The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Surf Boom Redux

  By the mideighties, a second surf boom was on. By just about any quantitative measure, it was bigger than the Gidget-launched craze of the sixties, and it lasted until 1990, when it crashed with a familiar abruptness.

  There were plenty of new products for what marketers now referred to as “core” (short for hardcore) surfers: the glue-on rubber nose guard to prevent spearing injuries; an Aussie-developed safety helmet to be worn at menacing shallow-water breaks like Pipeline; the simple but brilliant wax comb, used to crosshatch a wax job for better grip; and the thin Lycra rash guard, used by itself to prevent sunburn and wax rash while in the tropics, or worn as a skin-protecting layer beneath a wetsuit. A California company called Astrodeck introduced the peel-and-stick polyurethane-based “traction pad.” Pro-Lite, also from California, came out with a line of high-tech surfboard travel bags that were thin, spongy, and tough as hell. Surfboards and wetsuits did well, too, and new board sales in America hit a hundred thousand for the first time in 1986.

  Pro surfers also rode the boom. Minor league tours were formed in America, Europe, and Brazil during the mideighties, while total world tour prize money went from just over $500,000 in 1984 to $2.1 million in 1990. Tom Carroll signed a five-year contract with Quiksilver in 1989 that made him pro surfing’s first “million-dollar man.”

  Like skateboarding in the sixties, snowboarding became the new inland version of surfing. World tour pro Gary Elkerton spent part of the off-season bombing down various double-black diamond runs in the French Alps. Gerry Lopez went heli-boarding on a glacier in British Columbia, and rhapsodized about carving endless turns on “a 3,000-foot wave.” For that matter, skateboarding was getting ready to explode in popularity all over again.

  Meanwhile, surf-themed goodies rained down upon America’s vast waveless interior. It wasn’t surfers who were tuning into The New Gidget on syndicated TV, drinking Wisconsin-made Surf City Brew, buying Tube It can coolers, and driving out to the latest wavepool attraction in Cleveland—or Allentown, or Palm Springs, or Edmonton. (In 1987, Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that the company’s new fifty-acre water park in Orlando would have a wavepool featuring “the best surf east of Hawaii.”) A West Village nightclub called Big Kahuna had bar stools set in real beach sand, a twelve-foot fiberglass wave curling along one wall, and updated North Shore surf conditions scrawled onto a chalkboard behind the bar. In the summer of 1986, twenty thousand sunburned Midwesterners flocked to an afternoon “surf party” in Williamsburg, Iowa, featuring a thousand tons of imported sand, an endless loop of surf music, and a yawing motor-driven surfboard similar to the mechanical bull from Urban Cowboy.

  Surfing’s return to the mainstream was an unexpected sociological pirouette. Twenty years earlier, when Endless Summer left the nation’s movie theaters and marked the end of the original surf boom, the sport—as far as the country at large was concerned—looked destined to become just another friendly ghost in the cultural attic, a bygone fad like jitterbugging or the hula hoop.

  So what did this pop culture resurrection mean? Why now? Why 1980s America? A number of theories were floated: the new interest in surfing was a delayed escapist response to the lingering national trauma of Vietnam. It was the latest example of 1980s-era “conspicuous leisure.” One college professor said it was a “mass-culture fantasy,” and that “mental surfing” should be encouraged as “a relief from everyday stress.” Maybe. Or maybe the reason was far simpler. Asked by a Los Angeles Times reporter what the new heartland surf craze was all about, a thirteen-year-old from St. Louis shrugged and said, “Everyone wants to go to the beach, but it’s five hundred miles away.”

  * * *

  The boom hit hardest in the clothing industry, which made sense, since buying a pair of hot-looking surf trunks was easier than getting to a Manhattan surf bar or a Midwest beach party. The surf clothing manufacturers—Quiksilver, Ocean Pacific, Gotcha, and the rest—powered the sport’s hard-charging new economy and together formed what news sources in 1986 called a “billion-dollar industry.” That was just the beginning. Four years later, the industry was worth $1.75 billion. By that time, Ocean Pacific had licensed products in seventy-three countries. Quiksilver USA had two thousand American retail accounts; it was number eighteen on the Los Angeles Times’ annual “100 Best Performing Companies in California” list; and it had just moved into a vast Costa Mesa office park fortress measuring almost ninety thousand square feet.

