WAYNE BARTHOLOMEW, PIPELINE, 1976.
They raised the performance bar, the way top-flight surfers always do. More importantly, they gave surfing an image and attitude that nearly everyone in the sport was comfortable with. Surfing’s group identify had been wobbly for years. In the early and midsixties, authority figures like Surfer publisher John Severson had tried to arm-twist the sport into a kind of American Bandstand wholesomeness. This was followed by a hardcore soul-surf ethic that often seemed antifun as well as anticommercial.
Tomson, Richards, and Bartholomew shifted the sport back to a truer version of itself. They were soulful but not ponderously so, aggressive without being threatening, competitive and casual in more or less equal measure. They helped make the whole show more lively and colorful, and part of it was just seeing how much fun they were having. Soul-surfing godhead Gerry Lopez smiled like Mona Lisa, reserved and all-knowing, while Bartholomew, Richards, and Tomson were usually grinning like kids on summer vacation.
Bartholomew in particular wrung out every bit of drama and adventure from his surfing life. He’d been a Gold Coast wild child, quick enough on the soccer field to earn the nickname “Rabbit,” smart enough to earn dux honors as a schoolboy, and poor enough to steal wallets from beachgoing tourists to help his mother to pay rent. (Bartholomew said his legendary competitive drive came “from being hungry; from going to school without lunch money.”) Michael Peterson and Peter Townend lived nearby, and the three shared a wave-riding adolescence in the beautiful, not-yet-crowded Gold Coast beaches and points. Bartholomew won the first of his three Queensland open division state titles in 1973, just before graduating high school; for three years he entered every prize-money event in Australia and slowly worked his way onto the invite lists for the big pro events in Hawaii.
“IMAGINE THE HISTORY OF MANKIND STRETCHING OUT THE LENGTH OF A YARDSTICK, AND THERE AT THE VERY END IS AN INFINITESIMAL SPECK WHERE SURFING BEGINS. I COME IN ON THAT LITTLE SPECK AND GET TO BE ONE OF THE FIRST PEOPLE TO MAKE A LIVING FROM RIDING WAVES. CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW LUCKY THAT IS?”
—Wayne Bartholomew
He had a bad year in 1976, which was proof, some of the pros said, that Bartholomew was overrated. Maybe so. Bartholomew wasn’t a great natural talent, and what often came through in 1976 was the enormous effort he put into his rides. But at twenty-one, he was still improving. He had expressive hands, a super-cool tube slouch, and liked to throw a bit of flair into his ride-ending kickouts—a part of the ride most surfers paid no attention to. Bartholomew also understood before any of his peers that the emerging pro tour had to be viewed in strategic and tactical terms. He knew how to analyze a surf break for maximum competitive advantage; when to surf full strength and when to hold something in reserve; what to eat and drink over the course of an event. He had an assortment of twenty- or thirty-minute plays, to be used according to wave conditions and his opponent.
Closest to his heart—and soon recognized as a Bartholomew specialty—was psychological gamesmanship. Etiquette demanded that the pros mill about during an event in a roped-off “competitor’s area,” but Bartholomew liked to remove himself completely until just a few moment before his heat, when he’d suddenly materialize in the lineup. He could go catatonic just before a big match. Or he might launch into a frenzied round of shadow-boxing. Michael Peterson introduced the psyche-out ploy to surfing contests a few years earlier, but Bartholomew turned it into a black art. “He’d create this drama about himself,” Ian Cairns recalled, “and it just overwhelmed a lot of guys.” Mark Richards once said he was “frightened to surf against him.” It was all part of Bartholomew’s insatiable drive to win. “You can never, ever write me off,” he said years after retiring, but still speaking in present tense. “And not just in surfing. Tennis, pool, any sport or game—you never count me out, ’cause I will come back from the dead.”
Competition lent shape and purpose to Bartholomew’s life, but it wasn’t actually an end in itself. Style and showmanship—putting himself in thrilling situations, and telling the tales afterward—these were the things that really counted. Bartholomew needed to be champion because it made his life more compelling; because it made for a better story. A big part of this was internal. On the plane to Honolulu, Bartholomew closed his eyes and became Frodo Baggins creeping toward Mordor. In his mind, the running feud he had with Michael Peterson was nothing less than surfing’s answer to the Ali-Frazier fights. A newly issued IPS event schedule didn’t appear to him as a “season,” but a “campaign” to be approached, as Bartholomew wrote in his autobiography, like “Alexander the Great, leading horsemen over the plains of Sidon.”
