Surf lit’s new era got off to a strong start in 1992, with the publication of “Playing Doc’s Games,” a two-part New Yorker feature in which author William Finnegan—better known for his articles on apartheid-era South Africa and urban drug violence—looked back on his forsworn life as a hardcore San Francisco surfer. In the article, Finnegan is clearly still enthralled by the sport. In long, beautifully rendered passages, he describes the giddy fear of big waves, the banter-filled morning surf check, and the jackpot sense of good fortune that comes from stumbling into a day of perfect waves and no crowds. But he’s just as eloquent when detailing the sport’s less-attractive features, including the losing battle against commercialism and the surfer’s bottomless capacity for arrogance and selfishness. Most of all, Finnegan is convinced that a life overly dedicated to surfing will turn out to be, almost by definition, small and limited.
The article’s title refers to Mark “Doc” Renneker, a San Francisco surfer-physician who serves as both mentor and foil to the author, and “Playing Doc’s Games” is set at a time in Finnegan’s early middle-age when he is “trying to figure out how to live with the disabling enchantment of surfing.” After twenty years, the sport had become “some great, battered remnant of childhood that kept drifting incongruously into the foreground.” To matriculate into adulthood, Finnegan must give up his San Francisco beachfront apartment, move to New York, and focus his attention on career and family. “On summer weekends, I surf Fire Island,” he says at the end of “Doc’s Games,” wistfully but with no regret, “where conditions are most often ridiculous, never very good, certainly never scary.”
“THE RICH TRADITION OF SURF STORY-TELLING HAS MORE TO DO WITH WHAT GUYS DID BEFORE AND AFTER SURFING THAN WITH SURFING ITSELF. TALKING ABOUT SURFING TO NON-SURFERS BECOMES MUCH LIKE SAYING, ‘I MASTURBATED TODAY, AND IT FELT GREAT.’ WHO CARES?”
—Dan Duane
In his 1996 memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, San Francisco writer Dan Duane is just breaking in as a full-time wave-rider, learning the ropes on the raw, undeveloped beaches and reefs just north of Santa Cruz. Duane is at the opposite side of the surfing experience as Finnegan, but he often finds himself in a comparable state of ambivalence. At times the sport appears to him as the height of indulgence. Talking about surfing, he notes, “becomes much like saying, ‘I masturbated today, and it felt great.’” But unlike Finnegan, Duane chooses to make surfing a vital if nonconsuming part of his adulthood, and he develops “an unshakable sense that this unlikely use of time mattered.” The sport’s physicality appeals to him, and among the many waterlogged semi-losers he meets, he also picks up at least two bright, funny, similarly dedicated surfing friends. More than anything, Duane feels the sport grounds him to the landscape; much of Caught Inside is taken up with the author watching the sky, the ocean, and the fields between the highway and the beach. Surfing often seems like nothing more than a justification for Duane to take his place among the still-wild flora and fauna of north Santa Cruz County. “I’m more part of this life,” he concludes, with a note of quiet achievement, “than most Americans are of any life anywhere.”
Finnegan and Duane together launched surf lit as a tiny but viable genre—and that wasn’t counting the hundreds of new nonfiction titles that appeared on the shelves: plush coffee-table photo books, how-to manuals, travel guides, essay collections, histories, biographies, kids’ books, and more.
A host of surf-themed novels also appeared. Many, but not all, were earnest misfires. However, Kem Nunn picked up good reviews and a cult following for Dogs of Winter (1997) and Tijuana Straights (2004); both were as dark as his 1984 surf-noir debut, Tapping the Source. In 2008, Australia’s Tim Winton produced a small, bittersweet, veracious work of fiction with Breath, a coming-of-age story set in Western Australia. Like Duane, Winton’s narrator, Bruce Pike, is attracted to surfing because it’s “pointless and beautiful.” Like Finnegan, Pike can only become a fuller, more responsible version of himself by giving up the life of a hardcore surfer. Most of the book takes place in the 1970s, but at the end Winton lovingly brings his damaged lead character into the present. “I have an old ten-footer, a real clunker from the sixties, like something Gidget would ride,” Pike says. He’s now divorced and has two daughters he doesn’t live with.
