The History of Surfing
Page 49
Eventually the Masters would become surfing’s most prestigious contest, but its 1971 debut had the look and feel of a midseason pee-wee-league soccer game. It was a pro event, but just barely—Continental Airlines didn’t sign the paperwork, or cut the $1,000 prize-money check, until just a few weeks before the contest. On the big day, Hemmings walked onto the beach at Pipeline with a card table and a clipboard, a roll of cheap plastic-flag bunting, a megaphone that he plainly didn’t need, and six metal folding chairs for the judges. The barely overhead surf was uninspiring. Odds-on Masters favorite Gerry Lopez, convinced that the event would be postponed, left the beach and drove back to Honolulu, missing the contest altogether. At the end of the day, Jeff Hakman won—he won pretty much everything on the North Shore in the early 1970s—but the whole thing went completely unnoticed by the surf press. Hakman himself, when asked to recall a special Masters victory moment for an article commemorating the contest’s twenty-fifth anniversary, admitted that he “just didn’t remember too much about it.”
Pro surfing had taken root. But its growth was going to be slow.
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Beginning in 1973, a rotating cast of about twenty surfers—mostly Aussies and Hawaiians, a few South Africans, and two or three Brazilians—traveled on what Queensland regularfooter Peter Townend would later call the “gypsy tour,” flying from nation to nation to compete in a series of unrelated pro events.
Hawaii had four prize-money contests in 1973, and it led the professional movement. (Eventually, the three biggest North Shore contests would be packaged together as the Triple Crown of Surfing, and winning the Triple Crown became a competitive achievement second only to the world title itself.) Australia was also coming up fast. Rip Curl professionalized the long-running Easter week Bells Beach contest in 1973; there was a pro contest in Queensland; and 1974 brought the debut of the Coke Classic in Sydney, worth an impressive $7,000. The main attraction in South Africa was the 1969-founded Gunston 500 in Durban. Brazil got onboard with the Rio de Janeiro International. In 1975, all told, a dozen pro contests were held around the world, with purses ranging from $2,000 to $9,000. That December, the surf press announced that Shaun Tomson, a handsome twenty-year-old University of Durban economics major, earned just over $10,000 in prize money for the year.
The American median income in 1975 was about $14,000; the idea that somebody could make two-thirds of that figure for just riding waves caught a lot of people’s attention. Tomson’s bottom line wasn’t quite what it seemed, however. Signature model boards, along with the royalty checks they generated, were a thing of the past, as were the sponsorship deals of the midsixties. Pro contests were the only revenue source, and travel expenses on the gypsy tour ate up every dime of prize money—even for those with black market plane tickets and free guestroom lodging around the world.
The whole thing was still small enough in 1975 that nobody bothered to separate the amateurs from the pros. Groups like the Australian Surfriders Association, the Hawaiian Surfing Association, and the California-based Western Surfing Association had no link to any national or international amateur athletic group, but they were de facto amateur outfits nonetheless. In most places, all the way into the late 1970s, pro surfers could enter a regional, state, or national amateur competition, no questions asked.
About half of 1975’s top pros made ends meet by shaping surfboards. The rest did what they could: Eddie Aikau was a North Shore lifeguard, Michael Tomson of Durban wrote surf magazine articles, Jeff Hakman gave surfing lessons in Waikiki. “I remember borrowing money from pretty much everyone I knew,” two-time Pipeline Masters winner Rory Russell said. “Like, ‘Hey Mom, could I have $600 to go to Australia?’”
Even Shaun Tomson, the $10,000 man, the game’s winningest pro by far, didn’t think much of his surfing career prospects. At the end of 1975, he decided to compete whenever he could the following season, but he also reenrolled at the University of Durban—just to be on the safe side.
Building a World Circuit
In 1975, Rip Curl founder Doug Warbrick and Sydney Sun journalist Graham Cassidy launched the Australian Professional Surfers Association (APSA). Australia was on track to pull ahead of Hawaii as the richest and best-covered stop on the competition calendar, and Aussie surfers in general were miles ahead of the Americans in terms of sheer pro surfing enthusiasm. Six pro events across the country were slotted into the 1975 APSA schedule, membership dues were collected, and efforts were made to standardize rules and formatting. Competitors would be ranked not by their year-end earnings, but a points system similar to that of Formula One racing.
