I am optimistic about professional surfing. My wobbly Twitter feed often says otherwise, I know. When a tight world title race gets routed through feckless European beachbreaks, for instance. Or when Joe Turpel's adenoidal phrasemaking worms into my Celexa-fortified pyramid of calm.

But the new men's world champion is under 30 years old and Brazilian and polarizing and mysterious and I can't take my eyes off him. Kelly Slater just announced he'll be at Snapper. Moore-Wright-Gilmore-Fitzgibbons is the greatest world tour foursome since Cheyne-Shaun-MR-Bugs and Three Mile Island were blowing up all at once.

But I am not 1974-level optimistic. I have no data to back this up, but in my opinion 1974, two years before the official WCT launch, was when all of us—magazine editors, writers, workaday surfers—were feeling most bullish about what we were then calling "professionalism." With good reason. Jeff Crawford won the Pipeline Masters that year to prove that even a kid from Florida could rise to the top at surfing's most hallowed break. Reno Abellira beat Jeff Hakman by a razor-thin margin to win the '74 Smirnoff at pulverizing Waimea. The Hawaiians, in fact, were so pumped on competing for money that they came off their Rushmore-like perches on the North Shore and traveled overseas to put jerseys on and ride crap waves for points. Reno and Jeff and Gerry Lopez and Rory Russell all flew to Australia to compete. Barry Kanaiaupuni, even! (It didn't last. Lopez was just two years away from ending a piece of contest reportage with this Zen-koan towel snap: "With one event left, the World Cup, it's anyone's guess as to who will end up on top this winter. But then again are contests an indication of anything? Go surfing.")

1974 also brought the debut Coca-Cola Surfabout, in Sydney. The Coke, as everybody called it, has a big prize purse (big at the time, anyway: $7,000), unprecedented media coverage, a multi-round format and a still-new "objective" scoring system. It was enough to coax Nat Young out of retirement. Young was just 26, but eight years past his groundbreaking 1966 world title win, and as now famously and often bitingly critical of surfing competition. A few years earlier he'd gone full soul monster in Byron Bay—chickens in yard, lumberjack whiskers, Maharishi quotes on the wall, every box checked. Now here he was back in Sydney, beardless, fit as fuck and ready to rumble.

The excerpt below is from Young's excellent 1998 biography, Nat's That and That's That. It begins a few weeks before the Coke contest, with Young watching Michael Peterson warm up for the Bells Beach Rip Curl Pro.

He was surfing brilliantly, ripping every available wave to shreds. Back when I'd been living in Byron and making regular trips to the Gold Coast, I'd watched Michael's development with interest. On a solid easterly swell at Kirra, his performance in and around the curl was flawless, and the amount of spray he'd put in my eyes during one of his cutbacks at Burleigh was awesome. Watching him now for the top of the cliff at Bells I was thinking that he'd be the one to take my place and not Wayne Lynch as I'd once thought would be the case. Wayne simply didn't have the temperament to win consistently, only on the rare occasions when all the variables came together.

I had a weird feeling about Peterson filling my shoes as a competitor. He was a real street fighter who'd do anything to win, and sometimes watching him I felt as though I was looking in a mirror. Michael was making all the same moves as I would, but cleaner and sharper, with more power and direction. It was almost eerie, that day at Bells. I could sense every move before he made it; it was like watching a movie of myself—I knew exactly what he was thinking.

But watching Michael surf in his heats at Bells also caused me to lose faith in both him and the new objective "points-per-manoeuver" scoring system, which was just coming into use at that time. He took off on a bad wave, made a turn and the wave closed out. Instead of flicking off, though, and getting another wave, he went straight in the foam, moved forward in a crouch position and dangled one foot over the nose all the way to the beach. Under the new system this gave him the necessary points to win the heat, but I thought it was a shocking display, and not worthy of his talent. I was angry at a system that had forced Michael to compromise his surfing to the point of making it look like a game of pinball. He was performing like a trained seal, and I felt sick watching it. In fact, I marched down to the officials' tent and gave [contest director] Stan Couper an earful about how shithouse the new system was. In retrospect I took it much too seriously—taking things too seriously is one of my weak points—but I hated the idea of Michael prostituting his talent just to win a contest.

After Bells, everyone was off to Sydney for the first Coca-Cola Surfabout contest, and I made a point of cornering Michael in the carpark at Narrabeen before the first day of competition began. We smoked a joint together and talked about the scoring system; by the end of our rave we were both laughing.

All the competitors at Narrabeen were buzzing with the news that there was to be a national circuit of professional contests in 1975. The thought occurred to me that I should be trying harder to make a living out of contest surfing. I felt a bit of a hypocrite, really. I didn't mind sponsorship deal, being paid to do ads seemed fair, but I'd made statements against surfing in contests for money. I needed more exposure to professional surfing to make a decision, so I not only entered the Coke contest, but decided to take it seriously. I could use the money. Making boards was okay, but it was hard, dusty work that I didn't want to be doing forever. Things were tight for me financially. I'd recently lost $10,000 on my foray into the cattle industry, and our house payments were a drain. Perhaps the Coke contest was exactly what I needed to get me out of the soul surfer role and back into the real world.

The contest started on May 1st, 1974. May is usually a good time of year for waves in Sydney. The event consisted of a number of rounds, and was mobile, moving to the best beach on any given day, so chances of poor waves were minimized. The second round was held on the outside ledge at Fairy Bower, in good eight-to-10-foot surf, and everyone who knew how to ride solid powerful waves reveled in the conditions. The headland was covered with thousands of spectators and looked fantastic from the water—I felt like an actor onstage with all those faces staring down at me. I got one big deep tube which got the highest score of the day, and my self-confidence was restored; perhaps I really could make a living from professional surfing. I felt as though I was finally surfing up to my potential after the last few years out of competition.

Then, predictably, the surf dropped the following day and the contest moved to Narrabeen for the duration—and it was there I decided not to become a professional surfer. I found myself doing my best to kill the other guy to advance out of my heats. By injecting a relatively small amount of money into a new sport, Coke executives had us all fighting and squabbling like hungry chooks over a handful of wheat. The cash put a whole new slant on things.

Still, I held my own at Narrabeen. Michael Peterson ended up winning the contest, Ian Cairns was runner-up, and I took third. I wasn't disappointed. I felt I'd been judged fairly. I felt lucky to have experienced professional surfing up close. But that was essentially it for me. The money turned the contest into a dog-eat-dog event, and by going for public exposure over quality surfing locations, contests were unlikely to be held in good waves, and these weren't conditions I was prepared to compete under. It was the end of an era. You could see where things were heading, even at the Coke. It was going to be all about coaching and training, and surfing was going to be just like every other sport. Twenty years passed before professional surfing realized its folly and began holding events at proven locations at the right time of year.

NAT YOUNG AND THE '74 SURFABOUT. IT'S COMPLICATED

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