The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

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  This was the kind of added-value drama the surfing world grew to expect from its new big-wave idols, and nobody understood this better than Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo. They weren’t the best in their class—Doerner and Little were named in a 1989 poll as the top Waimea surfers—but they played to the audience. Indeed, at times the whole big-wave domain seemed to pivot around them the way it used to pivot around Greg Noll. Each had a great backstory. Foo’s low-tucked, slightly affected riding style got him nowhere on the pro tour during the late seventies and early eighties, but it looked great on film and earned him plenty of surf magazine cover shots—which in turn got him labeled, correctly, as a relentless self-promoter. Foo began riding big waves at age twenty-five, a transition made easier by the fact that he lived right across the street from Waimea Bay. He was motivated in part by wanting to earn a level of peer respect, and to a point it worked. Foo surfed beautifully at Waimea, and was a modernizing force in the bargain, riding a streamlined tri-fin board while everyone else stuck to their bulkier single-fins. Then again, he had no use for the traditional big-wave surfer’s code of conduct. He brought a pile of scorn down upon himself in 1986 after telling a surf magazine reporter that, “Personally, I don’t think anyone surfs Waimea better than I do.”

  Ken Bradshaw’s road to big-wave distinction was both longer and straighter than Foo’s. Houston born and raised, an all-city high school linebacker, Bradshaw abandoned home and family at seventeen and drove to Southern California. A surfing neophyte, he arrived just in time to catch the Swell of ’69. Three years later he moved to the North Shore, where he efficiently, aggressively—and in many people’s minds, artlessly—moved up the ranks. At Sunset Beach he appointed himself as a kind of on-the-spot hanging judge. Interfere with one of Bradshaw’s waves and you’d be tracked down immediately afterward and ordered to dismount, so that the pumped-up Texan—“He has muscles the way a fish has scales,” one surf journalist put it—could palm-smash a fin off your board and then bark an order to leave the water. At Waimea, however, Bradshaw did things strictly by the book. He was respectful to his betters (Eddie Aikau, James Jones) and his elders (Ricky Grigg, Peter Cole), and took his membership in the big-wave brotherhood seriously. Bradshaw didn’t blow anybody’s mind when he first surfed Waimea; it took several years to climb his way into the top.

  “ANYTHING THAT COULD GO WRONG, YOU BLOCK IT FROM YOUR MIND. IF YOU HAVE FEAR, YOU’LL HESITATE. IF YOU HESITATE, YOUR WORST FEARS WILL COME TRUE.”

  —Mark Foo, on big-wave surfing

  KEN BRADSHAW, NORTH SHORE, 1978.

  MARK FOO, BACKDOOR.

  Foo and Bradshaw were both articulate and quotable. What did it really feel like to ride a giant wave? Foo considered the question, and playfully volleyed with one of his own: “What’s it like to walk on the moon, Mr. Armstrong?” He loved to play the rewards of big-wave surfing against the dangers. “If you want the ultimate thrill,” Foo often said, “you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” And: “Out there is something so special that some guys are willing to die for it.” Bradshaw described himself as “dysfunctional,” and talked about what had been lost or overlooked in his constant pursuit of waves. “It’s sad to think about all the opportunities I missed because I’m so obsessively addicted to surfing,” he told San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Bruce Jenkins. “Don’t be me. I don’t have what most human beings want.”

  Individually, Foo and Bradshaw were both compelling. Together, they were fascinating—a pair of battling demigods who shared a mutual dislike of each other. It began during an argument at Sunset Beach in the late seventies when, after a few minutes of back and forth, Bradshaw put Foo in a headlock and held him briefly underwater. Things intensified in 1985, following a day of gigantic surf at Waimea. Bradshaw turned in a heroic and mostly unrecorded performance in the morning; Foo got all the attention for a spectacular afternoon wipeout—photographed, of course—which he immediately spun into a long Surfing article. Outside magazine later ran a story on Foo and Bradshaw called “The Dueling Kings of Big-Wave Surfing,” in which Foo casually mentioned that he was better paid than Bradshaw and that “good surfing is making it look easy, [while] Kenny’s always used a make-it-look-hard approach.” For his part, Bradshaw bullied the younger surfer, calling him “Foo-Foo,” and at one point, with Outside’s reporter standing between them, delicately extended a forefinger and thumb and yanked out one of Foo’s half-dozen chest hairs.

