Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

As it had throughout the 1960s and '70s, surfing developed internationally at a happy, ambling pace during the 1980s and early '90s. Vetea David of Tahiti won the juniors’ division of the 1986 World Surfing Championships. From a distance, Peru’s euphoniously-named Luis Miguel “Magoo” de la Rosa, a seven-time national champion from Lima, could easily be mistaken for Tom Carroll. Tel Aviv became a minor European surfing hot spot, and a few dozen Italian 

 were thrashing around in the mostly wind-chopped waves off of Livorno, Viareggio, and Genoa. The Swedish Surfing Association was up and running. A Norse fireman named Roar Berge had taken to the reefs and points near Stavanger. German lifeguards were shooting the shorebreak in the North Sea.

Surfing grew faster in some places than others. After Quiksilver Europe opened a retail outlet in Biarritz in 1985, the town became France’s version of Orange County, filled with surf shops, surf-themed restaurant and bars, and huge retail outlets for Billabong, Rip Curl, and others. The Biarritz surf was only middling good. But Hossegor’s board-snapping world-class tubes were only a few miles to the north, and just across the Spanish border, not far from Bilbao, at the mouth of the Guernica Estuary, long, fast, time-warping barrels could be had at a place called Mundaka. Doing business in Biarritz was always a pleasure.

Then there was Brazil. In the 1980s, as civilian government replaced a two-decade period of military rule, the country rose to the top tier of surfing nations—a phenomenon that seemed to miniaturize all other international developments in the sport during the period.

Brazil’s emergence as a surfing power caught most Americans and Australians by surprise. The Atlantic side of South America is hemmed by a huge wave-reducing continental shelf, which means that Brazil doesn’t have a single A-grade break along its entire 4,800-mile coast. As such, it was never much of a surf travel destination, and like Japan, the country posed a language barrier for English-speaking surfers. Nevertheless, Brazilian surfers—mostly the upper-class sons of Rio diplomats, financiers, and industrialists—had been hitting it hard since Australian Peter Troy gave an impromptu wave-riding demonstration at Arpoador Beach in 1964. The country offered some real advantages to the surfer: it was warm all year, the waves were small but rarely altogether flat, and there was plenty of room. Also, beachgoing, fitness, and public display were national obsessions—surfing combined all three.

For these and other reasons, Brazil became the first developing nation to break into surfing's first rank. In the next century, it would move to the fore.

In the 1960s, Brazil was known in part as a nation that seemed to be forever defaulting on its potential greatness. Industry took root, tourism boomed, and yet the country was still defined to a large degree by poverty and crime, inflation and corruption. Rio was noted nearly as much for its depressed 

 shantytowns, sky-high murder rate, and fortressed estates, as it was for its sexy urbane panache. The gap between rich and poor was huge in every Latin American nation. In Brazil it was surreal.

Yet no country in the world was better at having a good time—in the cafes and clubs, along the boardwalks and beaches, on soccer fields, and especially during the long, thrumming, sweat-drenched 

 bacchanalia. The first few generations of Brazilian surfers, in fact, approached the sport as a kind of 

 samba on the waves, with everyone paddling out in large, happy groups. They were aggressive and often fearless. In the 1970s, when Rio’s best surfers began visiting the North Shore, the established pros watched with a mixture of concern, amusement, and scorn as the “Brazil nuts,” one after another, clawed their way into sucky triple-overhead closeouts, got obliterated, came up laughing and roaring Portuguese swears to their friends, then paddled back out for another try.

Technically, Brazil was one of the original world-tour host countries, as it launched the IPS-rated Waimea 5000 at Rio’s Arpoador Beach in 1976. The total prize purse was just $2,400, and just a few of the gypsy tour pros bothered to enter. But a handsome 16-year-old Rio goofyfooter named Pepe Lopes earned a fair-and-square win, which in turn gained him an invite to that year’s Pipeline Masters, where he beat future world champions Shaun Tomson and Peter Townend for a finals berth.