I shove it into the [car], drive down to the Point and paddle it out through the knots of scab-nosed bodyboarders. I’m not there to prove anything—I’m nearly 50 years old. I’ve got arthritis and a dud shoulder. But I can still maintain a bit of style. I slide down the long green walls into the bay to feel what I started out with, what I lost so quickly and for so long: the sweet momentum . . . and those brief, rare moments of grace.
My girls stay with me now and then. My favorite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed. Out there I’m free. I don’t require management. They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances.
This is what surfing looks like after the obsession. In the hands of someone like Winton, it’s out here—not on the pro tour, not in fifty-foot surf, but sitting in the lineup with creaky joints and a lot of collateral damage left on the beach—where things really begin to get interesting.
Pop Culture Surfer
Surfing in pop culture, as depicted in TV shows and movie theaters, also expanded and mellowed, and the previous era’s over-the-top icons—dudester Jeff Spicoli and surf-lunatic Colonel Kilgore—began to morph into surprisingly real people. This was literally true for a string of first-rate surfing documentaries. Apparently, just about any topic imaginable can be filtered effectively through a surfing lens—aging, terminal illness, and family chaos, in that order, were well-served in Surfing for Life (1999), Heart of the Sea (2002), and Surfwise (2008). Metaphysics and religion came into play in John From Cincinnati, a baffling HBO drama series about a toxic San Diego surfing family and a serene newcomer who may or may not be Jesus returned. Indeed, despite comparisons to Twin Peaks, the show only got stranger and more confusing as it went, and was cancelled in 2007 after just ten episodes.
Less ambitious but more popular were two independently made theatrical releases. Step Into Liquid (2003) was a friendly throwback made by Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown, whose own long-awaited Endless Summer II (1994) had been a mild disappointment. Former skateboard-wheel tycoon Stacy Peralta followed with a hyperkinetic big-wave history called Riding Giants (2004), the companion piece to his skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). Neither Brown nor Peralta had anything especially new or different to say about the sport. Still, both films looked spectacular—much of Giants was a vertiginous mix of archival material and hundred-beats-per-minute acid-house editing—and they earned good reviews and made money at the box office.
Hollywood, meanwhile, found it impossible to stray from the old Ride the Wild Surf formula—hit ’em with a surf sequence every fifteen minutes and wrap things up with a big-wave showdown. Make it a traditional sports narrative, like Rocky or The Natural, except with boards and bikinis. There had to be a big event. Huge waves. Huge, deadly waves. Or huge deadly waves and a contest! Hollywood couldn’t surf any other way.
“SURF CULTURE: THE ART HISTORY OF SURFING,” 2002 LAGUNA ART MUSEUM INSTALLATION.
In this regard, the sport itself wasn’t very cooperative. “Surfing makes no story,” Dan Duane wrote in Caught Inside, pointing out that it’s a circular, not linear, activity. “No conflict, no crisis and resolution; no difficult goal obtained.”
Hollywood tried anyway. The resulting movies weren’t complete failures. North Shore (1987), In God’s Hands (1998), and Blue Crush (2002) all did fine in the action department. Millions were budgeted for second-unit surfing-only camera teams, and the sport reveled in its 35mm presentation. Other than that, the movies were nothing but paper-thin characters, dumb storylines, and lots of awkward jargon-filled dial
ogue. For surfers, this provided a certain camp value—but that only went so far. Hollywood continued to flatten the sport out, or turn it into a good-looking joke. It was a nagging little injustice that a lot surfers, even if they didn’t admit it, hoped would someday be addressed.
Surf’s Up (2007), Sony’s Oscar-nominated animated feature about a surfing penguin named Cody Maverick, was a step in the right direction. Granted, the stakes weren’t very high—Surf’s Up’s target audience was fourth-graders. The Hollywood surf-cliches were all there and accounted for, too. But this was the first big studio surfing movie that knew exactly what it was about. The script was funny and inventive, and the performances all zipped along. The wave-riding itself was gorgeous, even soulful. Best of all, many of the sport’s newer conventions—including pro contests and hard-sell commercialism—were neatly skewered. Fourth-graders loved it. So did most surfers. “For the first time ever,” one surf magazine reviewer noted, “Hollywood doesn’t make us want to quit surfing, it makes us want to go surfing.”
