In the early 2000s, New Zealand almost tore itself in two over the defection of a couple of yachties. Duncan Greive looks back on the campaign that whipped the nation into a frenzy.

New Zealand had never known a sporting betrayal like the time Sir Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth left Team New Zealand to join Italian rivals Alinghi after our successful 2000 America’s Cup defence. It inspired one ad exec to create the tribal Team New Zealand yachting fan engagement monster that was BlackHeart. What started as an unofficial supporters club escalated out of control, until families were threatened and members of the Alinghi syndicate were wearing bullet-proof vests, and a raging talkback battle ran for months on end. 

It got to the point where Paul Holmes, not known for his mild manner, was accused by one columnist of being a “politically correct, rose-tinted-glasses, refuse-to-face-facts wimp” for his disavowal of the campaign. We examined this extraordinary, now almost forgotten moment in our sporting history for this week’s episode of our pop culture podcast Remember When.

The episode had its roots in America’s Cup mania, which absolutely gripped New Zealand in the 90s and 00s. The event was relatively obscure until the 1980s, until legendary Australian businessman Alan Bond (later to be disgraced and imprisoned on corruption charges) launched its modern era by ending the New York Yacht Club’s 130 year run of cup defences. It lit a fire under wealthy businessmen the world over, who poured millions into making the America’s Cup an elaborate wallet-measuring contest.

One such baron was Sir Humphrey Michael Gerard Fay, who made enormous amounts of money during New Zealand’s privatisation and deregulation frenzy of the 80s. He bankrolled the creation of what became known as Team New Zealand, and successfully pantsed the cartoon villain US skipper Dennis Conner, winning the America’s Cup for New Zealand in 1995, repeating the feat in 2000.

Both victories were led by skipper Russell Coutts and tactician Brad Butterworth. After the 2000 campaign, they got into a dispute with Team NZ and decamped to Alinghi, a new team set up by Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli. Coutts took a cheque for $5m to walk, and in so doing set off a heated, highly divisive campaign which brought out the worst in New Zealand.

BlackHeart was the brainchild of ad exec Dave Walden – the man behind ASB’s iconic Goldstein commercials, who believed that the betrayal of Coutts and Butterworth had not drawn the appropriate level of outrage. Supported by former All Black Stu Wilson, journalist and broadcaster Bill Ralston, cinema owner Barry Everard and real estate agent Bruce Whillans, he set about trying to gin up a national fury. They organised a dinner, raised $80k and set about aggressively turning all of New Zealand against Coutts and Butterworth through an organisation known as BlackHeart. 

“Maybe in this country we’ve got too forgiving,” said Walden at the time. “These other guys have made some choices, but they’re now the competition.”

Walden and his crew launched the movement with a lunch fundraiser, which got them over $100,000 to wage a publicity war against Alinghi. It was explicitly unaffiliated with Team New Zealand, but meshed well with the organisation’s slogan: LOYAL, daubed on its headquarters. It adopted Dave Dobbyn’s song of the same name as its slogan, which could not be read as anything but a verdict on the New Zealanders sailing for Alinghi as disloyal. The slogan and the BlackHeart campaign treated Team New Zealand as if it were a group of daring amateurs representing their country, rather than a privately owned and run franchise staffed by some of New Zealand’s highest-paid sportspeople.

BlackHeart’s “core purpose”, they said, “was to create a home ground advantage for Team New Zealand”. Yet from the outset it ran a highly visible ad campaign which explicitly attacked Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth through a fiercely nationalistic slogan: “Country before money”. 

The billboards and newspaper ads helped drive home the patriotic fervour, and painted one set of rich yachties as patriots, and a second as guilty of high treason. Set on white type against a black backdrop, they carried messages such as: “Coutts and Co – Swiss Bankers since 2000” and “High on a hill lived a lonely boatman – yodelei, yodelei, yodelei-e-hoo”. BlackHeart’s web editor typified the vibe, saying of Coutts, ”I wouldn’t even talk to the bloody traitor, unless he were asking for a ride to the airport.”

That quote was given to the New York Times, one of a clutch of major international publications which covered the campaign, testimony to how wildly BlackHeart escalated. Letters threatening the sailor’s families were sent, prompting a police investigation. Coutts’ wife returned to her car to find black hearts stuck all over its exterior, according to the Guardian. 

Coutts himself had to travel with bodyguards due to legitimate fears for his safety, the paper later reported. “Former Team New Zealand sailors have allegedly taken to wearing bullet-proof vests in public, while accompanied by security guards at all times to protect themselves from the snipers said to have been spotted lurking by the harbour.” Snipers! In the Viaduct!

“New Zealand, a country with no huge financial clout, has fallen foul of being a small nation in a game that has gone supersonic,” said Ian Walker, skipper of Britain’s GBR challenge. “But there’s a thin line between patriotism and National Front stuff, and all it takes is one lunatic to decide these men are traitors and this whole thing could explode.”

The country seemed to split between a hardcire group, led by Murray Deaker and Mike King, doyens of sports talk radio, that earnestly believed in the betrayal, and a larger chunk of the country who thought things were going a bit far. “We are not a dastardly organisation,” said Walden at its height. “We aren’t a bunch of nutters.”

Eventually, the fever broke. With a simple message on their website, the BlackHearts announced: “We will pull our heads in.” Not long after, Team New Zealand lost the America’s Cup to Alinghi in a 5-0 drubbing.

Two decades on Team New Zealand would avenge that defeat with a triumphant victory on home waters, in front of solely loyal New Zealand fans, as borders were closed due the pandemic. Showing its own loyalty, the franchise announced the next America’s Cup would be raced for in Barcelona. 

Today the episode is little remembered – Bill Ralston could recall the lunch but little more when contacted by The Spinoff. But it marks a strange spasm of Muldoonist nationalism, when the rage of an ad exec curdled into something strange and fearsome, which felt like it might see blood in the Waitematā during one weird summer.

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