Competitive surfing in the age of Nixon needed a rock-bottom moment, a wreck to crawl away from, and with the 1972 World Championships in San Diego it got a beauty. What a bleak and luckless and monumentally stunted event. Conceived with good intentions, sure. Nobody involved set to rip off or otherwise harm the sport. But good intentions were quickly stampeded by bad choices, ineptitude and, above all, lethargy. With a few exceptions, the '72 World Contest was filled with people—contestants and administrators, both—who didn't really seem to be trying. Partly because that was the prevailing attitude of the time, especially in California. Partly because Hawaii had earlier agreed to host the event then bailed out just a few months before the October start time, at which point the contest went full white elephant. 

You could see this thing was going to be a loser from a mile away. The money guys sure took a pass. Surf company CEOs glanced at the World Contest prospectus and kept their checkbooks tucked away in their Op cord walkshorts, non-endemic corporate sponsors wouldn't even pick up the phone, and event organizers were finally reduced to crowdfunding. "The World Contest," SURFER announced that summer, "is sponsored solely by 

, the surfers, through the purchase of World Contest T-shirts and programs." Right on, man, I'll buy a program and help out! Whoops, sorry, the programs are boxed up at the printers because the payment check bounced. (

 magazine, in its World Contest Preview, offered bitter fruit in the opening paragraph: "Surfers in general don't care one bit for contests, even the World Contest.")

Meanwhile, the list of '72 World Contest absentees looked like a handbill from the latest Hal Jepsen flick (Aurness, Farrelly, Godfrey, Young, Hamilton, Tabeling, and Lynch, for starters); localism took aim and kicked the event hard in the nuts (David Nuuhiwa's competition board was stolen, stabbed, broken, graffitied, and hung by a rope from the Ocean Beach Pier on finals day); and the head of the International Surfing Federation was publicly feuding with the event organizer. 

And the waves? The waves mostly sucked. Okay four-footers at Oceanside for the prelims, then onshore high-tide averageness at La Jolla Shores, then waist-high dribblers at Ocean Beach for the finals. There's a short movie out there on the '72 World Contest, and watching it you just feel sorry that on top of everything else, the ocean itself turned its back on the event.

Except it didn't. Halfway into the 10-day World Contest waiting period, Tropical Storm Joanne lit up every southern-exposure break on the coast. On Wednesday, October 5, Third Point Malibu was double overhead and light offshore from dawn to dusk. Lowers was even bigger. And Newport Point, as it does every ten or so years, was out-Pipelining Pipeline. Two days in a row. Big, thick, throaty left tubes, spitting sand and foam and broken boards, with a few Backdoor-ish rights thrown in for good measure.

And thus, my reimagined alt-history version of the 1972 World Championships: 

Gerry Lopez, the most revered and most reluctant surfer in the event,  scrapes through a couple of mushed-out Oceanside prelim heats, arrives two days later at Newport Point in all its thundering Joanne-juiced glory, pulls out a gleaming 7' 4" Lightning Bolt pintail while everybody else desperately changes fins on their roly-poly little beachbreak models, and paddles out as Honk plugs in and blasts "Tunnel of Love" into the salty Newport air. Three heats and a dozen or so firewalking tuberides later, Lopez saunters up the beach at Newport as your new world champ, ascends the winner's podium, and gives an enigmatic smile as he finishes up a haiku-like victory speech. "It's a cakewalk." Mic drop.

But no, that was never going to happen. 

Not because the event was San Diego's baby, and moving things north of Oceanside was out of the question. And not because, as Drew Kampion wrote, the whole contest was dripping with "negative karma." No, Lopez just wasn't a big enough contest-obsessed bastard to win. I the gods had interceded and the event was magically transported to Newport Point with 10-foot pinwheeling A-frames for all—Jeff Crawford would have grabbed the cheese, not Lopez. Jeff had the chops and was a very big bastard indeed. Gerry? Gerry didn't really give a shit.

[Crawford surf photo by Jeff Divine; Lopez photo by Lance Trout]

ALTERNATIVE SURF HISTORY: LOPEZ WINS '72 WORLD TITLE!

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