Road to Santosha

The Kevin and Craig Show

Hippie Trail Gold

At Play in the Fields of Allah

Career Move

Grand Prix Dream

Follow the Money

Big in Japan

Rabbit's Big Adventure

Shaun Tomson's Tunnel Vision

South Africa in Black and White

Mark Richards, Gentleman Killer

Two Fins, More Wins

The Divine Miss M

The Fortune Seekers

Years before Shaun Tomson reconfigured high-performance surfing in the mid-1970s, South Africa's best riders had proven themselves to be of international caliber: Peers Pittard was the fastest man alive in the long pointbreak peelers near Cape St. Francis; Jonathan Paarman threw his board up and down the faces of huge reef waves near his Cape Town home like the Afrikaner version of Barry Kanaiaupuni; and Mike Esposito, an elastic goofyfooter from Durban, was probably robbed when the judges had him runner-up to Tomson in the 1975 Gunston contest.

Going back even further, Gavin Rudolf of Port Elizabeth had a long-odds victory for the ages in the 1971 Smirnoff Pro-Am, held that year in punishing 12-footers at Sunset. Rudolf had matriculated out of a long military tour of duty just four weeks before the contest started. He had zero experience in Hawaii and rode Sunset for the first time in his life the day before the event on a board he’d never used before. Rudolf didn’t just fluke his Smirnoff win, either. He won every heat he surfed in, picked up the event’s only perfect score, and finished with a confident shrug during his post-contest interview: “The other guys played it cool and surfed Sunset like it should be surfed. I surfed it like it shouldn’t be surfed, but 

Durban was on its way to becoming a favorite stop on the pre-IPS gypsy tour: overseas entrants for the 1974 Gunston 500 included Jeff Hakman, Ian Cairns, Reno Abellira, and new US champion Rick Rasmussen. All were impressed with what they saw. The local surfers ripped, and the Gunston itself was possibly the sport's best-organized contest. Durban itself was a little strange. Imported movies were edited, nudie magazines and strip clubs were banned, 

 was banned, and there was no alternative press. On the other hand, the surf along Durban’s Bay of Plenty was hollow and consistent, some slightly-underground clubs played good live music, and a connected visitor could score a bulging newspaper-wrapped ounce of Durban Poison weed for less than five bucks.

Surfers didn't fly to South Africa to experience Durban, though. They came for Jeffreys Bay, a remote pointbreak 500 miles to the southwest. 

 Bruce Brown, of course, had already filmed and celebrated nearby Cape St. Francis, the original perfect wave. But “Bruce’s Beauties” proved too fickle to plan a surf trip around. Cape Town surfers, by the mid-'60s, were instead driving 20 miles past Cape St. Francis, to the enormous dune-and-scrub-covered point at Ferreiratown—the fishing town called Jeffreys Bay was actually another two miles up the road—where they rode another excellent right-breaking wave. There was no fussing around with the name. They simply called it the Point.

This was something of a misnomer. The break was pretty much in the lee of the point—a gnarled half-mile-long chunk of coastline with black lava fingers extending from the beach to the sea. Bigger waves rolled hypnotically down to where visiting surfers sat waiting on their 10-foot Malibus. But it was too fast up there and too rocky.

By the late '60s, surfers from Durban to Cape Town were camping for weeks at a time in the beachfront dunes in front of the Point, and had been labeled by a disapproving Afrikaner newspaper as the “Hippies of Jeffreys Bay.” In the summer of 1968, taking advantage of a small but alluring head-high swell, Gavin Rudolf and visiting Aussie Keith Paull paddled their first-generation shortboards a few hundred yards south from the Point and discovered they now had speed and control enough to match the best part of the Jeffreys wave. The break’s various sections were soon named. At the outermost top of the point, a double-overhead wave at Boneyards would collapse into Supertubes, which in turn ran through Impossibles, down to Tubes—with peel-off velocity, up to this point, ranging from fast to hypersonic—and it would finally wind up as a slower but still rippable five-footer at the Point. The aptly named Impossibles was usually too fast to make, and surfers generally rode the 250-yard-long Supertubes zone, or stayed on the bay side of Impossibles. But a few times a year, on the cleanest medium-big swells, you could ride from Boneyards all the way through to the Point; a two-minute experience that, as Australian surf journalist Derek Hynd phrased it, “sent a surfer out of bounds . . . removed him from the planet.”

You had to work for it, though. Jeffreys is nearly waveless during summer and inconsistent even during the prime winter months. The ocean is chilly, and the wave-making cold fronts surging from the west—which occasionally drop snow on the Drakensburg Mountains inland of Jeffreys—can push air temperatures down into the 40s. The storms also create a powerful southwesterly “berg wind” that can throw a huge misting cape behind each wave—a spellbinding thing to see from the beach, but hard to surf through. Before the surf leash, and before full neck-to-ankle wetsuits were popular, a misstep at Jeffreys was almost always paid for with a long, slow, shivering crab-crawl over mussel-covered rocks to retrieve a lost and invariably damaged board. During a good swell, the smell of resin hung over the tents and vans clustered along the base of the Point as surfers patched up their mangled boards.

