The real rapture began when Slater disappeared inside an exploding Backdoor grotesquery and somehow found an exit thirty or forty yards down the line. The judges were stuck. They’d already given out two perfect scores for rides that were clearly inferior to the one Slater had just turned in. Everybody shrugged and punched in their 10s—it was a grievous underscore. Two minutes later Slater off-handedly put together another near-perfect ride, and with the heat barely half over his three-wave total was 29.7 out of 30.
It was obvious how the rest of the afternoon was going to play out: Slater, all at once, would take the contest, the Triple Crown, and the world championship. It was the most thrilling season finale the world tour had ever produced. Machado himself felt it, even as he watched his one and only chance at a world title slip away. With five minutes left in the heat, he came flying out of a beautiful Pipeline tube—an 8.7 ride; not enough to gain any ground—and saw Slater in the channel. Machado adjusted course. Slater sat up on his board. Both were grinning as they reached out and slapped palms.
* * *
Slater didn’t just win contests; he was a modern celebrity, ready to live his life in public. He out-confessed every pro of his generation, going on record often to speak about family troubles (broken home, alcoholic father, struggling working-class single mother), his accidental daughter (the result of a summer fling), and his mostly botched love life. He playfully seized the dramatic moment. In 2003, just before paddling out for an electrifying world-title showdown at Pipeline with Hawaiian rival Andy Irons, Slater darted across the beach and crouched down behind Irons, warmly grasped his shoulders, leaned in close to whisper “I love you, man,” then smoothly jogged off while Irons looked around, puzzled.
Slater also worked the commercial angle like nobody else. He appeared in an endless stream of surf-world ads, movies, videos, and DVDs, and he put his name on a storeroom full of signature products. Crossing the great mainstream divide, he posed for a Versace underwear ad and did a TV spot for L’Oreal cosmetics. Most infamously, in 1993 Slater tried to leverage his growing surf stardom into a Hollywood career, taking the role of Malibu High surf king Jimmy Slade on Baywatch, the lifeguard-drama TV series. Baywatch was his one real career blunder. Surfing fans jeered—with good reason; in one scene, Slater wrestled a board-stealing octopus—and the time he spent on the show contributed to his losing the 1993 world title. After ten episodes, he quit.
But in general, Slater did well as surfing’s frontman, navigating his way through a long, image- and product-pumped career with little more than an occasional light breeze of backlash. The Third Boom went down a little easier for hardcore surfers than either of the first two booms, in part because Slater helped to present surfing in a more authentic light than had happened in the past. (It made a difference that he was with surfwear-favorite Quiksilver, for example, whereas Second Boom champion Tom Curren had been sponsored by Op, a department-store-only line that had been laughably unhip since the late 1970s.) The rank and file didn’t necessarily approve of Slater raising the level of commercialism. But with two booms already behind them, most surfers understood that the sport was going be sold, and sold big, one way or another. The real question had become: Is the sell-job embarrassing or not? Baywatch certainly was. The rest of Slater commercial efforts were not.
Rebel For Hire
Kelly Slater picked Noam Chomsky as his favorite writer, painted his own boards, and occasionally pulled a world-tour no-show—he did just enough, in other words, to be thought of as independent and mildly quirky. Yet he was never less than a model surfer-citizen: likeable, well-mannered, and always acting—in the hoary but still-popular phrase—for “the good of the sport.”
So he was useless to those who still needed surfing to be a conspicuous act of rebellion. Mickey Dora, the sport’s great icon of disaffection, hadn’t caused trouble for generations, but his basic message retained its power. The hardcore surfer engaged the sport not just for pleasure but as a running battle—mostly against crowds, kooks, and nonlocals, but also the Establishment, the Man, and a host of other vaguely defined institutional bugbears.
Still, times had changed since the fifties and sixties—Dora’s era—when surfing was half-driven to its antiestablishment position. Then, the general public had thought the sport was odd to the point of being subversive, and all that Gidget-era handwringing over “surf bums” and “the bad surfer” practically invited rebellious behavior. By the 1990s, wave-riding was no longer thought of as either peculiar or dangerous. Just the opposite. Everybody loved surfing. Teachers, parents, lawyers, managers—the Man was out there catching waves, too.
