1998 Volume 121 No 1–4 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

Interestingly, Muldoon
does not drink, hasn't for
20 years. But he's never
lost the taste for a fight.
"Once," said Helen
Stubbs, cook on the justcompleted
Newport-Bermuda
Race, who is
studying for her masters
degree in mental health at
Harvard, "we had a bowman
who was just as tough
as Jim. In the middle of
the race, Jim started yelling
at him. They guy was going
as fast as he could but
Jim kept yelUng. Finally,
the guy jumped down on
deck and said, 'If you think
you can do it better, come
up here and do it yourself.'
Next thing we knew, they
were running at each other
like a couple of bulls and
chasing each other aroimd
the boat. It was hilarious."
Next morning, she said,
all was forgotten.
That Muldoon is an eccentric
among yachtsmen
is clear. Many of his crew
say he has a Napoleon
complex, being relatively
short of stature. At close
mark roimdings, starts and finishes, or in narrow channels, he's
famous for shrieking at his crew to sit so he can see. "He
thrives on mayhem," said one crew member.
"One time in Antigua, some of us got a little drunk, found a
shopping cart and started wheeling people around from boat to
boat," said Johnson, the crewman from Potomac. "Somebody
said, 'Let's get Muldoon!' So six of us tackled him and tried to
put him in the cart. We couldn't lift him. Six big guys! He just
hunched down and we couldn't budge him. He, like, bolted
himself to the dock."
Muldoon pays two loyal full-time employees, Bert CoUins of
Kensington and Holly Vrotsos of Annapolis, to look after Donnybrook,
but racing crews get nothing—no plane tickets, no
accommodations, no pay. In the high-stakes world of big boat
racing, where rich owners on like-sized vessels pay America's
Cup and Whitbread hands hundreds and even thousands of
dollars a day to whip their boats home first, Muldoon is
uniquely parsimonious.
"We're a highly competitive program that's completely amateur,"
he said. "We make no attempt to improve our performance
by attracting even tmpaid 'rock stars.' I would never
replace one of my unpaid crew with a rock star, even if one
wanted to come," he said.
"I'd rather sail with people
I like."
The new boat replaced
the old 70-footer, which
placed highly in a number
of prestigious distance
races including
Marblehead-Hahfax, Annapolis-Newport
and the
400-mile Martha's Vineyard
Race. That boat also
established Muldoon as a
notoriously ill-starred
competitor.
Three times it was
dismasted, twice during
races, and it met its demise
in a most spectacular way.
The 70-footer was nearly
cleaved in two by the 80-
foot maxiboat Creighton's
Naturally during a heavyair
race in Antiqua two
years ago. The collision,
which was the fault of
Creighton's Naturally, left a
gaping gash down the side
of Donnybrook that
stopped just above the waterline.
Debris was strewn
everywhere. The damage
was deemed beyond repair,
though an islander has
since patched the boat and refloated it.
Muldoon came back to Washington with incredible action
photos of the crash and the staggering damage and began battiing
insurance companies for a fair settlement. Meantime, he
found the unfinished hull of the newest Donnybrook languishing
in a Seventh-Day Adventist colony in California, where it
had been dumped when the manufacturer went belly up. He
bought it, said Collins, Donnybrook's paid captain, for a very
nice price.
CoUins and Vrotsos had the 16-foot-wide hull trucked across
the country and spent eight months finishing it in Rhode
Island.
Now, Donnybrook is back in harness, with Muldoon barking
orders as loudly as ever with added status as president of the
nation's top yachting organization. Will age and position finally
mellow him
"Not reall)^' he said. "I'm a hard competitor. We yell and we're
going to keep yelhng. We're good at it."
More details and photos on the Fraternity web site—a must see!
Angus Phillips is a writer with The Washington Post. His article
is reprinted with permission, © 1998 The Washington Post.
http://www.phidek-ghq.com FALL 1998 THE SCROLL 15