The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The California pros, meanwhile, were barely in the game. Easy access to all that Orange County surf industry wealth, the theory went, made the West Coasters lazy, and ASP results seemed to bear this out. It was a different story in Florida: Cory and Shea Lopez of Indian Rocks both made the Top 16, with Cory going all the way to number three. CJ and Damien Hobgood of Satellite Beach did even better, and CJ won it all in 2001. Brazil didn’t yet have any durable replacements for Flavio Padaratz and Fabio Gouveia, but a small-wave dervish from Rio named Victor Ribas hit number three in 1999, and Sao Paulo’s Adriano de Souza won the world junior title in 2004. (In years to come, the WCT roster would become slightly more cosmopolitan, with low-ranking newcomers from France, Tahiti, Portugal, and Spain. Best of the lot was a grim powerhouse regularfooter from Durban named Jordy Smith—the hottest thing out of South African since Shaun Tomson.)

  To nobody’s surprise, Andy Irons was the one who stepped up to Slater in 2002. In fact, Irons owned the season beginning to end and took his first world title in a walkover; Slater failed to win an event and finished the year ranked ninth. In 2003, it was a different story. If anything, Irons was even sharper, but Slater was now completely back into the rhythm of full-time competition, and thrilled to finally have a rival worthy of the name—a career first—right there with him. Going into the Pipeline Masters, the last event of the year, Slater and Irons each had four wins and were virtually tied for the ratings lead. Advancing from opposite sides of the heat draw, both made the four-man final. Here was the showdown ASP fans had been waiting on for years. Whoever came out ahead would win the title.

  Slater owned these kinds of do-or-die situations, especially at Pipeline. Not this time. In thumping eight-foot tubes, it was Irons who turned superhuman at the crucial moments. Not only did he win the Masters and a second world championship, he apparently brought the Slater era to a close. He was still twenty-five, after all. Slater was nearly thirty-two. Just to make sure, Irons won a third title in 2004, while Slater failed to win a single event. Surfing magazine at that point ran a cover story titled “Generation Now,” illustrated with a portrait of Irons and seven other top pros—with Slater conspicuously missing.

  At that point Slater, somehow, found a new gear. He won four out of six contests during the middle of the 2005 season, and pulled down a seventh world championship title before the tour even got to Hawaii. He scared off any challengers in 2006 by winning the first two events, and added world title number eight. Then things got bizarre. After a pause—Mick Fanning darted in for the 2007 championship—Slater, in 2008, at age thirty-six, became virtually unbeatable, winning fully 90 percent of his heats, and six of eleven contests, including the Pipeline Masters. Irons stayed in the hunt for a while during this four-year period, finishing runner-up in 2005 and 2006. By the time Slater won his ninth championship, however, the Hawaiian was off the tour, saying he was burned out.

  Two things were now clear. First, in terms of individual athletic achievement, Slater had pretty much detached himself from his own sport. Comparing him to Mick Fanning, or Andy Irons, or Mark Richards was almost pointless. He’d moved up to some weird unquantifiable realm of super-champions, along with people like Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, and Lance Armstrong.

  The next point was less dramatic: surfing’s high-performance standard was advancing at a slower rate than it ever had. Beginning in the late 1940s, the sport’s generational changes had always been obvious, and usually abrupt, and that continued up until the early 1990s, when Slater and his teenaged New School friends launched themselves into the vanguard. Progress after that came at a smooth, incremental pace. (Tow surfing was in a separate category, and didn’t count.) Sure, the aerials were higher and more intricate in 2008 than 1992. The barrels were longer and deeper. But there were no sudden breakthroughs—nothing like Shaun Tomson’s Free Ride tube-weaving, or the 1956 American lifeguard team exploding Australia’s whole concept of surfing with an impromptu Malibu demonstration in the Sydney shorebreak.

  Nobody got to reinvent the sport more than once, Kelly Slater included. His ninth world title was a spectacular accomplishment. It wasn’t freaky, though. It was simply a better version of what he’d done to win his first world title, sixteen years earlier.

