Cairns was right to feel that professional surfing in general needed to be standardized, but the world tour also badly needed the North Shore contests, and Cairns was wrong to exclude them. Many believed he was using the tour to settle old scores with Hemmings. In any event, nobody came out ahead. The 1983 season was compromised, and a lot of the pros were angry—especially Dane Kealoha, a twenty-five-year-old from Honolulu who was the number two surfer on the 1980 world tour. Kealoha rode the North Shore with a fissioning mix of power and style, and was at the top of his powers in 1983. Defying Cairns and the ASP, Kealoha entered all three of Hemmings’ contests and won both the Pipeline Masters and the Duke Classic. He then refused to pay his fine—correctly noting that the ASP had changed the rules midseason to keep the top pros out of Hemmings’ contests—but the ASP still suspended him, and the dispute was bitter enough that Kealoha quit the tour altogether. “I still had a chance for a world title at that point,” he later said. “The ASP situation that year, it just ruined me.”
The year-end North Shore events were back on the ASP schedule in 1984, but in 1986, after the riot at the Op Pro contest in California, Cairns resigned—shattered that his vision of pro surfing had apparently gone up in smoke—and Sydney Sun journalist Graham Cassidy replaced him as ASP executive director. Cassidy further consolidated Australia’s influence on pro surfing, in part by pushing to have the season-ending events in Sydney, rather than the North Shore. Two world-tour showdowns, in 1986 and 1987, were thus held in routine beachbreak surf rather than the usual double-overhead gnarlers at Pipeline and Sunset. This further unbalanced a world tour that already felt weighted in favor of Australia. In 1985, Australia held eight of twenty world tour events; in 1989, it was seven of twenty-five.
DANE KEALOHA, OFF-THE-WALL, 1978.
Australia had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of pro surfing, and its contests were better-run than those of any other region. Just as important, world tour members never complained that the Down Under pros had an unfair homewave advantage. Still, by the late 1980s pro surfing felt too Australian. The season was too long. The schedule was too packed. Not everybody wanted to compete every weekend, like many of the Aussies did. Between them, Cairns and Cassidy ran the ASP for nearly a decade, and pro surfing was richer and better organized for their efforts. Yet the overall impression was that the pro tour show hadn’t developed in the way it could have.
Even in Australia, interest seemed to level off. Pro surfing wasn’t going to be rubgy, tennis, or Grand Prix racing, the way Cairns and Cassidy hoped. What it could be, if redirected properly, was a better version of surfing itself. How to do that? Less contests, better waves. Finish the season at Pipeline, not Manly Beach. It wasn’t rocket science.
Surfrider, and the Beachfront Politics of Apathy
Surfers made two forays into politics during the mideighties. First voluntarily on behalf of the environment, and then as a reluctant bit player in South Africa’s apartheid struggle. “Sports and politics don’t mix” continued to be the surfers’ default position. But the mixing had already taken place. Athletes had in fact proven themselves to be, at times, politically influential: from Jackie Robinson’s dignified crossing of major league baseball’s color line to heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s notorious remark that “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”—a propagandizing one-two punch against both American racism and the Vietnam War.
SANTA BARBARA OIL SPILL, 1969.
Surfing fed and nourished an apolitical mindset. It was famously and proudly unorganized, and had always been justly described as an “individual” sport. Furthermore, by the second half of the twentieth century, it was a hanging offense among surfers to tell outsiders about a new surf break, or an upcoming swell, which led to a default reaction not to call attention to anything at all. “We’re selfish,” as former world champion Nat Young said. “Surfing’s always been totally self-indulgent.”
Politics in general had come to be viewed as something you escaped by going surfing. “It is only within the act of riding the wave that the surfer, for a moment or two, loses his shackles,” surf journalist Brian Gillogly wrote in his 1984 “Politics of Surfing” article for Surfer magazine. “Once he sets foot back on terra firma, the whole mess begins.”