  Fashion-wise, the sport had charged into a rough patch. A very brightly colored rough patch. Tight-fitting neon-on-neon was the dominant trend, but there was also an outbreak of squiggly multicolor “ethnic prints,” and some vestigial New Wave designs. Op’s new genital-hugging Lycra-and-neoprene boardshorts were laughed off the beach, even though Op teamrider Tom Curren used them. Then there was the counterintuitive “urban-surf look,” identified by Gotcha CEO Michael Tomson as “post-nuclear-torn-and-destroyed.” Finally, just before the crash of 1991, came the inevitable move to earth tones.

  Surfwear execs did their best to keep up their counterculture bona fides. “We’re the last outlaws,” said one company CEO in 1988, after closing the books on a $45 million sales year. Yet the industry was in fact corporatizing in all the usual ways. Large surf companies started buying smaller surf companies. Quiksilver was the first to go public, with a 1986 NASDAQ listing. The Surf Industry Manufacturers Association (SIMA), surfing’s first trade group, headquartered in Orange County’s Dana Point, was founded in 1989. Orange County itself, meanwhile, having consolidated its position as the sport’s industrial center over the previous two decades, was now described as “Surfing’s Silicon Valley.” Clark Foam, Surfer, Surfing, Op, Gotcha, Hobie, Quiksilver, Rip Curl USA, and Billabong USA—traffic permitting, all were within a twenty-minute drive of each other.

  SNOWBOARDING TAKES OFF. TOM BURT, SLIDE MOUNTAIN, NEVADA, 1985.

  QUIKSILVER AD SHOOT, EARLY EIGHTIES.

  In another echo of the first surf boom, the surfing trade show returned. The original was the 1962 Los Angeles Surf Fair—a sprawling three-day event with manufacturers’ displays, surf movie screenings, live music, door prizes, a Miss Surf-O-Rama pagent, and a “Surf Wagon” contest. For three years, the Surf Fair was held at the fashionable Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, but despite its popularity, it wasn’t especially profitable. Florida’s Surf Expo revived the idea in 1976, as three dozen exhibitors gathered in a Cocoa Beach hotel banquet room for a mellow weekend of surf trade. In 1981, organizers for the first Action Sports Retail show—surf-based, but open to all “beach lifestyle” companies—ambitiously booked their event into the huge Long Beach Convention Center, then looked on with dismay as exhibitors outnumbered buyers.

  Surf Expo and Action Sports Retail both survived, then flourished during the boom. By the end of the decade there were two annual Surf Expo shows, both in Orlando, and two ASR shows, in San Diego and Long Beach. ASR San Diego was the biggest: nine hundred companies bought space for the 1990 show, and over ten thousand buyers roamed the aisles. Neither ASR or Surf Expo was open to the public, but determined event crashers always found a way to get inside. Top surfers lolled like princes in their sponsors’ booths; hired models strolled around in bikinis and stilettos. Giveaway “swag” was a must—even the newest, tiniest startup wouldn’t dream of showing up at a trade show without boxes full of stickers, keychains, and bottle openers. More libertine exhibitors handed out cocktails to company friends and associates after lunch. The drinking picked up over dinner, and continued through the official and unofficial evening entertainments, and the cycle repeated the following day. It wasn’t coincidental that ASR and Surf Expo became popular just as the surf movie was dying out. Surfers missed their off-beach gatherings, and if doing so now meant wearing plastic-covered ID tags and wandering fluorescent-lit convention centers, so be it.

  Also, there was a tacit, universal agreement at trade shows to act as if the sport hadn’t boomed into a billion-dollar ope
ration. Everyone pretended they were still part of the same esoteric cult of thirty years ago, and these were just gigantic parties. “I’d already gone to three Action Sports Retailer shows before I even knew what they were,” a Surfing magazine reporter said in 1988, setting a new standard for either cluelessness or disingenuousness. “The turnstiles, the garish lights, the bunting and flags, the hot dogs, balloons, and dancing girls—I had no idea it had to do with millions of dollars changing hands. All I knew is that an upcoming ‘show’ meant the circus was in town.” Here was a thriving business sector, in other words, that refused to acknowledge itself as such. Not until years later—with the launch of the trade publication TransWorld Surf Business—did the sport finally quit the pretense that it was still a cottage industry.

