Carroll didn’t believe it. Neither did Tom Curren, Cheyne Horan, and Martin Potter, pro surfing’s fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-ranked surfers, respectively, all of whom agreed to join Carroll in the boycott. Carroll, as world champion, got the most attention. But Potter’s involvement was just as important. The other guys were all outsiders—he was South African. And not just any South African, but heir to the Springbok surfing throne that Shaun Tomson himself had occupied for so many years.
Potter made a fireballing entry into the pro ranks in 1981, at age fifteen, by placing runner-up in his first two world tour outings, both in Durban. He was light, fast, and relentless, especially in small waves. After watching the prodigy for the first time, Mark Richards raised an eyebrow and announced that Potter’s “problem” was that “he keeps doing turns and cutbacks even after the wave has stopped.” Despite his fast start on the world tour, Potter, by 1985, hadn’t yet disciplined himself in competition; he’d win occasionally, but more often he’d find a way to lose. It didn’t really matter. After Carroll, Curren, and Mark Occhilupo, Potter was the sport’s biggest star, and he was loved in part for his lack of discipline. He threw his board into crazy high-speed turns, outdrank all challengers at post-event parties, gorged himself in the lineup (“I’m not a very aggressive person until a wave comes through . . . then it’s every man for himself”), and in general paraded across the surfing landscape like a little emperor.
Potter brought the 1985 anti-apartheid boycott into sharper focus. It was fine for Carroll to say his stance on South Africa came from “the realization that things weren’t getting any better for blacks.” When Potter said he’d personally watched black surfers get arrested for riding waves on Durban’s whites-only beaches—the point was that much stronger.
Former Tracks editor Phil Jarratt covered the boycott for Surfer, and he framed what was now being called “the South African question” simply and articulately: “There was a time when sporting organizations could fence-sit on apartheid, but it has long since passed. The ASP cannot win on South Africa. There is no forward position. Retreat is the only honorable stance. Apartheid cannot win, and tacit support of it through sporting contact is a loser’s position. The boycotters are on the side of right; from the world champion on down, they will be seen as the surfers who knew when enough was enough.”
ASP officials didn’t blink. The pro tour visited South Africa as scheduled. Never mind that civil unrest forced the South African government to declare a state of emergency in 1985, just before the pro surfers were due to arrive; or that new economic sanctions by the United States and most European communities had been declared; or that South Africa’s free-falling currency meant that none of the three pro tour contests would meet the minimum prize-money requirement for ASP sanctioning. Executive director Ian Cairns’ terse public statement on the tour’s justification for returning to South Africa was, “We don’t have a political policy.”
ASP officials never backed down from that position. The world tour continued making annual stops in South Africa through apartheid’s final years—even while the prize money stayed low, the number of boycotters went up, and magazines like Surfer dropped their coverage of the South African contests altogether.
Tom Carroll’s 1985 boycott announcement was surfing’s high-profile anti-apartheid moment. Ten years later, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke said he could find “no example in the history of Australian sport where a champion has been prepared to put principles so manifestly in front of his or her own interests.” Yet the issue stayed with the sport, in one form or another, until apartheid itself was dismantled. Cheyne Horan caused a minor stir when he returned to compete in South Africa in 1986 with “Free Mandela” printed in huge black letters across the bottom of his board. In 1989, a young Cape Town regularfooter named Cass Collier—star of the just-formed nonracial South African Surfing Union, and the son of one of South Africa’s original black surfers—became his country’s first nonwhite competitor on the ASP tour.
Surfing’s involvement with anti-apartheid politics came full circle in 1990, when a Virginia Beach pro named Wes Laine told Surfing magazine that he “loved South Africa, [and] couldn’t not go there, because the waves are just too good.” Laine felt that a surfing boycott wasn’t going to have “any impact on South Africa’s politics, period.” Three months later, Laine was supposed to compete in a regional pro contest in Barbados, a black-majority country with close ties to the anti-apartheid movement. After Laine’s Surfing comments were brought to the attention of contest officials, however, he was told that he wouldn’t be allowed in the country.
Laine was furious. He vowed to bring down the event—with a surfer boycott.
