The Golden State’s vaccine verification for concerts, conventions and sporting events, which begins next month, is the first for a state in the U.S., expanding on an earlier state order for events with a minimum of 5,000 people. And it mirrors a growing list of similar vaccine requirements — in public and private workplaces and imposed by individual cities and counties — as the state battles another surge of infections from the highly contagious delta variant.

Also on Wednesday, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo unveiled a plan to require that all attendees and staff of events of 50 or more people at city-owned facilities — such as the SAP Center, Convention Center and Center for Performing Arts — show proof of full vaccination, with no negative test option allowed.

And come Friday, San Francisco will become the only major U.S. city that won’t let you enter restaurants, museums, gyms or just about anything else you might consider entertainment without proof that you are fully vaccinated. The City by the Bay’s order is the mother of all mandates in what’s become an avalanche of new rules in a shift toward a new social structure:

No shoes, no shirt, no vaccine, no service.

In this politically progressive city where 78% of eligible residents are already fully vaccinated — and fans of the San Francisco Giants and “Hamilton” are already used to presenting their vaccination cards or negative COVID-19 tests — the impending V-Day is just one more thing locals are gearing up for. In the wake of Wednesday’s statewide announcement, their experiences may be a test run for all of us.

“It could be worse — and it’s been worse,” said Henry Morales, who’s been working at Patxi’s Chicago Pizza in the Hayes Valley neighborhood for the past three years, including during months of the pandemic when indoor dining was forbidden. “It’s still better than not having any diners at all.”

The explosion of the delta variant spurred San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Director of Public Health Dr. Grant Colfax to announce the new requirements last week. Only New York City has come close to the mandate, requiring proof of just one dose of vaccine for indoor dining and other activities.

Across San Francisco this week, restaurant and other indoor-venue managers are scrambling to figure out exactly how to comply and enforce the new rules. Do employees have to worry about people presenting forgeries? Will maitre d’s become bouncers? Will tourists have any idea what’s going on?

Mark David, an assistant manager at Absinthe Brasserie & Bar on Hayes Street, said that after months of mask mandates and shifting rules on indoor and outdoor dining, he’s ready for anything.

“We have been going over de-escalation techniques” in case belligerent patrons lash out against the new vaccine rules, he said. “We’ve been using that on mask usage, so we’re prepared on that front.”

Already, the city’s printed fliers are popping up on restaurant windows: “Vaccine & Masks Required Indoors.” Some store managers have decided to enforce the new rules two days before the mandate takes effect.

At Arbor restaurant and wine shop, manager Daniel Torres put up signs on the front counter at lunchtime Wednesday and already turned away one customer — a regular.

“She said she was unvaccinated,” he said. “I told her I can help you outside, but she just said, ‘I don’t know, I’ll come back later.’ ”

The city is encouraging people to retrieve their “Personal Digital COVID-19 Record” from the state of California by plugging in their name, birthday, cell phone number and a four-digit pin number to https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov/. You’ll receive a link to a QR code that can be presented as proof of vaccination. People can also show their paper vaccine card or a photo of it.

At Amano restaurant, manager Victoria Matias already retrieved hers and hopes most of her customers will do the same. Whether she or her staff will have any equipment to actually scan the QR code is still uncertain, she said, but she may not need to scan it. Just looking at it might be enough. She will also accept the paper vaccination record or a photo of it.

“We’re happy to be open and take all the necessary steps to be safe,” she said.

Other indoor venues have for months been asking either for proof of vaccine or negative COVID-19 tests. Fans of “Hamilton” couldn’t get into the Orpheum Theater without one or the other since it reopened Aug. 11. That will change Friday, when attendees will need to show proof that they have been fully vaccinated for at least 14 days prior to the show date. Under the city’s rules, proof of a negative COVID test will no longer be an option for those older than 12 but will be required for those 12 and under.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko concert hall has been a vaccination-only destination since it reopened in May — and patrons have had their vaccine cards at the ready.

“At that time, we were one of the first to draw that line in the sand,” said Randy Taradash, the venue’s creative director and general manager. Most patrons have been grateful, he said, “other than one mean tweet on our day of announcing.”

The new rules don’t apply to hair and nail salons, but that hasn’t stopped Lynn Vu, owner of The Muse SF nail spa on Grove Street to impose them herself — indoors or out.

“I’m asking for it from everybody,” Vu said. “It makes it safe for everybody.”

If San Francisco health officials hoped that the mandate might motivate the unvaccinated to finally give in, they might be having some luck.

Wossen Haile, 44, said that while he encouraged his wife and mother to get vaccinated, he’s been too busy to get inoculated himself.

“Look, if there are going to be laws in order for people to go to restaurants, libraries and theaters, then of course I’m going to be vaccinated,” said Haile, who’s been unemployed during the pandemic. “I’m going soon. Trust me.”

Staff writers Maggie Angst, John Woolfolk and Sal Pizarro contributed. 

The libertarian-leaning co-founder of PayPal and venture capitalist made his convention debut just days after the Republican Party adopted one of the most anti-gay platforms in history. So Thiel was taking a calculated risk in making his sexuality an issue in his speech. Some gay delegates said they were afraid he’d be booed.

But Thiel received a warm reception in the convention hall, even after he essentially chided the platform committee for debating which bathrooms transgender people should use. He called the debate “a distraction from our real problems.”

“Who cares?” he said of the bathroom issue.

He said he doesn’t “pretend to agree” with every plank in the party’s platform, “but fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline. And nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.”

The California delegation let out a cheer when Thiel said he was gay and proud, then broke into a series of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants.

Makan Delrahim, a delegate from Los Angeles, said the reception to Thiel’s speech showed that the GOP was a tolerant party.

“I have a hell of a lot more respect for entrepreneurs than corporate CEOs,” Delrahim said of Thiel. “They actually create jobs.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign quickly issued a statement on Thiel’s speech: “Unfortunately, he is speaking in support of a candidate that has run an anti-LGBT campaign and will undoubtedly continue that trend if he takes office.”

Thiel, 48, has always been known for his contrarian political views, but he still raised plenty of eyebrows in Silicon Valley when he signed up to be one of three Trump delegates from San Francisco.

He wasn’t the first openly gay person to speak at a GOP convention, but he was the first to acknowledge it from the stage during a prime time address.

