Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Surfing’s second boom—the 1980s beachwear-driven surge that turned the sport into a billion-dollar industry—was kneecapped in 1990 by a recession and a consumer market suddenly repulsed by neon boardshorts and scrawly ethnic-print T-shirts. Red ink splattered across the surf industry power centers of Costa Mesa, Biarritz, Sydney, and Torquay. Dozens of new companies imploded, and a few established ones went down as well. Those who made it to the mid-'90s in decent shape, however, were well-positioned for surfing’s next bull market—a 14-year-long Third Boom bonanza that made the sport’s previous two expansions look like warm-up routines. By 2006, US surf industry sales were just short of $7.5 billion (surfwear leviathan Quiksilver pulled down $2.6 billion all by itself), while the international figure was about $14 billion. In descending order, the biggest markets were the US, Europe, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Latin America, and Indonesia. The good times continued all the way until the 2008 world economic crash.

The new boom was an order of magnitude bigger than the previous boom, but it nonetheless followed the same procedural order: surfwear manufacturers sent vast consignments of goods to department stores worldwide, while doing everything in their power to come off as rootsy and “core.” Wave-riding didn’t much figure into this, except as a marketing device. Surfboard sales accounted for just over one-percent of industry revenue.

There was, however, a huge difference between the new boom and the '80s boom—women. Part grassroots effort, part killer marketing ploy, the women’s surfing movement in the 1990s and 2000s was responsible for the highest profits, and biggest demographic change, the sport had ever seen.

The development was long overdue. Until the mid-'90s, women’s surfing had muddled along as it had for the previous century—too small to get any real attention; too big to be a novelty. Women broke through on occasion: 

 midwifed the original surf craze, world champion Joyce Hoffman emerged as a sports-world star in the mid-'60s, the rivalry between Margo Oberg and Lynn Boyer helped buoy the pro tour in the '70s and early '80s. None of these achievements, however, did much to put more females in the water. For three decades leading to the 1990s, women made up roughly three-percent of the surfing population. Gender discrimination was the norm. Female surfers didn't get surf magazine cover shots, weren’t invited on sponsor-backed promo trips, and rarely turned up in surf movies. Prize money for female pros was a fraction of what it was for men, and contest coverage for the women's side of the draw was knocked off in a few dry sentences or ignored altogether. Derek Hynd, the sport’s premier surf-contest journalist in the 1980s, was thought of as roguish and literate for crafting sentences like, “Tom Carroll brutalized Margaret River. He smacked. He whipped. He punished . . . leaving the wave distraught and ravaged. Carroll’s rape of the River stamped [his] supremacy . . . and it must have felt good.”

The bikini girl, meanwhile, remained ubiquitous. 

 caused a sensation in 1981 by putting blond bombshell Kym Herrin, 

 Miss March, on the cover, and not long afterward the magazine debuted its annual bikini issue. A San Diego-based sandal company called Reef Brazil built a surfwear empire on the backside of the “Reef Girl”—a stable of thong-wearing bikini models who took turns starring in Reef’s endless surf-magazine advertising campaign. A 1993 

 article titled “Sexism Sucks” brought down a shower of hate mail, including one letter that began, “Hello, I’m a chauvinist pig,” and finished with, “I’ll give a chick respect when she can surf big waves, hold her liquor, and acknowledge the dominant gender.”

A handful of women pros during the 1980s and early 1990s nonetheless managed to rise above. Frieda Zamba, a drawling Floridian with an attacking style in the water took out five of ten events in 1984 to become the first world surfing champion from the East Coast. Without so much as a change of expression, Zamba won again in 1985, 1986, and 1988. An imperious regularfooter from South Africa named Wendy Botha also won four pro tour championships (in 1987, 1989, 1991, and 1992), ruffling some male feathers along the way by stating that “on any given day I can surf as good as a lot of the guys on tour.” Then she ruffled another part of the male anatomy with a nude layout in 

Australian Pauline Menczer gritted her way to a championship title in 1993. There was a lot to admire in Menczer. She was bright, sharp-tongued, and funny—a classic Aussie battler who’d fought off debilitating bouts of rheumatoid arthritis during her title run. She was also freckled and plain-looking—and the surf world for the most part treated her like a pariah. Barely sponsored during and after her world-title run, she depended on checks from her mother to get from event to event. Surf companies weren’t interested in her, Menczer explained, “because I don’t have big boobs, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Guys who aren’t so good-looking can get by on personality. Women can’t.” 

 each ran a cursory half-page interview with Menczer when she won the title, and 

 contacted her afterward only to get a quote for the magazine’s latest survey question: “Why do men fuss over women’s bosoms?” Dealing with arthritis for 15 years, Menczer said, had made her a tough person, but the gender politics got her down. “I love surfing,” she said in 1994. “I don’t much like the surf scene.”