  Everyone in the Water: The New Women Surfers

  The women’s surfing movement continued to evolve. In its early stage, during the mid- and late-1990s, the whole thing was both dressed up and weighted down by Roxy Girl cuteness and by the high-wattage glamour of four-time world champion Lisa Andersen. This was about to change. In the first decade of the new century, as other top women surfers came to prominence, and as the fashion imperative began to wane, the female presence became more nuanced and diverse. As the process continued, the sport inched closer to a better version of itself.

  Lisa Andersen quit the tour halfway through the 1998 season, a few months after winning her fourth straight world championship. She was exhausted, her lower back was chronically sore, and her daughter was ready to start kindergarten. For awhile, it looked as if Andersen’s retirement would open up a Slater-like “who’s next?” void in the women’s division. It didn’t happen. Layne Beachley, a cheerful, driven, glam-free regularfooter from Sydney’s Dee Why Beach, matched Andersen’s four straight championships (beginning in 1998), extended the run to six, came up short for two years, then stormed back in 2006 to win a seventh and final title. Nobody could touch Beachley for range—and that included former champ Margo Oberg. She was quick and nimble in beachbreak waves and fearless on the North Shore. In 2001, while tow surfing with boyfriend Ken Bradshaw at Outside Log Cabins, Beachley became the first woman to crack the thirty-foot mark.

  The Beachley-Andersen comparisons were inevitable. The new champion was a classic overachiever who trained constantly. She was also friendly and foul-mouthed, open and accessible. In Beachley’s hands, the whole show—in the water, at the gym, at the post-contest party—came off as wildly enjoyable.

  Yet Andersen, even during Beachley’s long run at the top of the ASP ratings, remained the era’s defining female surfer. She had the greater pure gift for riding waves. Surfing came naturally to Andersen in a way that Beachley had to work for. But star power was the real difference. Andersen was cool and enigmatic and a known surf-world femme fatale. She played the sex angle. For a 1998 Surfing magazine portrait (similar to a 1980 shot of Jericho Poppler), she lounged in a bubble bath, one glistening leg resting on the edge of the tub, a coy smile playing across her face, and a bottle of champagne within arm’s reach. Beachley was known as “the Beast”—in homage to her big-wave gnarliness—and for her big 1998 portrait shoot, she was photographed in the gym, drenched in sweat, wearing a men’s tank top and boxing gloves. It was a telling moment. Women’s professional surfing was then still firmly attached to fashion (“Skin Deep: Do You Look as Good as You Surf?” was the title of a 1999 Surfing Girl cover story), and Andersen wasn’t just a title-holder, but the face of Roxy, the sport’s most fashionable surfwear brand. Beachley was a magnificent champion, and Billabong, her primary sponsor, did right to promote her as such—just as they did for team riders Mark Occhilupo and Andy Irons. But she was never more than an athlete. Plus, she arrived on the world stage just after Andersen—who was never less than an icon.

  Peru’s Sofia Mulanovich, the daughter of a Lima fish factory worker, took the 2004 world championship and helped change her entire country’s view of the sport. Surfing in Peru had long been an aristocratic boys-only club. Demographic change had already begun filtering into Latin America’s beaches and lineups, but Mulanovich—a compact sloe-eyed charmer with a low, fast, tightly coiled wave-riding style—greatly accelerated the process. By the late 2000s, roughly half of Peru’s surfers were from the expanding middle class, and among this new generation there was a small but fast-growing number of females.

  When the 2005 women’s world championship went to Chelsea Georgeson of Tweed Head, New South Wales, the message was simpler—the Aussie women w
ere becoming just as dominant at the professional level as their male counterparts.

  Meanwhile, Rochelle Ballard and Keala Kennelly, a pair of firewalking haole-Hawaiians, arguably had more effect on women’s surfing than any of the post-Andersen champions. Both had long ASP careers: Kennelly was runner-up to Beachley in the 2003, and Ballard was runner-up to Mulanovich in 2004. But their reputations had less to do with competition results and more with their pioneering work in hollow waves.

  ROCHELLE BALLARD.

  KEALA KENNELLY, TEAHUPOO, 2005.

  As of the mid-1990s, most women surfers, pros included, avoided the tube altogether. Those who tried didn’t ride it well. Some believed it was a matter of physiology—that women lacked the necessary leg strength, or they crouched differently than men. It didn’t help, as one surf journalist put it, that hollow surf is “fiercely contested, and in a dog-eat-dog lineup female surfers will always get axed by males.”