Thiel is an early investor in Facebook and a member of the company’s board of directors and also recently bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the online gossip site Gawker, which several years ago outed Thiel as gay.

In his speech, he said he supported Trump because he’s a builder, not a politician. Although the economy looks strong in Silicon Valley, he said, “Silicon Valley is a small place. Drive out to Sacramento, or even just across the bridge to Oakland, and you won’t see the same prosperity. That’s just how small it is. Across the country, wages are flat.”

He said the government is “broken” under Democratic leadership.

“Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all,” he said.

“This is a staggering decline for a country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.”

Thiel originally pumped $2 million into former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s SuperPAC, but later switched to Trump in a move that stunned other valley leaders turned off by the Republican nominee’s protectionist policies and jabs at Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Ken Yale, a GOP delegate from Dublin, said Thiel’s appearance in Cleveland shows that Trump’s reach extends beyond his white working class base.

“I know a lot of Republicans in Silicon Valley,” said Yale, a health care industry executive. “The fact that Peter is a libertarian reflects to me that there are a lot of very committed Trump people from all walks of life.”

Juan Hernandez, an alternate delegate from Santa Clara, said the fact that Thiel was invited to speak is “one of the best things that could be happening right now for the Republican Party. And it shows that Trump is inclusive of the LGBT community and respects personal liberty and freedom.”

Thiel also offers Trump a chance to appeal to young tech workers who are more attracted to Trump as a disruptive force than they are to Clinton, said Bruce Cain, who directs Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.

“This is a play for young people who are dissatisfied with politics and idealize Silicon Valley disrupters,” Cain said.

Although Thiel could sway some techies to vote for Trump, he risks alienating many associates who oppose Trump’s protectionist trade proposals and abhor the GOP’s stand on social issues.

“By any logical calculation,” Cain said, “it’s not a smart move on his part.”

Contact Matthew Artz at 510-208-6435. Follow him at Twitter.com/Matthew_Artz.

What’s being hailed as the first, large-scale launch of an “augmented reality” game is sweeping the nation, and in less than a week since its Wednesday release, Pokemon Go is already close to surpassing Twitter in daily active users. Along the way, parks, shopping malls, churches and even cemeteries are being overwhelmed by the search for Pikachu and PokeSpots.

Don’t be surprised if you bump into a Pokemon Go player soon — or if one bumps into you. They’re easy to spot swiping up on smartphone screens and often calling out netherworldly exclamations like, “Look, there’s a Growlithe behind you!” and “Wow, you got an Oddish?” They’re pursuing animated images of the cartoon creatures that appear on their phones as if they are popping out from the real-life landmarks where the phone’s camera is aimed.

Courtney Von Raesfeld, 19, has met up with Pokemon seekers at all times of the day and night, from the Target store to her bank and, on Monday, San Jose’s Municipal Rose Garden.

“You say, ‘Hey, are you playing Pokemon Go?'” said Von Raesfeld, who works at Starbucks. “I’ve never had someone say no.

“A lot of people say, ‘Get a life.’ But this is giving people a life, going outside and talking to people, instead of staying inside by themselves.”

A’s outfielder Coco Crisp said the game has taken over the clubhouse. And on Saturday night, while staying with the team at a Houston hotel, he said, “There must have been 70 kids” in a park nearby using their phones to hunt down the characters.

Across social media, Pokemon Go is being heralded as everything from the cure for obesity (players can walk miles to hunt down certain characters) to the answer to world peace (strange encounters in parks in the middle of the night are leading to more friendships than suspicions.)

Yet, as with any shiny new thing comes the inevitable macabre shockers: One teen stumbled upon a dead body in Wyoming and others were ambushed by robbers in Missouri while hunting for Pokemon.

Police throughout the Bay Area are catching on, issuing the obvious safety tips, and some are getting in on the fun. —We don’t just catch bad guys, we catch pokemon too,” tweeted Mountain View Police.

When Fremont Police realized their headquarters were a hot spot for Pokemon, they sent this cautionary tweet: “Hey #PokemonGo trainers… You have to be at level 5 to battle at the FPD gym — no need to enter the lobby #goodluck.”

At downtown San Jose’s Cesar Chavez Plaza, Lexi Hall, 25, says she’s made “15 new friends so far just walking around” since last Thursday and has lost five pounds.

“I suffer from some depression and anxiety. This gets me out of the house,” Hall said. “For a lot of us who are a bit pudgy, this gives us a reason to exercise.”

Rayne Greenwood, 24, said she was a big Pokemon fan as a kid. Back then, though, the game was restricted to playing cards and the handheld Nintendo Game Boy device.

With GPS mapping technology, a camera phone and the latest in animated graphics, “we’re living out our childhood dreams,” she said. “What if Pokemon were real? We’re halfway there at this point.”

In less than a week, Pokemon Go has turned into a boon for Nintendo, which owns one-third of Pokemon Company. Nintendo and Pokemon each own a piece of Niantic Labs, the San Francisco-based developer of Pokemon Go, which itself was spun off from Google last year.

Already, more than 5 percent of Android smartphone owners have downloaded Pokemon Go, and the game is the most-downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store. Nintendo stock has surged 36 percent and added $7.5 billion to Nintendo’s market value since Pokemon Go was released.

Traffic has been so overwhelming, however, that the company spent the weekend scrambling to keep their servers up as users reported the game crashing. New players were temporarily blocked from registering Monday morning.

Some players are already seeing the marketing potential. Allison King, 25, sees businesses clamoring to become hotspots for Pokemon characters. A Pokemon Pub Crawl is already planned in San Francisco later this month, where King hopes a bartender might give free “Pokeshots.”

On Monday, no place seemed off limits as Pokemon hiding places.

At a gym in Castro Valley, Curt di Cristina, 28, suffered an awkward moment when he took out his phone to play between exercises.

“It looked like I was trying to get a photo of the guy next to me,” he said. When the other gym-goer noticed that di Cristina was actually trying to catch a Pokemon, he pulled out his phone to try to capture the same one.

Hal Schoolcraft is hooked too, and he’s far from a millennial.

“I’ve never seen as many people wandering the park aimlessly as I did last night,” said Schoolcraft, 64, who was catching Pokemon in downtown San Jose.

Schoolcraft is among the many who are nursing Pokemon Go-related injuries: He nearly twisted his ankle while playing at night. “I was walking off the sidewalk and bumping into plants.”

