The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The girl’s boardshort was part of a broader change in women’s athletics. After two decades, the feminist-first sportswoman model, as epitomized by Martina Navratilova, had run its necessary but grim course. Sex appeal—hetero all the way—was becoming an unabashed part of female athletics. In 1994, Andersen raised a few unplucked eyebrows with her “sad but true” evaluation that women’s surfing was in a depressed state because it wasn’t “really a sexy thing.” What the sport needed, she said, was a “girly-girl” makeover.

  Killer Cute: The Roxy Revolution

  Andersen’s statement was a champagne magnum smashing against the bow of Quiksilver’s new Roxy line, which sailed off to become a flagship for the newest, richest, sexiest division of the surf industry. For two or three years, Roxy’s growth was merely steady. Then suddenly it exploded. Yearly revenue shot past $100 million in 1999 and reached $500 million by 2003, at which point the brand was stamped not just on jeans, shoes, sundresses, sweaters, and pajamas, but on luggage, bedding, jewelry, watches, sunglasses, and perfume. Other major surfwear brands—including Billabong, Rusty, and a 1998-launched outfit called Hurley—rushed their own girl’s lines into production. California surf journalist Sam George chortled over this business-model turnaround: “Suddenly, an incredibly gender-biased industry woke up and said, ‘Wait a minute. Women buy way more clothing and accessories than guys. What were we thinking?’”

  Female-targeted surf magazines, surf shops, and surf schools were all up and running. Women-only surf videos were produced, with titles like Peaches and Empress. Gidget was reprinted. MTV’s Surf Girls was a minor reality-show hit in 2003, and half the cast of a competing WB program called Boarding House: North Shore was female. That same year, PBS aired a documentary on Makaha’s Rell Sunn, a warm and graceful first-generation pro who surfed her way through cancer for nearly fifteen years before dying at age forty-seven—having become a Hawaiian surf icon nearly equal to Duke Kahanamoku. The watershed event was Universal’s surf-chick-flick Blue Crush—whose $30-million price tag was roughly double the combined cost of every surf movie made in history up to that point. It opened nationwide in the summer of 2002 and earned its three female leads a “Night Out” column in the New York Times Sunday Styles section.

  ROXY AD SHOOT, NEWPORT BEACH.

  “At various cultural moments,” New Yorker writer Susan Orlean observed, “surfing has appeared as the embodiment of everything cool and wild and free; this is one of those moments.” The sport had always been a “tough guy domain,” Orlean added. But “to be a girl surfer [today] is even cooler, wilder, and more modern than being a guy surfer.”

  Still, the transformation at this point was incomplete. The term “girl” itself was part of the issue: it was eagerly reclaimed after twenty-five years of feminist blacklisting, and none of the new female-targeted surf products would be marketed for “women.” Yet it gave female surfing an infantilized look and style that made a lot of grownups roll their eyes. Pink and baby-blue were the colors of choice; everything was decorated in flowers, hearts, and butterflies; and the logos were almost all drafted in looping Barbie-style cursive. Lisa Andersen’s “girly-girl” wish had come true with a vengeance. Judging by product design, it was as if female surfers, after decades of being made to feel unwelcome because of their gender, had turned around and were now doing the same to anyone—male or female—over the age of thirteen.

  Then there was the Roxy Girl phenomenon—a 1990s-launched promotional campaign that gave the new women’s movement its signature look. The Roxy Girls were active, fun, beach-loving surfers. They weren’t on the pro tour. Contests, world titles, ripping and tearing; these things didn’t count. As a Roxy official put it, the campaign was about “the lifestyle thing.” Roxy ads (print, mostly) were shot in a fauximprov style and depicted a sun-drenched tropical world inhabited by very likeable girls—a smiling group of friends, apparently about sixteen to twenty years old, who rode longboards together in plastic hula skirts and palm-frond hats, cruised the boardwalk on skateboards, and made pancake breakfasts in their bikinis. Of course, Roxy also delivered lots of hip-cocked nymphet flesh and plenty of lecherous below-the-waist closeups. It was a weird sort of empowerment. Roxy higher-ups (almost all men) claimed their models were just having a great time in the sun; that they were self-confident, independent young women; that the whole campaign was nothing more than an idealized version of what was happening on beaches everywhere. All true. It was also true that few companies this side of Calvin Klein worked harder than Roxy to sexualize the underage female. Sure, old-school Navratilova-style feminism was a bit astringent. But it was honest and direct and encompassing. Whatever feminist achievement the Roxy Girl phenomenon represented was narrow at best. It was empowerment by way of Lolita, strained through a hundred marketing meetings—and topped with a plastic lei.

