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

By the mid-'80s, a second commercial and pop culture surf boom was on. By almost any quantitative measure, this new boom was bigger than the 

-launched craze of the '60s, and it lasted until 1990, when it crashed with a familiar abruptness.

There were plenty of new products for what marketers now referred to as “core” (short for hardcore) surfers: the glue-on rubber nose guard to prevent spearing injuries; an Aussie-developed safety helmet to be worn at menacing shallow-water breaks like Pipeline; the simple but brilliant wax comb, used to crosshatch a wax job for better grip; and the thin Lycra rash guard, used by itself to prevent sunburn and wax rash while in the tropics, or worn as a skin-protecting layer beneath a wetsuit. A California company called Astrodeck introduced the peel-and-stick polyurethane-based “traction pad.” Pro-Lite, also from California, came out with a line of high-tech surfboard travel bags that were thin, spongy, and tough as hell. Surfboards and wetsuits both continued to evolve, and in 1986 new board sales in America hit 100,000 units for the first time.

Pro surfers also rode the boom. Minor league tours were formed in America, Europe, and Brazil during the mid-'80s, while total world tour prize money went from just over $500,000 in 1984 to $2.1 million in 1990. Tom Carroll signed a five-year contract with Quiksilver in 1989 that made him the sport's first million-dollar pro.

Like skateboarding in the '60s, snowboarding became the new inland version of surfing. World tour pro Gary Elkerton spent part of the off-season bombing down various double-black diamond runs in the French Alps. Gerry Lopez went heli-boarding on a glacier in British Columbia, and rhapsodized about carving endless turns on “a 3,000-foot wave.” For that matter, skateboarding was getting ready to explode in popularity yet again.

Meanwhile, surf-themed goods rained down upon America’s vast waveless interior. It wasn’t surfers who were tuning into 

 on syndicated TV, drinking Wisconsin-made Surf City Brew, buying Tube It can coolers, and driving out to the latest wavepool attraction in Cleveland—or Allentown, or Palm Springs, or Edmonton. (In 1987, Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that the company’s new fifty-acre water park in Orlando would have a wavepool featuring “the best surf east of Hawaii.”) A West Village nightspot called Big Kahuna had bar stools set in real beach sand, a twelve-foot fiberglass wave curling along one wall, and updated North Shore surf conditions scrawled onto a chalkboard behind the bartender. In the summer of 1986, 20,000 sunburned Midwesterners flocked to an afternoon “surf party” in Williamsburg, Iowa, featuring 1,000 tons of imported sand, an endless loop of surf music, and a yawing motor-driven surfboard similar to the mechanical bull from 

Surfing’s return to the mainstream was an unexpected sociological pirouette. Less than 20 years ago, when 

 left the nation’s movie theaters and marked the end of the original surf boom, the sport—as far as the country at large was concerned—looked destined to become just another friendly ghost in the cultural attic, a bygone fad ski ballet or distance plunging.

So what did this pop culture resurrection mean

 Why now? Why 1980s America? A number of theories were floated: the new interest in surfing was a delayed escapist response to the lingering national trauma of Vietnam. It was the latest example of 1980s-era “conspicuous leisure.” One college professor said it was a “mass-culture fantasy,” and that “mental surfing” should be encouraged as “a relief from everyday stress.” A little far out, but not bad.

Or maybe the reason was much simpler. Asked by a 

 reporter what the new heartland surf craze was all about, a 13-year-old from St. Louis shrugged and said, “Everyone wants to go to the beach, but it’s 500 miles away.”

The boom turbocharged the surfwear industry, which made sense, since buying a pair of great-looking surf trunks was easier than getting to a Manhattan surf bar or a Midwest beach party. The big surfwear manufacturers—Quiksilver, Ocean Pacific, Gotcha, a few others—powered the sport’s hard-charging new economy and together formed what news sources in 1986 called a “billion-dollar industry.” And that was just the beginning. Four years later, the valuation had jumped to $1.75 billion. By that time, Ocean Pacific had licensed products in 73 countries. Quiksilver USA had two thousand American retail accounts, was #18 on the 

 annual “100 Best Performing Companies in California” list, and it had just moved into a vast Costa Mesa office park fortress measuring almost 90,000 square feet.