Some observers are less enamored with Pokemon Go than others. Isaac Smith, 29, humored his girlfriend Monday by spending his lunch hour with her as she tracked down Smirtle in downtown San Jose in front of the Quetzalcoatl statue.

While some are boasting about the game’s ability to create community, Smith says it appears short-lived. Players give head-nods to each other, he said, “then the people waddle off.”

“People are weaving through the world,” Smith said, “but not paying attention to the world itself.”

Staff Writers John Hickey, Rex Crum, Angela Ruggiero, Judy Prieve and Erin Baldassari contributed to this report. Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at twitter.com/juliasulek

Obama stressed international connections, despite the anxiety those relationships can create, during his seventh — and last — Global Entrepreneurship Summit. His appearance came on the day the world was reeling from Britain’s exit from the European Union.

“I believe we are better off in a world in which we are trading, and networking, and communicating, and sharing ideas,” Obama said. “But that also means that cultures are colliding, and sometimes it’s disruptive and people get worried. You’re the bridge. You’re the glue — particularly the young people who are here, who can help lead to a more peaceful and prosperous future that provides opportunity for everybody.”

Obama received a standing ovation when he took the stage, and had a tough time getting those in front to stop taking selfies and sit down. The attention continued on his way out of town — hundreds of people lined the road as the presidential motorcade left Stanford on its way to Moffett Field. For more than a mile along the Embarcadero in Palo Alto, summer campers in matching T-shirts waved, some holding American flags.

The annual summit is an opportunity for Obama’s administration to showcase its commitment to fostering global innovation. The three-day event brought in more than 700 entrepreneurs from 170 countries, as well as 300 investors, for pitch competitions, panels and networking.

In addition to the outgoing president, speakers included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Secretary of State John Kerry, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. On Friday attendees even got a visit from cast members of HBO’s TV series “Silicon Valley,” who kept the audience in stitches by mocking tech startup culture.

Budding international entrepreneurs said they were inspired by Obama’s speech, especially when he suggested that starting new businesses should be about more than making money.

“The social entrepreneurship, it’s helping other people to grow,” said Stephanie Carvajalino, who has a cookie company in her home country of Colombia.

Another entrepreneur from Colombia, Juan Camilo Basto, plans to share the lessons he’s learned here with his countrymen and women.

“We think this kind of event will drive our companies in new ways,” he said. “We’re getting huge contacts here.”

Obama took the opportunity Friday to comment on Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. The president said he spoke with Prime Minister David Cameron, who he called an outstanding friend and partner, and is confident that Britain is committed to an orderly transition away from the EU.

“One thing that will not change is the special relationship that exists between our two nations,” he said.

Obama also called attention to the United States’ improved relations with Cuba — a priority of his administration — by pointing to 11 Cuban entrepreneurs in the audience, the first Cubans to attend in the program’s history.

Emphasizing an issue acutely felt in the Bay Area tech community, Obama warned that as the world’s innovators forge ahead, they cannot leave women and minorities behind.

“You deserve the same chance to succeed as everybody else,” he said, speaking to underrepresented groups. “We’ve got to make sure that everybody has a fair shot to reach their potential. We can’t leave more than half the team on the bench.”

Obama congratulated more than 30 companies that signed a “Tech Inclusion Pledge” this week — including Airbnb, Lyft, Pinterest, Spotify and Zynga — promising to make their workforces more representative of the U.S. population by creating specific recruitment goals and publishing annual diversity metrics.

After his presentation, Obama hosted a panel discussion with Zuckerberg and three entrepreneurs — Mai Medhat of Egypt, Jean Bosco of Rwanda and Mariana Costa Checa of Peru.

“To me entrepreneurship is about creating change,” Zuckerberg said, “and not just creating companies.”

The conversation then turned to Facebook, and Obama asked Medhat about her experience with the site.

“I don’t know where to start exactly. In Egypt, we started a revolution off of Facebook,” she said, prompting cheers from the audience. But the government later blocked access to the site, she said.

Obama cautioned foreign governments against that type of restriction, saying it stifles innovation.

“What we are seeing around the world oftentimes is governments wanting the benefits of entrepreneurship and connectivity, but thinking that top-down control is also compatible with that,” he said. “And it’s not.”

Marisa Kendall covers startups and venture capital. Contact her at 408-920-5009 and follow her at Twitter.com/marisakendall.

Instead, Chan returned as their commencement speaker Thursday evening, having not only become a pediatrician and philanthropist, but founder and CEO of an East Palo Alto school for low-income students who have few of the privileges most Harker kids enjoy.

At the Mountain Winery amphitheater in front of 187 students and their families, including some of the students from the same class she taught seven years ago, Chan encouraged the graduates to chart their own course, live by their values and lead a life of service.

“Go out into the world with pride and strength knowing the values that will guide you live within you,” she said.

Chan, a new mother of a 5-month-old daughter, choked up in the midst of her address, joking, “Oh God, it’s not even my own kid!”

Zuckerberg, sitting almost unnoticed nine rows up in the midst of the crowd, welled up, too. He wiped his tears on his bluejeans.

The students from the Class of 2016 may not have been Chan’s own children, but she gave them credit on the windy Thursday evening for shaping her and “the way I feel about education, to make sure every child has the chance to learn and reach their potential.”

The private Harker School is renowned for its science and technology curriculum, with many of Silicon Valley’s engineers, who hail from around the globe, sending their children there. Over the past decade, 66 students have become semifinalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition, with three finalists last year.

This is a school where students learn anatomy on a life-size digital cadaver, where they have access to endowment funds to travel for original research projects in Washington, D.C., where kindergartners are introduced to digital microscopes to study the integumentary system and seniors can take classes in “neural networks” and “game theory.” Last year, students launched their own scientific research journal.

It’s a different world from The Primary School that Chan founded last fall in East Palo Alto. There, making sure the children have access to basic health care is integrated into the education environment so the children have the fundamentals to succeed.

Chan grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees. She was the first in her family to attend college, graduating from Harvard, where she met her husband.

“My goal is to empower children to learn and live their lives to their full potential,” she said. “I always took what I thought was the most interesting and challenging step to reach my goals. From each vantage point, I had no idea where I would land next.”

She told the graduates that it’s not important to know what job title they wanted now, “the world changes too fast for that.”

Instead, she said, “focus on the change you want to see in the world. Take risks, ask for help, believe in yourself.”

