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"Never Get Excited." Before a race, Shields is the picture of relaxation at the tiller of Aileen. With her identifying numeral, 25, on her mainsail, Aileen is probably hailed more than any other boat in Long Island waters. He invariably answers all calls, even from total strangers who hail him as "Corny." Often he adds a compliment to the passing skipper on the looks of his boat. To Corny Shields, "all boats are beautiful."
But as the warning booming of the miniature cannon on the committee boat sounds the approach of a race's starting time, Shields settles down to the business at hand: getting off to a split-second start. Nobody racing today does it better. His eyes flicker from the tiny "telltales" of thread on the stays (for gauging wind) to his stopwatches, to the starting line, to his sails, which. Corny stoutly maintains, "are 75% of racing success." All the while, he issues quiet orders to his crew of fellow amateurs.
During a race. Shields's only sign of tension is an off-key whistling through pursed lips, a slight clenching and unclenching of his free hand. Though he insists he never gets excited ("The secret of winning is keeping calm") and though he tries never to shout at his crew ("A sure sign of panic on a boat"). Shields is occasionally moderately guilty of both. But invariably he calms down quickly, invariably apologizes in the next breath for a testy command. Ordinarily, Corny Shields, who has probably sailed and won more races than any man alive, lives up to his maxim for sailing success: "Never get excited."
What a Sailor Must Learn. Cornelius Shields was born far from the sea, in St. Paul, Minn., in 1895. Fitly enough, it was a notable year in U.S. sailing history, though the year's tidings made little ripple beyond the Eastern Seaboard. It was the year in which American yachtsmen, sailing Defender, a lineal descendant of the great ocean racer America,* defeated the British challenger for the tenth straight time in the America's Cup series. It was also the year in which the premier international championship for smaller boats, the Seawanhaka Cup series, was launched. Though he was in no position to appreciate it at the time, Corny Shields was to help win the Seawanhaka Cup for the U.S. by the time he was 40, and was to have his own turns at the wheel of a big America's Cup boat.
It was not until the Shields family moved to Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1901, that young Corny got out in his first boat. His father, by then the president of the Dominion Iron & Steel Ltd., bought his family a 15-footer. In that, and in a later 25-ft. Class R type sloop, Corny learned what every good sailor must learn: how to anticipate and take advantage of every little change in weather and tide. By 1909, when the family was settled down in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., 14-year-old Corny was the acknowledged skipper of the 25-footer, and had set about learning racing tactics in competition: to get the jump on rivals at the start, maneuver a boat so as to steal the wind from a leading boat and pass her, cut a rival off at the turning of a mark or crossing the finish line.