All of this should have come off as overwrought, even delusional, but there was always a core truth at the center of his exaggeration and embroidery. Rivalries are exciting. The North Shore is terrifying. Bartholomew naturally put himself in the middle of his tales, but he rendered the supporting cast in careful, loving detail. The implication was that surfing wasn’t his moveable feast. It was everybody’s.
* * *
On the 1977 IPS tour, Bartholomew was ranked number one going into the season-closing Hawaii finale. But a Sunset Beach wipeout left him with two broken ribs, and he was lucky to struggle past the wire a few weeks later, his torso still heavily wrapped in tape, for a number-two year-end ranking. Three months after that he opened the 1978 season with a win at the Stubbies, and from then on never once lost the ratings lead—he cruised to a world title with room to spare.
It was a timely win. Fred Hemmings was pushing IPS competitors to clean up their act and become TV-ready athletes, and Ian Cairns and Peter Townend had started calling themselves the Bronzed Aussies—mainly to feed their own PR buzz, but also to try and bring a team concept into the sport. To many surfers, these were both vaguely disturbing trends. Bartholomew, the new champion, never said anything against Hemmings or the Bronzed Aussies, but he wasn’t especially clean-cut—his kept his hair in a neglected surfer-shag and proudly drove a $50 Holden sedan with see-through floorboards. He also understood that surfing was by nature a solitary pursuit. Everyone got together later for a few beers, but you paddled out alone, not with your teammates.
THE BRONZED AUSSIES: PETER TOWNEND
AND IAN CAIRNS.
The IPS tour was still finding itself in 1978, but the period was already being called “the professional era,” and the distance between everyday surfers and those at the top had become wider and more pronounced. Bartholomew may not have actually prevented a surf-world schism—the sport had already been proven capable of regulating itself—but he claimed a championship while remaining aligned with the legions of surfers with salt-encrusted hair and junker cars. Bartholomew “made the whole show bigger,” as filmmaker Bill Delaney put it, and that was important. Equally as important, he didn’t try to turn the sport into something it wasn’t.
Shaun Tomson, the Pride of Durban
Shaun Tomson was the pro surfer of Fred Hemmings’ dreams. To use a marketing phrase that was just beginning to catch on, he was “the complete package”: bright and earnest, polite and dependable, a deadly competitor who was never anything less than a perfect sportsman. All that, plus he had an aristocratic blow-dried handsomeness that earned him modeling assignments from Calvin Klein and GQ. Everything about Tomson was above-average, and over the course of a long career he sometimes overplayed his hand—wearing a Tony Manero three-piece disco suit to pro contest banquets, or letting it be known that he had never fixed his own dings, held a job, or been on a grubby camp-out surf trip. A vocal antidrug crusader, he offended a lot of Down Under surfers by saying in print that Michael Peterson, a Queensland legend and hardcore stoner, had “put the sport in disrepute.” As one surf journalist wrote, with a lightly sarcastic voice, Tomson was the “Prince Valiant of the pro circuit.”
None of that really mattered. Shaun Tomson was a wave-riding supernova, and in the winter of 1975–76 he lit up the sport completely by himself.
There had been a
lot of advance notice. Still three months shy of his fifteenth birthday, “Sean Thompson”—as misspelled by the Australian surf press—had been touted as a longshot contender for the 1970 World Surfing Championships title. The Tomson style had already gelled, even at that early date, and everything about it ran counter to the sport’s prevailing early-seventies approach: instead of riding out of a closed, vertical, en garde stance, Tomson spread himself low and wide across the board, rounded his back, and kept his arms out like balancing poles—the classic “stinkbug,” except nobody used that description on Tomson. Even at fourteen, his body and board worked in full synchronization, and he had the positioning instincts, in the lineup and while riding, of surfers twice his age.
