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If sailing were baseball, Corny Shields would long have ranked with the Stan Musials and Joe DiMaggios; if golf, with the Ben Hogans and Sammy Sneads. But sailing is sailing, and Until last year no scheme had ever been worked out for picking a national, all-class men's champion. Then, after some 1,500 elimination races in associations from coast to coast, Corny Shields and his two-man crew beat seven other crews at Mystic Seaport, Conn, last September, and Corny was crowned North American sailing champion, the first in history.
Champion Shields looks like a sailor. He has a thatch of white hair over tanned, weather-beaten features. His clear brown eyes are edged with crowfeet wrinkles from squinting into the sun. Broad-shouldered and stocky (5 ft. 10 in., 180 lbs.), Shields stays in trim by doing a good part of the work on his own boat. A non-smoker (he gave up cigars 15 years ago) and a lifetime teetotaler, he has the wind to stay under water close to a minute at a time, as he lovingly swabs smooth the gleaming green hull of his International sloop Aileen before a race.
The Absolute Skipper. Corny has worked out his own design for living on the water. Five mornings a week, he is at his desk in Wall Street's Shields & Co., the family brokerage house. But two days a week—and as many other afternoons as he can justify to his conscience—he heads for the Larchmont Yacht Club, one block from his home, on the north shore of Long Island Sound. There he doffs his banker-style clothes for khaki pants and a polo shirt, gathers a three-man crew and hoists sail. On a good day, he can get in two or three hours of wheeling his boat around a selected course, outguessing his rivals (and sometimes being outguessed) on winds and sail settings, outmaneuvering them (and sometimes being outmaneuvered) on the turns. With practice spins, and sailing to starting marks. Corny often spends eight or nine hours a day in his boat.
Like most devout sailors, Corny Shields has brought his children up on the water. The Aileen is named for his daughter, who won the national women's sailing championship in 1948. Son Corny Jr., 19 (nickname: Glick), is one of the top Long Island skippers in the speedy 110 Class boats. Mrs. Shields, in the older tradition of yachtsmen's wives, prefers the yacht club porch, seldom races with her husband, "because Corny won't let me do anything in the boat."
In his own boat, Corny is the absolute skipper. "I want all the responsibility," he says. He also admits: "I hate to lose!" Rival skippers—one affectionately calls him "a genius"—would rather beat him than anyone else for just that reason; plus, of course, the satisfaction that comes from beating the North American sailing champion. This week, Corny celebrated the second day of Larchmont Race Week by leading 19 other Internationals home in a brisk, 18-knot northeasterly. Said Corny happily: "The harder it blows, the better I like it."