  * * *

  While Roxy and a dozen or more imitators created a giant surf-themed fashion nebula during the late 1990s and early 2000s—doomed to collapse, in the way of all fashion trends—another, quieter development was set in motion. Females were actually hitting the surf in numbers never seen before. A lot of teens and preteens were no doubt drawn in by the voguish surf-chick look of it all. But they discovered soon enough that learning to ride waves was nonglamorous in the way of anything requiring total mental and physical focus. It took work. Just to advance out of the rank beginner stage was a one- or two-year project, and every grace moment along the way was paid for with hours of struggle. You almost always felt great afterward—but you looked damp and bedraggled. For those who kept at it, surfing had nothing to do with cute outfits and accessories.

  Females sparked a beginner’s explosion in the late 1990s that extended well beyond Roxy-wearing schoolgirls to include dawn-patrolling housewives, urban professionals, and vacationeers in every warm-water port of call from Mazatlan to Phuket. Australian surf journalist Nick Carroll counted more than a thousand surf schools worldwide in 2002, most of them less than five years old. The Manly Beach Surf School, all by itself, provided 25,000 pupil-lessons that year. It was estimated at that point that there were roughly 5 million surfers worldwide. By 2010, the number was as high as 20 million (although it’s worth noting, as Transworld Surf pointed out, that the surf industry was “confused and unprofessional” when it came to demographics, and that none of the figures were “detailed or accurate”). Because everybody took lessons now, or enrolled in a surf camp, wave-riding came into one’s life in a friendly, supportive, sociable manner. Crowds at popular beginner’s spots were beehive-thick, yet people smiled and talked and in general behaved nothing like surfers. Learning how to ride waves was no longer an extended, often lonely trial-by-fire journey. Beginners, of course, hardened as they advanced—but not like they had in previous decades.

  As for women, it was still hard to isolate the surfing part of the women’s surfing movement from the fashion craze. The women’s surf magazines didn’t bother; Wahine was about 80/20 surfing to fashion, Foam was the opposite. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, the standard industry line was that females accounted for somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the surfing population—a six-fold increase, give or take, from a decade earlier.

  Oddly, the new rush of women surfers took place with little or no comment from the men. This was more a sign of changes in the culture at large, especially in America, than in surfing in particular. After twenty years’ worth of Title IX funding (which mandated that public school programs fund women’s sports equal to men’s), and a rousing 1996 Olympic gold medal win for the U.S. women’s soccer team—plus a few million games of mixed-doubles beach volleyball—by the late 1990s it just didn’t seem particularly novel to have a gender-integrated lineup.

  But it was more than that. With a few women scattered into the crowd—and not women in the abstract, but neighbors, classmates, girlfriends, wives, and mothers—the sport was a little better behaved. Lineup violations still boiled over to the yelling stage, but not quite as often.
There were fewer male-display exhibitions of swearing and belching. None of this felt imposed or restrictive. Just the opposite, in fact. It was a relief. “It’s generally a nicer experience with girls in the water,” Australian surf journalist Nick Carroll wrote. “Most of us dudes aren’t nearly as tough as we pretend to be in a men’s-only environment. The girls gave us permission to act a bit more like gentlemen.”

  Kelly Slater and the New School

  With four world titles to her credit and a billion-dollar industry built largely in her image, Lisa Andersen by all rights should have been the definitive Floridian surfer. It didn’t work out that way. In 1985, the same year Andersen ran away from Ormond Beach to restart her life in California, a cupid-faced thirteen-year-old named Kelly Slater was darting like a hummingbird across the weak central Florida surf on a custom-made 4-foot 9-inch tri-fin, getting ready to win the boys’ division of the U.S. Surfing Championships. He was from Cocoa Beach, less than seventy miles down the coast from Ormond. Andersen and Slater were poised to become the sport’s most dominant figures in the 1990s. But where Andersen tapered off just past where she could be called the best ever—up to that point, at least—Slater hit that mark and kept ascending. He didn’t just break competition records, he ran the numbers up until they seemed almost surreal. World titles, for instance: Tom Carroll had two, Tom Curren had three, Mark Richards had four. Slater won six in the 1990s, took a three-year break, then came back and picked up another three. Surfer Poll Awards: Carroll had one, Richards had three, Curren had eight. Slater, as of 2009, had fifteen.

