The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  TOM CURREN.

  Tom Curren turned pro in the summer of 1982, just before his eighteenth birthday and just after winning the men’s division of that year’s World Championships. He immediately signed $40,000 worth of contracts with Rip Curl and Ocean Pacific—close to what Richards and Tomson and two or three other top pros were earning, and a record-smashing amount for a rookie. Curren easily won a nonrated pro event at Trestles, stepped onto the world tour, made the quarterfinals in his debut, followed two weeks later with a win at the Marui Pro, and finished the year at number nineteen, despite having competed in just four of twelve events.

  It was a good start, but not good enough to put him above Joey Buran, the “California Kid,” a zealous blond goofyfooter from north San Diego County who surfed like a wetsuit-clad terrier and had a career-best year in 1982, finishing number seven—one spot ahead of Curren. But their respective paths were set. Curren already looked as if he’d reserved a place in surfing Valhalla, next to Blake, Dora, and Lopez. Buran gracefully retired in 1984.

  Curren won back-to-back world championships in 1985 and 1986, both times with room to spare. Over the next two years, his competitive venom seemed to drain off, leading to a one-year break from the tour in 1989. Then he stormed back to win seven of twenty-one events in 1990, becoming the first men’s division pro to regain the championship, at which point he again retired from full-time competition.

  This time he sounded genuinely burned out. “I’ve done what I’ve done,” he told American surf journalist Sam George. “I don’t feel that I owe the surfing world anything.” He hadn’t turned against competition, he said in another interview, but he questioned the value of why anybody would want to continue “scrapping it out in a 25-minute heat, to beat somebody, to advance to the next round. Who cares?”

  * * *

  People who knew Curren weren’t sure whether he meant what he said or if he was being disingenuous. He had a mile-wide competitive streak. Maybe it didn’t come off that way in interviews, but he was in fact happily proud of his world tour triumphs. Still, Curren could afford to be cavalier about his professional record. Style and form—a different, higher surfing realm altogether—was where he made his signature mark. Curren transformed the way people surfed. This was an accomplishment that overshadowed his three pro-tour titles.

  “OCCASIONALLY YOU’LL HIT A POINT WHERE YOU’RE NOT THINKING, AND YOU’VE LOCKED INTO EVERYTHING PERFECTLY—THAT’S WHEN THE ART OF SURFING BECOMES MANIFEST. IT’S A VERY BRIEF THING THAT ONLY HAPPENS FROM TIME TO TIME.”

  —Tom Curren

  It’s nearly impossible to overestimate the value of style in surfing, and it’s been that way since the beginning. Jack London’s 1907 description of George Freeth as “impassive, motionless as a statue . . . calm and superb” is part of a long tradition in which brilliance is determined almost completely by form. “Style is everything to me,” Wayne Bartholomew declared. Phil Edwards took the argument to its logical endpoint when he said, “Style is the whole point of surfing.”

  Curren’s achievement in this area wasn’t hard to deconstruct; he simply combined the two dominate stylistic themes from the previous decade—the cool, purified elegance of Gerry Lopez and the “rip, tear, and lacerate” attack of the Free Ride stars. Like Lopez, Curren’s body line had a formal grace: back knee turned slightly in, shoulders and head level, spine lengthened whenever possible, arms lowered, and hands floating midair with Raphael-like articulation. (Maybe it’s a hula-influenced carryover from surfing’s Polynesian beginnings, but the placement of wrists, hands, and fingers has always been a key barometer of style.) Yet where Lopez was a minimalist, Curren was dynamic and lively, full of compression and release, always flowing, and as aggressive as Carroll, Occhilupo, and the rest of the Australians. He planted his front foot at a 90-degree angle to his board’s centerline—45 degrees was about average—which gave him added leverage and balance. He invented the “double-pump” bottom turn: instead of completing the move as a single arc, he’d ease off near the end, take a quick look at the crest, then reengage the turn. This gave him a chance to pick out the sweet spot for an off-the-top move and to offload any extra speed.