During the 1980s, the Waimea 5000 was still regarded by most traveling pros as an optional event. It was a week-long party more than a surf contest. The local pros were happy to pull out every stop to show a visiting surf-celeb a good time, the local women were as forward as they were beautiful—getting laid in Rio, one California pro once said, was “like fishing with dynamite”—and cocaine was often piled in white hillocks across the nearest coffee table. Still, the contest itself was predictably held in gutless waist-high surf, and the loud and enthusiastic spectators packed onto Arpoador Beach could, visiting pros learned, turn ugly at a moment’s notice. After beating two or three local favorites during the prelims of the 1979 Waimea 5000, a top-ten pro from Australia named Chris Byrne was pelted by sand, food, and bottles as he ran up the beach during his quarterfinal heat. Byrne stopped, turned, raised a middle finger to the audience—“Very nearly an act of suicide in Rio,” as world champ Wayne Bartholomew later observed—and later needed a police escort to get from the contest site to his hotel room.

Surfing’s popularity exploded in Brazil during the late '70s and early '80s, as Sao Paulo became just as surf-crazed as Rio. Racing to get into this hot new market, local entrepreneurs took advantage of Brazil’s anything-goes patent laws, and tens of thousands of young Brazilian wave-riders were soon found 

 in contraband Lightning Bolt T-shirts, Rainbow sandals, and Quiksilver boardshorts. It was full-frontal product piracy, and American and Australian companies had no legal recourse. The surfing industry wasn’t being singled out—bootlegged goods of every description were available across Latin America. But it further widened the gap between Brazil and the rest of the surfing community, as the sport’s top CEOs were now looking at this huge, ascending nation of surfers and feeling ripped off.

Brazilian surfers, from the beginning, were serious about competition. The model, of course, was the Brazilian national soccer team, with its collection of World Cup trophies and its roster of legendary players, past and present. Soccer—along with Formula One racing, another Brazilian specialty—gave surfers not just a huge dose of national sporting pride but a sense of destiny. The surf competition machinery was soon in place. By 1988, Brazil had two events on the world tour schedule, a first-rate national pro tour, and a sound amateur system. New, nonpirated domestic companies like Hang Loose surfwear and Mormaii wetsuits, even while battling astronomical inflation rates, pumped a lot of money into sponsoring the country’s best riders.

That same year, a moon-faced regularfooter named Fabio Gouveia, from the outskirts of Joao Pessoa, flew to Puerto Rico and effortlessly won the men’s division of the World Surfing Championships. Gouveia turned pro a few weeks later, along with junior division semifinalist Flavio Padaratz. They made an odd pair. Padaratz, an upper-middle-class suburbanite from Florianopolis, spent the previous year living in Huntington Beach, where he learned perfect surf-inflected English, competed in the National Scholastic Surfing Association, and made sure he was in range whenever a photographer turned up on the beach. Blond and handsome, friendly and talkative, quick and flashy in the water—Padaratz was the one who seemed poised to be Brazil’s breakthrough pro.

Gouveia was poor, quiet, shy, spoke no English, and looked, as surf journalist Ben Marcus wrote, “like a Portuguese fisherman.” It would have surprised no one if he’d packed up his amateur World Championship trophy and gone home for a long, moderately well-paying career on the domestic pro circuit. Gouveia wasn’t an eye-catching surfer, like Padaratz, but his turns were beautifully linked, and he hit a lot of the same clear, chiming style notes as Tom Curren.

The two surfers set out together on the 1989 world tour. Gouveia finished the season ranked #25 and picked up rookie-of-the-year honors; four years later, he went all the way to a year-end #5 rating. Padaratz was slower off the mark but worked his way up to #8 in 1994. Brazil had never before had even a mid-ranking world-tour surfer. Now it had two in the top ten. Moreover, the number of world-caliber surfers coming up behind Gouveia and Padaratz appeared to be endless, and that extended to every platform of competitive surfing: men, women, juniors, seniors; shortboard, longboard, bodyboard; amateur and pro; individual and team. Brazilians were poised to compete, and in many cases, dominate.

Naively or not, many people behind the Brazilian push believed that competitive success would bring about a smooth sharing of power. "We will win contests in small waves, in good waves, and in big waves,” predicted Rio-based 

 magazine editor Rosaldo Calvacanti, right about the time Gouveia and Padaratz were doing just that, “and everybody will then have to take their hats off to us.”

