CANADIAN CLUB CELEBRITY CUP
at Sugarloaf in Maine

KINGFIELD, Maine - Route 27 from Augusta winds through the wetness, grays and browns, the Carrabasset River a deeper gray than the air and sizzling with white rapids, the hardwood thicket along the roadsides just blushing with the maroon color of early buds.

The road stretches out through low pasture land where just days before dead cattle were being hauled out of the flood. Through Kingfield, ascending toward Sugarloaf Mountain, a sheriff is stopping cars to say the road is washed out and is barely passable. Go slow. Pick your way, he says.

And, indeed, in some spots the flood has undermined the entire banking and half the road so that, about at the centerline, the sawtooth edge of pavement drops off 20 feet to the rushing river below. At every dangerous spot, a barrier has been erected, and volunteers are standing in the rain stopping cars and explaining to drivers where to expect further trouble as they approach the mountain.

By their very nature, ski areas are usually oases of pleasant living surrounded by desperate extremes of the rugged living, rural poverty, beauty. Across northern New England, from the Green and White Mountains to the end of the Appalachian Trail at Baxter State Park, scenes of struggle roll out through the stone-gray landscape. Northern spring.

It makes one rather guilty to be driving through such a storm-ravaged place on the way to go skiing. Is it fair to come up here to play while so many people are straining to hold their world together? An inescapable thought.

Though New Hampshire has been pretty well wiped out, Vermont and Maine, having stockpiled so much natural and manmade snow, were hanging in there through the weekend and into yesterday. A full week of warm rain, however, and the picture could change dramatically. The season that just wouldn't quit may, just this suddenly, be forced into retirement.

This weekend at Sugarloaf was the annual Canadian Club Celebrity Cup to benefit the Jimmy Fund, an event that looked questionable last Thursday as Maine's rivers raged out of control. But with some amazing effort by road maintenance crews, the route to this big, farflung mountain in western Maine was opened up in time for the weekend.

As often happens, the sourest-looking conditions send forth some very decent skiing. On Saturday, despite a fog that hung in the upper reaches to deaden the visibility and make the skiing interesting, the snow was firm enough, despite spring conditions, to be fast.

Before the handicapping, we took a few runs from the top, the part of this 2,600-foot hill that received the brunt of the 46-inch storm two weeks ago. It was skiing by feel over the soft bumps. Tote Road was in excellent shape, Narrow Guage not bad, and a new bump trail, Skidder, was exhausting.

The handicapping is a peculiar form of fraud in which all 72 competitors take a run through gates to establish a time. Then teams are formed with eight members each, with skier positions determined by the handicap times. But such a rash of sandbagging broke out as might embarrass a Dennis Conner. The advantage is obvious: Go slow Saturday and draw an easy race in Sunday's triple head-to-head action.

But so widespread was the sandbagging that everyone raced at about their appropriate level. It was a slow show on Saturday morning, very quick on Sunday.

Among the notable performers, nearly all of them sandbagging, were former Patriots Gino Cappelletti, Larry Eisenhauer, Bill Lenkaitis and Tim Fox; Red Sox 1967 Cy Young Award winner Jim Lonborg; Olympic gold medal marathoner Joan Benoit, and Handicapped Olympic gold medal skier Diane Golden. The celebrity field was rounded out by a host of TV personalities -- Lucinda Crosby, Bruce Greenwood, Martin Kove, Jennifer Savidge, Jill Whelan, Ernie Townsend and Peter Boynton.

The winner of the affair, naturally, was the Jimmy Fund. The fourth annual Celebrity Cup raised $40,000, nearly double last year's $26,000, and four times the first-year donation.

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