"Quiet Triumph: the Remarkable Journey of Pam Burridge," by DC Green, ran in the Summer 1998 issue of Deep magazine. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.

Consider this: at the time of writing, Pam Burridge and Trudy Todd were the sixth- and third-highest rated surfers, respectively, on the ASP world tour. Yet Trudy only began surfing in 1990, when Pam had already been on the world tour for a then-unprecedented ten years. Pam's longevity defies description or comparison. At the end of this year, she should have racked up her 15th Top Eight slot, an achievement unmatched by any man or woman surfer anywhere, ever. She's come third in the world four times, second a staggering six times, and was world champion once—bittersweetly, unforgettably—by a record margin over Wendy Botha in, yep, 1990.

But burn the record books, I say, with their lies, damned lies, and statistics. Pam was the first Australian woman to become a genuine pro surfer, and she blazed a path in our male-dominated sport so inspirationally that Aussie women now utterly dominate their half of pro surfing. She grew up in the public eye with an anvil of media expectations upon her so heavy it would have crushed a lesser mortal. Pam not only survived, she triumphed. If women's surfing—nay, Australian surfing; nay, the 

—has produced a single worthy role model in the modern era, it surely must be this still-super-stoked surfer, this undemonstrative supporter of causes from Amnesty International to People Opposing Ocean Outfalls (P000), this one so humble I can picture her now, grimacing as she reads these words.

Even during the school holidays, the town of Bendalong, on the NSW South Coast, is a sleepy backwater. I steer my old Holden off the Princes Highway and drive past a variety of tree-named streets, across a one-lane bridge, until I spot the letterbox number. I pull in behind a Ford Falcon, evoking a chorus of excited barking from the three Australian silky terriers on the balcony—Bluey, Maisie, and Muddle—and a cursory glance from the big Eastern Grey in the neighbor's yard. Then Pam herself appears on the verandah, in knee-ripped jeans and jumper, and waves, and I flash on the first time I'd first read about her in 

 when she was about 13 (same age as me): an all-conquering, all-beaming blond micro-grommet, often mistaken for a boy. Twenty years ago.

Pam is back in Oz for a refuel between contests in South Africa and America, where she is soon to fly with her shaper-husband and former near-world longboard champion, Mark Rabbidge, who's in the garage-turned-shaping bay out the back, half-cursing at his volume of shaping orders. Mark is one of those stoked grey-haired grommets who has a yarn for every occasion. After an entertaining hour with him, I gladly accept Pam's offer of a surf check.

Everywhere is tiny and crowded, so we head back to the house. I ask Pam if she has any recent video footage of herself surfing. She has: in among segments featuring Maisie's last litter and rosellas on the balcony, there are scraps of footage of Pam ripping to victory at last year's Konica Skins event and taking apart a local beachie. And I mean taking it apart—her surfing looks better than ever, more fluid and varied, everything crisply executed with that characteristic Burridge steely jutting of the jaw.

"All right," I say. "Let’s go . . . . "

Pam was born on July 26, 1965, to Bill and Irene Burridge, the third of three girls spaced roughly seven years apart. The Burridges are one of those all-Aussie families whose sporting achievements alone I could spend this whole article detailing. As a grommet, Pam smashed swimming records, rebelled against the wearing of dresses, and masked her shy insecurity beneath a facade of self-contained independence. She was upset when she learned that, because she was a girl, she would never be allowed to play for the Manly Sea-Eagles (a team she still, mysteriously, supports with zeal today). Seeking an alternative adrenaline release, Pam graduated from her skateboard to a KFC Coolite, which she would ride across the backyard pool, to a bulky 5' 8" single-fin shaped by a family friend—a present Pam eventually succeeded in badgering from her parents for her 10th birthday.

Bill and Irene supported virtually anything Pam and her sisters showed an interest in. Though surfing was hardly their dream sport, they could see Pam loved the ocean like nothing else, and that was what mattered. So they ended up becoming an on-call taxi service for Pam, as they had been for each daughter in turn—driving her up and down the coast in arguably the worst car ever sold in Australia, the dreaded Leyland P76.

Their nurturing was total, says Pam. “And they're 

 there for me. Mum videos my contests, despite her osteoporosis. And dad, he just picked me up from the airport. He's 72, and still runs marathons.”

In 1976, 10-year-old Pam joined a fortnight-long surf school run by a local surf media man named Bill McCausland. She was the only girl in the school, a fact that escaped most other surfers (McCausland including). Two years later she entered and won her first competition, the open women's section of the local Manly Pacific Boardriders Club.

Yet the great female role-model-to-be had no female role models of her own. In those days, girls' bikini contests usually carried more prizemoney and prestige than the girls' surfing events. Teen angst book-turned-movie 

 showed where women lay in relation to surfing—on their backs, behind the dunes. The women depicted in surf magazines were bikini models, not surfers. Grommie Pam didn't even own a bikini. As for a male role model, the favorite photos on her bedroom walls were all of the glamorous wunderkind Cheyne Horan. ("Mark Richards," she says, "was a bit too straight for me back then.")