Terry Fitzgerald won the inaugural circuit, but traveling partners Peter Townend and Ian Cairns were APSA’s two most active pros. Cairns, twenty-three, was a big, bright, outspoken regularfooter from Perth and a monster in bigger waves. Over the past four years he’d put together the best record of any Australian in the North Shore pro events. The surf press loved him. “We put our lives on the line,” Cairns half-snarled at one reporter. “We go out there and take insane risks, we go over the falls and get annihilated, we impress the crowd—and yet we make such a measly amount of money.”
FRED HEMMINGS.
Peter Townend was small and light, fast and smooth. He wasn’t as explosive in the water as Cairns, but he grabbed everybody’s attention with a quiver of hot-pink surfboards and a duffel bag full of matching surf trunks. For three years in a row, starting in 1972, he was runner-up in the Australian National Titles. Like Cairns, Townend was shrewd, articulate, and obsessed with the development of professional surfing; they were the ones who created the APSA’s Grand Prix–style points system, and in 1976, just as an exercise, they began to track everyone’s contest results for non-APSA international pro events. Townend was equally taken with the world of celebrity. “You know that David Bowie song, ‘Fame’?” he said in a 1975 interview. “I keep hearing that when I’m surfing. That’s what I want. I want to be a famous person, not just a famous surfer.” He and Cairns both wore half-unzipped velour jumpsuits to surf-contest awards banquets, and it didn’t take much to persuade Townend to climb up and dance on a tabletop.
A well-traveled haole -Hawaiian named Randy Rarick was one of the gypsy tour pros Townend and Cairns kept track of in 1976. At age twenty-seven, Rarick knew his days as a competitor were numbered, but he wasn’t yet ready to give up the global wave-chase. Getting involved with some kind of world tour—the “pro circuit” that Townend and Cairns endlessly talked about—might keep him on the road for another few years. Rarick had no money and little experience with the mechanics of surfing competition. But he was clean-cut and presentable, and rightly figured he’d make a good liaison between surfers, sponsors, and event organizers. Fred Hemmings, Rarick knew, was the guy to talk to.
Hemmings by that time was a county chairman for the Republican Party, and he also had his hands full running the North Shore pro contests. Seven years earlier, he and big-wave surfer Fred Van Dyke had tried to set up an international tour, but the project had gone nowhere. As of early 1976 Hemmings wasn’t convinced the time was right. He strongly believed, however, that the sport needed a world champion—the whole idea had been in deep-freeze since the amateur World Championships contest had imploded in 1972. To that end, Hemmings penciled out a money-based ratings sheet at the end of 1975, with the idea that the pros would be ranked each year according to their winnings, same as the PGA tour.
“SURE IT’S A GAME, BUT THE WINNERS AREN’T PLAYING FOR FUN. THERY’RE PLAYING FOR CASH, AND WHAT THAT MEANS TO SURFING DEPENDS ON WHAT SURFING MEANS TO YOU.”
—Surfer magazine, 1977
It was a step in the right direction. Tomson was number one, with $10,875 in prize money—that was impressive. Dropping a few spots down the list, though, it hardly seemed worth calling the sport “professional.” Tenth-place finisher Mike Esposito earned $1,247. At number fifteen, big-wave honcho Eddie Aikau made just $25. Sexism in the sport, meanwhile, could now be quantified. The men had
over a dozen money events in 1975; the women had three. Michael Peterson got $1,500 for taking Bells, women’s division winner Gail Couper got $200. Nobody bothered putting together a women’s year-end money ratings.
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Fred Hemmings still wasn’t sure, but Randy Rarick was enthused by the idea of creating an international pro circuit that would crown a world champion. By the summer of 1976 the two men were having regular meetings, usually in the kitchen of Rarick’s rented North Shore flat, to discuss the formation of an umbrella group that would unify all the pro contests. They called it International Professional Surfers—or the IPS tour for short.
