Rhode Islanders of a certain age, and yachtsmen everywhere, may remember a younger, brasher Ted Turner, the America’s Cup skipper aptly nicknamed “The Mouth of the South,” aka “Captain Outrageous” and “Terrible Ted.”

Turner, who had been kicked out of Brown University in 1960 (girls weren’t allowed in men’s dorm rooms in those days), returned to Rhode Island in 1974, to enter the defense trials for the America’s Cup in Newport that year. He went down to defeat at the helm of Mariner, a “breakthrough” design that broke nothing but its backers’ spirits as it went down to resounding defeat.

Turner came back in 1977, more terrible than ever, roistering up from Atlanta and tossing verbal cherry bombs into Newport society’s gaily-striped party tents, as if determined to avenge Sherman’s March to the Sea. This time his boat was Courageous, one of the best 12-meters ever. Turner sailed it to new heights of grandiosity on the way to a convincing Cup victory.

“There will never be a time in my life as good as this time,” he told a reporter. “I’m so hot I just tell my guys to stand by me with their umbrellas turned upside down to catch the stuff that falls off me and onto them…. My biggest problem now is to keep from getting a big head. You don’t think I have one, do you?”

At his memorable victory press conference, Turner, who had been accepting an astonishing variety of alcoholic beverages since reaching the dock, slid blissfully beneath the table as the world watched.

It was an embarrassing moment for the blue-blazered members of the ultra-exclusive New York Yacht Club, which had turned down Terrible Ted’s application for membership before swallowing its pride and letting him in when it appeared Turner was the skipper most likely to save its precious Cup.

But other observers, including John Bertrand, the Australian skipper who finally wrested the Cup from the New Yorkers in 1983, have said they should have placed a plaque where Turner fell, to mark the end of a long era of glorious amateurism and the beginning of the Cup’s metamorphosis into a professional sport, marked by long, grinding campaigns, commercialism and endless legal wrangling.

Doug Riggs ( driggs@projo.com) is the author of Keelhauled: The History of Unsportsmanlike Conduct and the America’s Cup (1986).