Surf’s Up was an indicator of surfing’s comfortable new position at the frictionless middle of American culture. Much of the film is a Spinal Tap–like mockumentary—a lampooning style that only works if the topic is familiar to the audience. And while the surfing characters are mouthy and scatological, they’re never subversive or threatening. As presented, surfing is cool. It’s also settled, conventional, and family-friendly.
Old Pros Rule
Former world champion Wayne Bartholomew was named ASP president in 1999, and he helped steer the organization toward a half-realized goal called the “Dream Tour.” The idea was simple. Trim the tour schedule back. Drop the festival-style, beach-audience, “parking lot” contests. Hold events at A-grade breaks.
Bartholomew and the ASP got pretty close. In the 1980s, there had been as many as twenty-five men’s division events per season; now there were a dozen. Jeffreys Bay was added to the schedule, as were Kirra, Teahupoo, and Tavarua. The Japan contests were all dropped. Trestles replaced Huntington Beach as California’s tour stop. Brazil’s contest organizers insisted on a tour stop, and they had enough ASP political leverage to make it so. None of the country’s breaks were good enough to be included in anything called a Dream Tour, though, and a lot of the pros, if they could afford to, skipped Brazil altogether.
Meanwhile, in 1992 the tour was split into two related ASP-run international circuits: the elite 44-surfer World Championship Tour, or WCT—this was the part everybody paid attention to—and an enormous minor league “feeder” tour called the World Qualifying Series, through which lower-ranked pros gained admission to the WCT. Pro-tour prize money went up steadily. Each WCT men’s event in 1999 was worth $120,000; by 2007 it was $300,000. For the women—second-class as ever when it came to world-tour wages—it went from $30,000 to $80,000.
Other Third Boom pro competition developments (some ASP-sanctioned, some not) included a junior’s division world tour, launched in 1998, and the Women’s World Longboard Championships, which debuted the following year. Big-wave contests, similar to the Quiksilver/Aikau event at Waimea, were held at Maverick’s, Todos Santos, and Jaws. California’s Brad Gerlach, runner-up on the 1991 world tour, invented a team-based competition called the Game, that dressed surfing up like a high school basketball tournament, complete with uniforms, coaches, starting lineups, bench-warmers, “home” and “away” games, and whistle-blowing referees in black-and-white striped shirts. The Game was never a threat to the ASP tour. It was, however, what millions of ESPN watchers saw when surfing gained admittance to the X Games in 2003.
Six-time world champion Kelly Slater announced his retirement from full-time competition at the end of the 1998 season, and new ASP president Bartholomew, along with every event organizer and sponsor, was nervous about losing the tour’s biggest draw. There was nothing to worry about. When the 1999 championship went to thirty-three-year-old Mark Occhilupo of Australia, it became the rousing final chapter in a comeback tale that had even the most jaded world-tour mavens snuffling back tears of joy.
Throughout the mideighties, Occhilupo had been his country’s extravagantly talented answer to Tom Curren. He won the Pipeline Masters and Op Pro, and there wasn’t an ASP fan alive who didn’t think he’d win a mantle-filling number of championship titles in the years ahead. But he came undone in stages, from too much drinking and cocaine, and from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. By 1990, Occhilupo had quit the circuit and moved into his parents house. Two years later he was drug-free but depressed, living on his own on Queensland’s Gold Coast, where he spent his days in the living room, eating takeaway fish and chips and watching game shows. Rock-hard in his prime, he ballooned to 245 pounds. It was Occhilupo’s wife-to-be who finally convinced him to see a therapist. Diagnosed and treated, he got back in the water full-time, trained in the afternoons, and dropped eighty pounds. In 1997—his first year back on tour—he finished runner-up to Slater for the world title. The following season he dropped to number seven, then in 1999 he powered out three contest wins, and took the championship. Still cheerful and guileless despite all his years in the hole—one surf magazine pointed out that he was not only the oldest surfer on tour, but the “most cuddly”—Occhilupo won his 1999 title having banked more goodwill than any surfer in pro tour history. “We now believe in miracles,” another magazine wrote. “Occy has achieved surfing sainthood.”