Brazil Makes Noise
Surfing continued to develop internationally at a happy, ambling pace during the 1980s and early 1990s. Vetea David of Tahiti won the juniors’ division of the 1986 World Surfing Championships. Tel Aviv by that time was home to five thousand surfers, and a few dozen Italian ragazzi were thrashing around in the choppy waves off of Livorno, Viareggio, and Genoa. The Swedish Surfing Association was up and running. A Norse fireman named Roar Berge had taken to the reefs and points near Stavanger, and German lifeguards were shooting the shorebreak in the North Sea. From a short distance, Peru’s euphoniously named Luis Miguel “Magoo” de la Rosa, a seven-time national champion from Lima, could easily be mistaken for Tom Carroll.
Surfing grew faster in some places than others. After Quiksilver Europe opened a retail outlet in Biarritz in 1985, the town became France’s version of Orange County, filled with surf shops, surf-themed restaurant and bars, and huge retail outlets for Billabong, Rip Curl, and others. The Biarritz surf wasn’t too hot. But Hossegor’s board-snapping tubes were only a few miles to the north, and just across the Spanish border, not far from Bilbao, at the mouth of the Guernica Estuary, long, fast, time-warping barrels could be had at a place called Mundaka. Doing business in Biarritz was always a pleasure.
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1977.
Then there was Brazil. In the 1980s, the country rose to the top tier of surfing nations—a phenomenon that seemed to miniaturize all other international developments in the sport during the period.
Brazil’s emergence caught many Americans and Australians by surprise. The Atlantic side of South America is fringed by an enormous wave-reducing continental shelf, which means that Brazil doesn’t have a single A-grade break along its entire 4,800-mile coast. As such, it was never much of a surf travel destination, and like Japan, the country posed a language barrier for the English-speaking surf-world powers. Nevertheless, Brazilian surfers—mostly the upper-class sons of Rio diplomats, financiers, and industrialists—had been hitting it hard since Australian Peter Troy gave an impromptu wave-riding demonstration at Arpoador Beach in 1964. The country offered some real advantages to the surfer: it was warm all year, the waves were small but rarely altogether flat, and there was plenty of room. Also, beach-going, fitness, and public display were all national obsessions—surfing combined all three.
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In the 1960s, and for decades after, Brazil was a nation that seemed to be forever defaulting on its potential greatness. Industry took root, tourism boomed, and yet the country was still defined in large part by poverty and crime, inflation and corruption. Rio in particular was notorious for its squalid favela shantytowns, sky-high murder rate, and fortressed estates. The gap between rich and poor was huge in every Latin American nation. In Brazil it was surreal.
Yet no country in the world was better at having a good time—in the cafés and clubs, along the boardwalks and beaches, on soccer fields, and especially during the long, thrumming, sweat-drenched carnival bacchanalia. Brazilian surfers, in fact, approached the sport as a kind of bloco samba on the waves, with everyone paddling out in large, happy groups. They were aggressive and often fearless. In the 1970s, when Rio’s best surfers began to visit the North Shore, the established pros watched with a mixture of concern, amusement, and scorn as the �
��Brazil nuts,” one after another, clawed their way into sucky triple-overhead closeouts, got obliterated, came up laughing and roaring Portuguese swears to their friends, and then paddled back out for another try.
FLAVIO PADARATZ, 1994 RIP CURL HOSSEGOR PRO.
Technically, Brazil was one of the original world-tour host countries, as it launched the IPS-rated Waimea 5000 at Arpoador in 1976. The total prize purse was just $2,400, and few of the gypsy tour pros bothered to enter. But a handsome sixteen-year-old Rio goofyfooter named Pepe Lopes earned a fair-and-square win, plus an invitation to that year’s Pipeline Masters, where he beat future world champions Shaun Tomson and Peter Townend for a finals berth.
By the 1980s, the Waimea 5000 was regarded by most traveling pros as an optional event. It was a weeklong party more than a surf contest. Local pros were happy to pull out every stop to show a visiting surf-celeb a good time, the women were as sexually forward as they were beautiful—getting laid in Rio, one California pro once said, was “like fishing with dynamite”—and cocaine was often piled in white drifts across the nearest coffee table. Nevertheless, the Waimea 5000 was held in predictably gutless waist-high surf, and the loud and enthusiastic spectators packed onto Arpoador Beach could, visiting pros learned, turn ugly at a moment’s notice. After beating two or three local favorites during the prelims of the 1979 Waimea 5000, a top-ten pro from Australia named Chris Byrne was pelted by sand, food, and bottles as he ran up the beach during his quarterfinal heat. Byrne stopped, turned, raised a middle finger to the audience—“Very nearly an act of suicide in Rio,” Wayne Bartholomew later observed—and needed a police escort to get from the contest site to his hotel room.