  Ballard and Kennelly learned to surf in Kauai, home to Hawaii’s thickest, hollowest, least-crowded breaks. They were comfortable riding over shallow reefs, and getting bounced was part of the game. By the time they turned pro, both surfers had a growing collection of scars across their feet, ankles, knees, and elbows. Of the two, Ballard was the better tube-riding technician, ready to ad-lib trajectory changes as needed, and showy enough that she might glide beneath the canopy in a full standup display—the first woman to do so.

  Kennelly was a slugger by comparison. Ballard took plenty of chances with her surfing, but Kennelly was almost masochistic, throwing herself into one imploding dead-end tube after another. She also powered through the biggest barrels any woman had ever ridden up to that point. Kennelly was a four-time winner of the ASP Teahupoo contest, and in 2005 she surprised nobody by becoming the first woman to tow surf there—at one point gunning her bright pink board through the middle of a full-blown eighteen-foot-by-eighteen-foot reef-smasher.

  Both also helped to broaden the image of the female surfer. Ballard, freckled and moon-faced, with short wash-and-go hair—a board-riding “Smurfette,” as described by a friend—was the tomboy antidote to the Roxy Girl. She was cute but low-glam, and perpetually hardcore, and the sport loved her for it: Ballard won the Surfer Poll Awards three times running, from 2000 to 2002. Kennelly, a rave club DJ with spiky bleached-white hair, didn’t quite come out and say she was gay or bisexual, but told surf journalist Matt George, for the record, that “it took a woman to finally make a woman out of me.” Like Ballard, she reaped nothing but appreciation, with two runner-up Surfer Poll finishes. “Surf fans really do see themselves in their icons,” the magazine pointed out, adding that Kennelly’s high rank proved that surfers were “a lot more open-minded” than they’d been given credit for.

  Indeed, surf-world homophobia, like sexism, seemed to be in retreat. A handful of ex-pro tour women came out of the closet, and in 2007 MTV aired a Los Angeles–based reality series called Curl Girls, about a group of lesbian surfers. One year later, a former ASP backbencher named Matt Branson posed for the cover of Stab magazine as a well-tattooed, pierced, head-shaved, openly gay man—the first male pro to come out.

  * * *

  If none of the twenty-first-century female surfers remade the sport the way Lisa Andersen did in the 1990s, it didn’t matter. By the time Gold Coast teenager Stephanie Gilmore won her first ASP world championship in 2007—ten years after Andersen retired—it was obvious that the whole enterprise could get along fine without a new icon.

  The female surfing population actually didn’t increase much in the 2000s, but the skill-level distribution changed, as thousands of women each year rode their way up and out of the beginner breaks. All the gear fit better now—wetsuits in particular—and there was a lot more of it. The fashion angle was toned down. Without making a fuss, Quiksilver brought the Roxy Girl campaign to an end. The little-girl pinks and blues that had colored women’s surfing in the 1990s never completely disappeared, but things were looking more adult at the pro level, where Gilmore—a radiant and relaxed five-foot-ten, 150-pound lioness of a surfer, all power and fluency—often used plain white boards and black wetsuits.

  AUSTRALIA’S STEPHANIE GILMORE, 2008.

  Wahine, Surfer Girl, and the rest of the women’s surf magazines died off one by one, and even this represented a form of progress. Most women surfers didn’t want to be partitioned off from the guys. Better to shoot for equal time in Surfer, Surfer’s Journal, and Australia’s Surfing Life. Sure, testosterone still dripped from the pages of most surf magazines. But women had established a small, defineable, permanent presence. There was Hawaiian super-grom Carassa Moore hucking the tail on the cover of Surfer. And here was pro tour rookie Sally Fitzgibbons on the back cover, in the new all-surfing Roxy campaign, slashing off the top.

  All of this was accompanied by a small but noteworthy change in semantics. There remained a certain utility to those gender-signifying adjectives that could be tacked onto “surfer”—“woman,” “girl,” chick,” and the rest. But usage was no longer obligatory. So what if more than four out of five surfers were male; that still left a few hundred thousand females in the water. Numbers brought acceptance, which in turn brought a form of nondifferentiation. The curvier ones with the chipped nail polish and tied-back hair—they were just surfers.

