Mark Patton: Throwing Cold Water on the Jinxes of Journalism

The toughest opponent in sports goes by the name of Jinx.

It’s why baseball players would rather step on a land mine than a chalk line. It’s why they also steer clear of their pitcher whenever he approaches a no-hitter.

Maybe they should start avoiding sports writers, too.

Baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews was only a few years out of Santa Barbara High School when he graced the first cover of Sports Illustrated in August 1954.

He injured his hand the following week and missed seven games, taking the Milwaukee Braves right out of the National League pennant race.

SI has been turning gold into straw ever since. It ended Pete Rose’s 44-game hitting streak with a cover story on the Cincinnati Reds’ star in 1978.

It had no mercy even for a teenage cover boy from Texas who had just surpassed a national high school pitching record with his 51st-straight win in 1989.

After getting his pub from SI, Brenham High School’s Jon Peters got punked in the next game for the only defeat of his prep career.

The most tragic moment of the Sports Illustrated jinx came in 1958 when race car driver Pat O’Connor was killed on the first lap of the Indianapolis 500 just four days after appearing on the cover.

My own most grievous journalistic jinx occurred 40 years ago this summer after I was contacted by a pair of intrepid sailors.

I was a young reporter at the time, looking to fill some space in the sports section of the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Nojay Komoda and Gerhard Kiesel needed publicity to raise $20,000 for an upcoming Trans-Pacific voyage.

The two Maui residents were in Santa Barbara to prepare their 19-foot racing catamaran for a California-to-Hawai‘i crossing that they hoped would break a world record.

“We’ll call you for a follow-up story as soon as we get there,” Kiesel promised just before their departure. “We’re going to be sipping mai tais in Maui in no time!”

They became the first of many jinxes that my dark-humored colleagues began to track. My feel-good stories of success were seemingly written with a poisoned pen, spurring slumps and losing streaks and even injury.

I showed up for a softball game in 2011 to interview UC Santa Barbara’s hot-hitting shortstop, Keilani Jennings, for a future column. She blew out her knee on a freak play during the sixth inning while UC Riverside rallied to halt UCSB’s nine-game winning streak.

She was nice enough to grant me the interview before being whisked off to the hospital.

But I regret no story more than the one on July 20, 1983, that sent Komoda and Kiesel on their ill-fated voyage.

I’m still awaiting Kiesel’s call for that follow-up interview.

Eyes of the Storm

They struck me as an odd couple from the get-go.

Komoda was a 26-year-old catamaran dealer who had never sailed outside Hawai‘i’s chain of islands.

Kiesel was a 61-year-old baker who had logged 35,000 miles of sailing, but never in anything as small and lightly equipped as a catamaran.

“I know a lot about catamarans and Gerhard knows about crossings,” Komoda told me.

“Together, we should make a good team,” Kiesel chipped in.

The duo even described their equally poor vision as a problem that could be solved collectively.

An errantly thrown firecracker cost Komoda the sight in his right eye.

Kiesel, who fought for Germany’s Wehrmacht during World War II, was blinded in the left eye during a firefight with American soldiers. His eye socket was smashed by metal fragments when a bullet struck his helmet.

“Together, we can see fairly well,” Komoda said with a laugh. “We’re a good team.”

Western Airlines — a company that would cease operations less than four years later — was their major sponsor.

“We’ll be in radio contact with a Western Airlines captain every day when they fly overhead,” Komoda explained. “They’ll be able to give us the weather forecasts and let us know the shortest route to take.”

He believed the voyage would be “more peaceful and safer than crossing the road.”

“Out there, you consider yourself as part of the elements — you just go with it rather than against it,” Komoda said. “We find it’s harder crossing L.A. than the ocean.”

He figured that his racing catamaran could reach Maui in a world-record time of eight days. It would be a record just making it there since no craft that size had ever officially made such an attempt.

Komoda mailed me a thank-you card after our interview, which included an invitation to their Bon Voyage Party at the “Spruce Goose.” The Hughes H-4 Hercules aircraft had been moved to Long Beach Harbor and converted into a tourist attraction just two months earlier.

The location for the shindig gave me a chilling premonition: The “Spruce Goose” — the world’s largest aircraft of its time — had been a doomed project climaxed by a flight of just 26 seconds.