Hemmings and Rarick got busy. They ordered letterhead stationary, sent out press releases, and the nonprofit IPS made its debut in September. Hemmings was executive director. He handled event sponsors, media, and anything else having to do with nonsurfing parties. Rarick was the administrative director; he dealt mostly with the surfers, which initially meant trying to wheedle a $5 IPS registration fee from each pro. The title of head judge went to Jack Shipley, cofounder of Lightning Bolt Surfboards and a long-time contest official. The pool of qualified—and more or less voluntary—surfing administrators was so tiny that nobody protested Shipley’s astonishing conflict of interest, since he had a business relationship with more than a half dozen top surfers. Hemmings wanted to continue ranking the pros by their prize-money earnings. Cairns and Townend, however, flew in for the 1976 North Shore competition season before the decision was made, and with Rarick’s help they convinced Hemmings to adopt the same points-based ratings system that was used by the APSA: each event winner was awarded 1,000 points, with a 15 percent reduction in value for each subsequent place-getter.
Rarick went over the result sheets for all the pro contests held worldwide since January, and retroactively placed nine events into the 1976 contest schedule: three in Australia, two in South Africa, and one each in Brazil, New Zealand, Florida, and Hawaii. He also calculated each surfer’s point total so far. The five upcoming North Shore events would complete the season. In other words, the tour was two-thirds finished before anybody knew it existed.
Confusion reigned. Shaun Tomson had no idea a 1976 world title was in the offing until he flew to Hawaii in late November, after completing his final exams, for the last two events of the year. Hawaii’s Rory Russell said he found out in October, when one of the Aussies ran up to him on the beach and said, “There’s a new tour, mate, and you’ve already got thousands and thousands of points!” The surf press was caught off guard. In the same article, published in early 1977, Surfing announced “the birth of the IPS” and the year-end results. “Nobody knew what was going on,” Michael Tomson, Shaun’s cousin and another top-ranked pro, recalled. “I was there in the middle of things. I didn’t know.”
1974 AMERICAN PRO CHAMPIONSHIPS, SUNSET BEACH.
The 1976 tour events themselves were a complete jumble sale. There were four-man heats, six-man heats, and one World Cup loser’s round heat featuring nine surfers. Every competitor in Hawaii’s Pro Class Trials had to pony up a $75 entry fee. Every Duke Invitational contestant received a $100 check just for showing up. Some events were open to virtually all comers, others were limited to eighteen surfers; just getting into the starting gate for a North Shore contest—where invite lists were drawn up at the pleasure of each event producer—was an intense, complicated, politicized process unto itself. Half the contests used the traditional 1-to-20-point subjective judging system. Half used the new and short-lived points-per-maneuver format. The subjective system eventually became the IPS standard, but it was by no means a perfect solution. “I’d come out of a heat,” Rory Russell recalled, “look up and see friends of mine sitting up there on the judges stand. So even if I stunk the joint up, I’d win. Then sometimes I’d surf great and not advance, because the other guys had their friends up there.”
Adding to the chaos and confusion—and to a large degree overshadowing the IPS tour itself—was the fact that some Hawaiian heavies, including a few pro surfers, had sworn vengeance on the Australians, who had swaggered a bit too freely after winning six of the seven North Shore events the previous year. In the winter of 1975–1976, the Aussies, along with the Tomson cousins from Durban, flew in clearly intending to overthrow the old Hawaiian order. The time was ripe. Barry Kanaiaupuni, Jeff Hakman, Reno Abellira, and Gerry Lopez had been on top since the start of the decade and were now in maintenance mode. The Kanaiaupuni bottom turn looked the same in 1975 as it had in 1969. If Lopez was getting deeper inside the tube, it was only by inches. The Aussies, meanwhile, were turning harder than they had the year before, slipping into every tube that popped up, and banking off sections that a year earlier they would have dodged. And they did it at Sunset Beach, Pipeline, Haleiwa, even Waimea Bay. The powerful North Shore surf demanded respect, especially from visitors. This had always been natural law in the surf world. But in 1975, the visitors rode the North Shore as if it were a playful four-foot shorebreak.
