The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The sport had already been introduced to Tom Carroll, who represented a surfing nation that would continue to dominate the pro tour in the 1980s. In 1977 Carroll won the Pro Junior in Sydney, surfing’s premier eighteen-and-under event, and along with Cheyne Horan, they became the sport’s official Aussie teenage sensations. Carroll lived in Newport, a comfortable suburb of Sydney’s northern beaches. Older brother Nick was a first-rate surfer (Australia National Titles winner in 1979 and 1981) and a developing surf journalist (future editor of both Tracks and Surfing), as was good friend and top-ten IPS pro Derek Hynd. Carroll was already the star of Newport Plus, his local surf club, at a time when performances at regularly scheduled Aussie club events were often equal to that of anything seen on the world tour.

  In 1979, Carroll joined the pro circuit full-time. At five foot six, 145 pounds, he was the second smallest competitor—Hawaii’s Michael Ho was an inch shorter and ten pounds lighter—but nonetheless recognized as a purebred power surfer. As quick and sharp as Carroll was in smaller waves, he didn’t come into full devastating form until the surf was overhead, and on Oahu’s North Shore—the better part of Carroll’s reputation was made at Sunset Beach and Pipeline—he put his turns together with the slashing, brutal elegance of Jim Brown on an open-field run. Like all great power surfers, Carroll had a soft touch when required; he knew how to feel his way into and out of a maneuver. But the move itself often seemed to explode out of his small frame—Carroll’s turns “were so powerful,” one surf journalist wrote, “they left vapor trails.”

  Carroll had overcome a lot of hardship. His mother died when he was seven; an abdominal surfboard-spearing in 1979 resulted in peritonitis and a three-week hospital stay; and two years later he had complete reconstructive surgery on his right knee. Carroll was the first pro surfer—maybe the first surfer of any kind—to augment his time in the water with serious gym work and cross-training. For all that, he was a perpetual cutup: a loud, grinning, eyebrow-arching whirl of motion, proudly answering to the name “Gobbo” (short for goblin), and always glad to hoist a few down at the pub with his mates. Three years into his world tour career, Carroll had become the surfing’s most likable pro. He also hadn’t won a single event. In early 1982, citing a lack of focus, longtime sponsor Quiksilver dropped him from the team roster.

  Carroll then got serious about competition. He trained harder. He studied opponents, surf breaks, tactics. He never became machine-like, but he tapped into a what turned out to be a near-bottomless reservoir of determination. Six months after getting sacked by Quiksilver, Carroll placed second to Curren at the Marui Pro, and three months after that he won the season-ending World Cup—held in grinding twelve-footers at Sunset Beach—to finish the year ranked number three. He was among the leaders during the first half of the 1983 season, then he went berserk down the stretch, winning four of the last six events, and easily taking the first of two back-to-back world titles.

  Carroll’s dominance was a perfect fit for the times, as Australia in general, more so than any other surfing region, continued to shape and define the sport. Nine men’s division world titles had been handed out since 1976—eight had gone to Aussies. Rip Curl was the coolest wetsuit manufacturer; Quiksilver had licensees in America, Japan, Brazil, France, and South Africa, and would soon become surfing’s first publicly traded company; Billabong was also about to go international in a big way. Under the editorship of Nick Carroll, Tracks magazine was regarded by insiders as the surfing’s best publication. Aussie slang was even pushing out a lot of American-coined favorites—“bro” and “dude” held their own against “mate,” but “grommet” had replaced “gremmie,” and “boardshorts” was clearly a better, more surfy term than “trunks.”

  TOM CARROLL, WINKIPOP, VICTORIA, 1989.

  It wasn’t just surfing, either. The West developed a huge Aussie crush in the 1980s: Gallipoli made a star of Mel Gibson, Men at Work albums sold by the millions, and The Thorn Birds was America’s biggest TV hit since Roots.

  In Australia itself, surfing had seamlessly merged into the national identity and was embraced by the nation, from Perth to Melbourne, Sydney to Brisbane. The police had long since stopped rounding up surfies on vagrancy charges. Many of the ecological issues that Tracks had championed during in the early 1970s had been addressed, or were at least on the radar. Unlike the United States, Australian newspapers and magazines generally looked at surfers not as offbeat curiosities or beachfront thugs, but as fully integrated sportsmen—to a point, actually, where surfing too often seemed defined by heat scores and year-end standings.