Where did that leave the surfing malcontent? Again, following Dora’s lead. His rebelliousness always had a posed quality, and in the midsixties he famously marketed his image and reputation for his “Da Cat” signature model board. Twenty-five years later rebelliousness had no real value in surfing except as a pose and a marketing strategy.
A Makaha regularfooter named Johnny-Boy Gomes became surfing’s thug-rebel in the 1980s. Gomes had the same knockout talent as heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson—blinding speed, explosive power, awesome confidence. He was a North Shore specialist. At one point, over a single thirteen-month period, he won three straight pro contests at Pipeline; blasting out of a long tube, he liked to turn shoreward and give the judging panel a snarling deep-elbow Italian salute—daring them to post anything other than a perfect score. They didn’t need convincing. Gomes had a brutal surfing genius—he deserved every 10 he got.
He also, as Australian surf journalist Tim Baker put it, “soured more surf sessions, for more people, than anyone alive.” Gomes got an assault conviction for breaking a surfer’s nose, and was once fined by the ASP for punching a competitor while their heat was in progress—a world tour first. He tracked Baker down one afternoon, put him in a headlock, and laid a rusty screwdriver against his throat. Rarely did a week pass during the crowded North Shore winter season when Gomes didn’t get into at least a half-dozen confrontations, many of them physical.
Gomes wasn’t surfing’s first badass. Tough guys have had a presence in the sport since the beginning. What set Gomes apart was that he became surfing’s first commercialized badass. Starting in the late 1980s, a new beachwear manufacturer called Life’s a Beach/Bad Boy Club paid him to look menacing in full-page magazine ads. The campaign added to his dark reputation. “By all accounts,” one magazine writer said, anticipating a 1990 meeting with Gomes, “I’m about to interview a walking time bomb.”
It made sense that this particular surfing archetype came out of Hawaii. The sport was in closer proximity here than anywhere else to high crime rates, heavy drug use, gang culture—the whole poverty-driven roster of urban pathologies, but in a tropical setting—and the menacing Hawaiian had been a familiar part of the surfing landscape for decades. When hip-hop style began filtering into the sport during the early 1990s, it was a ridiculous fit, image-wise—except in Hawaii, where it made a kind of depressing sense. Gomes ate it up. By mid-decade, he’d taken on a more flamboyant thug persona, showing up at the Pipeline Masters with “GOMES” tattooed gang-style across his abdomen, and telling Australia’s Surfing Life that he’d be just as hardcore while traveling overseas. “All you clowns in the surf? Stay the fuck out of my way. Just look at me, just give me a little vibe, and I’ll kick your ass in your own hometown.”
Surf-thug chic never caught on big. It never went away, either. Some of Hawaii’s post-Gomes surfers ran even further with the gangsta theme—none more so than Kala Alexander, a muscle-ripped regularfooter from Kauai with a long assault-filled rap sheet. Alexander was head of the Wolfpak, a vigilante squad who stayed in a house overlooking Pipeline. A coach’s whistle would sound from the porch when somebody interfered with the ride of a Wolfpak member, at which point the offending party would at the very least be ordered from the water, but more likely punched out and then ordered from the water.
JOHNNY-BOY GOMES, BACKDOOR PIPELINE, 19
90.
MARTIN POTTER.
Alexander wasn’t in Gomes’ league as a surfer. But he was tougher and scarier—and therefore an even hotter media personality. Surf magazines chased him down for fawning interviews, and he played himself, to supremely malign effect, in 2002’s Blue Crush. He turned up in nearly as many beach-wear ads as the world-title contenders, with the caption on one double-pager reminding readers that “Kala Alexander Runs the North Shore.”
All good for business, as Alexander knew. After pointing out to a Surfing magazine interviewer in 2004 that the Pipeline was a “pretty heavy neighborhood,” and that his gang had it “locked down . . . nobody fucks around here,” he shifted into marketing mode. “I’ve just registered the name Wolfpak,” he said proudly. “We’re going to be coming out around the world with products—hats, T-shirts, videos.”