The new age in women’s surfing was ushered in by an ambitious Floridian runaway named Lisa Andersen. In 1985, at age 16, not long after her alcoholic father placed her surfboard on the living room floor and jumped on it until the fins smashed off, Andersen stole away from her Ormand Beach home, flew across the country, and landed in Huntington Beach, California, where she lived with “a drug freak who kind of beat me up a few times.”

Andersen turned pro in 1987 and was immediately picked as a world-beater. For five years, though, she was a chronic world-tour underachiever: now and then she'd manage an event win, but mostly—because of nerves, indifference, lack of focus; nobody, Andersen included, seemed to know—she found ways to lose. Competitive surfing nonetheless put Andersen in with a better crowd of people, and during this period she was advised, coached, nurtured, housed, and fed by a top-ranked world-tour pro, a magazine photographer, and a series of other nonabusive boyfriends and benefactors. It was a drifting but protected life.

Contest results aside, Andersen became the acknowledged best female surfer in the world. She was both smooth and aggressive. She could throw an extravagant one-off move, but was even better at spinning out a long, full, perfectly-sequenced ride. Over the years, both male and female surfers had approvingly described “the feminine style” as a kind of demure, “Birth of Venus” way of riding. That wasn’t Andersen. She borrowed heavily from world tour stars Tom Curren and Martin Potter. Under her influence, this style became neither feminine nor masculine—it was just good, solid, beautiful surfing. She’d also become a girl-jock knockout: lean, blond, and tan, with an incandescent smile.

Andersen’s world-tour fortunes began changing in 1992, after an affair with a married world-tour judge resulted in a surprise pregnancy. After giving birth to a daughter, Andersen, for the first time in her life, felt grounded and calm and focused on winning—both to prove to herself that she could and to provide for her daughter. She surfed in a world-tour contest less than three weeks after exiting the delivery room. In 1994, she opened the season by either winning or placing runner-up in five straight events, then rode well enough down the stretch—despite chronic lower back pain from constantly holding an infant on her hip—to win the world title.

The same magazines that had ignored Pauline Menczer a year earlier now showered Andersen with attention. “Lisa’s Style and Class” was the title of a fawning 

 put Andersen on the cover, blasting through a top turn, with a taunting male-aimed blurb: “Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You.” 

s 1996 feature on Andersen described her as the sport’s “first true female star, period.” Autograph seekers mobbed her at contest sites, and surf photographers made arrangements for exclusive sessions at the break of her choice.

Quiksilver, Andersen’s primary sponsor, then made a smart business decision: they asked the newly crowned champ to help revamp their long-neglected in-house juniors brand, called Roxy. For years, Andersen had been wearing men’s boardshorts instead of bikini bottoms, preferring a slightly butch look to what she called bikini-related “technical problems” after a wipeout. In hindsight, what she recommended was stunningly obvious: Roxy should create a girl’s boardshort. While trunks in general were becoming looser and baggier, Roxy bucked the trend and designed a snug, semi-high-cut pair of shorts. Nobody knew if they would take off as a fashion item, but you could go over the falls at Pipeline in these new trunks and they’d remain securely in place. Andersen approved.

The girl’s boardshort sold in the millions and was raised over the sport like a flag to symbolize a cultural shift. After two decades, the somber and politicized feminist-first sportswoman model, as epitomized by Martina Navratilova, had run its course. Sex appeal was becoming an unabashed part of female athletics. In 1994, Andersen raised a few unplucked eyebrows with her “sad but true” evaluation that women’s surfing was in a depressed state because it wasn’t “really a sexy thing.” What the sport needed, she said, was a “girly-girl” makeover. Roxy execs swooned and added a couple more zeros to their bottom line.

 published an article titled “Sexism Sucks” in 1993, it brought down a shower of hate mail, including one letter that began, “Hello, I'm a chauvinist pig,” and finished with, “I'll give a chick respect when she can surf big waves, hold her liquor, and acknowledge the dominant gender.”

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

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