  Curren was astoundingly good in all conditions, from Second Reef Pipeline to dribbly Huntington Beach shorebreak. Like Shaun Tomson, but better, he could link chambering tube sections together one after the next. But where Curren truly excelled was in long-scrolling point waves, like Rincon or Jeffreys Bay, places where each dazzling turn could be offset with a moment or two of quiet—where the ride passed not as a sequence of moves, but as one long curvilinear thrust.

  Radical was no big deal in the 1980s. Radical and ethereal—that was Curren, and only Curren. “He’s on another level,” one magazine put it. “He can surf a wave the way the rest of us only mind-surf it.”

  California Comeback

  Curren was never much of a flag-waver. Asked by a reporter in 1986 how national pride fit into his recent world-title victory, Curren answered that he was “basically doing this for myself.” He married a French woman in 1983, and not long after that moved to the Basque coast, near Biarritz, where he spent nearly five years as a de facto American expat.

  Curren was the exception, however. In the 1980s, surfers across the United States let loose with celebrations trumpeting their long-awaited return to international glory. The American surf media did everything but tag Curren’s haunch with a stars-and-stripes branding iron. Surfing announced his first world title with a five-color, boldface, drop-shadow cover blurb: “Great Day for the USA!” Curren was introduced as a “true American hero” in a movie called Amazing Surf Stories, and his segment wrapped up with a tribute montage played over a song whose chorus went, “You’re the top cat, pride of the USA/Top cat, champion of the world.” For eight straight years, Surfer readers voted Curren the number-one spot in the magazine’s annual Readers Poll Awards.

  TOM CURREN, HOSSEGOR, FRANCE, 1991.

  West Coasters were especially invested. They were eager to point out that Curren hadn’t gotten to the top by having simply out-Aussied the Australians, which allowed his success to be viewed as indigenous to California. Curren was often said to have a “pointbreak” style (point surf being a West Coast specialty), or that he ripped as hard as anyone, but still had “California soul.” A minority suggested he was instead a freak of nature, a wave-riding savant who would have been a huge star no matter what coast he grew up on. But California surfers weren’t having it. For twenty years, they’d been withdrawn and marginalized. Now they were desperate to fully reengage with the international surfing community—not just engage, but lead—and that goal was much closer to reality if Curren was claimed as distinctively, thoroughly Californian. Even if he was living in Basque country, surfing the Aquitaine coast, drinking Bordeaux, and speaking French.

  AL MERRICK, 1989.

  The California push involved more than just Curren. By 1985, Brad Gerlach, a flamboyant San Diego County regularfooter with a smashed-in nose and a wicked forehand top-turn, had already won his first world-tour contest. Gerlach would eventually go as high as number two in the final ratings, then remake himself as a big-wave rider. Curren’s junior high school classmate Kim Mearig won the women’s pro tour in 1983 and finished runner-up in 1987. Mearig and Curren both got their equipment from Al Merrick, a quiet, deep-voiced, Santa Barbara shaper who helped put California back on top of the world’s boardmaking industry.

  Output and craftsmanship had never dropped off in California, even during the states’ long post-boom funk. But for fifteen years, from the plastic machine up to the tri-fin, nearly all of the important board-design advances had been made by the Australians and the Hawaiians. Now the pendulum was again in motion. There were no more Thruster-like breakthroughs in the 1980s, but the refinement process was led by San Diego’s Gary Linden and Rusty Preisendorfer—Mark Occhilupo’s surfing jumped forward after switching to the Preisendorfer label in 1984—while Merrick’s impeccably balanced and foil
ed boards became the industry standard.

  Overload: The Rise and Fall of the Op Pro

  In the 1980s, the whole sport steadily turned ever-more garish and gaudy, from Australia’s Surfing Life mauve-and-yellow zebra-strip cover logo to the smeary magenta of Zinka brand sunscreen to Pipeline specialist Jon Damm’s favorite 1985 North Shore ensemble, which consisted of a purple Lycra vest, pink-and-white trunks, and a yellow board with jagged pink-and-blue fault-line stripes. Reflective wraparound Oakley Blade sunglasses were in. So were oversized Casio digital watches. Not all eighties surfers used mousse or gel, but plenty did, and the lineup often smelled faintly of offgassing hair product. Labels and stickers became the spending rash of endorsement-era professionalism, and the front half of every pro’s board—the part that showed most readily in photos—was now blistered with sponsors’ logos.