The Aerial: Sticking the Landing
Aerial surfing—any move performed in the airspace just above the wave—was introduced in the late 1970s as a low-altitude imitation of what skateboarders were doing in empty pools and half-pipes. Most of the pioneering work was done by Kevin Reed and Davey Smith of California, Florida’s Matt Kechele, and aging Hawaiian pro Larry Bertlemann. At first, there wasn’t a whole lot of air involved. In one early aerial photo, Smith puts about six inches between his board and the crest. Nobody could pull the move off with any consistency either. Ninety-nine aerial wipeouts, give or take, paid off with one well-stuck landing. But the thrill of surfing above the wave, weightless, in flight, even if for just a moment at a time, was enough to point the sport in a new direction.
Teenage world-tour pro Martin Potter was the first to recognize that the new moves could be served up with a new attitude. Not only did Potter fly higher and farther than anyone else, he talked up aerials as the progressive alternative to most of the riding being done at the pro level. In 1983, at age seventeen, he had the brass to call out fellow world-tour newcomer Tom Curren for having “a conservative approach,” and said the same about four-time world champion Mark Richards, for good measure. Potter’s own method was based on “going for big moves and taking risks. I just can’t approach a wave conservatively. It’s just not in me. If I don’t go out and pull off at least one aerial, I’m not happy.”
Despite Potter’s example—he was everybody’s pick as the world’s most spontaneous, exciting surfer—the aerial was slow to develop. It was the hardest move in the sport, for one thing. Skateboarders and snowboarders had the luxury of a stable practice field. They could fine-tune the latest aerial move like a tennis player grooving a backhand groundstroke against a wall. In surfing, every wave was unique. Each aerial move felt different from the last. At liftoff, the surfer had to “lead” his board ahead of the wave, like a rifleman leading a skeet, so that the two moving objects—board and wave—intersected at the exact right moment, five or ten feet closer to shore than where the move began. The airborne surfboard, also, was an especially clumsy piece of equipment. It wasn’t strapped to your feet, like a snowboard. It could be manipulated a little bit, by grabbing a rail with one or both hands, but not like a skateboard. The only plus: aerial-friendly waves—small, broken-up, beachbreak surf, with a light onshore breeze—were easy to find.
Meanwhile, practicing your aerial attack often meant not working on standard off-the-top moves. Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, Mark Occhilupo, and just about every other headlining 1980s pro beside Potter didn’t embrace them, and this made aerials a surfing novelty for years. The divide between aerial surfing and competition surfing was made clear in 1989, when Martin Potter at last won an ASP championship by adopting the “conservative approach” he’d once scorned. “I only rode at 75 percent that year,” Potter later said, sounding almost regretful.
In 1985, Potter spent the summer at an Orange County beach town called San Clemente. He was in full-throttle aerial mode then, ready to vault off any likely-looking curl that came his way. Wipeouts didn’t matter. Hang-time did. Matt Archbold and Christian Fletcher, two local schoolboy groms, watched carefully. In the coming years, as Potter turned the volume down in order to pick up a world championship, Archbold and Fletcher took the aerial and expanded it into a loud, slightly delinquent surfing subspecies—the new “sport within the sport,” just as noseriding had been years earlier.
Of the two, Archbold was the real talent. He didn’t have a head for competition, steered away from big waves, and was a fledging substance abuser in the bargain, but he had the same natural genius for surfing as Tom Curren and Wayne Lynch. His line, although radical, was smooth as calligraphy. His aerials were for the most part long, half-dome arcs. Archbold launched often and aggressively—every few weeks he’d snap a board in two just by landing a bit too far on the flat water ahead of the wave—but he never pursued aerial surfing fanatically. Good form was too important to him, and air time was second to his desire for a balanced, integrated ride.
Nobody in surfing was as pedigreed as Christian Fletcher: he was the son of Herbie Fletcher, a 1966 World Championships semifinalist who led the longboard revival; the grandson of Walter Hoffman, California’s original hardcore big-wave rider; and a nephew to two-time world champion Joyce Hoffman. In 1983, Christian Fletcher was a cheerful thirteen-year-old master of both the longboard and shortboard. He also did a lot of skateboarding, and was fascinated by that sport’s expanding catalogue of aerial tricks, as well as its grungy punk-influenced “skate and destroy” aesthetic.