Known to the graduates as “Miss Chan,” she was a favorite of Naomi Molin, who remembers learning physics from Chan by making a giant roller coaster out of K’NEX pieces and rolling marbles down the tracks.

“She wanted us to understand concepts, not just be tested on them,” said Molin, who will be attending Chapman University in the fall. “She didn’t talk to us like we were children. We had a good mutual respect going.”

Students liked Chan so much, Molin said, that when Chan was on recess duty, “we would run up to her and cling on to her legs and not let her go for the whole recess. If it annoyed her, she never let on. She was just a really fun person to be around.”

The kids knew she was dating “some guy named Mark, but I don’t think we knew or cared who Mark Zuckerberg was because we loved Miss Chan so much,” Molin said.

Namitha Vellian remembers Chan as “young and vibrant” and in charge of the fourth- and fifth-grade service club.

“That shows a lot,” said Vellian, who will be attending a six-year pharmacy program at Butler University. “Now she’s super into helping anybody. She was always encouraging us to join.”

Shortly after the birth of their first child in December, the couple established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for charitable causes, pledging to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth more than $45 billion.

As she ended her address to the graduates, Chan pulled out the 2008 yearbook from her teaching year at Harker. She read handwritten notes in the margins from Vellian — “Good luck. I really, really hope you graduate (you probably will)” — and from Molin: “Too good to be forgotten.”

Although Molin had once hoped Chan would return as school nurse, she’s glad she didn’t.

“She’s done so many important things,” Molin said. “She’ll always be Miss Chan to me.”

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek 408-278-3409 or follow her on Twitter@juliasulek

In 1985, for the Bay Area’s first and until now only Super Bowl, Jim Steeg’s job as head of special events for the NFL was to gussy it up for the title game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Miami Dolphins and make it comfortable for the VIPs paying $60 a ticket.

So he walked into the Cupertino office of the man who the year before had unveiled the first Super Bowl-specific commercial, the Orwellian “1984” ad to launch the inaugural Macintosh. Would Steve Jobs mind paying for 85,000 seat cushions? Steeg asked. He could print his rainbow Apple Computer logo on each one.

As Steeg recalls, Jobs had only one question: “Will they last forever?”

It was an ironic if not prescient question posed at a pivotal time both in the history of the Super Bowl and in the personal computer revolution taking hold across the Santa Clara Valley. By year’s end, Jobs himself would be gone, ousted from the company he founded.

To consider who we were in 1985 and how far we’ve come on the road to Super Bowl 50, we need look no further than inside and outside the gates of Stanford Stadium on Jan. 20, an unusually foggy day when President Ronald Reagan tossed the coin via satellite and Joe Montana, Dwight Clark and Ronnie Lott took down Dan Marino and his Dolphins 38-16.

No one sitting on their Apple seat cushions on that Super Bowl XIX Sunday, from then-San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery to Computer History Museum curator Chris Garcia, who was just 11 then, could anticipate how quickly antiquated their film-filled cameras would become or that the transistor radios many carried to listen to the game on KCBS were the grandfathers of ubiquitous personal electronics. The football fans were all perched on the squishy precipice of change that would dramatically redefine this place and the world as they knew it.

“Up until then, when you said where you were from, you’d say San Francisco or the Bay Area,” said author and historian Michael S. Malone, an adjunct writing professor at Santa Clara University. “Right about then, you could say Silicon Valley.”

Until then, business in San Francisco was mostly known for its lawyers and bankers and Palo Alto for its venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. The geeks of the valley — the engineers with pocket protectors — were only starting to cross the border of San Antonio Road. When you said technology, many people still thought of Hewlett-Packard. When you said software, people thought flannel pajamas.

And back then, the Super Bowl began its transformation from sport to spectacle.

The 49ers’ home at Candlestick Park, along the edge of the bay in south San Francisco, was too small and too cold for Super Bowl standards, which required at least 70,000 seats and a mean temperature in January of 50 degrees.

Before it was renovated and downsized for intimacy, 84,000-seat Stanford Stadium met the criteria, but its crude amenities and other challenges necessitated the kinds of invention that would come to exemplify the event three decades later. The megasized banners that now drape from stadiums were born from Steeg’s attempts to cover up the stadium’s bland walls. Corporate villages for Super Bowl VIP pregame parties arose from Steeg’s fear that the big wigs would be bored for hours before kickoff since he encouraged them to leave their San Francisco hotels four hours early to beat the traffic on Highway 101.

It was also the first year the Super Bowl moved away from the tradition of having the local university band play in the pregame show.

“I love the Stanford band, but I was going, ‘That’s not going to happen,’ ” Steeg said of the notoriously irreverent and unpredictable ensemble.

For entertainment at the 1985 Super Bowl — instead of a hot band like Coldplay headlining this year’s half-time show — the performance featured cartwheeling clowns and sparring pirates and an astronaut in a spacesuit honoring the space shuttle Discovery, which was orbiting the Earth.

And while Super Bowl coaches these days are usually escorted to the media day conference by limousine and police escort, in 1985, Steeg said, Dolphins coach Don Shula took BART from Oakland, where the team was staying, to the San Francisco event.

The press box at Stanford was expanded to accommodate the burgeoning media interested in the game. Steeg ordered 65 typewriters along with fax machines so reporters could send their stories back to their offices. Only the earliest adopters (was that even a hip term yet?) were outfitted with brick-size Motorola DynaTAC mobile phones or the portable TRS-80 Model 100, a Tandy Radio Shack computer released in 1983 that ran on four AA batteries. Transmitting required suctioning “acoustic couplers” onto a telephone’s handset.

On game day, Doug Menuez, who went on to chronicle some of Silicon Valley’s most historic moments, was working as a freelance photographer for USA Today. Across the street at the Holiday Inn, he and his team employed the latest technology at hand: a “refrigerator-size” computer and a Scitex scanner that transmitted images to his editors in Virginia.

“Picture me standing in a room at the Holiday Inn processing film in the bathroom,” he said. “I’m trying to transmit. Somebody turns on a hair dryer to dry the film and a fuse blew out the whole wing of the hotel. It could have been me.”

In 1985, email was a “curiosity” and innovation was the purview of the establishment, said tech forecaster Paul Saffo.

