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

Aussie flamboyance was the rule for the generation of pros who came of age in the 1980s. Gary Elkerton told an interviewer that his American counterparts were “a bunch of softcocks.” Seventeen-year-old Mark Occhilupo, in his first 

 portrait, grinned like a jack-o-lantern while caressing a bottle of champagne tucked into his jacket. Sydney surf journalist John Witzig fondly remembered young Tom Carroll reacting to his first Surfabout heat-draw by “jumping three feet into the air, roaring with lust, and twisting his face into an aggro expression of ambition.” One-upping their 

 predecessors, the new Aussie pros were poised to make the surf world a louder, showier, more colorful place.

They didn’t fail, exactly. Swagger and volume have been the sport's default settings since the 1950s, the Australians gave it a new twist, and surfers around the world fell in line.

Most of them, anyway. Tom Curren of Santa Barbara, California, went in the opposite direction—and wound up having more influence on surfing than anybody from his generation. Quiet and withdrawn, Curren seemed to move in direct counterpoint to the Australians. Elkerton snarled into the camera for a Quiksilver ad campaign whose tagline read “If You Can’t Rock and Roll, Don’t Fuckin Come.” In his ad for surfwear giant Ocean Pacific, Curren gazed morosely toward the sea. Occhilupo told an interviewer that he “loved outrageous girls,” and that “even eating a pastry gets me horny.” Curren was married and monogamous at 18. The other guys’ boards were brightly-colored, his were plain white; they traveled in groups, he traveled alone.

If the Aussies were hot, Curren was cool. Indeed, he was the coolest thing to hit the sport since Gerry Lopez. It helped that he had wavy brown hair and sleepy John Travolta eyes, and that he played drums and guitar. Also, like Chance the Gardener in 

, Curren’s low-voiced reticence allowed surf journalists, moviemakers, and fans to imbue him with as much intelligence and profundity as they liked. Finally, he was a West Coaster, which was a huge plus for those yearning for the end of the “California Ice Age,” as one surf mag put it. Curren was without a doubt a singular talent. But on top of that, his timing could not have been better.

Curren was taught to surf at a young age by his father, Pat Curren, a La Jolla boardmaker and big-wave specialist from the '50s and early '60s who himself was recognized as one of the sport’s coolest, most idiosyncratic figures. At 15, Tom Curren was already being featured in surf movies. At 16, during the 1981 Katin Pro-Am in Huntington Beach, he finished ahead of Mark Richards, Dane Kealoha, Simon Anderson, Larry Bertlemann, and Tom Carroll, and placed second in the finals to Shaun Tomson. Curren was still an amateur, but great expectations were already piling up. “He carries the pride of the nation with him,” one magazine wrote. “Curren will almost certainly shake up the whole professional status quo,” said another.

The Curren Phenomenon, as it was often called, had its share of quirks. Pat was often mentioned but never seen (he was about to leave the family), while Jeanine Curren, Tom's mother, had become the original surfing stage mom, serving as a meet director for amateur contests in Santa Barbara, and shouting encouragement whenever her son paddled for a wave. Tom, like Jeanine, was a born-again Christian. He entered the 1981 Katin not as a member of a surf manufacturer’s team, like the other top riders, but as part of a squad put together by Orange County’s Calvary Chapel. Curren was featured in a surf magazine ad not long after the Katin: “Contest victories come and go, but the victory that Christ made is the one that counts.” Interviewed three years later, Curren said that he’d been “forced into a lot of things,” church included, by his mother. He also confessed to an un-Christian-like motivation as a competitor: “The person who’s really got the most venom . . . that’s the one who is going to win.”

Curren returned to Huntington for the 1982 Katin, won, then announced he was going to wait another eight months before turning pro. In part, he wanted to finish high school, but Curren was also still getting a lot out of the sport’s amateur system, which over the past few years had been upgraded and expanded.

The biannual World Surfing Championships had returned in 1978, after a six-year absence. For American amateurs, the bigger news that year was the founding of the National Scholastic Surfing Association, in Huntington, which quickly became both a training ground and showcase for the country’s best young surfers. Parents of NSSA surfers liked the idea of “scholastic” being inserted into their kids’ surfing experience. The bar wasn’t set too high; NSSA members only had to maintain a 2.0 grade-point average. But it was a step away from the dreaded “surf bum” rap. Surfers themselves, meanwhile, liked that the NSSA’s contests were better run than the other amateur groups (except for the outstanding Eastern Surfing Association) and that most members now got credit for something called “Surfing PE”—which mostly meant they were allowed to skip first period.

In 1980, NSSA founder Chuck Allen convinced former world-tour pros Peter Townend and Ian Cairns to move from Australia to Huntington in order to coach the NSSA’s elite National Team. More to the point, Allen wanted the US to finally beat the Aussies. It was a tall order. Australia’s boardrider club system had experienced its ups and downs over the past two decades, but overall it had functioned to the great benefit of the country’s win-loss record in international competition, amateurs included. American surfers didn’t seem to have the same drive to win, and Californians had been especially hamstrung by the previous generation's anti-contest movement. West Coasters had a “serene indifference” to competition, wrote California expat Mike Perry, the original editor of 

magazine, while the club-raised Aussies spent their lives “racing for meals, and arm-wrestling for toilet privileges.”