Tomson also had the full backing of his family, which was a great advantage. Ernie Tomson, Shaun’s father, was the prosperous owner of one of South Africa’s biggest car dealerships, and still loved the ocean despite having the better part of his right biceps ripped from his arm by a Zambezi shark while swimming along Durban’s South Beach as a young man. New boards and wetsuits, transportation up and down the coast, contest entry fees, coaching and encouragement—Ernie backed his son’s interest in surfing to a degree that was unheard of at the time. On top of that, Shaun had a daily sparring partner in his slightly older cousin, Michael, who was fractionally less talented but just as determined.
In 1973, surfing in front of a hometown crowd in Durban, Tomson won the first of six consecutive Gunston 500 titles. Two years later, not long after finishing his conscripted eighteen-month national service with the South African Defense Force, he won the Hang Ten American Pro in perfect triple-overhead waves at Sunset Beach. In the finals, he out-pointed Jeff Hakman, Gerry Lopez, Reno Abellira, and Larry Bertlemann—Hawaii’s entire starting lineup. With that, Tomson was anointed the leader among what Surfer described as an “increasingly powerful group of Australian and South African performers.”
South Africa had indeed become a first-rate surfing nation. Even before Tomson, the country’s best surfers had proven themselves to be of international caliber: Peers Pittard was the fastest man alive in the long pointbreak beauties near Cape St. Francis; Jonathan Paarman threw his board up and down the faces of huge reef waves near his Cape Town home like the Afrikaner version of Barry Kanaiaupuni; and Mike Esposito, an elastic goofyfooter from Durban, was probably robbed when the judges had him second to Tomson in the 1975 Gunston contest. Four years earlier, Gavin Rudolf of Port Elizabeth had a long-odds victory for the ages in the Smirnoff Pro-Am, held that year in punishing twelve-footers at Sunset. Rudolf had matriculated out of a long military tour of duty just four weeks earlier; he had zero experience in Hawaii and rode Sunset for the first time the day before the contest on a board he’d never used before. And he didn’t just sneak off with the win. He took every heat, picked up the event’s only perfect score, and finished with a confident shrug during the postcontest interview: “The other guys played it cool and surfed Sunset like it should be surfed. I surfed it like it shouldn’t be surfed, but should be surfed.”
“GETTING SPAT OUT OF ONE OF THOSE ROARING HAWAIIAN TUBES IS THE MOST AMAZING SENSATION YOU’LL EVER HAVE. IT’S JOY, FEAR, AND ACCOMPLISHMENT ALL ROLLED INTO ONE EXPERIENCE.”
—Shaun Tomson
Durban became a favorite stop on the pre-IPS gypsy tour: overseas entrants for the 1974 Gunston 500 included Jeff Hakman, Ian Cairns, Reno Abellira, and new U.S. champion Rick Rasmussen. All were impressed. The local surfers ripped, and as a rule they were friendly and well-spoken. The Gunston 500 itself was regarded by many as pro surfing’s best-organized contest. Durban itself, though, was a little strange. Imported movies were edited, nudie magazines and strip clubs were banned, television was banned, and there was no alternative press. On the other hand, the surf along Durban’s Bay of Plenty was hollow and consistent, some slightly underground clubs played good live music, and a connected visitor could score a bulging newspaper-wrapped ounce of Durban Poison weed for less than five bucks.
No one came to South Africa for Durban, though. They came for Jeffreys Bay, a remote pointbreak five hundred miles to the southwest. Endless Summer’s Bruce Brown, of course, had already discovered Cape St. Francis, the original perfect wave, nearby. But “Bruce’s Beauties” proved too fickle to plan a trip around. Cape Town surfers, by the midsixties, were already driving twenty miles past Cape St. Francis, up the coast to the enormous dune-and-scrub-covered point at Ferreiratown—the fishing town called Jeffreys Bay was actually another two miles up the road—where they rode another excellent right-breaking wave. There was no fussing around with the name. They simply called it the Point.
It was something of a misnomer. The break was pretty much in the lee of the point—a gnarled half-mile-long chunk of coastline with black lava fingers extending from the beach to the sea. Bigger waves rolled hypnotically down to where the newcomers sat waiting on their 10-foot Malibus. But it was too fast up there, and too rocky.