Now, he said, “We’ve had a perfect inversion of innovation in that sense. I think we’ve gone too damn far. Everyone wants to do a startup,” Saffo said. “The great irony is that people are thinking much more short-term today than they did in 1985.”

Fry’s Electronics opened its first store in Sunnyvale in 1985, and in June of that year the San Jose Mercury News switched from a paper clipping file to electronic archives. On the Stanford campus, the “Center for Integrated Systems,” which began the intense development of microelectronics, was built, the first building on campus to break with the traditional sandstone architecture. And just months earlier, Stanford University started collecting pieces for its Silicon Valley archives, “a recognition that something was going on that’s historically important,” said Henry Lowood, curator of Stanford’s History of Science & Technology Collections.

At the same time, Silicon Valley was barreling into the future, with IBM’s PC and Apple’s Macintosh, complete with mouse, plotting a digital path into our homes. San Jose would give itself the name “Capital of Silicon Valley,” and the coveted Fairmont Hotel would complete construction and help transform downtown San Jose. Just two years earlier, Mayor McEnery took a helicopter ride with Steve Jobs over the verdant Coyote Valley to the south, where Jobs first dreamed of building an I.M. Pei version of the spaceship headquarters now under construction along Interstate 280 in Cupertino.

“We were at the end of the rainbow and had the pot of gold, a lot of land,” McEnery said. “If I looked as a historian, I’m amazed how far we’ve come and I’m disappointed that we didn’t go a bit further.”

The Super Bowl sure has. The $1.3 billion Levi’s Stadium, now the Santa Clara home of the 49ers, is considered the most technologically advanced, equipped with more than 400 miles of data cable, 1,300 Wi-Fi access points and two of the largest high-definition video boards in the NFL.

Looking back, it seems like the 1985 Super Bowl was in many ways a celebration of Silicon Valley and the Apple seat cushions a symbol of what was to come. If he looked hard enough, McEnery said, he would probably find the souvenirs in his basement. Garcia, from the Computer History Museum, went to the game with his father and wishes he kept his, too.

“Even then I was an Apple geek,” he said. “We had an Apple II.”

Steve Jobs died in 2011 of cancer at the age of 56, but his Silicon Valley legend grows on. And what about those seat cushions? Would they last forever?

Check eBay, a company founded in the heart of Silicon Valley in 1995. You can buy one for $198 — just about the price to upgrade to an iPhone 6.

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at twitter.com/juliasulek

MILPITAS — This much-anticipated Tesla Model X SUV, with duct tape outlining the windows of the Falcon Wing doors, was spotted Thursday afternoon out for a test drive on southbound Interstate 880.

The all-electric vehicle, which is expected to be priced somewhere between $55,000 and $75,000, is supposed to be “revealed” in September, company founder Elon Musk told shareholders last week.

“As we prepare to launch Model X in September, we are building more validation vehicles, executing final engineering and testing work,” Musk said.

For the short time it was observed Thursday, the Model X spotted on I-880 stayed mostly in the slow lanes, keeping speeds under 60 mph.

Two engineer-types appeared in the front seats, but no sign of Musk.

More on Tesla at www.siliconvalley.com/tesla

Did Tesla nail it with the design . . . or not? Add your comments and join the conversation below.

He’s learning how to hunt wild pigs.

Zhang is part of a new generation of would-be hunters who crowded into a barn in the rolling hills east of Gilroy on Saturday to learn how to shoot, kill, track and butcher the animals — which have become destructive pests in almost every county in the state.

Unlike past generations, many of the three dozen participants who joined the clinic sponsored by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife didn’t grow up with fathers teaching them the fundamentals of hunting.

Zhang certainly didn’t — and his job at a Mountain View startup wasn’t getting him much closer to the land.

“Sitting in a cubicle all day is not healthy,” Zhang said. “This is a good way to communicate with nature.”

Lt. Alan Gregory, who led the clinic for his department, estimated that 75 percent of the participants in the class were new hunters who hadn’t grown up with the sport.

“There is a generation gap,” Gregory said, “and this program bridges that gap.”

Driving into the hills east of Gilroy to the state’s Cañada de los Osos Ecological Reserve is a lesson in environmental appreciation alone. Along the 20-minute drive to what was the old Stevenson Ranch before it was purchased by the state in 2001 for $7.2 million, it was easy to spot a pair of wild turkeys, a family of deer, a hawk, a peacock and a rancher waving from a tractor.

From the state’s point of view, however, the hunting clinic was an opportunity to bring in new, well-trained and respectful hunters to help keep the population of wild pigs under control.

The number of licensed hunters in California once reached more than 800,000. Now, there are only about 350,000. The number of wild pigs in the state, on the other hand, has soared to anywhere from 200,000 to more than a million.

The beasts are not native to California. They were brought in from Europe as livestock to the California missions in the 1700s and 1800s. While grizzly bears nearly eradicated them by the turn of the 20th century, their populations starting resurging in the 1920s after Monterey County ranchers raised them to hunt on their ranches. They often escaped, however, and found perfect conditions to propagate in the region’s oak-studded hills and grasslands.

But the pigs, also called wild boar, proved to be a menace. Not only do they threaten native wildlife and habitat, they also often churn up farmers’ fields, backyards and soccer fields with their incessant rooting.

They’ve become such a nuisance in the Almaden Valley and Coyote Creek areas of South San Jose that the city is now allowing the animals to be shot by licensed trappers within the city limits.

Zhang says he’s happy to be a part of the solution when it comes to culling the pig population. He plans to invite his other engineer friends to join him. But for Zhang and others at the workshop, their motivation is more powerful.

Breanna Duplisea, 26, grew up in Orange County and works for the state as a field biologist. As much as she appreciated wildlife before, she is gaining an even deeper understanding by hunting.

“As a hunter, you get to know the prey even more than as a scientist because you understand that connection” between the predator and prey and the animal and its habitat, she said.

Killing an animal is both an awesome and humbling experience, said Duplisea, who only recently shot her first wild turkey.

“Having that adrenaline rush is insane,” she said.

Some of her old friends don’t understand why she would want to kill a living thing.

“I ask them: ‘Do you eat meat?'” she said. “Where do you think that wrapped piece of chicken comes from?”

For his part, the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Gregory made sure the hunters understood the responsibility of hunting. Not only must they avoid trespassing on private property without permission, he said, but when they bag an animal they must take all the edible meat with them.