Cairns and Townend stayed with the NSSA for six years. The training regimen they designed took contest preparedness from a loose DIY ethic to something on par with a high school football program, with scheduled beach runs, sprint paddles, tactical seminars, one-on-one coaching, and endless intramural surf-offs. There were rules and lectures. There were player-coach tensions. It wasn’t a fun way to surf. But the results were amazing. Four World Surfing Championships events were held between 1980 and 1986, when Cairns and Townend left the NSSA. America and Australia were always the top-two finishers in the team standings. America won three of the events, Australia took one.

Tom Curren turned pro in the summer of 1982, just before his 18th birthday and just after winning the men’s division of that year’s amateur World Championships. He immediately signed $40,000 worth of contracts with Rip Curl and Ocean Pacific—close to what Mark Richards and Shaun Tomson and two or three other top pros were earning, and a record-smashing amount for a rookie. Curren easily won a nonrated pro event at Trestles, stepped onto the world tour, made the quarterfinals in his debut, followed two weeks later with a win at the Marui Pro, and finished the year ranked #19, despite having competed in just four of 12 events. In 1983, his first complete year as a pro, Curren went to #8—less of a jump than he'd hope for, and not enough to put him above Joey Buran, the “California Kid,” a hyperactive blond goofyfooter from north San Diego County who surfed like a wetsuit-clad terrier and had a career-best year, finishing #7. But their respective career arcs were set. Curren already looked as if he’d reserved a place in surfing Valhalla, next to Blake, Dora, and Lopez. Buran gracefully retired in 1984, after achieving a lifelong dream of winning the Pipeline Masters.

Curren won back-to-back world championships in 1985 and 1986, both times with room to spare. Then the competitive venom seemed to drain off, leading to a one-year break from the tour in 1989. Curren returned to win seven of 21 events in 1990, becoming the first men’s division pro to regain the championship, at which point he again retired from full-time competition. This time he sounded genuinely burned out. “I’ve done what I’ve done,” he told American surf journalist Sam George. “I don’t feel that I owe the surfing world anything.” Curren hadn’t turned against competition, he said in another interview, but questioned the value of why anybody would want to continue “scrapping it out in a 25-minute heat, to beat somebody, to advance to the next round. Who cares?”

This was, at best, disingenuous. Anybody who'd been around Curren for more than a few days knew that he had a mile-wide competitive streak. Still, he could afford to be cavalier about his world tour career. His true gift was in the realm of style and form, and what he accomplished there overshadowed his three pro-tour titles.

It’s nearly impossible to overestimate the value of style in surfing, and it’s been that way since the beginning. Jack London’s 1907 description of George Freeth as “impassive, motionless as a statue . . . calm and superb” is part of a long tradition in which excellence in surfing determined as much by form as by athletic prowess. “Style is everything to me,” Wayne Bartholomew declared. Phil Edwards went even further: “Style is the whole point of surfing.”

Curren’s achievement in this area wasn’t hard to deconstruct; he just combined the two dominate stylistic themes from the previous decade—the purified elegance of Gerry Lopez, and the “rip, tear and lacerate” attack of the 

 stars. Like Lopez, Curren’s body line had a formal grace: back knee turned slightly in, shoulders and head level, spine lengthened whenever possible, arms lowered, and hands floating midair with Raphael-like articulation. (Maybe it’s a hula-influenced carryover from surfing’s Polynesian beginnings, but the placement of wrists, hands, and fingers has always been a key barometer of style.) Yet where Lopez was a minimalist, Curren was dynamic and lively, full of compression and release, and as aggressive with his turns as Carroll, Occhilupo, and the rest of the Australians. He planted his front foot at a 90-degree angle to his board’s centerline—45 degrees was about average—which gave him added leverage and balance. He invented the “double-pump” bottom turn: instead of completing the move as a single arc, he’d ease off near the end, take a quick look at the crest, then re-engage the turn. This short pause between turns allowed Curren to pinpoint the best spot for his off-the-top move, which in turn allowed him to go into the move with greater speed and confidence.

Curren was astoundingly good in all conditions, from Second Reef Pipeline to dribbly Huntington Beach shorebreak. Like Shaun Tomson, but better, he could link chambering tube sections together one after the next. But where Curren truly excelled was in long-scrolling point waves, like Rincon or Jeffreys Bay, places where each dazzling turn could be offset with moments of quiet—where the ride passed not as a sequence of moves, but as one long curvilinear thrust.

Radical was no big deal in the 1980s. Radical and ethereal—that was Curren, and only Curren. “He’s on another level,” one magazine put it. “He can surf a wave the way the rest of us only mind-surf it."

Tom Curren's surfing, even at a young age, was stylish to the point of being ethereal. By 1982, it looked as if he'd already booked a place in surfing Valhalla, next to Blake, Dora, and Lopez.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

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