  Australian surfers even had political value. In fact, nothing better illustrated just how far the sport had come in this country. In 1971, Nat Young was a bearded semi-recluse in Byron Bay, eating magic mushrooms and talking about “supporting the revolution.” In 1974, the former world champion donated his $600 Surfabout prize-money check to the Australian Labor Party, earning a private meeting with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and an invitation to speak at a Labor Party rally at the Sydney Opera House. Young arrived at the big event clean-shaven and dressed in a tailored suit, and was escorted to a front-row seat on Whitlam’s immediate right. “I’d never met anyone like him,” the usually combative Young later wrote. “He was powerful and gentle. We talked about a range of issues, [and] I melted like butter as I sat listening to his soft distinctive voice.” Years later, Young himself would make a spirited but unsuccessful state parliament bid.

  Flash forward to 1984: at a pro tour event in Bondi Beach, newly crowned world champion Tom Carroll was introduced to just-elected Prime Minister Bob Hawke—a tanned and pompadoured Labor Party centrist whose love of sport helped boost him to a 70 percent national approval rating. They hit it off, and in 1993, when Carroll announced he was quitting the pro tour after fifteen exemplary years, Hawke was the featured speaker at his black-tie retirement dinner. “There is no Australian sporting hero or legend, at whose name I have a greater surge of affection and admiration than [that of] Tom Carroll,” Hawke said. “Thank you for what you’ve done for your sport. Thank you for what you’ve done for your country.”

  A prime minister getting misty-eyed over a surfer. That’s where the sport stood in Australia.

  * * *

  Depth of talent has always been Australia’s greatest strength as a surfing nation, and this was certainly true during Tom Carroll’s long world-tour career. Barton Lynch and Damien Hardman were the era’s best tacticians, and each won a world championship during the 1980s, with Hardman picking up a second title in 1991. Then there was Glen Winton, a rubber-jointed goofyfooter; Richard Cram, with his sledging forehand cutback; Nicky Wood, Mark Richards’ godson, who won the 1986 Bells event—his world tour debut—at age sixteen; and a friendly but deadly born-again Christian named Dave MacAulay, who posed for a two-page Surfer portrait holding the same leather-bound New Testament he used on proselytizing missions between contests.

  All of these surfers were first-rate, but none were in the same league as Tom Carroll. Gary Elkerton of Queensland was close. And Sydney’s Mark Occhilupo was right there, neck and neck—maybe better.

  Elkerton was better known as “Kong.” He was a pugnacious twenty-year-old world-tour rookie in 1984, and if he lacked Carroll’s finesse and polish, he threw his turns with the same blunt-force power. Like Carroll, he was among the last group of world-class surfers to come of age when the idea of a surfing career still seemed a little farfetched. (Carroll spent eighteen months pounding metal in an auto-body shop before turning pro; Elkerton dropped out of school to work on his father’s Sunshine Coast shrimp trawler). Elkerton, too, was a natural in heavy Hawaiian surf. Australia’s Surfing Life would later name him the best surfer ever at Sunset Beach, and Elkerton himself wouldn’t dispute the call. “I’m gifted with something,” he once said, in response to a question about his ease in big surf. “When I get the speed, no one can touch me.”

  GARY “KONG” ELKERTON, 1984.

  MARK OCCHILUPO.<
br />
  For three or four years, Elkerton seemed to be channeling the rock-till-you-die spirit of AC/DC frontman Bon Scott: he’d drop his trunks on crowded beaches, or crawl screaming from the passenger window of a moving car to crouch on the hood. Daybreak often found him moving blearily through the lineup in a nimbus of exhaled beer fumes. Psyching up for a heat in the 1984 Stubbies Pro, Elkerton gripped the railing of his fifteenth-floor hotel room balcony and pushed up into a handstand.

