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

Tom Curren was never a flag-waver. Asked by a reporter in 1986 how national pride fit into his recent world-title win, Curren answered that he was “basically doing this for myself.” He married a French woman in 1983, and moved to the Basque coast, near Biarritz, where he spent nearly five years as a 

Curren was an exception, however. In the 1980s, surfers across the United States let loose with celebrations trumpeting their long-awaited return to international surf competition glory. The American surf media did everything but tag Curren’s haunch with a stars-and-stripes branding iron. 

announced his first world title with a five-color, boldface, drop-shadow cover blurb: “Great Day For The USA!” As introduced in a movie called 

, Curren was a “true American hero," and his profile wrapped up with a tribute montage played over a song whose chorus went, “You’re the top cat, pride of the USA / Top cat, champion of the world.” For eight straight years, 

 readers voted Curren the number-one spot in the magazine’s annual Readers Poll Awards.

West Coasters were especially invested. They were eager to point out that Curren didn'g get to the top by having simply out-Aussied the Australians, which meant his success had to be indigenous to California. Curren was often said to have a “pointbreak” style (point surf being a West Coast specialty), or that he ripped as hard as anyone, but still had “California soul.” A minority suggested he was instead a freak of nature, a wave-riding savant who would have been a huge star no matter what coast he grew up on. But California surfers in general weren’t having it. For 20 years, they’d been withdrawn and marginalized. Now they were desperate to fully re-engage with the international surfing community—not just engage, but 

—and that goal was much closer to reality if Curren was claimed as distinctively, thoroughly Californian. Even if he was living in the Basque country, surfing the Aquitaine coast, drinking Bordeaux, and speaking French.

The California push involved more than just Curren. By 1985, Brad Gerlach, a flamboyant San Diego County regularfooter with a smashed-in nose and a wicked forehand top-turn, had already won his first world-tour contest. Gerlach would eventually go as high as #2 in the final ratings, then remake himself as a big-wave rider. Curren’s junior high school classmate Kim Mearig won the women’s pro tour in 1983 and finished runner-up in 1987. Mearig and Curren both got their equipment from Al Merrick, a quiet, deep-voiced, Santa Barbara shaper who helped put California back on top of the world’s boardmaking industry.

Output and craftsmanship had never dropped off in California, even during the states’ long post-boom funk. But for 15 years, from the plastic machine up to the tri-fin, nearly all of the important board-design advances had been made by Australians and Hawaiians. Now the pendulum was again in motion. There were no more Thruster-like breakthroughs in the 1980s, but the refinement process was led by San Diego’s Gary Linden and Rusty Preisendorfer—Mark Occhilupo’s surfing advanced noticeably after switching to the Preisendorfer label in 1984—while Merrick’s impeccably balanced and foiled boards became the industry standard.

Meanwhile, the whole sport was becoming ever-more garish and gaudy, from 

 mauve-and-yellow zebra-strip cover logo to the smeary magenta of Zinka brand sunscreen to Pipeline specialist Jon Damm’s favorite 1985 North Shore ensemble, which consisted of a purple Lycra vest, pink-and-white trunks, and a yellow board with jagged pink-and-blue fault-line stripes. Reflective wraparound Oakley Blade sunglasses were in, as were oversized Casio digital watches. Not all '80s surfers used mousse or gel, but plenty did, and the lineup often smelled faintly of off-gassing hair product. Labels and stickers became the pox of endorsement-era professionalism, and the front half of every pro’s board—the part that showed most readily in photos—was now blistered with sponsors’ logos.

Some surfers were horrified by the new look. Others were energized. Still others saw opportunity. Here was the cultural foundation upon which a huge sideshow-filled surf event could be built; a platform to both satisfy and exploit a new generation of ready-to-be-hyped world-tour pros.

Beachwear leader Ocean Pacific began planning a massive whirligig of a contest around Tom Curren even before the company signed him to a five-year sponsorship contract. The event would be called the Op Pro, and it was scheduled for Labor Day weekend, 1982, at Huntington Pier. Originally, the contest was modeled after the Coca-Cola Surfabout, Australia’s biggest and richest event. Then Op signed off on an eye-popping $400,000 marketing budget—ten times bigger than any other contest on the schedule that year—and contest officials tore up the original plan and started over.

The Op wouldn’t be the first pro contest in California to draw an international field. The annual Katin Pro-Am, also held at Huntington, dated back to 1977, and was the oldest. The 1978 California Pro was the most embarrassing—the prize-money checks all bounced, and the contest organizer skipped town. In 1981, six years after the pro tour was founded, California finally got on the event schedule with the US Pro, held at Malibu. Up to this point, California's pro events all looked pretty much alike: a dozen folding chairs, a megaphone, some plastic bunting to mark off the officials’ area, a few nylon banners stuck in the sand, and five hundred spectators, give or take. Nobody had much of an operating fund. Also, a vestigial tendency remained to keep things low-key—to not “over-amp,” as the phrase went.

Ocean Pacific was having none of that. They wanted noise and bombast, sideshows and huge crowds. They wanted a VIP area with laminated access passes, front page coverage, and the Goodyear blimp floating overhead. In short, they wanted the Superbowl of pro contests.

That’s just what they got. The Labor Day weekend weather was perfect, and 35,000 people cheered Cheyne Horan to victory over Shaun Tomson in the finals—with the Goodyear blimp, sure enough, watching from above. 

 cheerfully noted that the Op Pro “reached a pitch that could only be described as hysteria.” 

 ran a full-page shot of Horan getting mobbed by fans just after the final, and Horan responded by saying he “wouldn’t have put on as good a performance” if not for all the “noise, yelling, and screaming.”