By the late sixties, visiting surfers from Durban to Cape Town were camping for weeks at a time in the beachfront dunes in front of the Point, and had been labeled by a disapproving Afrikaner newspaper as the “Hippies of Jeffreys Bay.” In the summer of 1968, taking advantage of a small but alluring head-high swell, Gavin Rudolf and visiting Aussie Keith Paull paddled their first-generation shortboards a few hundred yards south from the Point and discovered they now had speed enough to match the best part of the Jeffreys wave. The break’s various sections were soon named. At the outermost top of the point, a double-overhead wave at Boneyards would collapse into Supertubes, which in turn ran through Impossibles, down to Tubes—with peel-off velocity, up to this point, ranging from fast to hypersonic—and it would finally wind up as a slower but still rippable five-footer at the Point. The aptly named Impossibles was usually too fast to make, and surfers generally rode the 250-yard-long Supertubes zone, or stayed on the bay side of Impossibles. But a few times a year, on the cleanest medium-big swells, you could ride from Boneyards all the way through to the Point; a two-minute experience that, as Australian surf journalist Derek Hynd phrased it, “sent the surfer out of bounds . . . removed him from the planet.”
You had to work for it, though. Jeffreys is all but waveless during summer and inconsistent even during the prime winter months. The ocean is chilly, and the wave-making cold fronts surging from the west—which occasionally drop snow on the Drakensburg Mountains inland of Jeffreys—can push air temperatures down into the 40s. The storms also create a powerful southwesterly “berg wind” that throws a huge misting cape behind each wave—a spellbinding thing to see from the beach, but hard to surf through. Before the surf leash, and before full wetsuits were popular, a misstep at Jeffreys was almost always paid for with a long, slow, shivering crab-crawl over mussel-covered rocks to retrieve a lost and invariably damaged board. During a good run of waves, the smell of resin hung over the tents and vans clustered along the base of the Point as surfers patched up their mangled boards.
Sea life is a constant presence at Jeffreys. Dolphins ride down the point, sometimes by the hundreds, torpedoing beneath the surface of a wave, then suddenly leaping through the air, just ahead of the curl. Jeffreys is also shark infested. Not quite as badly as other parts of the South African coast, but bad enough; as of 2009, there had been hundreds of shark sightings, a dozen or so attacks, and no fatalities.
SHAUN TOMSON, BACKDOOR PIPELINE, 1975.
SUPERTUBES, JEFFREYS BAY.
Sharks, cold water, flat spells, berg winds—despite these things, Jeffreys still earned a place on everybody’s short list for World’s Best Wave. A local fish-and-chips shop began to keep a “Surfer’s Guest Book” in 1968, and while many of the early comments expressed either disappointment or some variant of naughty-talk—“All that way for nothing.” “Get a dick in ya!”—lots of others relayed a giddy excitement at this vast, complex new surf break: “Magic waves,” “Outasight!!!” “Was 10 foot and perfect when we arrived and perfect a week later when we l
eft. Wonder what it’s like when it’s good?”
Caught Inside: Surfing and Apartheid
Apartheid was the South African government’s official policy of racial segregation from 1948 to 1994. By the 1960s, most nations, including the United States, were seeking to ostracize South Africa because of this. Beginning in 1964, the country was banned from the Olympics, and sports-governing groups from around the world—representing everything from cricket to soccer to ping-pong—signed off on a much wider international sporting boycott. With few exceptions, South African athletes couldn’t play overseas, and athletes from other nations couldn’t play in South Africa.
None of this affected surfing. South African pros were able to compete anywhere they chose, and for most Jeffreys-bound visitors apartheid was either willfully ignored or breathtakingly rationalized. Randy Rarick of Hawaii, just a few months after making the semifinals of the 1970 World Championships, flew into Durban and apparently made his mind up about the plight of “the natives” just a few minutes after checking into his East London hotel: “They’re stoked working for the whites, and taking life with a smile,” he said in a surf magazine article. “Can’t see what all the fuss is about, everything is cool here.” Australian surfer Midget Farrelly, in his 1969 South African travelogue for Surfing World, wrote that “apartheid is not worth talking about because [everybody has] too many screwed ideas about what’s happening in Africa.” Setting the record straight anyway, Farrelly went on to say that “the government has protected the black majority,” and that “the black man in the city . . . generally thinks well of the white man.” Outside the city limits, though, Farrelly continued, blacks weren’t against “hacking up a human the way we slaughter cattle for food.”
The History of Surfing Page 51