  In 1986, at age twenty-three, newly married and unhappy with his pro tour results up to that point, Elkerton sobered up, moved to France, sent out a press release demanding that he no longer be referred to as “Kong,” and began to compete with the same ferocity he’d heretofore applied to football-Sunday pub crawls. The next year he hit number two. He did it again in 1990, and once more in 1993. Finishing second, Elkerton said years later, “crushes you.” Giving up the “Kong” identity, he added, in what seemed to be an indictment of his career and of surfing competition in general, had been “a sad point in my life.”

  Mark Occhilupo of Cronulla was Australia’s greatest natural talent since Wayne Lynch, although you wouldn’t know it from watching him walk down the beach—he was stocky and short-legged, with a wide bottom, a mildly swayed back, and a barracuda underbite. He turned pro in 1983 at age seventeen. Like almost every Sydney-area goofyfooter of the time, he’d picked up a lot from watching Tom Carroll, who was five years his senior. Carroll held an edge on Occhilupo as a tuberider and big-wave charger, and was always more focused and determined. But Occhilupo was untouchable—not just by Carroll, but everybody of his generation, save Tom Curren—in terms of flow, balance, and spontaneity. Where Carroll came to greatness by learning to ride within himself, Occhilupo did the opposite: he loved to push a maneuver slightly beyond control, duck his head a bit, neutralize the edges of his board, spread his open-fingered hands out like balance sensors, and calmly feel his way back to center. He wasn’t a battler. He was never injured, and his monumental talent wasn’t so much crafted as it was simply channeled. Even more than Carroll, Occhilupo was the Australian “It” surfer during the mid-1980s: fans gaped at his loose and inventive “free surfing” (anything outside of competition), cheered wildly at his world tour successes (second runner-up on the 1984 tour, five event wins in 1985), and were drawn to his odd but compelling man-child charisma. He’d picked up the nickname “Raging Bull” during his rookie year, but it was wholly unfitting to his character. Occhilupo was pro surfing’s gentlest, most vulnerable figure—he’d basked in the attention of his mother and sisters, and was damaged by a stern, demeaning Italian immigrant father—and people fell over themselves to help and protect him.

  The defining events of Occhilupo’s life and career would unfold spectacularly in the decade to come, as he had a series of a mental breakdowns, retired, then charged back to finally win a world championship in 1999 at age thirty-three. But his first appearance seemed miraculous, too. “He just appeared,” Wayne Bartholomew later said. “Tom Carroll—we’d all seen that one coming for years. But Occy was a bolt from the blue. No buzz, nothing. He just seemed to turn up one morning, and we all stood there watching, awestruck.”

  Tom Curren’s Reign of Style

  Aussie flamboyance was the rule for a generation of pros who came of age in the 1980s. Gary Elkerton told an interviewer that his American counterparts were “a bunch of softcocks.” Seventeen-year-old Mark Occhilupo, in his first Surfer portrait, grinned like a jack-o-lantern while caressing a bottle of champagne tucked into his jacket. Sydney surf journalist John Witzig fondly remembered young Tom Carroll reacting to his first Surfabout heat-draw by “jumping three feet into the air, roaring with lust, and twisting his face into an aggro expression of ambition.” One-upping their Free Ride predecessors, the new Aussie pros were poised to make the surf world a louder, showier, more colorful place.

  They didn’t fail, exactly. The swaggering, balls-up presentation has always been a surf-world hit, and Australians turned it into an artform.

  Tom Curren’s style was completely opposite—and as it turned out, even more influential. Quiet and withdrawn, he often seemed to move in direct counterpoint to the Australians. Elkerton snarled into the camera for a Quiksilver ad campaign whose tagline read “If You Can’t Rock and Roll, Don’t Fuckin Come.” In his ad for surfwear giant Ocean Pacific, Curren gazed morosely toward the sea. Occhilupo told an interviewer that he “loved outrageous girls,” and that “even eating a pastry gets me horny.” Curren was married and monogamous at eighteen. The other guys’ boards were brightly colored; his were plain white. They traveled in groups; he traveled alone.

