This article ran in the January 2000 issue of Australia's Surfing Life magazine.

As a kid I remember this little shop up a side road in Newport Beach. It had the ubiquitous seagrass floor matting, which was probably something to do with hippiedom, but actually seemed to go all right with the saltwater that poured from our noses as we sat around and talked about the waves we thought we'd ripped that day.

The surf shop! It was never just a shop. It’s where the club meeting’s memos and contest results were stuck up in the window, and you’d get a 10% discount for being a club member, even if half the time the discount wiped out whatever feeble traces of profit the owner had hoped to pull in. There wasn't any video then, but if there were we'd have probably sat there all day staring at the screen, soaking up one impossible move after another, and seeing which of us was most like one of the surf stars or another. And in the window beyond the posters and contest results and tatty faded rock concert flyers, there they stood. The Boards. Glowing and glistening, after we’d spent all day looking and reaching out and running our hands longingly up and down their unattainably perfect rail lines and being razzed by the shop worker who’d polish them daily with a cloth and a can of Mr. Sheen just to get our sticky pawprints off the Holy Objects. Mums would come in and buy the boardshorts and T-shirts and stuff, the bits and pieces of a still primitive surf clothing industry, but we just wanted The Boards.

There’ve always been great surf shops. The one at Sunset Beach, Hawaii, springs to mind. The Sunset Surf Shop is practically a hole in the wall; it's not even the size of your average suburban garage. You walk out of glaring tropical sunlight and into a dark pit stuffed so full of surfing equipment it's hard to take a single step without getting a legrope round your neck or tripping over the tailblock of Owl Chapman's old 10’6". The glass countertop looks like it’s held together by stickers and not much else. But this is a place where every great surfer of the past two decades, from Hakman and MR to Occy and Slater, has come to pay their 75 cents for a block of Sex Wax and swap a bit of bullshit with Gene, the crusty old fuck behind the desk—who, by the way, doesn't give a shit who you are. It's all the same to Gene.

This weird sanctity developed simply because, for a very long time, the things surf shops sold just couldn't be bought anywhere else. Now and then department stores flirted with The Boards, but soon fled in terror when they realized what a crappy sales item a Board really is—surfboards make quite a few people a living but they haven’t made many people money. And as for legropes, wax. ding repair kits, fin system sets, deck grip, videos, all that stuff—what kind of decent, family-minded department store is gonna stock stuff like that?

I called around the place to get a few educated guesses on the number of shops in Australia today, and heard numbers varying from 731 to over 900. It's amazing how some of 'em have turned into empires, their owners into millionaires. It’s also amazing how no matter what, they still cling to the shreds of sanctity: the giant wave painted on side of the Surfection shop in Mona Vale, worn and weathered but still there after 20 years; the second-hand racks in Kirra Surf with their beaten-down occupants hiding stories of surfs pathetic and glorious. But now it's almost Y2K, or whatever the hell we're supposed to call it, and perhaps one day soon all the clothes and legropes and everything else will be sold on Internet, wonderful, empty, soulless, human-free hell that it is. But I suspect that when it’s each other we want—when it’s a talk about the surf last week, or a block of wax, or even just to look at The Boards as they stand up there, different shapes now, but no less incredible—the Surf Shop will still be where we’ll go.

"DROP TILL YOU SHOP: WHY THE SURF SHOP IS SACRED GROUND," NICK CARROLL (2000)

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