The trouble started three months later, when Surfer published an interview with newly crowned Duke winner Ian Cairns, entitled “We’re Number One.” The article had its funny moments, and some perceptive ones as well. But there was a lot of chest-pounding. The Australians “push themselves harder than Hawaiians,” Cairns said. The North Shore locals had “stagnated,” and the “classic old-style Hawaiian approach is entirely divorced [from] performance surfing.” Then Wayne Bartholomew jumped in with “Bustin’ Down the Door.” A long Surfer opinion piece, it was mostly praiseful of the Hawaiians, but it looked rabble-rousing, with Bartholomew striking a chin-out, power-fisting, tough-guy pose on the title page. Other boastful articles were published in the Australian surf press and eventually found their way across the Pacific.
The Hawaiians were furious. Older surfers recalled how aggressive and disrespectful Nat Young had been while visiting Hawaii a decade earlier, and this seemed like more of the same. With the 1976–77 winter season approaching, a vengeful mood settled over the North Shore.
Bartholomew arrived on October 1, weeks ahead of the other visiting pros, and had no idea that anything was amiss. Two days later he was gang-beaten at Sunset Beach. Local boardmakers were told not to sell or give equipment to any of the Australians. There were death threats, arson threats, and vague but believable rumors that the ill-will extended to Hawaiian mobsters. Some of the Aussies panicked. Queensland’s Peter Drouyn walked out of the terminal at Honolulu, was briefed on the state of play, turned on his heel, and caught the next plane back to Sydney. Two or three other Aussie pros who hadn’t said anything inflammatory about the Hawaiians got a pass by publicly denouncing those who did. The South Africans were targeted as well but not to the same degree. Shaun and Michael Tomson had accepted their laurels the season before with more politesse than the Aussies.
A month went by. Bartholomew and Cairns spent most of their time behind locked doors at an expensive security-patrolled hotel a few miles east of the North Shore, until Eddie Aikau marched them in front of an ad hoc Hawaiian tribunal, where they were forced to recant and apologize. In return, they were allowed to surf in the North Shore contests.
Blood and violence, intimidation, trash-talking, kangaroo courts—here was the lead story for the 1976 Hawaiian surf season, not the launch of the IPS world tour. Rarick and Hemmings, to their credit, banged out the remaining five contests in quick succession and without any untoward drama. There was some quiet grumbling at the fact that Peter Townend and Ian Cairns finished the year, respectively, as world champion and runner-up. They were both top surfers, no question, but they’d also been pretty deeply involved in creating the tour that they’d just won. It just didn’t smell right. There was also a bit of head-shaking at the idea that Townend hadn’t won a single event all year. He was consistent, making the semifinals or finals of every contest save one. But wasn’t Shaun Tomson a better surfer? And Mark Richards? And Ian Cairns, Jeff Hakman, Michael Peterson, Larry Bertlemann, and several other pros?
Plus, the sport hadn’t convulsed and died by commercial overdose, as some of the hardcore anticontest believers predicted. As it turned out, the new world tour was exciting and interesting, and professionalism would eventually be accepted as simply one aspect of the sport, not the definition of it. Hemmings himself, in a rare conciliatory moment, said: “Be a surfing artist if you want. Or compete for money, glory, and fame. Or do both. It’s a big ocean and it’s a free world.”
Follow the Money
California was the sleeping giant of pro surfing. Nothing changed here during the second half of the seventies in terms of surf-world commerce and production. Wetsuits, trunks, skateboards, skimboards, bodyboards, logo T-shirts, surfboard blanks, car racks, and every other specie of beach culture merchandise—most of it was designed and assembled, packaged, warehoused, and shipped out of Los Angeles or Orange County. California wave-riding, however, continued to lag. Ultra-orthodox soul surfing and localism were on the wane but by no means defeated, and while the IPS pros rode brightly colored easy-turning boards in the six-and-a-half-foot range, a lot of Californians were still on their long, plain white Hawaiian-style cruisers. The Age of Aquarius beachfront bromides lived on—a 1977 ad for Santa Monica’s Natural Progression surfboards featured “soul survivor” George Trafton speed-trimming on a 7-foot 6-inch gun, doing his best to “live in harmony with nature.” (Australian pro Mark Richards, in explicit counterpoint, was winning over tens of thousands of eager young new-generation surfers by saying he lived for “sex and tube rides.”)