  MIDEIGHTIES COLOR: WILLY MORRIS.

  Here was the cultural foundation upon which a sideshow-filled surf contest could be built; a platform to both satisfy and exploit a new generation of self-conscious, ready-to-be-hyped world-tour pros.

  Ocean Pacific began planning a huge whirligig of a contest around Tom Curren even before the company signed him to a five-year sponsorship contract. The event was called the Op Pro, and it was scheduled for Labor Day weekend, 1982, at Huntington Pier. At first, the contest was modeled after the Coca-Cola Surfabout, Australia’s biggest and richest event. Then Op signed off on an eye-popping $400,000 marketing budget—ten times more than any other contest on the schedule that year—and officials tore up the original plan and started over.

  The Op wouldn’t be the first pro contest in California to draw an international field. The Katin Pro-Am, an annual event since 1977, was the oldest. The 1978 California Pro was the most embarrassing—all the prize-money checks bounced, and the contest organizer skipped town. In 1981, six years after the pro tour was founded, California finally got on the schedule with the U.S. Pro, held at Malibu. Up to this point, all the California pro events looked pretty much the same: a dozen folding chairs, a megaphone, some plastic bunting to mark off the officials’ area, a few nylon banners stuck in the sand, and five hundred spectators, give or take. Nobody had much of an operating fund. Also, a vestigial tendency remained to keep things low-key—to not “over-amp,” as the phrase went.

  Op was having none of that. They weren’t interested in a regular pro contest. They wanted noise and bombast, sideshows and huge crowds. They wanted a VIP area with laminated access passes, page-one sports section coverage, and the Goodyear blimp. In short, they wanted the Super Bowl of pro contests.

  That’s exactly what they got. The Labor Day weekend weather was perfect, and thirty-five thousand people cheered Cheyne Horan to victory over Shaun Tomson in the finals—with the Goodyear blimp, sure enough, floating overhead. Surfer cheerfully noted that the Op Pro “reached a pitch that could only be described as hysteria.” Surfing ran a full-page shot of Horan getting mobbed by fans just after the final, and Horan responded by saying he “wouldn’t have put on as good a performance” if not for all the “noise, yelling, and screaming.”

  Contest director and just-retired pro Ian Cairns said the Op Pro would bring a “massive payoff” for the sport, and he was right. Companies who’d been eyeing the circuit as a potential new channel into the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old demographic now rushed forward, and within two years the number of pro-tour men’s division events doubled, from twelve to twenty-four. Some of the older contests stuck with a “waiting period” format, meaning the event could be held at any point during a predetermined ten-day block of time. A few contests were mobile, and depending on the surf quality, would move up or down the coast. In both cases, the idea was to give the contest every chance at scoring good waves. Fans were welcome, but they had to stand by and wait, like everybody else.

  The Op Pro wasn’t the first pro-tour event to flip things around and put spectators before waves, but it took the concept to a new extreme. Everybody knew where and when the Op would run, and every heat was scheduled to the minute, with the finals always taking place on Sunday afternoon. It was hard to argue with Op’s success, and the “parking lot contest”—so named because the venue, above all, had to be located next to a major municipal parking lot—became the world tour standard.

  These competitions held a certain democratic appeal. Local fans, whose contact with the pros was otherwise limited to movies and magazines, could now see their favorite surfers in person like any other pro sport. There were also a few tremendous Sunday afternoon clashes, including a two-out-of-three showdown between Mark Occhilupo and Tom Curren at the 1985 Op Pro that was half prizefight, half Joffrey dance recital, which ended in a thrilling 2-1 victory for the Australian. Every event organizer of course hoped for a ripping Occy-Curren battle, or something like it, but high-end surfing wasn’t the point at any of the parking lot contests. What counted was putting at least twenty thousand people on the beach. If officials prayed for good surf, it was only after praying for sunny 80-degree weekend weather.