Contest director and just-retired pro Ian Cairns said the Op Pro would bring a “massive payoff” for the sport, and he was right. Companies who’d been eyeing the circuit as a potential new channel into the 18-to-24-year-old demographic now rushed forward, and within two years the number of pro-tour men’s division events doubled, from 12 to 24.

A world tour schism formed. Most of the established contests stuck with the “waiting period” format, meaning the event could be held at any point during a predetermined ten-day block of time. A few contests were also mobile and could move up or down the coast. In both cases, the idea was to give the pros every possible chance at scoring good waves. Spectators were welcome, but they had to stand by and wait, like everybody else.

The Op Pro wasn’t the first tour event to flip things around and put spectators before waves, but it took the concept to a new extreme. Everybody knew where and when the Op would run, and every heat was scheduled to the minute, with the finals always taking place on Sunday afternoon. It was hard to argue with Op’s success, and the “parking lot contest"—so named because the venue, above all, had to be located next to a major municipal parking lot—became the world tour standard.

Parking lot contests had a certain democratic appeal. Local fans, whose contact with the pros might otherwise be limited to movies and magazines, could now turn up at a given time and place to see their favorite surfers in person. There were also a few tremendous Sunday afternoon clashes, including a two-out-of-three showdown between Mark Occhilupo and Tom Curren at the 1985 Op Pro that was half prizefight and half Woodstock, and ended in a thrilling 2-1 victory for the Australian.

Still, while every event organizer hoped for a ripping Occy-Curren battle, or something like it, high-end surfing wasn’t the point of a parking lot contest. What counted was putting 20,000 people on the beach. To that end, there were expo booths, product displays, a video lounge, and a halfpipe ramp for skaters and BMX riders. There were sidelight competitions for juniors, longboarders, and bodyboarders, a Jet Ski demonstration, and usually a “legends” heat for retired pros. Two or three local rock bands played an afternoon set. Event programs and posters were handed out by the thousands; MCs lobbed surf wax, T-shirts, and other freebies into the crowd; wetsuits, boards, even cars, were raffled off; and a haze of atomized suntan lotion and deep-fried food hung over the whole show. For an hour or so on Saturday afternoon, and again on Sunday, all action in the water was halted for the bikini contest – which invariably upstaged everything. Alcohol usually wasn’t sold at beachfront concession stands, and was often banned outright by city ordinance, but plenty of spectators arrived with backpack-smuggled six-packs of beer, and drunken howls went up as the bikini contestants strutted and posed. By the time the surf contest final itself rolled around, a lot of audience members were already spent.

For two or three years it was kind of a rush. Then it began to feel like overkill. What happened to presenting the sport to the general public as a casual, deep-blue, open-space activity—like it was in 

 On whose behalf were these beachfront carnival events being staged for, anyway? From the debut Op Pro, surf journalists pointed out that jumbo-contest attendees were mostly beachgoers, not surfers. Was the idea to get all those people in the water? To turn them into surf fans? Was that even possible?

The promise of a “Surfing Superbowl,” of an ultimate contest, never panned out because most events like the Op Pro were held in lousy waves. The surfing on display was by and large a hobbled, even comical version of elite-level sportcraft – like Olympic fencers dueling with cardboard tubes. Yes, the big contests made the local sports page and were featured briefly on the local evening news. But there wasn’t much evidence that spectators were in fact being converted into fans. There wasn’t much evidence, for that matter, that competition in 

 waves turned nonsurfing spectators into fans. There was too much downtime between rides, and unless you already surfed, it was next to impossible to tell a good ride from a great ride.

The 1986 Op Pro riot, in hindsight, was inevitable. On Sunday afternoon, just before the men’s finals, in a crowded area behind the bleachers, two women had their bikini tops yanked down. The police were called. They arrived and were pelted with cans. More police were called, more cans were thrown, things escalated, and within the hour, less than a hundred yards from the contest site, thousands of rioters had set cars on fire, smashed windows at the lifeguard headquarters, and held off more than 150 baton-wielding police reinforcements. Contestants, Op officials, fans, journalists, a city councilman, and an MTV film crew – everybody was pinned down at the contest site for another two hours until the area was cleared.

The fallout from the Op Pro riot was immediate. Ian Cairns resigned as world tour executive director and moved back to Australia. Pro surfers, all of whom started out as enthusiastic supporters, finally began talking about the downside of jumbo contests. Poor surf was their big complaint, but it also hurt their professional pride to have to vie for attention with Jet Ski shows, half-pipe demonstrations, and bikini models. “The great mainstream experiment has failed,” a 

 editorial declared. Forget the big crowds, the magazine advised; wave-riding isn’t like other sports. As presented on the world circuit, surfing had come to resemble nothing so much as a “plug horse in a straw hat, straining for the unobtainable carrot dangling in front of its nose.”

In 1988, when the grumbling from competitors began to feel like a brewing revolt, world tour officials sent an open letter to pro surfers that reminded them, “sponsors [are at] the very top of the ladder . . . you actually work for them.” Pro surfing’s corporate backers for the most part wanted to keep their big events and prime youth-market demographic hookup. Bombastic fixed-date world-tour contests would lumber on through the rest of the 1980s and into the next decade before the advantages of a smaller, leaner, nimbler world tour eventually became too obvious to ignore.

The surfing on display at the new "parking lot contests" was by and large a hobbled, even comical version of elite-level sportcraft – like Olympic fencers dueling with cardboard tubes.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

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