  If the Aussies were hot, Curren was cool—indeed, he was the coolest thing to hit the sport since Gerry Lopez. It helped that he had wavy brown hair and sleepy John Travolta eyes, and that he played drums and guitar. Also, like Chance the Gardener in Being There, Curren’s low-voiced reticence allowed surf journalists, moviemakers, and fans to imbue him with as much intelligence and profundity as they liked. Finally, he was a West Coaster, which was a big plus for those in the sport yearning for the end of the “California Ice Age,” as one surf mag put it.

  Curren was taught to surf at a young age by his father, Pat Curren, the La Jolla boardmaker and big-wave legend from the fifties and early sixties who himself was recognized as one of the sport’s coolest, most idiosyncratic figures. At fifteen, Tom Curren was already being featured in surf movies. At sixteen, during the 1981 Katin Pro-Am in Huntington Beach, he finished ahead of Mark Richards, Dane Kealoha, Simon Anderson, Larry Bertlemann, and Tom Carroll, and placed second in the finals to Shaun Tomson. Curren was still an amateur, but great expectations were piling up. “He carries the pride of the nation with him,” one magazine wrote. “Curren will almost certainly shake up the whole professional status quo,” said another.

  The Curren Phenomenon, as it was often called, had its share of quirks. Pat was often mentioned but never seen (he was about to leave the family), while Jeanine Curren had become the original surfing stage mother, serving as a meet director for amateur contests in Santa Barbara, and shouting “Go, go, go!” whenever her son paddled for a wave. Curren himself was a born-again Christian. He entered the 1981 Katin not as a member of a surf manufacturer’s team, like the other top riders, but as part of a squad put together by Orange County’s Calvary Chapel. He took out a surf magazine ad not long after the Katin to announce: “Contest victories come and go, but the victory that Christ made is the one that counts.” Interviewed three years later, Curren said that he’d been “forced into a lot of things,” church included, by his mother. He also confessed to an un-Christian-like motivation as a competitor: “The person who’s really got the most venom in them . . . that’s the one who is going to win.”

  * * *

  Curren returned to Huntington for the 1982 Katin, won it this time, then announced that he was going to wait another eight months before turning pro. In part, he wanted to finish high school, but Curren was also still getting a lot out of the sport’s amateur system, which over the past few years had been upgraded and expanded.

  The biannual World Surfing Championships had returned in 1978, after a six-year absence. For American amateurs, the bigger news that year was the founding of the National Scholastic Surfing Association, in Huntington, which quickly became both a training ground and showcase for the country’s best young surfers. Parents liked the idea of “scholastic” being part of their kids’ surfing experience. The bar wasn’t set too high—NSSA members had to stay in school and maintain a 2.0 grade-point average—but it was a step away from the dreaded “surf bum” rap. Surfers liked that the NSSA’s contests were better organized than the other amateur groups (except for the outstanding Eastern Surfing Association), and that members now got credit for something called “Surfing PE”—which mostly meant they were allowed to surf through first period in high school.

  In 1980, NSSA founder Chuck Allen convinced former world-tour pros Peter Townend and
Ian Cairns to move from Australia to Huntington in order to coach the NSSA’s elite National Team. More to the point, Allen wanted the United States to finally beat the Aussies. It was a tall order. Australia’s boardrider club system had experienced its ups and downs over the past two decades, but it always functioned to the great benefit of the country’s win-loss record in international competition, amateurs included. American surfers didn’t seem to have the same drive to win in the first place, plus the Californians had been especially hamstrung by the 1970s anticontest movement. West Coasters had a “serene indifference” to competition, wrote California expat Mike Perry, the original editor of Australia’s Surfing Life magazine, while the club-raised Aussies spent their lives “racing for meals, and arm-wrestling for toilet privileges.”

  Cairns and Townend stayed with the NSSA for six years. The training regimen they designed took contest preparedness from a loose do-it-yourself routine to something on par with a high school football program, with scheduled beach runs, sprint paddles, tactical seminars, one-on-one coaching, and endless intramural scrimmages. There were rules and lectures. There were player-coach tensions. It wasn’t a fun way to surf. But the results were amazing. Four World Surfing Championships events were held between 1980 and 1986, when Cairns and Townend left the NSSA. America and Australia were always the top-two finishers in the team standings. America won three of the events. Australia took one.