“One of the worst things you can do as a hunter is not respect the animal,” Gregory said. “Morally, ethically, legally, it’s your responsibility to take all the meat out of the field.”

For a pig hunter, with a $46 hunting license and $22 to tag each killed animal, that could mean returning home with 70 pounds worth of meat.

The Barragan brothers, Benjamin and Genaro, are looking forward to the whole experience.

Both grew up in East Palo Alto the children of Mexican immigrants. Their parents didn’t hunt, but they knew how to slaughter a goat in their backyard for Christmas.

That sent the younger Genaro hiding under his bed as a child. But now, at 27, he is beginning to appreciate the value of killing his own food.

“I’ve never killed an animal,” said Genaro Barragan, an engineering consultant who still lives in East Palo Alto with his brother, but he’s getting ready to try. “A lot of guys just want to get the big boar, but I just want the experience.”

For Benjamin, a drywall contractor, “sometimes a big part of it is just getting out of the city.”

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at twitter.com/juliasulek

She answered back.

“I remember the good times, too,” she tapped on her keyboard.

Her husband Will, a Cambridge-educated Silicon Valley entrepreneur, had been neglecting her lately. What could be wrong with a virtual trip down memory lane?

Since Lia and Will MacDonald became one of Match.com‘s first success stories when they met online in 1996 — so long ago that Lia had to mail in a snapshot of herself and Will didn’t even have a home computer — they have become a Silicon Valley social experiment for our times.

Like anthropologists studying the cultures of rare civilizations, so, too, did journalists chronicle the trendsetting digital lifestyle of the MacDonalds. PBS Newshour called them “pioneers in online dating.” Kendall, their firstborn child was dubbed the “Internet baby,” and Lia, a former schoolteacher, an “abundantly connected” mom who was one of the first with a computer on her kitchen counter for storing recipes and setting up play dates.

Perhaps no family, including teenagers, grandparents and friends abroad, better personifies the power of technology to redefine our relationships — the latest installment in our series on how technology has redefined our lives. The story of the MacDonalds, in all its cultural touchstones and modern mayhem, reads like “The Truman Show” meets “Real Housewives” meets “Dr. Leakey and the Dawn of Man.”

But 14 years after their match, the technology that brought the MacDonalds together was threatening to tear them apart.

Could this marriage made in Internet heaven be saved?

Daters go online

Like the MacDonalds, nearly a quarter of online daters met a spouse or long-term partner through a dating website, according to a study this year by Pew Internet and American Life Project. Another study finds couples who meet online are twice as likely to get married than couples who met offline. More than ever, people are connecting with partners across the globe, giving new meaning to long-distance relationships and creating bonds that never existed in a pre-digital world.

And it’s not just about love. People are counting among their friends those who may share a passion for pinot noir or the Pittsburgh Steelers, even though they’ve never actually met; a 2011 Pew Research Center study found that 7 percent of the average Facebook user’s friends are strangers.

Like so many of us, though, the MacDonalds discovered that all this connectivity can come with a cost. Since it’s so easy to reach across the globe to make our next best friend — or rediscover an old one — we’re stumbling at staying focused on the people who are physically closest to us, in the same house, at the same dinner table, in the same bed.

Parents grumble that their teenagers are so distracted by their gadgets they can’t look up, much less have a real conversation. Children are disappointed that their parents are too busy updating their Facebook status on the sidelines to catch them scoring the big goal.

“If we don’t develop some skills moving forward about how to initiate real relationships in real time in seeing and in being with people, it’s going to be too easy to discard them, like Kleenex or a Dixie cup,” said Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University.

Despite all the hand-wringing, however, there is evidence that the most socially active people online are also the most socially active offline.

“There is not a displacement going on,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center Internet Project who also co-authored “Networked: The New Social Operating System.” “It’s an addition.”

London calling

In many ways, technology has been a savior for the MacDonalds and their three children, Kendall, Mitchell and Fiona, who moved to London in 2007 when Will opened a new office for his videoconferencing company, Codian. They left behind Lia’s extended family, including grandparents who were devastated that they would be missing all their games and performances and Christmas plays. But pictures and videos posted on Facebook and regular chats on Skype proved the next best thing.

“They’ll do their dances and sing their songs,” said Lia’s stepmother, Patty Boone, 63. “Now we actually get to see the dance steps. And every time Fiona loses a tooth or gets her braces on, she calls us. We get to see them in real time.”

When one of Kendall’s friends from the U.K. moved back to the States, the two 15-year-olds barely skipped a beat. They talk “face-to-face” on their smartphones as they get ready for parties.

“I would have her there when I was doing my makeup. I would prop her up on my bathroom sink while I was doing it,” said Kendall, who was featured in the Mercury News in 2001 as a 3-year-old with her own computer. “It’s definitely the next best thing to a sleepover.”

Texting came in handy when it was time for Kendall to end a relationship after two dates with the son of a family friend.

“Since it was very new and not very official at all, it would have been kind of weird to end it in a big face-to-face kind of way,” she said. “I could text it and think about what I wanted to say instead of thinking and saying it on the spot. It wasn’t too bad at all.”

‘You should know this’

Kendall was texting her way out of a teenage problem, but her parents were confronting a technology-induced drama of their own.

It was the summer of 2010. The family was in Los Gatos for summer break and Lia was at the Santa Cruz County coastside resort Pajaro Dunes with friends for a scrapbooking weekend when Will MacDonald received a startling Facebook message.

“Will, sorry to have to do this,” read the message that appeared to be from Lia’s friend, Jenna Wright. “Maybe Lia really shouldn’t have her password out there and maybe not keep her messages. But since you seem to give her the world, I thought you should know this. It just isn’t right.”

Below, she had cut and pasted the illicit messages that Lia was trading with her old boyfriend. Will cringed as he scrolled through them.

“I still have all the letters you ever sent to me,” the boyfriend wrote to Lia. “You have sparked a flame in me.”

The messages that followed were as suggestive as they were surreptitious: “So, just call me when you get this,” Lia messaged. “I won’t answer if I can’t talk. I’m taking the computer with me. BTW — my phone is pay as you go, so there won’t be a paper trail with my phone calls.”

But there was a trail, all right — a modern-day virtual trail — and it looked like Lia’s friend, Jenna Wright, had found it.