Even as surfing created an apolitical supermajority, there was still room in the margins for activism of one kind or another. With varying degrees of success, battles were fought in the early- and midsixties, in America and Australia, over beach access rights, surfboard licensing, helmet laws, and no-surfing zones. The U.S. Surfing Association was best remembered as a competition group, but it was founded in 1961 as a political outfit to “protect and preserve the sport of surfing” and “fight against misguided legislation.” The USSA chalked up a few minor victories, while providing an early lesson in the political inclinations of surfers. In 1964, after three years’ worth of magazine ads and “join now” editorials, USSA membership leveled out at two thousand. The following year, when the group reinvented itself as a surf contest organizer, membership jumped to almost five thousand.
Beginning in the late sixties, surfing became a foot soldier in what was then called the “ecology movement”—this was the real starting point for surfer activism. The stakes were a lot higher than they had been for things like helmet laws and surfboard licensing. “Our Mother Ocean,” Surfer magazine’s environmental column, was created in response to the 1969 oil-drilling blowout that put three million gallons of heavy crude into the Santa Barbara Channel. In Australia, Tracks editors ignored all the pretty surf shots and put a sulphurous black-and-white image of a Sydney sand mining factory on the cover of the magazine’s 1970 debut issue. When hotel expansion projects threatened to alter or destroy some of Waikiki’s best breaks, original hot curl surfer John Kelly formed Save Our Surf, the loudest and best-organized group of its kind. Kelly, in middle-age, became something of a radical. “We’ll meet you in the streets!” was the SOS rallying cry, and Kelly cheerfully announced that his group had broken into a political opponent’s office to steal documents. Kelly’s supporters papered Waikiki with leaflets about the hotel plans, and a 1971 SOS-organized demonstration at the state capitol building, Surfing magazine reported, drew over three thousand “surfers, ecofreakos, and other friends.” The worst part of the development plans were blocked, and much of the credit went to SOS.
Over the next decade, apart from the occasional surferled rally or petition, the sport became less involved in environmentalism. Tracks had pretty much lost interest in the subject by the midseventies, and Surfer’s “Our Mother Ocean” column wandered off to focus on tidal waves and beach safety.
Then, in 1984, Malibu’s Surfrider Beach got hit with an environmental double-whammy, and a handful of local surfers decided to organize. Malibu was the perfect cause celebre: no surf break was as venerated and historic, few were as beautiful, and it was located in a unique corner of America, filled with wealthy, beach-loving liberals. The first problem was simple. After the state bulldozed a channel from the Malibu Lagoon to the sea, sediment had filled in along the point and reduced the quality of the famous Malibu surf. The second issue was more complicated: the surrounding region had come to rely increasingly on Malibu Creek as a drain for all manner of suburban and agricultural runoff. It wasn’t a burning river, but the creek water was now often contaminated before it arrived at Malibu Lagoon, where it further stagnated until being flushed into the Malibu lineup by a heavy rain—or after a tank-clearing blast from an upriver sewage treatment plant—at which point surfers were prone to ear infections and skin rash.
With Malibu in mind, the Surfrider Foundation was launched in the summer of 1984. Santa Monica surfer and aerospace engineer Glenn Hening was a cofounder, along with an environmental battler from Huntington named Tom Pratte and Malibu noseriding legend Lance Carson. From the beginning, Surfrider was shooting for political respectability. In his early-sixties surfing prime, Carson was known as the guy who could murder a six-pack of
Miller High Life and still ride First Point better than anybody, but at Surfrider’s first public outing—held in a community center before a panel of California State Parks officials and more than 150 supportive surfers—he put on a suit and tie and eloquently delivered the group’s keynote speech. Pratte, up next, noted that the group was already in consultation with the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. Hening followed with a computer graphics demonstration that showed how the creek was being affected. When the meeting was over, Hening and Pratte thoughtfully folded and stacked the community center’s chairs. The point was made: Surfrider was going to play by the rules.