  Over the course of his long career, Slater played guitar onstage with Pearl Jam, scored an Interview cover story, starred in his own PlayStation video game, was rendered in twenty-foot-high statuary, and made Hard Day’s Night–like escapes from screaming mobs of female fans. Bruce Weber photographed him. Cocoa Beach named a street in his honor. On Surfer’s 2009 list of the fifty greatest surfers of all time, Slater finished on top. (Duke Kahanamoku placed second; Tom Curren third.) He dated, in order, Pamela Anderson, Gisele Bundchen, and Cameron Diaz. “He is, with absolutely no equivocation, the biggest surf star of the modern era,” one surf journalist said. “How utterly convenient that he is also the best wave-rider.”

  Slater’s announcement that he would be turning pro in the summer of 1990 triggered a bidding war among surfing’s three biggest companies. He flew out to California and signed a deal with Quiksilver worth close to $200,000 annually. Business completed, he then returned to finish his senior year at Cocoa Beach High School, where he graduated with a 4.0 grade-point average and was voted Homecoming King. Slater convincingly won his first event as a professional, a non-ASP contest held at Trestles, at one point scoring three perfect 10s in a single heat. But things got harder on the world tour. He finished his rookie year ranked number forty-three, and a bit of speculative chatter went out over the coconut wireless that maybe Slater wasn’t up to the pressures of big-league competition. He didn’t pace himself during an event. He wiped out too often. He got rattled.

  Wiser heads believed that Slater was just going through an adjustment period. Aussie surf journalist Derek Hynd called him an “era-changer” more than a year before he won a pro tour event, and Surfer claimed he’d already “broken the establishment wide open.” Slater’s wave-riding outside of the competitive arena had only improved during his rookie year—to the point where, at age nineteen, he was by far the most progressive and inventive surfer in the world. He just hadn’t yet figured out how to consistently put it together during a twenty-minute heat.

  High-performance surfing at that point was still largely about “power surfing,” tidily described by master practitioner Tom Carroll as “burying a rail, at speed, holding it, and driving the turn as far as possible.” The explosive top turn, the haymaker cutback, the trench-cutting bottom turn—these were the building blocks for the high performer, as they had been since the shortboard revolution. Power was integral. As with boxing, tennis, or any other velocity-based sport, power was in fact fashion-proof—it never went out of style.

  It barely registered that Slater was a fine power surfer in his own right. What attracted everyone’s gaping attention was that, even as a rookie, he’d already invented a half dozen or so acrobatic variations on the standard moves. Riding a slender Al Merrick tri-fin, Slater would delay his pivot move off the top by a half beat so that the entire tail section of his board fanned through the air above the curl. Midway through a cutback he’d shift forward and punch down with his back foot, throwing the turn into a controlled drift. He brought a second axis of motion into play. A pure power surfer like Tom Carroll could take a wild up-and-down course on a wave, but his board always moved forward, as if it were on a monorail. Sliding of any kind—coming out of that forward track—had always been the mark of a poorly executed turn. Slater broke this rule constantly. He often finished a turn with his board going sideways or even backward.

  There was more: looping 360-degree carves. Aerial moves. Origami-like body positioning that allowed Slater to ride deeper in the tube, especially on his backhand, even in cataclysmic double-suck barrels at Pipeline. “He invents things so fast,” Surfing magazine said, “people have trouble naming them.”

  Slater’s rise didn’t happen in a vacuum. Another dozen or so young pro-grade teenagers were riding the same kind of feathery boards to the same inventive purpose. Somebody called them the “New School” and the name stuck. Among the best were Shane Powell of Australia, a fearless Big Island regularfooter named Shane Dorian, and San Diego’s Rob Machado, who kept a Lopez–like sense of flow even while twisting through the latest upside-down and backward move.