  Tale of Two Retailers: Gotcha and Quiksilver

  What was a nouveau riche surfwear CEO supposed to do? Believe in the “grow or die” dictum and start filling those bulk orders for Macy’s and JC Penney? Or stay “core,” knowing that the surfers who made your label cool in the first place weren’t going to hang around once their boardshorts were being worn by the people who shop at Macy’s and JC Penney?

  GOTCHA SURFWEAR AD CAMPAIGN, 1988.

  This was the Ocean Pacific dilemma. In the 1970s, Op smashed all surf industry sales records after moving strongly into the department stores. With this decision, it also became instantly and terminally unhip among surf-world tastemakers. By the late 1980s, Op was still the biggest, most profitable name in surfing, but newer companies viewed it as less a success story and more a cautionary tale. “We’re in and they’re out,” boasted a young surfwear CEO in 1987 whose sales that year were exactly one-tenth that of Ocean Pacific’s. Op was still active in the core market, sponsoring Tom Curren and the Op Pro event at Huntington. But most surf shops had quit carrying the line ten years ago, and the company seemed to understand the bargain it had made—it was at least honest about cashing in and moving to the mainstream.

  Gotcha, on the other hand, shamelessly played it both ways. The company ran ads in Details magazine, and sold to department stores from Pittsburgh to Tulsa to Spokane, yet aggressively promoted itself as the most hardcore outfit in all of surfdom. It worked, for awhile. Gotcha was the new boom’s hippest, sexiest label—it brought back the long-cut boardshort and madras plaids, and invented a bright surfer-rugby long-sleeve shirt. Kids not brave enough to steal Gotcha clothes from surf shops would yank off the company sticker-backed hangtag and steal that. But Gotcha’s hipness was in part born of contempt for the consumer. The company’s sneering formulation of cool was epitomized by 1988’s “Don’t Surf” campaign. Each ad began with a full-page black-and-white portrait selected from what Gotcha’s marketing heads obviously saw as a vast confederacy of losers—schoolboy nerd, fat teen, middle-aged bald guy, low-life urbanite—and an all-cap banner reading, “If You Don’t Surf, Don’t Start.” Turn the page and there was a blazing color action shot of a Gotcha teamrider, with a second banner: “If You Surf, Never Stop.” Cruel and effective. The company that year posted its biggest sales figures to date. Within months, however, Gotcha sold 40 percent of its ownership to Merrill Lynch, and not long afterward its cool quotient was in free fall.

  Quiksilver was the first surf company to honorably cross over to the mainstream and hold its core customer base. In 1976, Hawaiian pro surfer Jeff Hakman, along with a freckled USC business school grad named Bob McKnight, made a deal with Quiksilver founder Alan Green to become the company’s American licensees. Aussie boardshorts hadn’t yet caught on internationally, and Green’s three-year-old business had just posted a modest $400,000 in annual sales. Not only were Quiksilver trunks a surf-fashion hit in 1977, but the licensee startup actually outperformed the parent company. So it continued in the years ahead. McKnight emerged as the top player on the American side, and Quiksilver USA was the dominant side of the operation. After the boom-launching 1985 season, Quiksilver USA’s revenue was up 80 percent from the previous year, and the company was ready to go public.

  Quiksilver carefully steered its way deeper into the mainstream. Year after year the company offered a handsome, well-made product. McKnight was happy to throw in a bit of marketing swagger now and then, but Quiksilver USA had never really been an “edgy” outfit, at least not like Gotcha, and it was thus better positioned, image-wise, for a move into corporate adulthood. “Still the Nicest Way to Go Surfing” was Quiksilver’s main 1988 ad campaign—a warm breeze next to “If You Don’t Surf, Don’t Start.”