“WE ARE A VERY TERRITORIAL PEOPLE, AND EVEN WHEN SURFING OVERSEAS WE TRY TO RULE THE BREAK. WE TAKE THE WAVES THAT ARE OURS, AND WE TAKE OTHER SURFERS’ WAVES TOO.”
—Fabio Schifino, Brazilian surf shop owner
Surfing’s popularity exploded in Brazil during the late seventies and early eighties, with São Paulo becoming just as surf-crazed as Rio. Racing to get into this hot new market, local entrepreneurs took advantage of Brazil’s anything-goes patent laws, and tens of thousands of young Brazilian wave-riders were soon found après surf in contraband Lightning Bolt T-shirts, Rainbow sandals, and Quiksilver boardshorts. It was product piracy on a fairly large scale, and American and Australian companies had no legal recourse. The surfing industry wasn’t being singled out—bootlegged goods of every description were available across Latin America. But the gap between Brazil and the rest of the surfing community was widening, and it didn’t help that the sport’s top CEOs were now looking at this huge, ascending nation of surfers and feeling ripped off.
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Brazilian surfers quickly became serious about competition. The model, of course, was the Brazilian national soccer team, with its stockpile of World Cup trophies and its roster of legendary players, past and present. Soccer—along with Formula One racing, another Brazilian specialty—gave surfers a big dose of national sporting pride and a sense of destiny. The surf competition machinery was soon in place. By 1988, Brazil had two events on the ASP schedule, a first-rate national pro tour, and a sound amateur system. New, nonpirated domestic companies like Hang Loose surfwear and Moraii wetsuits, even while battling astronomical inflation rates, pumped a lot of money into sponsoring the country’s best riders.
That same year, a moon-faced regularfooter named Fabio Gouveia, from the outskirts of Joao Pessoa, flew to Puerto Rico and effortlessly won the men’s division of the amateur World Championships. Gouveia turn pro a few weeks later, along with junior division semifinalist Flavio Padaratz. They made an odd pair. Padaratz, an upper-middle-class suburbanite from Florianopolis, spent the previous year living in Huntington Beach, where he learned perfect surf-inflected English, competed in National Scholastic Surfing Association events, and made sure he was in range whenever a photographer turned up on the beach. Blond and handsome, friendly and talkative, quick and flashy in the water—Padaratz was the one who seemed poised to be Brazil’s breakthrough pro.
Gouveia was poor, quiet, shy, spoke no English, and looked, as surf journalist Ben Marcus wrote, “like a Portuguese fisherman.” It would have surprised no one if he’d packed up his World Championship trophy and gone home for a long, moderately well-paying career on the domestic pro circuit. Gouveia wasn’t an eye-catching surfer, like Padaratz, but his turns were beautifully linked, and he hit a lot of the same chiming-style notes as Tom Curren.
The two surfers set out together on the 1989 world tour. Gouveia finished the season ranked number twenty-five and picked up rookie-of-the-year honors; four years later, he hit number five. Padaratz was slower off the mark but worked his way up to number eight in 1994. Brazil had never before had even a midranking world-tour surfer. Now it had two in the top ten.
More would follow, and in years to come, it was common to see eight or ten men’s division Brazilians slotted into the Top 44. (In 1992, the world tour split into two related international circuits: the elite forty-four-surfer World Championship Tour, or WCT, and an enormous “feeder” tour called the World Qualifying Series—WQS—through which lower-ranked pros gained admission to the WCT.) Outside of the world tour, in almost every possible event category—men’s, women’s, girls, juniors, seniors; shortboard, longboard, bodyboard; amateur and pro; individual and team—the Brazilians did just as well.
