier the whole Hampton University sailing team had been carefully jotting down classroom notes - ``Left side of the boat is port; right side is starboard'' - and figuring out how to raise the sails and which way to shove the tiller so the boat goes where you want it to go.
But there they were, out in the heaving whitecaps, with teams from the Naval Academy, ODU and Georgetown deep in their wake and figuring out how to overtake the interlopers from Hampton U.
If white guys can't jump, then black guys can't sail. Or so you'd think if you believed in stereotypes, and the Hampton U. crew for the moment was sinking some stereotypes with every tack of their boat.
For the first time in history, a traditionally black college has a sailing team on the water in intercollegiate competition.
And, for the moment at least, they were in the lead.
On shore, watching all this madness out on the water, was Gary Bodie, for years the hottest sailing coach in America. Bodie built Old Dominion University's program into a national power in the 1980s, then spent a decade at the best job in collegiate sailing, head coach at the Naval Academy. His midshipmen won national titles four of the past five years. Before he got there, Navy hadn't won much since the mid-1950s.
But this fall Bodie brought his family came back to Hampton, their hometown, to start a sailing program at a university that is perfectly situated for sailing, on one of the finest harbors in the United States, but had never put a keel into the water in competition.
It just wasn't something black colleges did.
Bodie, who at 40 looks a good, easygoing decade younger, says it was the challenge, and the chance to move back to Hampton, that put a strange tack in his career path. ``I had the best job in college sailing for 10 years,'' he said. ``There wasn't much more to prove.
``I was looking for a way to start over, to take on something different. And, maybe, to do something socially relevant.''
In athletic terms, Hampton landing Gary Bodie as sailing coach was the rough equivalent of Bobby Bowden quitting Florida State to start a football team at Tidewater Community College.
The odds, actually, are stacked higher than that. At TCC, Bobby Bowden likely would find a couple hundred people who know the rudiments of football. At Hampton, Bodie was lucky to find a couple of kids who could tell the pointy end of a boat from the fat end.
``Maybe one or two can sail,'' he said, running down the roster in early October. ``And none of them have racing experience.''
A serious college program can have a couple dozen solid sailors, and, unlike other sports, they might break down into squads and compete in two or three regattas over the same weekend, at different locations.
Bodie started with a group of 10, and that pretty quickly shrank to a core of six or eight who looked like they'd stick it out. Most were freshmen, juggling academics and the pressures of a new life. Bodie worked with them one-on-one whenever they could schedule a free hour or two.
``Sailboats are really forgiving,'' he was telling the team one afternoon, after a chalkboard drill in the basics of what makes the wind move a boat.
``If you have the sails set anywhere close, it works. The boat goes. It's amazing. If you put the sails anywhere, halfway in, halfway out, it works, the boat goes.
``But it doesn't go fast. Correcting all these settings so it goes fast, that's racing.''
That's racing, all right, and racing was what Dilian Bass and Jennease Hyatt were all about as they tried to hold off all the experienced crews who were chasing them across the harbor.
They didn't quite manage, but they didn't roll over, either. In the first set of two races they finished fifth and sixth out of 11 boats in A Division. It was just their second regatta, the second time they'd sailed in competition, and those were remarkable scores.
Bodie met them at the dock as they clambered ashore, switching boats with the B Division crews who would sail next.
``Ohhh, wow,'' Jennease said, ``did you see the look on that ODU girl's face? She was all like, `Whoa, where did you guys come from?' '' Two weeks earlier some of the same crews had raced at Christopher Newport College. There was a lot of sympathy, that weekend and this Saturday morning, for the newbies from Hampton U. That ended abruptly after Dilian and Jennease whipped a few preppie butts in the first set of races.
``We didn't defend,'' Dilian countered, disappointed that he'd let a couple of boats slip by him. ``We gotta defend better.''
``Look, you two did a really great job,'' Bodie said, ``I'm really, really psyched.''
Earlier, the coach was saying Dilian has so much natural ability that in practice, on a straight course, Bodie himself has to fight hard to keep up with him. Dilian taught himself to sail in the waters off St. Thomas on one of those Sunfishes you could buy in a Sears catalog. He made spare change as a kid giving rides to tourists.