In the end, Surfrider’s Malibu work was only partly successful. In 1985, parks officials rerouted the Malibu Lagoon channel to the northwest, which fixed the surf. The water quality issue was much harder, as there were dozens of polluting sources, public and private, from one end of Malibu Creek to the other. This wasn’t an entirely bad thing for Surfrider. The group remained diligently on the case for the rest of the decade and through the 1990s, thus proving itself as a long-term player. Because of their efforts, the Malibu water was better monitored, even if the water quality wasn’t fully restored, and some level of accountability was brought to bear on upstream polluters.
* * *
Surfrider took on other causes. The most famous was launched in 1989, when the group filed a Clean Water Act suit against two Humboldt County pulp mills. Both were Fortune 500 companies, and every day they pumped 40 million gallons of dioxin-laced effluent through outfalls ending less than a mile offshore of North Jetty, the region’s most consistent surf break. Surfrider turned the case over to new hire Mark Massara, a long-haired twenty-seven-year-old University of San Francisco law school graduate who looked like Jeff Spicoli but attacked like a pitbull in the courtroom. With help from the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Surfrider and Massara hit the adjudicative jackpot in 1991, winning the second-largest Clean Water Act settlement in history: $6 million in civil fines, $60 million in factory improvements, and a $500,000 reimbursement to Surfrider. Massara also slipped in a wicked little clause forcing both companies to use recycled paper for all suit-related reports and correspondence.
“THERE WAS A PUNGENT CHEMICAL SMELL. AND BLACK FOAM; STRINGY BLACK STUFF. YOU COULD TASTE IT IN THE WATER. I REMEMBER THINKING THIS WAS THE MOST EGREGIOUS CASE OF WATER POLLUTION I HAD EVER SEEN.”
—Attorney Mark Massara, after surfing North Jetty, in Humboldt County
Underdog litigation doesn’t get much sweeter. The network news programs covered the story the day it broke, Business Week and the Wall Street Journal followed with lengthy features, and the Los Angeles Times, in its front-page article, declared that the Humboldt pulp mill case would “undoubtedly put Surfrider Foundation on the map as an environmental organization.”
Other surfer-led environmental battles were engaged. In Australia, former pro tour champion Wayne Bartholomew helped kill a 1987 development plan that would have transformed Queensland’s Kirra Point into a “marine park,” with a five-hundred-slip boat harbor and an international shipping terminal. Tracks editor Kirk Willcox bought attention to the nearshore outfalls at Manly and Bondi, whose combined output of partially treated sewage was more than 250 million gallons a day. In Hawaii, Waimea pioneers Peter Cole and Fred Van Dyke organized against a 1,130-acre multiuse hillside development directly behind Pipeline; this project would go through a series of defeats and resurrections for almost twenty years until the state finally bought the land in question and turned it into a park reserve.
Still, it was just a handful of surfers who were getting things done—eco-consciousness didn’t penetrate too far into the rank and file. Reporting on his fight against the Kirra marina plan, Wayne Bartholomew talked in a resigned tone about the surfer’s “luxury of unaccountability.” Mark Massara said that organizing surfers was “like herding cats.” In 1988, four years after it launched, Surfrider had just a thousand members.
Getting surfers involved wasn’t impossible, but the cause had to be urgent: a harbor, an outfall, a beachfront development. It also had to be local. Very local. Surfrider cofounder Tom Pratte was talking to a small group of Huntington Pier regulars in 1988 about an impending breakwater project at nearby Bolsa Chica State Beach, when he was interrupted by a young board-carrying passerby. “You mean they’re going to build a breakwater out there?” the surfer asked, worried, gesturing out beyond the end of the pier. “No,” Pratte explained, “two miles up the coast.” Relief spread across the surfer’s face. “Okay then,” he said, turning away and continuing to the water’s edge. “I thought you meant they were going to build it right here.”
The surf industry wasn’t doing much, either. Surfrider’s total corporate donations in 1990 were barely $100,000—this from an industry whose aggregate sales were somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion. Beachwear giant Op was outed for having donated a paltry $2,000 to the group. As Surfrider’s executive director told Surfer, his people had “busted our asses to prevent destruction and pollution,” while surf companies mostly just gave “lip service to the environment.”