Tech giveth, tech taketh

Nearly a quarter of Internet users say they have either flirted with someone online or researched information about someone they dated in the past, according to Pew Research study. One British divorce lawyers’ website claimed in 2011 that Facebook played a role in a third of all divorces. Online infidelity has become so rampant that that www.facebookcheating.com was created for scorned spouses to vent, and high-tech spyware is being marketed to catch cheating spouses in the online act.

Perhaps it was preprogrammed that the MacDonald marriage should come to this. In 1996, they were both in their early 30s when they turned to technology because the traditional way of meeting potential dates wasn’t working for either of them. She was a secretary at San Jose State’s anthropology department working on her teaching credential. He was a computer scientist working for a startup.

Neither liked the bar scene. Match.com, even in its infancy, seemed relatively efficient. Still, their virtual profiles left much to the imagination. When they met at a Chili’s, Will thought Lia was cuter than her picture. Lia liked Will’s Scottish accent. They made a perfect couple: both smart, good-looking and fun-loving. In 1998, they married and started a family.

In 2010, three years after moving to London and just months before Lia’s Facebook fling, life looked grand on Lia’s Facebook page, a perfect forum for Lia to keep in touch with friends and family back home, chronicle the growth of her young children and post pictures of their global adventures.

In January, there they were poolside in Barbados. In February, she posted a message that the family was heading off to St. Anton, Austria, for a winter ski break.

“I want to be Lia for a day! Enjoy!!!” a friend commented.

Lia responded in uppercase: “HAVE TO ADMIT, LIFE IS PRETTY DARN GOOD!”

‘We weren’t connecting’

But life wasn’t exactly as it appeared on Facebook.

Technology had made Will a millionaire many times over. After signing a noncompetition clause when he sold Codian and before he started another videoconferencing company, StarLeaf, he spent much of the year kite-surfing around the world. Lia stayed home with the kids while he posted pictures of his exploits from the Dominican Republic to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.

“I felt like a single mom,” Lia said. The couple talked on the phone and through Skype. But, “we weren’t connecting. We weren’t a team. There was a big wall between us.”

She was down on herself and down on her relationship. But she wouldn’t mention that on Facebook, of course.

“It’s like ‘positive-land.’ Everyone writes about the happy, happy, joy, joy that they do,” Lia said. “Maybe if I said I wish my husband was around more often — I don’t know, nobody does that. Do they? They only write the happy stuff.”

But Facebook also gave her a false sense of security, that she could indulge a fantasy with her old boyfriend without consequence.

“I’m not sure if he was right next door I would have been as flirtatious,” Lia said. “It was easier having him be farther away.”

Slap in the virtual face

In so many new and unpredictable ways, our virtual selves are replacing face-to-face encounters.

One of Lia’s best friends, Hellene Garcia, says that her husband’s extended family used to have reunions every year or two but stopped, because “everyone had joined Facebook” and was keeping up online.

Another friend put her 14-year-old son’s iPhone on lockdown after she discovered he had texted a girl in school some 10,000 times in less than a month. As shocking as the “exceedingly inappropriate” messages were, she said, one of the girl’s replies in particular seemed even more disturbing: “why don’t you talk to me in the halls?”

That reluctance to interact in person — even when it seems so much is at stake — can have even bigger implications, as Will MacDonald found out.

If he had picked up the phone or Skyped Jenna Wright after he received her Facebook message, he would have quickly realized that the note about his wife’s virtual infidelity didn’t come from Jenna at all.

It was from a digital impostor.

In this age of hiding behind avatars and screen names and “catfishing” fake identities, the person who outed Lia for her online fling was a virtual mystery.

Someone had stolen Jenna Wright’s Facebook profile picture and created a new Facebook page using her name, then sent Will the salacious news. The impostor was so convincing, Lia at first lashed out at Jenna, accusing her of betraying their friendship. It took days of cyber-sleuthing for Lia to confirm it was really someone else, most probably a friend from the scrapbooking weekend who must have seen Lia’s open Facebook page, cut and pasted its contents, then created a fake page to alert Will.

“The real me had no idea,” Jenna Wright said. “That whole thing was stupid. Whoever that person was, we can’t let that person win and destroy any real relationships.”

Lia apologized to Jenna for the accusation, but never confronted the woman she believes contacted Will. She figured the woman, a Facebook friend, was jealous of the life she posted, the “world” that Will had given her. But in the world of Facebook, Lia gave the woman the virtual equivalent of a slap in the face: She unfriended her.

The old-fashioned way

Somewhere, between the misgivings, miscommunications and misunderstandings, Will and Lia figured out a way to connect again. For all the calculations that go into how we communicate — when we are furious with a lover, longing for a long-lost friend, or avoiding an unwanted dinner invite — Will had to decide how to confront his wife.

Should he text her a diatribe? Skype her his disdain? Facebook his fury?

Will thought about it first.

“I wasn’t a good husband. I wasn’t a good father. I was wondering if life as a beach bum was more fun than technology,” Will confessed. “The fact that Lia was getting in touch with an old boyfriend, I don’t blame technology for that. I blame myself. Technology made it easier for her.”

So he packed up the kids and raced down to the beach house. He took Lia to the bedroom and confronted her, face-to-face.

“Do you have something to tell me?” he asked her.

It didn’t take long for Lia to admit her online dalliance. She felt unloved, detached. The two-week Facebook affair, she said, never got farther than a few phone calls.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Will said.

And right there, in the downstairs bedroom, they made up the old-fashioned way. There was nothing virtual about it.

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at Twitter.com/juliasulek

Out there — as his Oracle Team USA would find decades later — winds can blow at 40 knots. Tides can pull you in and toss you out. Waves roil. Boats break.

“If God lets me back in alive,” he said, recounting the story from San Francisco City Hall after winning the 2010 America’s Cup, “I will never do this again.”

When it comes to sailing, Ellison has been to the brink — and back.

The journey of the self-made billionaire through sailing’s hierarchy — both San Francisco Bay’s and the world’s — has been marked by daring and defiance. Along the way, he has remade the very nature of the 162-year-old international regatta from a graceful highbrow sport to a death-defying drag race. To ensure his control, he famously shunned the venerable St. Francis Yacht Club and embraced the blue-collar Golden Gate Yacht Club down the jetty that now flies its burgee over the 34th America’s Cup.

On the eve of the Cup’s final match, the epic vision of the thrill-seeker will be put to the ultimate test.