Fashion-wise, the sport had gone bright. Very bright. Tight-fitting neon-on-neon was the dominant trend, but there was also an outbreak of squiggly multicolor “ethnic prints,” and some vestigial New Wave designs. Op tried a genital-hugging Lycra-and-neoprene boardshort. Then there was the counterintuitive “urban-surf look,” identified by Gotcha CEO Michael Tomson as “post-nuclear-torn-and-destroyed.” Finally, just before the crash of 1991, came the inevitable shift to earth tones.

Surfwear execs did their best to keep up their counterculture bona fides. “We’re the last outlaws,” said one company CEO in 1988, after closing the books on a $45-million sales year. Yet the industry was in fact corporatizing in all the usual ways. Large surf companies started buying smaller surf companies. Quiksilver became the first surf brand to go public, with a 1986 NASDAQ listing. The Surf Industry Manufacturers Association (SIMA), surfing’s first trade group, was founded in 1989. California's Orange County, meanwhile, having consolidated its position as surfing’s industrial center over the previous two decades, was now described as “Surfing’s Silicon Valley.” Clark Foam, 

, Op, Gotcha, Hobie, Quiksilver, Rip Curl USA, and Billabong USA—traffic permitting, all were within a 20-minute drive of each other.

In another echo from the 1960's surf boom, surfing trade shows made a roaring comeback. The original was the 1962 Los Angeles Surf Fair—a sprawling three-day event with manufacturers’ displays, surf movie screenings, live music, door prizes, a Miss Surf-O-Rama pageant, and a woody “Surf Wagon” contest. For three years, the Surf Fair was held at the fashionable Santa Monica Civic Auditorium (home to the Academy Awards at the time), but despite its popularity, the show wasn’t especially profitable, and it folded after the '64 event.

Florida’s Surf Expo revived the idea in 1976, as three dozen exhibitors gathered in a Cocoa Beach hotel banquet room for a mellow weekend of surf trade. In 1981, organizers for the first Action Sports Retail show—surf-based, but open to all “beach lifestyle” companies—ambitiously booked their event into the huge Long Beach Convention Center, then looked on with dismay as exhibitors outnumbered buyers.

Expo and Action Sports Retail both survived, then flourished during the boom. By the end of the decade there were two annual Expo shows, both in Orlando, and two ASR shows, in San Diego and Long Beach. ASR San Diego was the biggest: 900 companies were jammed into the 1990 show, while 10,000 buyers roamed the aisles. Neither ASR or Surf Expo was open to the public, but determined event crashers always found a way to get inside. Top surfers lolled like princes in their sponsors’ booths; hired models strolled the floor in bikinis and stilettos. Giveaway swag was everywhere—even the newest, tiniest startup wouldn’t dream of showing up at a trade show without boxes full of stickers, keychains, bottle openers, and so on. The more libertine exhibitors handed out cocktails to company friends and associates after lunch. The drinking picked up over dinner and continued through the official and unofficial evening entertainments, and the cycle repeated the following day. It wasn’t coincidental that ASR and Surf Expo became popular just as the surf movie was dying out. Surfers missed their off-beach gatherings, and if doing so now meant wearing plastic-covered ID tags and wandering fluorescent-lit convention centers, so be it.

These were shows, in every sense of the word. There was a tacit but universal agreement at Expo and ASR to act as if the sport 

 boomed into a billion-dollar operation. Everyone pretended they were still part of the same esoteric cult of 30 years ago, and that these new events were just gigantic parties. Here was a thriving industry, in other words, that refused to acknowledge itself as such. Not until years later—with the launch of the trade publication 

—did the sport finally, officially, quit the pretense that it was still a cottage industry.

“I’d already gone to three Action Sports Retailer shows before I even knew what they were,” a 

 magazine reporter said in 1988, setting a new standard for either cluelessness or disingenuousness. “The turnstiles, the garish lights, the bunting and flags, the hot dogs, balloons, and dancing girls—I had no idea it had to do with millions of dollars changing hands. All I knew is that an upcoming ‘show’ meant the circus was in town.”

Surf-themed goods and products rained down upon America's vast waveless interior. 

 on syndicated TV, Wisconsin-made Surf City Brew, wavepools in Cleveland, Allentown, Palm Springs. Twenty-thousand sunburned Midwesterners flocked to an afternoon “surf party” in Williamsburg, Iowa.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Surf Boom Redux

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