Brazilian surfers expected that mastery in competition would translate into better relationships with surfing’s traditional powers—mainland America, Australia, and Hawaii. “We will win contests in small waves, in good waves, and in big waves,” predicted Rio-based Now magazine editor Rosaldo Calvacanti, right about the time Gouveia, Padaratz, and the rest of the Brazilians were doing just that, “and everybody will then have to take their hats off to us.”
No such luck. Brazil’s rise only seemed to draw complaints and negative remarks from other surfers. Much of it was aimed at their competitive success. The Brazilians choked in the big events people said. They didn’t bring any style to the game. They won because they had a better minor-league pro tour back home. There was an element of truth here. But the fact was Brazilian surfers had spent years turning themselves into a nation of finely tuned competitors, and they played hard and fair. Every title they picked up was well earned.
A second, louder critique focused on the Brazilian national character. A 1989 Surfer article noted that “most surfers think ‘Brazilian’ is synonymous for loud, obnoxious, and ready to hassle.” This was the polite end of a spectrum of remarks that bottomed out with a 1994 Australia’s Surfing Life feature in which the Brazilian is described as “the bastard surfer . . . a dark-haired, rude-as-fuck, uncivilized prick, ripping off [other people’s waves] like a pirate stealing gold.”
The Brazilians were convinced that the Americans and Australians had conspired to prevent the newcomers from assuming their rightful place in the first rank. “They simply despise the growth of Brazilian surfing,” one Rio surf journalist said. Rosaldo Calvacanti agreed: “They look for any excuse to punish us. Anything. They’re afraid of us.” While there was never a coordinated effort to keep Brazil down, the charges weren’t groundless. Americans and Australians didn’t do much outreach. Brazilians didn’t get much time in surf videos. They never got the cover of Surfer, Surfing, Tracks, or Australia’s Surfing Life. Fabio Gouveia, Flavio Padaratz, and the rest of the Brazilian pros to follow—none of them placed anywhere near the top of the Surfer Poll Awards.
To some degree, Calvacanti was right. Americans and Aussies were afraid of the Brazilians. This was a developing country; surfers here lived in closer proximity to violence and poverty, which gave them a certain hardness. The Brazilians occasionally spooked other surfers. A top-rated Brazilian pro once responded to a quarterfinals elimination by launching a volley of rocks onto the judges stand. One of the original 1970s “Brazil nuts” was stabbed to death by his own brother. Pepe Lopes himself, Brazil’s original homegrown
surfing hero, died after running his hang-glider into the side of a mountain. Brazilian culture ran hot, which was great, so long as it was safely channeled—into a big night on the Ipanema boardwalk, say, or watching a World Cup match in a public square. Surfing wasn’t always mediated that way, however, and some felt the country and its wave-riders weren’t so much exciting as dangerous.
In the final analysis, though, what really kept the larger surf world from fully embracing Brazil boiled down to etiquette. For all their self-congratulatory pride over not having signed on to the mainstream social contract, surfers had of course produced a social contract of their own. You traveled in small groups. When visiting a new break, you didn’t make a lot of noise. The guy closest to the peak has right-of-way. All of these courtesies, and dozens more, might be ignored or abridged for a variety of reasons, but from Malibu to Chiba, Pipeline to Padang, everyone pretty much understood the code. Everyone but the Brazilians. Furthermore, they didn’t seem to care. “Our behavior in the surf is a natural thing,” one Brazilian world tour pro shrugged. “We usually come in large groups,” a Porto Alegre surf shop owner explained to an American reporter. “It’s two or three truckloads of us, which crowds the break and pisses people off.” As carioca surf journalist Reinaldo Andraus summarized, “Brazilians in general . . . talk loudly and practice little respect for their neighbors.”
Ironically, by being loud, rude, and aggressive, the Brazilians were treating surfers the way surfers—particularly two or three decades earlier—had famously treated everyone else. The Americans and Australians, unfortunately, were too busy gnashing their teeth to appreciate the poetic justice.
Time passed, and the relationship between Brazil and the rest of the world’s surfers improved, at least a little. Other surfing nations became familiar with the Brazilian approach, and the Brazilians—some of them—claimed that exposure to different surf cultures was changing their own. “Our manners are getting better,” the Porto Alegre shop owner said. “Maybe in the future we are all going to share waves.”
The History of Surfing Page 62