  When Quiksilver USA went public, it also bought American trademark rights, which freed the company up from Quiksilver Australia. Alan Green had always been disinclined to push too hard into department stores and other non-core outlets, fearing that such a move would damage what he called the “Quiksilver authenticity”—a reasonable position, given what had happened to Hang Ten, Lightning Bolt, and Op. McKnight was unburdened by such worries. He hired professional managers from outside the surf industry—the resulting admixture of Quiksilver USA execs was known collectively as “the suits and the salts”—opened the company’s supply lines to the major shopping center retailers, and shored up the base with a magnificent all-fronts marketing plan that included a stable of top pro surfers, lots of well-made promo videos, and a record-breaking $55,000 first-place check for the company’s annual big-wave contest at Waimea Bay. In 1983, Quiksilver USA’s year-end revenue was $5.3 million. In 1989, it was $70 million.

  Then came a national recession and the inevitable surf-boom crash—an economic double-whammy that saw Quiksilver USA lose nearly one-third of its retail accounts in 1991.

  But McKnight kept his financial house in order, and always tended to Quiksilver’s surf roots, and the company emerged from the recession as an entirely new surf-world animal: big, slick, and battle-tested, but not soulless. It was armed with a brand-name familiarity and trust that would protect it against most season-to-season fashion vagaries, on the beach and in the mall.

  Quiksilver came of age just as the entire surfwear industry became a billion-dollar industry concern. The company was now poised to become a billion-dollar entity all on its own.

  Australia: Still Playing to Win

  American money fueled the 1980s surf boom, but Australia lit the fuse. It wasn’t just that a good many of the surf products flying out of stores from San Diego to Long Island came from Aussie-founded companies like Quiksilver, Billabong, and Rip Curl. It was more because surfing’s color and verve—the real underlying attraction of the surf boom—were themselves Australian exports. After the localism and soul-surfing vapidity of 1970s American surfing, it took Mark Richards and his exploded-color surfboards, Wayne Bartholomew zipping around like a sugar-wired juvenile, and Peter Townend dancing on tabletops to remind American surfers—all surfers—that the sport was above all a good time. Soulful, too, and beautiful. But if it wasn’t lively and fun, what was the point again?

  Oddly, there was no second boom in Australia—at least nothing to compare with what was happening in America. No trade shows, retailer magazines, or wavepools. No vast landlocked population staring wistfully across the interior toward the coast, fantasizing about a sunny beach, cool waves, and surfing—because of course everybody in Australia lived on the coast already, and all aspects of what was now endlessly referred to as “the beach lifestyle,” surfing included, could be indulged or not, according to whim. Surfing had to be reintroduced to America at large. Surfing in Australia never really went away.

  Throughout the 1980s, competition remained the driving force in Australian surfing. Every weekend there were club contests. Most surf-related stories on TV and in the papers were about the latest event, amateur or pro, national or international: who won, who lost, how the ratings were shaping up. It was mostly happy news, especially at the world tour level, where Australians usually filled over half the slots in the elite men’s Top Sixteen. (The 1987 season was typical: Australia had nine surfers in the Top Sixteen, mainland American had three, Hawaii an
d South Africa each had two.) Damien Hardman of Narrabeen, an elegant goofyfooter—so cool under pressure he was called Iceman—won the 1987 and 1991 world championships. Manly’s Barton Lynch, with his haymaker backside off-the-top move, won the title in 1988. Australia’s female pros weren’t as dominating, although a rangy blond named Pam Burridge placed second or third every year save one between 1982 and 1989, and in 1990 she finally became her nation’s first pro-era women’s division champ.

  The Aussies ruled world tour politics as well. Here, though, the results were mixed. Ian Cairns, the big, bright, former pro from Western Australia—the “We’re Number One” chest-pounder who got himself in deep trouble with the Hawaiians during the Free Ride era—led a 1982 coup against Fred Hemmings and the International Professional Surfers organization. When the dust settled, Cairns was the world tour’s new executive director, and the IPS was replaced by the Huntington-based Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) as the world tour’s governing body. Except it wasn’t that simple. Hemmings still owned all of Hawaii’s pro tour events, and he refused to modify his contests to meet the new ASP requirements. After another Cairns-Hemmings showdown, all three Hawaiian contests—the tour’s traditional grand finale—were removed from the ASP’s 1983 schedule. The events would still run as planned, but Cairns ruled that any top-ranked ASP pro who surfed in them would be fined and given a two-year suspension.