Naysayers of the Seafarers

I soon discovered I wasn’t the only one with doubts.

“Nojay said it was just something he had to do, but it wasn’t a reasonable thing to do at all,” said Steve Murray, who gave Komoda a place to stay during his summer in Santa Barbara. “We all tried to talk him out of it.

“We asked him, ‘Who says you have to do it?’ And he’d say, ‘I do.’”

Murray, who ran Murray’s Marine Distributing in Carpinteria, said it would be akin to sailing “a small trampoline” on the open sea.

“I’m not even sure it was a good downwind boat,” he said. “He did not even test it. His one shakedown cruise from Santa Barbara, he made it to Carp and ran out of wind.

“He just wasn’t concerned enough about what he was facing.”

Komoda even seemed to taunt fate by naming the boat “Hurricane.”

“It should be a real grabber to be listening to the radio and then hear, ‘The Hurricane is only 200 miles from Hawai‘i,” he told me. “The people there are really afraid of hurricanes.”

Kiesel, who had been wounded five times in fighting on both the Russian and Western fronts, seemed to have a better grasp of the dangers.

“This is a very difficult one, but it’s not impossible,” he told me. “I do not consider myself to be nuts. I see a real chance to make it.”

Nacra Sailing, which sold the 435-pound boat to Komoda, disapproved of its use after learning of his plans.

“We all thought it was a crazy thing to do,” said Jack Young, a Carpinteria representative of Nacra. “No one in the sailing industry wanted to sponsor him, and it really depressed him after a while.

“We certainly didn’t want anything to do with what he was doing.”

They did quiz him about how he would handle different emergencies.

“It bummed him out to hear all that negative talk, but you have to be ready when you do something like that,” Young said. “I’ve been washed off 36-foot catamarans before just like it was nothing.

“If that happened to him out there in heavy seas, just what could he do?”

The first glitch occurred when Komoda’s radio went dead on the first day out.

“You would think he’d return if he were just a one-day’s sail away,” Young said.

Family and friends remained hopeful despite the radio silence.

“They had a window of some remarkably good weather,” Murray recalled.

But the weather turned “terrible” two weeks after their departure.

Three successive hurricanes — Gil, Henriette and Ismael — churned through the South Pacific in late July and August.

A U.S. Coast Guard C-130 airplane began an 800-mile search for the missing sailors in early August.

I felt a pang of culpability when a news bulletin came across our United Press International teletype on Aug. 17: The Coast Guard announced that it was calling off the search for Nojay Komoda and Gerhard Kiesel.

The thought circled my mind like a hungry shark: Would they have attempted the quest had I not trumpeted it in print?

Bound for Paradise

It preyed on me again last year when my daughter, Caitlyn, asked if I could write a story about another sea voyager.

Her friend, Adrienne Smith, a young mother who runs a yoga studio in Santa Barbara, was part of a four-woman crew that was training to break another world record.

They planned to row from San Francisco to Hawai‘i faster than the old women’s record of 35 days, 14 hours and 23 minutes.

Her husband, Jason, the crew’s trainer, had recruited her to the task.

“My first question to my husband was, ‘Well, what are my chances of death?’” Smith said. “I was picturing doing this in a flat-water rowing boat, not an ocean-rowing boat.

“Once I got a little more educated, I wasn’t as freaked.”

Modern technology allowed me to track the Lat 35 crew the entire way. I even got to email Smith for updates.

She and crewmates — Sophia Denison-Johnston, Libby Costello and Brooke Downes — made it to the finish line at Honolulu’s Waikiki Yacht Club on July 25, 2022.

Their journey of 2,400 nautical miles — the equivalent of about 2,800 land miles — took 34 days, 14 hours and 11 minutes. That beat the previous record by a full day and 12 minutes.

Smith and her daughter, Reese, who would turn 5 a few weeks later, rushed toward each other on the boat dock before collapsing into each other’s arms for a long, tearful embrace. They were quickly joined by Jason.

“Utter love with Reese and Jason,” is how Smith described their reunion to Noozhawk.

And it was utter relief for the old Jinx Master.

But perhaps all those thoughts of hoodoo are really just so much doodoo.

And maybe — just maybe — Komoda and Kiesel are still out there, lounging on some deserted island, sipping coconut milk instead of mai tais.