The ASP world tour visited South Africa every year, so apartheid wasn’t a totally unfamiliar topic to surfers. Almost everyone knew what it meant, even if they didn’t know the numbers: that 30 million blacks in South Africa lived as an economically, socially, and geographically separated underclass to 4 million whites. That said, however, the sport was well and truly caught off guard in 1985 when apartheid was abruptly put front and center.
It started in April, at the annual Bell’s contest, w...