Unlike his past campaigns, the 69-year-old Ellison won’t be racing aboard Oracle Team USA’s high-tech 72-foot catamaran. He had considered crewing, telling this newspaper last spring he was getting in shape to endure the rigors of the fastest boat in America’s Cup history. Ultimately he decided to leave the racing to the young professionals — but the vision to transform the sport is pure Ellison.

The finals that start Saturday must overcome months of tragedy, hyperbole and scandal to redeem Ellison’s America’s Cup. If Oracle Team USA loses, Emirates Team New Zealand will strip Ellison of the gleaming silver trophy and move the next America’s Cup regatta back to Auckland.

“It’s funny, I realized after losing the America’s Cup twice, my personality didn’t allow me to quit while I’m losing,” Ellison told Charlie Rose in a televised interview last month. “After winning the America’s Cup, I discovered my personality doesn’t allow me to quit while I’m winning. So I’m kind of trapped. I just can’t quit.”

Expectations set

On the steps of the grand, red-carpeted staircase of San Francisco City Hall in early 2011, Larry Ellison stood in his black turtleneck and sport jacket next to the America’s Cup trophy he had just won in Spain. He told then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and the crowd of VIPs that the regatta he would bring to San Francisco in 2013 would be unlike any in the history of the cup. Never before have spectators been able to watch the races from shore.

“We’re holding this cup in the San Francisco Bay, the most spectacular natural amphitheater for sailing that God created on this Earth,” he said.

“And hundreds of thousand of people will be able to watch these races whether they’re from Crissy Field, office buildings in downtown San Francisco, over in Sausalito or anyplace on the shoreline.”

What he uttered next, however, would come to taunt him: “I believe we’ll have more than 14 teams, 16 teams here representing more than a dozen countries throughout the world.”

With the international economy tanking and costs to build the catamarans skyrocketing, only three challengers signed up — a reality that has soured the event for many of its backers. The challenger series that started in July was marred by the tragic capsize of the Swedish team Artemis Racing, which killed a beloved crewman, and an early boycott by the Italian team Luna Rossa Challenge, which complained the regatta was rigged against it.

And just this week, defending champion Oracle Team USA received the harshest punishment in the history of the cup for improperly adding extra weight to its smaller boats in a warm-up series last year. The defending champion will start the ultimate match on Saturday docked two races.

For Ellison, a man who spent his career getting his way both on and off the water, the event he envisioned has been spinning almost out of control.

But what happens over the next week or so could change all that.

“Larry is really a driven person, white line fever,” said Norbert Bajurin, commodore of the Golden Gate Yacht Club and owner of a radiator repair shop. “If he wants to do something, he won’t stop until it’s done.”

Trained on the bay

Ellison, perhaps the most competitive businessman in Silicon Valley, didn’t develop his confidence in the boardroom alone. He earned it on the bay.

At the volunteer-based Cal Sailing in the mid-1960s, Neil Larson taught Ellison advanced sailing skills on Thursday afternoons. He taught the young man how to sail the Lido 14 without a rudder, how to sail backward and to hang out over the water by his knees to keep the boat from tipping. He taught Ellison how to capsize, then right himself.

“He was talented and a fast learner,” said Larson, who would go on to a successful tech career himself.

If Ellison sailed under the Golden Gate, as he told the crowd at City Hall that night, he didn’t tell Larson. “You’d have to be a heck of a sailor to go out and try something like that,” Larson said.

Still, he said, he was disappointed when Ellison left the program. While the young man was never one to hang out and barbecue with the sailing group on weekends,”I thought he would be an asset to the club, but he disappeared.”

Soon, Ellison was building the company that would become Oracle.

80-foot Sayonara

Some three decades would pass before Ellison re-entered the sailing world. In 1994, a neighbor in Woodside suggested Ellison get into big boat racing and referred him to East Bay sailor Bill Erkelens. “A big boat to him was like buying a pair of roller skates,” said Erkelens, who presented Ellison a set of plans for the 80-foot Sayonara. “But it turned out to be quite a big thing for him.”

On Sayonara over the next decade, Ellison gained both confidence and humility.

In one of his first races, Ellison was reluctant to take the helm in a “maxi yacht” race in the San Francisco Bay against a group of blue-blood billionaires. The other skippers, including rival businessman Hasso Plattner, threatened to race without Ellison’s boat if he didn’t.

“I think he was just nervous,” Erkelens said. “He tended to hire very good people to do their jobs. He wanted everything to go as planned.”

But a different reaction proved more powerful, Erkelens said. “He felt they didn’t respect him.”

Erkelens and the sailing crew convinced Ellison to take the helm.

“He won and won by a lot,” Erkelens said. “He really started enjoying it after that.”

On board, “he is fully engaged and one of the guys, chitchats, and tells funny stories,” Erkelens said. “It’s not the business personality people love to hate, the aggressive warrior businessman.”

In 1999, Ellison learned a lesson of survival during the infamous Sydney-Hobart race, where a hurricane ravaged 155 boats and killed six sailors. Sayonara limped into the harbor in first place, but the crew was happy just to be alive.

“I think we do things like the Syndey-Hobart because we’re … always kind of curious if we can stack up,” he told members of the St. Francis Yacht Club in a speech a month later. “The most important lesson of the race for me is that life is short. Life is fragile.”

And Ellison wasted no time.

The very next year he was planning his first bid for the America’s Cup, and came to loggerheads with the St. Francis, which everyone assumed would be the team’s sponsoring club.

The reason? Control. Ellison wanted it. The club wouldn’t allow it. In one conflict, the Oracle CEO wanted to name his boat after his company. Some St. Francis board members considered that “too commercial.”

The club balked and Ellison walked — right down the spit to the Golden Gate Yacht Club, which was near bankruptcy before Ellison arrived.

For both Ellison and Golden Gate’s Bajurin, the move has often seemed like a triumph in the years since. Last summer, before all the troubles began, when the warm-up “America’s Cup World Series” was under way in smaller catamarans, the two of them stood side by side on the club dock and scanned the packed jetty and crowded Marina Green.

“Look at all the people,” Bajurin recalls Ellison saying. “This is amazing. This is what we wanted.”

And that’s what he wants again, starting Saturday, hundreds of thousands of exuberant fans lining the shoreline watching the best sailors compete in the fastest boats.

But he wants one thing even more. He wants to win.

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409.