  KELLY SLATER, OFF-THE-WALL, 1992.

  All of the New Schoolers were dynamic and exciting. But none were on Kelly Slater’s level. The New School may have been a group movement, Surfer magazine opined, but “it pretty much begins and ends with Slater.” The irresistible comparison was with Tom Curren, and the consensus soon took shape that each surfer ruled a different domain. Nobody, Curren included, could touch Slater for athleticism. But Slater, even though he synched his moves together perfectly and maintained transcendental calm in the hairiest situations, couldn’t match Curren for purity of style. Slater picked off every contest record Curren ever held, one by one. Curren, though, never fully lost his claim as the ultimate surfer.

  * * *

  Halfway through the 1992 season, Slater notched his first world-tour win and moved into the ratings lead. In Brazil, at the second-to-last contest of the year, he had enough points to become world champion. He then closed out the year with a victory in the Pipeline Masters. At twenty, he was the youngest men’s division world-tour champion.

  Knee surgery helped keep Slater out of contention in 1993, and the title went to mustachioed Pipeline ace Derek Ho—Hawaii’s first pro-era men’s champion. Slater then went on his great world-tour tear, winning five championships in a row. In 1994 he did it with an event to spare. In 1996 and 1997 he did it with two events to spare, and over the course of one particularly superhuman six-month period he bagged ten of fourteen events.

  Slater’s win in 1995 was the most improbable and dramatic. He was ranked number three going into the final contest of the season, the Pipeline Masters, and was all but mathematically out of the running. An old-school power surfer and malcontent from Oahu’s West Side named Sunny Garcia not only had a comfortable ratings lead going into the showdown event but was the defending three-time Hawaiian Triple Crown champion. Second-ranked Rob Machado wasn’t anywhere near as credentialed in Hawaii, but had been the “It” surfer for much of the year—he’d posted two wins, same as Garcia—and was an excellent tuberider. For Slater to retain the championship, three things had to happen. First, he had to win the Masters. Anything less and he’d come up short. Second, Garcia had to finish seventeenth or below, something he hadn’t done all year. And finally, Machado had to finish third or below. This set of outcomes was so unlikely that Slater told Surfer, jus
t before the contest, that he was “already resigned to losing the title.” There were no rivalries involved. Slater and Machado were golf buddies and played in a band together, and Slater was the godfather to one of Garcia’s children. These relationships made the prospect of losing a little easier. But not much. “This is my whole life,” Slater said prior to the Masters. “I have very high expectations for myself, and when I don’t achieve a goal, it hurts.”

  The contest started. Garcia, incredibly, surfed his worst heat of the year to finish seventeenth. That was one condition met. The following afternoon, with Pipeline double-overhead and perfect, Slater got ready for a do-or-die semifinal heat against Machado.

  “I WAS ALWAYS IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME. WHEN I WAS A KID, MY MOM WOULD SAY THAT I COULD JUMP IN A PILE OF SHIT AND COME UP SMELLING LIKE A ROSE.”

  —Kelly Slater

  Waves aside, the Masters had all the pomp and trappings of a corporate picnic. It was a Monday, so there were less than five hundred spectators. Judges and contest officials occupied a split-level scaffolding draped in nylon sponsors’ banners, and a mix tape of current FM hits played over a low-fi PA system. Contestants sat on the beach or hung out in the ocean-front yards of nearby houses. Slater and Machado were called to the officials area. Slater put on a red Lycra competition vest; Machado was in black. An airhorn sounded a few minutes past noon, and the heat began.

  INTERVIEW, 1996.

  After taking a mulligan on his first wave, Slater came out of a long backside tube and carved a figure-eight cutback. Score: 9.67. Machado started with a pair of throwaways, then tracked smoothly into an eight-foot-by-eight-foot barrel. The wave thundered across the reef for five seconds, then spat Machado out like a watermelon seed. Cheers, whistles, and a perfect 10. Slater navigated his way through a difficult Backdoor set wave—a shorter but more difficult ride than Machado’s—for a matching 10. On two waves in a row, Machado raced through long tube sections only to get shut down at the exit, turning what should have been a pair of 9-plus rides into junk scores.