No such luck. Brazil’s rise on the world stage only seemed to invite complaints and negative remarks from other surfers. Much of it was aimed at their competitive success: it was said that Brazilians choked in big events; that they didn’t bring any style to the game; that they won because they had a better minor-league pro tour back home. In the early years, there was some truth to all of these charges. But in fact the Brazilians had spent a decade turning themselves into a nation of finely-tuned competitors, and they played hard and fair. Every title they picked up was well-earned.

A second and louder critique focused on the Brazilian national character. A 1989 

 article noted that “most surfers think ‘Brazilian’ is synonymous for loud, obnoxious, and ready to hassle.” This was the polite end of a spectrum of remarks that bottomed out with a 1994 

 feature in which the Brazilian is described as a "bastard surfer . . . a dark-haired, rude-as-fuck, uncivilized prick, ripping off [other people’s waves] like a pirate stealing gold.”

Brazilians were convinced that the Americans and Australians were conspiring to prevent the Latin newcomers from taking their rightful place in the first rank. “They simply despise the growth of Brazilian surfing,” one Rio surf journalist said. Rosaldo Calvacanti agreed: “They look for any excuse to punish us. Anything. They’re afraid of us.” There was no proof of a coordinated effort to keep Brazil down, but the charges weren’t groundless. Americans and Australians didn’t do much outreach. The Brazilians didn’t get much time in surf videos. They didn't get the cover of 

. Fabio Gouveia, Flavio Padaratz, and the rest of the Brazilian pros to follow—none of them placed anywhere near the top of the annual SURFER Poll Awards.

To some degree, Calvacanti was right. Americans and Aussies 

 afraid of the Brazilians. This was a developing country; surfers here lived in closer proximity to violence and poverty, which gave them a certain hardness. The Brazilians occasionally spooked other surfers. A top-rated Brazilian pro once responded to a quarterfinals elimination by launching a volley of rocks onto the judges stand. One of the original 1970s “Brazil nuts” was stabbed to death by his own brother. Brazilian culture ran hot. People loved that so long as it was safely channeled—into a big night on the Ipanema boardwalk, say, or watching a World Cup soccer match in a public square. Surfing wasn’t always mediated that way, however, and some felt the country and its wave-riders weren’t so much exciting as dangerous.

In the final analysis, though, what really kept the larger surf world from fully embracing Brazil boiled down to etiquette. For all their self-congratulatory pride over having refused signed on to the mainstream social contract, surfers had of course produced a social contract of their own. You traveled in small groups. When visiting a new break, you didn’t make a lot of noise. The guy closest to the peak has right-of-way. All of these courtesies, and dozens more, might be ignored or abridged for a variety of reasons, but from Malibu to Chiba, Pipeline to Padang, everyone pretty much understood the code. Everyone but the Brazilians. Furthermore, they didn’t seem to care. “Our behavior in the surf is a natural thing,” one Brazilian world tour pro shrugged. “We usually come in large groups,” a Porto Alegre surf shop owner explained to an American reporter. “It’s two or three truckloads of us, which crowds the break and pisses people off.” As 

 surf journalist Reinaldo Andraus summarized, “Brazilians in general . . . talk loudly and practice little respect for their neighbors.”

Ironically, by being loud, rude, and aggressive, the Brazilians were treating surfers the way surfers—particularly two or three decades earlier—had famously treated everyone else. The Americans and Australians were too busy gnashing their teeth to appreciate the poetic justice.

Time passed, and the relationship between Brazil and the rest of the world’s surfers slowly improved. Other surfing nations became familiar with the Brazilian approach, and the Brazilians—some of them—claimed that exposure to other surf cultures was changing their own. “Our manners are getting better,” the Porto Alegre shop owner said. “Maybe in the future we are all going to share waves.” Americans didn't much care to share with Americans, and ditto with the Aussies, so the idea that there would be shared waves among nations was far-fetched at best. But the idea that Brazil would soon become a fully accredited surfing power, along with Australia, mainland America, and Hawaii—all of whom were a bit dysfunctional, among themselves and with others—proved accurate.

By being loud and aggressive, Brazilians were treating surfers the way surfers—particularly two or three decades earlier—had famously treated everyone else. But the Americans and Australians were too busy gnashing their teeth to appreciate the poetic irony.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

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