  The rivalry was genuine. But Foo and Bradshaw also knew that their clash was beneficial to their careers, and to big-wave surfing in general, and they played it up with theatrical flair. It wasn’t hard to guess what would happen next: the two slightly aging titans—still in the big-wave vanguard, but losing ground to a younger, talented, more-aggressive group of newcomers—would overcome their differences and join forces.

  In 1990, Foo wrote an article for Surfer called “The Unridden Realm.” It looked to the future and called for a redoubled attack on the big-wave ceiling: “the unridden realm” was Foo’s typically sound-bite-ready designation for thirty-five-foot-or-bigger surf. He mentioned new locations (Peru and Easter Island), new equipment, and new techniques. At one point Foo mused: “You could be towed [into a giant wave] by boat or jetski, but is that surfing?”

  In this uncharted frontier, Foo added, “the buddy system is mandatory.” And so it was that Foo and Bradshaw were all but linked at the elbow as the new decade began, setting off together into what would indeed prove to be big-wave surfing’s greatest era of change.

  Chapter 8: The Ride of Your Life 1990–2009

  “IS SURFING HIP?” LISA ANDERSEN ROXY GIRLS KELLY SLATER NEW SCHOOL SURF THUG CHIC AERIALS MARTIN POTTER CHRISTIAN FLETCHER MAVERICK’S MARK FOO’S LAST RIDE TOW SURFING JAWS LAIRD HAMILTON TEAHUPOO THE MILLENN IUM WAVE SLAB RIDING CATCHING THE DIGITAL WAVE TAYLOR STEEL MOMENTUM JACK MCCOY SURF CINEMA RETURNS SURF LIT HOLLYWOOD TRIES AGAIN ANDY IRONS LAYNE BEACHLEY THE RETRO MOVEMENT JOEL TUDOR BLANK MONDAY POSTMODERN SURFBOARDS ARTIFICIAL REEFS WAVEPOOLS “IT’S OFFICIAL: SURFING IS A RELIGION”

  In the early 1990s, after a century-long journey, modern surfing’s historical arc began to split in two. By the mid-2000s, wave-riding appeared almost schizophrenic. At one extreme, everything was fast, loud, and shape-shifting, with millionaire professionals, surf-themed PlayStation video games, and live-feed event coverage. Surfboards were computer designed, machine crafted, and mass produced. Engines were brought into the lineup—working in teams, and using personal watercraft, big-wave surfers catapulted themselves into waves that made all previous big-wave efforts look fumbling and rudimentary.

  At the same time, wave-riding in general was more settled and inclusive—even quieter—than it had ever been. And why not? At the dawn of the twenty-first century, surfing was no longer by any stretch of the imagination a young sport. Yes, it maintained a special flair for immaturity. But in its modern form it was now one hundred years old—solidly middle-aged. Parents surfed with their children. Females were at last welcome in the lineup. Going surfing wasn’t always an easy, nice experience, but it was moving inch by inch in that direction.

  The sport kept trimming ever deeper into the mainstream. Costco had its own line of boards. Merrill Lynch, Chevron, and Allstate produced surf-themed ads. Us and People ran photos of akimbo-armed Hollywood stars gamely riding shoreward on their huge beginner boards, while AARP Magazine profiled leathery but spry senior surfers. A group called the Association of Surfing Lawyers was formed. Every major surf town had at least one surfing museum, with its requisite overpriced gift store.

  All this was enough to trigger a small identity crisis. A Surfer cover, decades earlier, had featured a silhouetted rider on a back-lit wave, along with a koan-like blurb: “The Secret Thrill.” Surfers still wanted to believe their domain was tribal and elite, but doubt was creeping in. “Is Surfing Hip?” a 1998 Surfer feature by Sam George, begins with a hyperventilated pledge that all is well: “Oh yeah. Very
hip. The original hip. Hipper than hip. And you know it, too. You just don’t know you know.” Yet the article actually makes a convincing argument for how hip surfing used to be. “Surfing’s hipness timeline screeches to a halt in the early ’60s,” George admits, when the sport began “strip-mining that which made [it] special and dumping the ore into the open market.” His argument for contemporary hipness doesn’t extend much beyond the idea that surfing is beautiful and enjoyable—that, and the fact that surfing is a constitutionally better sport than BMX riding, or in-line skating, or wakeboarding. “Surfing isn’t included in the X Games,” George proudly concludes. “Now that’s hip.”