  Mideighties contests often put more energy into the ancillary entertainment—the sideshow—than the surfing competition. There were expo booths, product displays, a video lounge, and a halfpipe ramp for skaters and BMX riders. There were sidelight competitions for juniors, longboarders, and bodyboarders, a Jet Ski demonstration, and usually a “legends” heat for retired pros. Two or three local rock bands played an afternoon set. Event programs and posters were handed out by the thousands; MCs lobbed surf wax, T-shirts, and other freebies into the crowd; wetsuits, boards, even cars were raffled off; and a haze of atomized suntan lotion and deep-fried food hung over the whole show. For an hour or so on Saturday afternoon, and again on Sunday, all action in the water was halted for the bikini contest—which upstaged everything. Alcohol generally wasn’t sold at beachfront concession stands and was often banned outright by city ordinance, but lots of spectators arrived with backpack-smuggled six-packs of beer, and drunken howls went up as the bikini contestants strutted and posed. By the time the surf contest final itself rolled around, plenty of audience members were already spent.

  TOM CURREN, IN ORANGE VEST, 1984 OP PRO.

  For two or three years it was kind of a rush. Then it began to feel like overkill. What happened to presenting the sport to the general public as a casual, deep-blue, open-space activity—like it was in Endless Summer or Free Ride? On whose behalf were these beachfront carnival events being staged for, anyway? From the debut Op Pro, surf journalists pointed out that jumbo-contest attendees were mostly beachgoers, not surfers. Was the idea to get all those people in the water? To turn them into surf fans? And what about that title, “Super Bowl of surfing”? Doesn’t that sound a little . . . cheesy?

  The promise of a “Super Bowl,” of an ultimate contest, never panned out because most events like the Op Pro were held in lousy waves. The surfing on display was usually a hobbled, even comical version of elite-level sportcraft—like Olympic fencers dueling with cardboard tubes or championship tennis played on rained-out courts. Sure, the big contests made the local sports page and were sometimes featured on the nightly TV news. But there wasn’t much evidence that spectators were in fact being converted into fans. There wasn’t much evidence, for that matter, that competition in good waves turned nonsurfing spectators into fans. There was too much down time between rides, and unless you surfed, it was hard to tell a good ride from a great ride.

  The 1986 Op Pro was the beginning of the end for overblown surf contests. On Sunday afternoon, just before the men’s finals, in a crowded area behind the bleachers, two women had their bikini tops yanked down. The police were called, rocks were thrown, and an hour later, less than a hundred yards from the contest site, thousands of rioters set cars on fire, smashed windows at the lifeguard headquarters, and held off more than 150 baton-wielding police reinforcements. Contestants, Op officials, fans, journalists, a city councilman, and an MTV film crew—everybody was pinned down at the contest site for an
other two hours until the area was cleared.

  The fallout from the riot was immediate. World tour executive director Ian Cairns resigned and moved back to Australia. Pro surfers, all of whom started out as enthusiastic supporters of jumbo contests, began talking about the down side. Bad surf was the big complaint, but it also hurt their professional pride to have to vie for attention with Jet Ski shows, half-pipe demonstrations, and bikini models. “The great mainstream experiment has failed,” a Surfer editorial declared. Forget the big crowds, the magazine advised; wave-riding isn’t like other sports. As presented on the world circuit, surfing had come to resemble nothing so much as a “plug horse in a straw hat, straining for the unobtainable carrot dangling in front of its nose.”

  In 1988, when the grumbling from competitors began to feel like a brewing revolt, world tour officials sent an open letter to pro surfers that reminded them, “sponsors [are at] the very top of the ladder . . . you actually work for them.” Pro surfing’s corporate backers weren’t interested in letting go of big events and their prized demographics. Bombastic fixed-date world-tour contests would lumber on through the rest of the 1980s and into the next decade before the advantages of a smaller, leaner, nimbler world tour eventually became too obvious to ignore.

  Searching For the Perfect Surf Report

  Tri-fins, car phones, bandeau bikinis, and high-top sneakers all made Surfing magazine’s “What’s Hot” list for 1986. “What’s Not” items included drugs, localism, and “surfing like Mark Richards.”