Sea life is a constant presence at Jeffreys. Dolphins ride down the point, sometimes by the hundreds, torpedoing beneath the surface of a wave, then suddenly leaping through the air, just ahead of the curl. Jeffreys is also shark infested. Not quite as infested as other parts of the South African coast, maybe, but bad enough; as of 2018, at least a dozen surfers have been attacked at Jeffreys, one fatally, and in a live-streamed moment that made international headlines, three-time world tour champ Mick Fanning was knocked from his board by a great white during the finals of the 2015 J-Bay Open.

Sharks, cold water, flat spells, berg winds—despite these things, Jeffreys nonethelss earned a place on everybody’s short list for World’s Best Wave. A local fish-and-chips shop began to keep a “Surfer’s Guest Book” in 1968, and while many of the early comments expressed either disappointment or some variant of naughty-talk—“All that way for nothing,” “Get a dick in ya!”—lots of others relayed a giddy excitement at this vast, complex new surf break: “Magic waves,” “Outasight!!!” “Was 10 foot and perfect when we arrived and perfect a week later when we left. Wonder what it’s like when it’s good?”

For nearly three decades years, starting in the '60s, surfers visiting South Africa had to make a political choice with regard to apartheid. Even if this meant not making a choice at all.

Apartheid was the South African government’s official, codified, and strictly enforced policy of racial segregation. It lasted from 1948 to 1994. In the 1960s, most nations, including the United States, began to isolate South Africa, politically and socially, with an aim toward bringing apartheid down. In 1964, the country was banned from the Olympics, and sports-governing groups from around the world—representing everything from cricket to soccer to ping-pong—signed off on a much wider international sporting boycott. With few exceptions, South African athletes were not allowed to play overseas, and athletes from other nations couldn’t play in South Africa.

None of this affected surfing, however. South African surfers were for the most part able to compete anywhere they chose, and for Jeffreys-bound visitors apartheid was either ignored or breathtakingly rationalized. Randy Rarick of Hawaii, just a few months after making the semifinals of the 1970 World Championships, flew into Durban and made his mind up about the plight of “the natives” just a few minutes after checking into his East London hotel: “They’re stoked working for the whites, and taking life with a smile,” he wrote in a surf magazine article. “Can’t see what all the fuss is about, everything is cool here.” In a 1969 South African travelogue for 

, former world champion Midget Farrelly wrote that “apartheid is not worth talking about because [everybody has] too many screwed ideas about what’s happening in Africa.” Farrelly then went on to talk about it anyway, saying that “the government has protected the black majority,” and that “the black man in the city . . . generally thinks well of the white man.” Outside the city limits, though, Farrelly cautioned, blacks weren’t against “hacking up a human the way we slaughter cattle for food.”

In the mid-'70s, pro surfers began responding to apartheid with what might be described a bit of moral apartheid: that sports and politics should be kept apart. A high-minded variation on this, as expressed by Durban's own Shaun Tomson, was that sports “could rise above the politics of individual nations [and] bring people together.” There was some truth to this idea on a personal level. But mostly it was used by surfers as a justification to do what they wanted to do (ride Jeffreys, compete in Durban), not because they believed they were surfing to make the world a better place.

Ignoring apartheid wasn’t always easy for visiting surfers, however. In 1972, big-wave specialist Eddie Aikau was one of the invited contestants to the Gunston 500. Aikau was a full-blooded Hawaiian, with full lips, a broad nose, and skin dark enough to earn a polite but firm turnaround from the concierge at Durban’s Malibu Hotel, where he was supposed to meet Bill Hamilton and Jeff Hakman, two 

-Hawaiian pros who’d already checked in. Gunston contest officials rushed in and did the necessary damage control. Aikau ended up staying in a beachfront apartment with Ernie Tomson, and seventeen-year-old Shaun, already a nationally-recognized sports figure, surfed often with Aikau over the next few days. The Tomsons’ efforts on Aikau’s behalf were laudable—or at least civil. But it hardly proved that surfing could indeed “rise above politics.” Aikau flew home after giving an interview with a black-owned South African newspaper in which he said, “The color problem in South Africa, man, is really heavy—I fear to walk in the streets.” The Aikau incident didn’t seem to affect Bill Hamilton in the least. “The situation among the dark-skinned people [here] is accepted,” Hamilton reported in his 1972 Gunston 500 article for 

. “They are content with their working positions and the roles they play in society.”

This was pretty much what everyone in the sport wanted to hear. The political stink from the 1972 Gunston contest blew over quickly, and another 13 years would pass before apartheid again caught the attention of the broader surf world.

Visiting surfers did their best to ignore apartheid, but it wasn't always easy. In 1972, Gunston 500 invitee Eddie Aikau, a full-blooded Hawaiian, was given a polite but firm turnaround from the concierge at Durban's Malibu Hotel. "I fear to walk in the streets here," he told a local black-owned newspaper.

Chapter: 6

The Fortune Seekers

South Africa in Black and White

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