  Fate let that one dangle for five years. Surfing made its X Games debut in 2003.

  Hear Me Roar: Lisa Andersen and the Women’s Movement

  Surfing’s second boom—the 1980s beachwear-driven surge that turned the sport into a billion-dollar industry—was kneecapped in 1990 by a general recession and by a consumer market suddenly repulsed by neon boardshorts and scrawly ethnic-print T-shirts. Red ink splattered across the surf industry power centers of Costa Mesa, Biarritz, Sydney, and Torquay. Dozens of new companies imploded, and a few established ones went down as well. Those who made it to the midnineties in decent shape, however, were well-positioned for surfing’s next bull market—a fourteen-year-long Third Boom bonanza that made the sport’s previous two expansions look like warm-up routines. By 2006, U.S. sales were just short of $7.5 billion, and surfwear leviathan Quiksilver pulled down $2.6 billion all by itself. Internationally, the aggregate figure was about $14 billion; in descending order, the biggest markets were the United States, Europe, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Latin America, and Indonesia. The good times continued all the way until the 2008 world economic crash.

  Surfing’s new boom was an order of magnitude bigger than the previous boom, but it nonetheless followed the same procedural order: surfwear manufacturers sent vast consignments of goods to departments stores worldwide, while doing everything in their power to come off as rootsy and “core.” Wave-riding didn’t much figure into this, except as a marketing device. Surfboard sales accounted for just over 1 percent of industry revenue.

  There was, however, a big difference between the new boom and the eighties boom—women. Part grassroots effort, part killer marketing campaign, the women’s surfing movement in the 1990s and 2000s was responsible for the deepest profits, and the biggest demographic change, the sport had ever seen.

  It was a long overdue development. Until the mid-1990s, women’s surfing had muddled along as it had for the previous century—too small to get any real attention, but not small enough to be a novelty. Women broke through on occasion: Gidget midwifed the original surf craze, world champion Joyce Hoffman emerged as a sports-world star in the midsixties, the Margo Oberg/Lynn Boyer rivalry helped to buoy the pro tour in the late seventies and early eighties. But these achievements never did much to put more females in the water. In the three decades leading to the 1990s, women made up roughly 3 percent of the surfing population. Sexism, furthermore, remained the sport’s default setting. Female surfers never got the surf magazine cover shots, and they weren’t invited on sponsor-backed “photo-promo” trips or featured in surf movies and videos. Prize money for women pros remained a fraction of what it was for men, and their contest coverage was dispatched in a few dry sentences or ignored altogether. Derek Hynd, the sport’s premier surf-contest journalist in the 1980s, was meanwhile thought of as roguish and witty for crafting sentences like, “Tom Carroll brutalized Margaret River. He smacked. He whipped. He punished . . . leaving the wave distraught and ravaged. Carroll’s rape of the River stamped [his] supremacy . . . and it must have felt good.”

  The bikini girl, on the other hand, was ubiquitous. Surfing caused a sensation in 1981 by putting blond bombshell Kym Herrin, Playboy’s Miss March, on the cover, and not long afterward the magazine debuted its annual bikini issue. A San Diego–based sandal company called Reef Brazil built a surfwear empire on the backside of the “Reef Girl”—a stable of thong-wearing bikini models who took turns starring in Reef’s endless surf-magazine advertising campaign. In 1993, when Surfer published an article titled “Sexism Sucks,” it brought down a shower of hate mail, including one letter that began, “Hello, I’m a chauvinist pig,” and finished with, “I’ll give a chick respect when she can surf big waves, hold her liquor, and acknowledge the dominant gender.”

  * * *

  Nevertheless, a few women pros during the 1980s and early 1990s managed to rise above. A drawling Floridian teenager named Frieda Zamba won five of ten events in 1984 to become the first world surfing champion of any kind from the East Coast, amateur or professional; without so much as a change of expression, she won again in 1985, 1986, and 1988. Wendy Botha, an imperious regularfooter from South Africa, also won four pro tour championships (in 1987, 1989, 1991, and 1992), ruffling some male feathers by stating that “on any given day I can surf as good as a lot of the guys on tour.” Then she ruffled another part of the male anatomy with a nude layout in Australian Playboy.