  The Retro Movement

  Surfing began to retrieve and recycle its past decades earlier, when the longboard was so enthusiastically put back into play, and the process continued with the return of big-wave riding. The sport was broader, more interesting, and more inclusive for these efforts. Introduced in the 1990s, the “retro movement” began as a self-amused, half-ironic fashion trek to the soul-surfing headwaters of the late-sixties and seventies. It wasn’t a sport-wide craze. But by early in the new century, in most surf towns, it wasn’t hard to find at least a few bearded, bead-wearing Generation Y surfers with a closet full of vintage threads, a moldering beavertail wetsuit jacket, and at least two or three battered swap-meet single-fin boards at the ready.

  There was more to it than beach-hipster fashion wankery, though. The retro movement tapped into a broader desire among surfers everywhere for an alternative presentation—one that didn’t involve competition, ratings, logo overkill, and gratuitous aggression. You didn’t need to be a hardcore soul-era reenactor to enjoy videos like Sprout, Litmus, or A Brokedown Melody, all of which tapped into Morning of the Earth’s poetic slowed-down grooviness. (You did, however, need a raised threshold for earnestness and high purpose. Aussie writer and director Andrew Kidman, surfing’s principal neo-soul auteur, compared the sport’s new interest in its past to Bob Dylan’s tutelage under Woody Guthrie.)

  JOEL TUDOR, EARLY RETRO PERIOD, 1999.

  TYLER WARREN, NEW GENERATION LONGBOARDER.

  The retro movement also inspired a much-needed change in surfing equipment. In the early 1990s, shortboards suddenly went hyper-thin, narrow, and lifted. This New School-influenced “glass slipper” model provided turn-on-a-dime handling for the world’s best surfers but was a disaster for anyone below the expert level—it paddled like a serving tray, felt twitchy underfoot, and bogged down the moment it hit a flat spot. “For the first time in the sport’s history,” California surfer-shaper Dave Parmenter wrote in 1993, “the boards being ridden by pros cannot be ridden by the average surfer.” In response, Parmenter created a wide, flat, thoroughly practical alternative called the Stubb Vector. The Stubb didn’t ricochet off the lip or twirl in midair. But it caught waves like a dream, planed well, turned smoothly, and was user-friendly in just about every way. It also had the sex appeal of a VW Beetle. World-tour pros ignored the Stubb, as did most surf magazine editors, and it was doomed to niche-level popularity.

  Retro exponents agreed with Parmenter that most surfers needed more foam under their feet. Their preferred design, however, was a stumpy, split-tailed twin-fin called the fish. Introduced three decades earlier by San Diego kneeboarder Steve Lis, the fish liked to run on a straight lin
e and was a chore to ride in hollow surf—but it absolutely breezed across small, powerless waves.

  The fish was the hottest board to hit the market since the tri-fin. Style legend Tom Curren rode his to devastating effect at Jeffreys Bay, and better still, the fish was pulled from the deepest recesses of the newly fashionized seventies. This meant it could be introduced (or reintroduced) as the very height of à la mode surf-cool. To better market the whole thing, there was an unspoken agreement among boardmakers and the surf media that the fish could be modified or updated in any number of ways—curvier outline, more rocker, three fins instead of two—and still be called a fish.

  There was more. The retro movement encouraged board experimentation in general, and surfing was better off for it. High-performance tri-fins remained the shortboarder’s default equipment choice. But the pressure was off to ride what the pros were riding, and from the early 2000s forward, especially when conditions were marginal, surfers took to the water on a menagerie of wave-craft: fish, quad-fins, antique single-fins—even longboards.

  * * *

  Longboarding’s place in the retro movement was a little hard to pin down. In general, shortboarders and longboarders still didn’t have much to do with each other, and plenty of breaks remained segregated. But tensions between the two groups had eased over the decades. Furthermore, a young and conspicuously hip new generation of longboarders had arrived, and Joel Tudor of San Diego, the group’s best-known member, had for better and worse become surfing’s poster boy for all things retro.