By Annabella Garwood, Roger Garwood
The Auld Mug's seen a lot over the last 166 years.
She's been thrusted high above the heads of the world's greatest sailors, pelted by a sledgehammer and now she gets treated like a queen, flying first class inside a Louis Vuitton case.
But what I've come to learn recently is how the world's oldest sporting trophy came to make herself at home in the Garwood living room.
In 1983, the New York Yacht Club's Liberty failed to defend the cup at Newport, Rhode Island and for the first time in 132 years, the Auld Mug fell into the hands of the Royal Perth Yacht Club challenger Australia II.
My great uncle Roger was the official photographer for the America's Cup defence and naturally he was inundated with calls from magazines around the world.
A few days after it arrived, he phoned the club and asked if he could take a few shots of the Cup. To his surprise they said 'don't bother to come here, we'll send it down to you.'
Wearing its clear case, a security guard strapped the Cup into the passenger seat of a Holden and drove it from Perth to Roger's house in Fremantle.
He phoned my great grandfather Oliver and asked him to pop over because he had something to show him. He took a bit of convincing but eventually arrived with my great grandmother Ethel in tow.
Roger led his father to the living room and he was stunned beyond belief. He stood and stared at the cup perched on the living room bookshelves and burst into tears. I think it brought home his decision to turn down sailing the Firefly Dinghy Class at the 1948 Olympics, an offer he wasn't able to take because he couldn't afford to.
When my second cousin Ben told his classmates the America's Cup had been at his house, he was jeered at but when Roger sent him off to school with a black and white print the following day, they had to bite their tongues.
It must have been a shock for those children. I too had to pinch myself when my grandparents Shirley and Michael Garwood sent me the photograph a few days ago.
Newshub.