From then to now, surfer-driven environmentalism has continued to be a hit-or-miss proposition. Corporate funding improved, but not commensurate with industry earnings. Membership in surf-based environmental groups went up, too—mostly because surfing had a population explosion and because organizations started recruiting from outside sources. On its twentieth anniversary in 2004, Surfrider had forty thousand members, including divers, fisherman, kayakers, and swimmers. Reflecting the larger green movement, surf magazines began using environmentally friendly ink and bleach-free recycled paper, and there were small but earnest efforts to create green boards, wetsuits, and surfwear. On the other hand, surfers held onto their gas-hogging vans and SUVs (plenty of room for carrying boards), and many people in the sport came to regard the Jet Ski as an essential piece of surfing equipment, even though it’s a proven environmental offender.
In a 2008 reader survey, Surfer finally put the question directly to its readership: “Are surfers only environmentalists when it’s convenient?” The results: 77 percent said yes, 23 percent said no. Among that minority, though, are some smart, hard-working activists, and because of their efforts the sport is a shade or two greener than it probably has a right to be.
Apartheid and the South Africa Boycott
Because the pro tour visited South Africa every year, apartheid wasn’t an unfamiliar topic to surfers. Almost everyone knew what it meant, even if they didn’t know the numbers: that 30 million blacks in South Africa lived as an economically, socially, and geographically separated underclass to about 4 million whites. Surfers, however, were caught off guard in 1985 when the sport put apartheid front and center.
It started in April, at the Bell’s contest, when reigning world champion Tom Carroll told an Australian newspaper he was going to boycott that year’s three-event South African leg of the pro tour, as a protest against apartheid. Since 1964, when the country was first banned from Olympic competition, the international sports community had been steadily drawing back from South Africa, and foreign athletes who competed there after 1981 risked being put on the United Nations’ anti-apartheid blacklist. There were no legal ramifications to being named; it was more like crossing a picket line, and listees included Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman, and Billie Jean King. World tour surfers who competed in South Africa had so far escaped the UN’s attention, but the sport was growing, and Carroll was a better-known champion than any of his predecessors. If any surfer was going to be targeted by anti-apartheid forces, it was him, and avoiding the blacklist may have been a factor in Carroll’s decision to boycott.
Still, career considerations weren’t the only motivation. Carroll was a classic “fair go” Aussie; he’d been to South Africa four times already and didn’t like what he’d seen. “The father of a guy I surfed with there once told me we were lucky in Australia,” Carroll wrote in his autobiography,
“[because] all our Aborigines had been killed.” Carroll also knew that Hawaiian pro Dane Kealoha had been ordered from a whites-only restaurant in Durban, and that another Hawaiian surfer had been beaten up at a disco for talking to a white woman. Boycotting the South African contests, Carroll said, was simply “a basic humanitarian stand.”
The day after Carroll’s announcement, a banquet was held at the newly opened Australian Surfing Hall of Fame, in Torquay. Carroll by then had already talked to a few other pros about joining the boycott. The whole thing infuriated Shaun Tomson—former world champion, Free Ride hero, and member of the South African Sports Hall of Fame—who was receiving an award at that night’s event. The Hall of Fame was packed by 8 P.M., and the tension was exquisite. Not only was Carroll seated near the front of the stage, he was the top teamrider for Instinct, Tomson’s surfwear company, and he’d recently defeated Tomson for the ASP world title. Grim-faced and holding a new speech he’d written that afternoon, Tomson made his way to the podium and looked out at a crush of pro surfers, journalists, manufacturers, and competition organizers. He’d always been the sport’s most gracious speaker. Now, he raised the topic of the boycott and his tone became sarcastic. “Suddenly the surfers have principles. Suddenly we have political aspirations.” Tomson passionately defended the South African pro contests, and then asked rhetorically if the pros should also boycott the American contests because of U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras, or boycott the English event over that country’s heavy-handed presence in Northern Ireland. “Where will it all end?” Tomson asked, caught up in his doomsday political scenario. “I’ll tell you. It will end with the destruction of pro surfing as we know it!”
The History of Surfing Page 61