In 1978, a bunch of women surfers decided to break away from the bloke-dominated Australian Surfriders Association (ASA) to form the Australian Women's Surf Riding Association (AWSA), installing as their patron Australia's very first surfer, 78-year-old Isabel Letham. The timing was perfect. Pam had begun competing in junior boys' events, racking up numerous dented male egos and being invited to join the prestigious McCoy Surfboards team—home to her hero, Cheyne Horan. Even though she was 14 and the youngest competitor in the event, Pam won the inaugural AWSA championship at Newport. More honors and a series of "youngest-ever" victories followed. The media couldn't get enough of Pam. Already she was being touted as the "Margo Oberg of the '80s," and Australia's great blonde hope who would wrest the world championship from the Americans.

And there came the rub. Pam was originally drawn to surfing because it was a solitary pursuit that suited her introverted personality, an exciting escape from the real world. Yet her talent pushed her straight into the spotlight, away from the invisibility she craved. "There's a certain amount of destiny in your life, and you can't hide from it," Pam tells me. "It will keep reappearing in various guises."

Pam first went to Hawaii in 1980, with her mum and Pru Howarth. There she got to witness the American-dominated women's pro scene, surf huge waves, and dance with her #2 teen crush, Shaun Tomson. By year's end, she was #11 on the world rankings. By next year's end, School Certificate from Mackellar Girls secured, she'd moved up to #5. She was just 16 years old.

A new ruling separating professionals and amateurs barred Pam from defending her swag of amateur titles, so in 1982 she bailed school and sent a check for $50 to the IPS, becoming in the process the first full-time female Australian pro surfer. Little could she know her horrendous sequence of title near-misses was about to begin, a sequence documented thoroughly in Marion Stell's 1992 biography 

. Pam grimaces when I mention this and says: “I read it [the book], and it was just depression for a year afterwards. It was too much, living through it all again."

Anyway, 1982 set the pattern. Pam bolted from the blocks, held on through the season, and with one event to go was leading the title race. Though she placed ahead of nearest rival Debbie Beacham at Haleiwa, the results for the world title were reversed by one of those quirky mathematical technicalities that would become a hallmark of Pam's career. Debbie won, Pam finished #2. “I was heartbroken, but at least I still had something to strive for,” she reasoned.

Yet Pam's meteoric rise had faltered, and all the self-doubts she'd kept bottled up were loosed. She hacked her hair short and dyed it in an act of rebellion against the blonde surfer girl image. With a fake ID and a pair of big black boots, she began to haunt the inner city Trade Union Club, smoking pot and drinking hard. When confronted by the new generation of lithe, tanned Californian surfer girls, she became defensive, anti-social, pale-skinned, and heavy. ("Too much Guinness.")

Next season, almost en masse, the U.S. big wave specialists—Oberg, Boyer, Poppler, Sunn and Beacham—all retired. In their place, as Pam recalls, came "the Kim and Freida Show". Kim Mearig (West Coast) and Frieda Zamba (East Coast) were both based on the US mainland, not Hawaii, so they were more radical in small surf than their predecessors. For three years in a row, Pam finished at #3, then followed that run with a #2 ranking in 1986. There were a lot of heartbreakingly close calls, all of which Pam has comes to terms with. "I could have a bagful of world titles but for a few decimal places, but I don't regret that. I would've had a big head and wasted all that money."

Ah, money. Pam has always struggled for enough to even remain on tour. In the mid-'80s, she went on the dole, worked in a video store, took on unlikely sponsors such as car-parts dealer Asian Wreckers, and even released a tongue-in-cheek single with then-boyfriend Damien Lovelock of the Celibate Rifles. "Summertime All 'Round the World" by Pam and the Pashions drew plenty of mainstream media coverage and pulled attention away from her newest Australian rivals, Jodie Cooper and world amateur champ Jenny Gill. Jodie soon became the second Aussie to join the sixteen women on tour. She and Pam were soon close friends and travel-mates.

In many ways, Pam's greatest achievements of the mid-‘80s happened outside surfing. Worried about her burgeoning weight, Pam moved out of her parent's house and stopped eating (apart from perhaps a piece of broccoli before bed). She lost weight but also lost strength. She recognized that she had anorexia, but didn't know how to restore balance, and her walled-up personality meant she couldn't talk to anyone about what was happening. Meanwhile, in the hoopla of her title near-misses, the battle was completely missed by the media.