Fletcher dropped out of high school as a freshman and worked on transferring all his skateboard moves to his surfing. By the end of the 1980s he’d become not just another hot surfer who did aerials—next in line after Davey Smith and Martin Potter—but the original full-blown surfing aerialist.
He was a sensation. Magazine photos showed Fletcher levitating four, six, even eight feet above the crest, feet spread wide across his board, arms extended, mouth agape, and eyes slightly bugged. Photographers loved him. The cover shots and center spreads came one after the other. Borrowing terms already invented by skaters, Fletcher helped give aerial surfing its own lexicon. “Aerial” and “air” were fine as catch-all terms, but kids in the know were soon deep into the differentia—mostly having to do with hand placement on the board—between moves like the slob, the boneless, the stalefish, indy air, and mute air. The list grew by the month.
Fletcher also turned the aerialist into another type of surfing outlaw. In 1986, he’d been a quiet Leif Garrett–like pretty boy. Four years later he was a tattooed and pierced surf-death-rocker, with a mohawk and a quiver of boards covered in pentagrams, skulls, and daggers—although never in such a way as to obscure his sponsor logos. He made shrewd use of the outrageous quote. “Fuck the world before it fucks you” was an early, typical effort. Asked where he’d like to be at the turn of the century, Fletcher once replied: “Sitting on an island in the South Pacific with a big fat joint in my mouth.”
He reaped a small PR bonanza in 1990 after a group of world-tour pros cosigned a letter, sent to both Surfer and Surfing, complaining about the amount of media attention Fletcher had received over the past few months. “False images are being created out of second-rate surfers at the expense of high-ranked professionals . . . It’s quite unfair to dedicate yourself to the sport, train hard and travel around the world, only to pick up a magazine and see a guy [like Fletcher] on the cover.” The letter encouraged editors to cover the sport more like tennis magazines, saying that readers had to be taught to “identify with the champions.”
You didn’t have to be into aerials, or pentagrams, to side with Fletcher on this one. You just had to be put off, as thousands of magazine readers were, by officious, self-important world-tour pros.
As the celebrated young master of air and outrage, Fletcher went all the way to number seven on the 1990 Surfer Reader’s Poll—unheard of during a time when poll slots were all but reserved for top-ranking world-tour pros.
Then again, when Free Ride legend Shaun Tomson called aerials “the biggest hoax eve
r perpetrated on modern surfing,” he had a point—nobody had really figured out yet how to land the damn things. With few exceptions, every dramatic image of a surfer cannonballing through the air was a wipeout in the making. Fletcher didn’t land the big ones. Archbold didn’t. Potter didn’t. Even at low elevation—two feet or less—the success rate was no better than 50 percent. For good measure, Australia’s Surfing Life pointed out that while surfers labored over their tiddlywinking version of the aerial, skateboarders had long since hit the ten-foot mark, and snowboarders could fly to double that height.
The completed aerial was open to criticism, too. Surfers usually approached the move in a wary crouch, and landings generally involved a lot of uncontrolled arm movement. A “chop-hop” version of the aerial, done on flat-faced waves, similar to a skateboarding trick called an “ollie,” was perhaps the lamest bit of surfcraft ever invented. By 1990, the aerial had been around for more than a decade—long enough, in the view of people like Shaun Tomson, for the move to be called a failed experiment and thrown onto the scrap heap of surf tricks, next to the cheater five and the quasimoto.
* * *
Kelly Slater ended the argument. He quickly and almost single-handedly validated the aerial, beginning with a convincing win in the 1990 Body Glove Surf Bout, held in beautiful overhead waves at Trestles. Making his California pro debut, Slater—a protégé of original East Coast aerialist Matt Kechele—loosed off an aerial every third or fourth wave. He blew a few, and struggled through a few more. But just as often he feathered the move into place so that it was organic to the ride and not a tacked-on addition.
The History of Surfing Page 66