Dilian's crew, Jennease Hyatt, is just 18, a freshman, and a month ago she wouldn't have known a jib sheet from a frying-pan handle. Bodie wasn't even sure she'd stay with it, but he learned that there is one very determined young woman hiding in that little frame, one who's used to winning, not quitting.
But she'd come close, two weeks earlier.
``I was actually crying in the boat,'' she said. ``It was the end of the day, and we'd kept capsizing, and I was mad. I was cold and wet and pissed off and I started crying. I wanted to be anywhere but that boat, I wanted to be home, I wanted to be warm and dry. I wanted to quit.
``But Dilian, he told me to tough it out.
``So I'm ready now. I'm pumped, I want to sail.''
Out on the water, Devin Walker, a physics major from Memphis, had piloted Hampton U.'s second boat to an eighth-place finish in the first heat, but got hit with a penalty for jumping the start in the second race.
Walker is typical of the kind of enthusiasm Bodie has to draw from. He knows next to nothing about sailing, but he has a scientist's mind and turned down Harvard and MIT to attend Hampton because he got a better financial deal there. Between sets, he started grilling Bodie:
``Coach, have you taught me all there is know about sailing close-hauled?''
``No, Devin, I guess not. Not yet.''
``Coach, you gotta teach me more about sailing close-hauled.''
Bodie rolled his eyes and chuckled. ``Devin, will you please just learn how to sail the boat first?''
``I'm sorry coach. I'm just so competitive. Competitive.''
That drew a smile from Devin's crewman, Byron Gully. ``Devin, man, he's something. When he got into this, first thing he did was get a rule book and memorize it.
``Me, I just want to learn how to sail.''
When the school held a press conference to announce their new sailing team, the novelty of it even drew a blurb in USA Today. ``First blacks to do thus-and-such,'' as all such stories, like this one, go.
Among the team, though, the motivations pretty much match Byron Gully's: They just want to learn to sail. Hampton U. is a premier black school and it draws an awful lot of students who are used to walking through enamel-white doors in their lives, and they do it with confidence.
``It's not the biggest deal in the world,'' Jennease Hyatt said of the racial aspect. ``I don't think my mom understands, though. I tell her about the sailing team and she says, like, `Hey, we're black.'
``You don't really think about it until you get to a place like this and everybody's white, and they all know what they're doing. They're so experienced. That's more the problem, that they're all so experienced.''
That, indeed, is more the problem. And it showed as the regatta played out, and all the experience the other teams had, and all the experience Hampton U. lacked, began to pile up against Dilian and Jennease.
The great starts they'd pulled off those first two races eluded them. They broke rules they didn't know existed, and paid penalties. They made tactical mistakes that left the unflappable Gary Bodie wincing.
Once, as 10 boats crossed the starting line, the 11th - Hampton U. - was capsized, with Dilian and Jennease floundering around trying to get their sail out of the water. They ran up a string of last-place and next-to-last finishes, and they started to drop in the standings like an anchor cut loose from its line.
But every time they climbed back onto the dock, cold, wet and whipped, they talked about what they'd learned, not what they'd lost. Hunkered down in an old Hampton U. station wagon parked by the shore, running the heater from time to time to keep Dilian's Caribbean body from going hypothermic in the mid-Atlantic morning chill, dressed in bits and pieces of Gary Bodie's old personal sailing gear, chewing carry-out sandwiches and plotting impossible comebacks, the Hampton University Sailing Team nonetheless had the wind at its back and its eyes down course.
``Coach,'' said Jennease at one point, ``we gotta get more boats on the water when we practice. We're only practicing with one or two boats, and it's not like the race, with all those boats coming at you from all directions. We gotta make our practices more like a race.''
Bodie nodded, grinning. Yeah, that's the way, Jennease. Good thinking.
They may be new to sailing, but they're not new to competition. They've been in hard competition all their young lives, and they're used to coming out on top.
A little wind, a little water, well, that's just details. They'll figure it out. You can bet your dinghy on it. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Paul Aiken, The Virginian-Pilot
Jennease Hyatt ... and Dilian Bass...
Dilian Bass wearily hangs onto the dagger board...
Hampton University sailing coach Gary Bodie...
by CNB