Yachting: A self-effacing hero

Sir Peter Blake was a great big man with a great big heart, writes WARREN GAMBLE.

In the frenzy of the America's Cup homecoming to Auckland six years ago, two of the country's heroes shared the stage. Coated in streamers and snowdrift of confetti, Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mt Everest, shook the hand of Sir Peter Blake, conqueror of yachting's biggest quest.

To screaming approval, an announcer drew parallels between the two men, who shared a similarly powerful physique. Both, he said, had been great adventurers but had also thrown their energy into public activities for the greater good.

On the Aotea Square podium a quietly heroic struggle for the lower ground broke out.

"Peter refused to accept this," Sir Edmund recalled at his Auckland home yesterday. "He said, 'No, no, no.' And I refused to accept it. I said 'No, no, no."' Of such modesty New Zealand icons are made.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Helen Clark also linked the men, calling Sir Peter the "Hillary of the waters".

The pair made it to the top of their fields 42 years apart, but they embodied the understated Kiwi spirit.

Sir Edmund's famous words after becoming the first on top of Mt Everest in 1953 were: "We knocked the bastard off." Sir Peter presented the America's Cup to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in 1995 with a simple: "Well, here it is."

Despite his swashbuckling Viking looks, Sir Peter was more buckle-down than swash, a man who preferred doing things to talking about them.

As a teenager he and his brother Tony built their own boats in the backyard shed at Bayswater, on Auckland's North Shore.

That can-do attitude took him into a spectacular round-the-world career and on to the America's Cup, where he not only competed as a sailor but also captured the imagination of corporate sponsors and a public previously suspicious of an event regarded by many as a rich man's amusement.

His can-do attitude and candour carried along those who did not know their bow from their stern, and thought a gybe was something nasty you called out to Dennis Conner.

A pair of lucky red socks Sir Peter wore throughout the triumphant San Diego campaign showed his ability to connect with the nation as they became part of the national dress.

Off the water, one of his many unsung acts emerged yesterday from the Child Cancer Foundation. Chief executive Kay Morris says Sir Peter offered help in many ways, from endorsing campaigns to taking children out on a boat if they were well enough.

"He would ring up and say he had had a speaking engagement somewhere and that he was putting a cheque in the mail and didn't want a fuss being made. He insisted it be an anonymous donation.

"He went up to the wards to visit our kids and would come back extremely upset and visibly shaken by the experience. He was such a compassionate man. He was a gentle, loving man - a great big man with a great big heart ."

Historian Michael King says the qualities of people New Zealanders regard as icons are, in an enlarged way, emblematic of our national self-image.

"In Sir Peter's case those qualities were initiative, enterprise, competitiveness, an unwillingness to be intimidated by adverse circumstances or reputations of others and a laconic, non-boastful attitude toward his own success."

King says Sir Peter's rise from boyhood P-class yachting to the America's Cup was New Zealand's own version of the American dream of log cabin to White House.

King met Sir Peter briefly and remembers being impressed with his "understated charisma".

"It's something New Zealanders respond to. It distinguishes us from Australians who tend to be louder, more larrikin types and from Americans and the English."

Another in the understated mould, All Black great Colin Meads, says Sir Peter's great quality was being able to mix equally comfortably with everyone, from corporate sponsors to armchair fans.

"I met him after he won the America's Cup. At that stage he was on a high, really, but he was just a modest New Zealand guy.

"It's a New Zealand quality that Peter never tried to be anyone else but himself."

As with thousands of others, Meads says he was not a yachting fan - "there's not much sea around Te Puke" - but Blake and the 1995 challenge caught the national spirit.

Even when he was based in England for many years, his thirst for adventure, and more recently for environmental campaigning, kept him a hometown hero.

Sir Edmund, now 82, says Sir Peter's death is a tremendous loss to New Zealand. He particularly admired his campaigning to protect endangered environments.

"He really was in the prime of his life for his greatest love, which was environmental matters. He really had such a tremendous future in front of him.

"I don't think we will forget him in a hurry."

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