  Australian Pauline Menczer gritted her way to a championship title in 1993. There was a lot to admire in Menczer. She was bright, sharp-tongued, and funny—a classic Aussie battler who’d fought off debilitating bouts of rheumatoid arthritis during her title run. She was also freckled and plain-looking, and the surf world for the most part treated her like a pariah. Barely sponsored during and after her world-title run, Menczer depended on checks from her mother to get from event to event. Surf companies weren’t interested in her, Menczer explained, “because I don’t have big boobs, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Guys who aren’t so good-looking can get by on personality. Women can’t.” Surfer and Surfing each ran a cursory half-page interview with Menczer when she won the title, and Australia’s Surfing Life contacted her afterward only to get a quote for the magazine’s latest survey question: “Why do men fuss over women’s bosoms?” Dealing with arthritis for fifteen years, Menczer said, had made her a tough person, but the gender politics got her down. “I love surfing,” she said in 1994. “I don’t much like the surf scene.”

  The new age in women’s surfing was ushered in by an ambitious Floridian runaway named Lisa Andersen. In 1985, at age sixteen, not long after her alcoholic father dropped her only surfboard on the living room floor and jumped on it until the fins were smashed off, Andersen stole away from her Orlando home, flew across the country, and landed in Huntington Beach, California, where she lived with “a drug freak who kind of beat me up a few times.” She turned pro in 1987 and was immediately picked as a world-beater. For five years, Andersen was a chronic underachiever: she won events now and then and placed as high as number four in the rankings, but mostly—whether because of nerves, indifference, or lack of focus—she found ways to lose. Still, competitive surfing put Andersen in with a better crowd of people, and during this period she was advised, coached, nurtured, housed, and fed by a top-ranked world-tour pro, a magazine photographer, and a series of other nonabusive boyfriends and benefactors. It was a drifting but protected life.

  Meanwhile, she’d become the world’s best female free surfer: smooth and aggressive, able to throw down the extravagant one-off move, and even better at spinning out a long, full, perfectly sequenced ride. Over the years, both male and female surfers had approvingly described “the feminine style” as a kind of quiet demure, “Birth of Venus” way of riding. That wasn’t Andersen. She used the same type of flowing attack as Tom Curren. Under her influence, this style became neither feminine nor masculine—it was just the right way to surf. She’d also become a girl-jock knockout: lean, blond, and tan, with an incandescent smile.

  “HAVING A BABY PUT A LOT OF RESPONSIBILITY ON ME. IF I DIDN’T SURF–IF DIDN’T WIN–THERE’D BE NO DIAPERS, NO FOOD ON THE TABLE. I HAD TO TAKE IT MORE SERIOUSLY.”

  —Lisa Andersen

  Andersen’s world-tour fortunes began to change in 1992, after an affair with a married world-tour judge resulted in a
surprise pregnancy. After giving birth to a daughter the following year, Andersen, for the first time in her life, felt grounded and calm and focused on competition—both to prove to herself that she could win and to provide for her daughter. She surfed in a world-tour contest less than three weeks after being wheeled out of the delivery room. Five months later, she opened the 1994 season by either winning or placing runner-up in five consecutive events. She then rode well enough down the stretch—despite chronic lower back pain from constantly holding an infant on her hip—to win the world championship.

  The magazines that had ignored Pauline Menczer a year earlier now showered Andersen with attention. “Lisa’s Style and Class” was the title of a fawning Surfing article, and Surfer put Andersen on the cover, blasting through a top turn, with a taunting male-aimed blurb: “Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You.” Outside’s 1996 feature on Andersen described her as the sport’s “first true female star, period.” Autograph seekers mobbed her at contest sites. Surf photographers made arrangements for exclusive sessions at the break of her choice. In France she had her very own stalker.

  LISA ANDERSEN, 1995.

  Quiksilver, Andersen’s primary sponsor, then made a smart business decision: they asked the newly crowned champ to help revamp their long-neglected in-house juniors brand, called Roxy. For years, Andersen had been wearing men’s boardshorts instead of bikini bottoms, preferring a slightly butch look to what she called bikini-related “technical problems” after a wipeout. In hindsight, what she recommended was stunningly obvious: Roxy should create a girl’s boardshort. Though trunks in general were becoming looser and baggier, Roxy bucked the trend and designed a snug, semi-high-cut pair of shorts. Nobody knew if they would take off as a fashion item, but you could go over the falls at Pipeline in these new trunks and they’d remain securely in place. Andersen approved.