The ASP Old Schoolers kept on coming, as thirty-year-old Sunny Garcia of Hawaii became the 2000 world champion. Like Occhilupo, he was an eighties-raised power-surfing prodigy who’d overcome a drug problem. Garcia, though, was the least cuddly pro—tense and quiet, even thuggish when the mood struck. He stomped a board to pieces in Brazil after losing a close match, lobbed food at the judges to protest a decision in France, and threw a punch at fellow Hawaiian Derek Ho after they got into a paddle mix-up during a heat in Australia. No apologies. “I’m just like everybody else,” he later explained with a shrug, “except I don’t put up with anybody’s shit.” Garcia was also a near-unbeatable competitor on the North Shore. He had a record six Triple Crown titles and the best frontside “hack” in the business—a throttling U-turn just beneath the curl that left a cloudburst of spray in its wake. In 2000, he won the year’s first two events and coasted from there to the championship. (American television audiences got an eyeful of Garcia during a 2002 reality series called Boarding House: North Shore, where on three separate episodes, with cameras rolling, he bitch-slapped surfers who for one reason or another displeased him. “They’re saying I’m the Mike Tyson of surfing,” Garcia said in an interview afterward. “And you know what? I take that as a compliment.”)
Nobody questioned Occhilupo or Garcia’s championships. On the other hand, Kelly Slater’s absence floated next to their titles like an asterisk. There was even a taunting quality to Slater’s “retirement,” as he’d show up on tour now and then to remind everybody that the shots were still his to call: in 1999 he beat Occhilupo on his way to a Pipeline Masters win, and in 2000 he took out the Teahupoo contest, held in reef-splitting twelve-foot slabs.
Slater was the sport’s greatest showman. He thrived on attention, and everyone believed he’d eventually return as a full-time world-tour competitor. The only question was when.
Showdown: Kelly Slater Vs. Andy Irons
After three years, Kelly Slater found that life outside the pro tour could be a little rough. Slater’s band recorded a CD with T-Bone Burnett as producer, but the album bombed. Pamela Andersen dumped him for ex-husband Tommy Lee, then came back for round two, then dumped him again for a Calvin Klein underwear model—with Slater himself getting the news, along with everybody else, from the tabloids. By the end of 2001, he was ready to get back on tour.
Sunny Garcia wasn’t going to be much of a challenge to Slater’s comeback bid. Neither was Mark Occhilupo or any of the Clinton-era pros Slater had already dispatched, including all his New School cohorts. Slater was thirty at the beginning of the 2002 seas
on—in the three years he’d been gone, the next generation had arrived. Each of the top newcomers was fast and versatile, able to crease a wave with a power turn or flare up into any one of a dozen or more twisting aerial variations. They were also eight, ten, even twelve years younger than Slater and determined to prove that his time had come and gone.
Australia, as ever, was producing world championship contenders in bulk. Mick Fanning and Joel Parkinson of Queensland grew up in the blue see-through barrels of Kirra and had been drafting off each other’s talent for more than a decade. Both arrived on the pro scene just after Taj Burrow, a dazzling welterweight from Yallingup, Western Australia, who’d finished second to Mark Occhilupo in 1999.
MICK FANNING, 2007 WORLD CHAMPION.
Andy and Bruce Irons of Kauai were the hot teen wonders from Hawaii. Younger-brother Bruce was the smoothest, most naturally gifted of the new pros, but his interest in competition came and went. He finished second in the 1998 Pipeline Masters, right out of high school, and won the event three years later, but wouldn’t qualify for the WCT tour until 2004. Andy didn’t have Bruce’s faultless style, but he threaded moves together with more drive and imagination than any pro of his era. Their sibling relationship was as volatile as it was close. Even into adulthood, they sniped at each other in print and got into backyard wrestling matches that blew up into fistfights. One brawl took place during the North Shore contest season, and Bruce paddled out for his Pipeline Masters heat with a swollen black eye. Andy also had a tendency for self-destruction. He made his WCT debut in 1998 while still a teenager, then drank his way into a two-year rut and briefly dropped back to the minor leagues. Refocused and mostly sober by 2001, he again qualified for the WCT, grateful for a second chance.
The History of Surfing Page 71