Pam struggled on other fronts. Amazingly, she was still riding single-fins shaped by her eccentric boardmaking Svengali, Geoff McCoy. “I was probably one of the last people on the planet who went in competitions on the single-fin," she admits. The other person, of course, was McCoy's other star, Cheyne Horan, who also had a bagful of world title runner-ups. Pam and Cheyne's careers, in fact, were uncannily parallel. On McCoy's bold but perhaps competitively difficult designs, Pam had no problem doing big moves in the pocket. But she couldn't go out onto the shoulder and cut back, or do the crucial shorebreak grovel turns. When she tried a tiny Mearig tri-fin, it spun out. Not until 1985 did she finally get her hands on a Greg Clough-shaped Aloha thruster, which she loyally plastered in McCoy stickers. "I know he [Geoff McCoy] was disappointed," Pam says in her biography. "But he's not a very good communicator. He does a lot of knowing looks and silences. With me, that was a nightmare, because that's all I do too. It was all this radar talk and once you get crossed with someone like that, there’s nothing."

Even today, Pam is still loyal to McCoy. “I don't want to put shit on Geoff. We had such a strong team, and surfing for McCoy inspired confidence in me." After Pam officially changed shapers, though, she won the first contest she entered on a thruster. Yet even with Aloha she would be handed an identical model board to whatever the stars of the day were riding—Stuart Cadden or Damien Hardman, who were both shorter yet heavier than Pam. She wasn't getting the attention she deserved but was too much the team player to say anything.

Around this time, a bloke named Mark Rabbidge, then a stranger to Pam, had an odd premonition when he was watching TV. Mark explains: “There was Pam Burridge, losing yet another world title by bowing out early to a young hot-shot (Pauline Menczer). Of course, I'd heard of Pam before, but this particular time I had a feeling that I was somehow going to help this person . . . .''

After that same loss, the surf media dished Pam a hefty bagging from the surf press. In danger of slipping out of the Top Eight for the first time, and fearing her career was washed up, Pam's alcohol and drug abuse took control and she suffered a nervous breakdown.

"You decide to have as much fun as possible, yet underneath there's a simmering depression waiting to take over," she says, showing some hard-won insight. "Part of your soul is being ripped out. Surfing's so conducive to self-centredness which is so much a part of addiction. 'Oh, I'm not like everybody else; those rules don't apply to me.' You make all sorts of rationalizations for doing anything." Pam's health declined sharply. Yet as with the anorexia she eventually found a light at the end of her tunnel. By moving back home and committing fully to an alcohol recovery program, Pam's long climb to mental, physical and spiritual recovery began. Her year-end rating bounced from a career-low #7 in 1987 to runner-up in 1988. Yet all the by-now bored media of the day could do was scream was “Burridge is Bridesmaid Yet Again!” More important to Pam, however, was her total sobriety, which she maintains to this day. “If I could do it in moderation, I would. But for me, it's poison."

By 1988, Pam had become friends with the man who would become her husband. Mark Rabbidge was also a recovered alcoholic, along with being a skilled surfer who 10 years earlier had competed on the world longboard tour. For the first time, Pam had a boyfriend who also surfed and who wasn't intimidated by having a famous girlfriend. "Relationships with older men work well," explains Pam. "They're past that male have-to-prove-yourself phase. It's threatening for young men to have an athletic, driven girlfriend who doesn't dote on your every need and isn't there minding the towel.”

On cue, Mark joins us from his shaping bay for a healthy lunch of deluxe jaffles. We head to a downstairs room that is stacked with trophies and a wall of old McCoy-shaped Lazor Zaps, including a Cheyne Horan model so wide it had to be made out of two blanks. The wall inspires a Cheyne story from a few years back, at Haleiwa. "I've worked it out," Cheyne whispered to Pam in a conspiratorial voice. "If you ride a bigger board, you catch bigger waves!" As she finishes this anecdote, Pam looks a bit stricken, as if she has just betrayed a confidence. "He's still such a lovely guy," she quickly adds.

I swing the conversation back to Mark and Pam. It is a surf love story for the ages, one Mark is keen to expand upon. "Pam's a pretty intense person. She is passionate about her surfing, but she's also the most sportsmanlike person I've ever met. I'll say, 'You've been fucking ripped off!' But Pam just goes on with it. She's deserved her awards, more through her losing than her winning. Her personal growth will never be matched. I've seen girls who are great champions but are terrible losers. Pam is always herself, always positive, win, lose, or draw."

Pam is squirming with embarrassment at Mark’s glowing words and changes direction slightly. "We're a good balance. I'm into synchronicity and she'll-be-right, whereas Mark's a plan-for-the-future guy. So we balance each other into an acceptable rate of getting things done.” She concludes simply: "He's a good man."

We backtrack to 1988, which was the year Mark began to shape Pam's boards. Boards that finally recognized Pam in particular, and women in general, have neither the physical shape nor the riding style of a man; something so obvious, yet at the time, so revolutionary. Her boards became looser, thinner and the widest point crept back beyond the halfway mark. Her surfing improved immediately, leaving the other women surfers no choice but to follow suit (Mark has also shaped for other top female surfers such as Layne Beachley and Kylie Webb).

In 1989, Pam finished the year at #2, this time to a rampaging Wendy Botha. Yet all the signs were improving. Pam ended the season with a big win—in Hawaii, no less, on her traditionally weak backhand. Her boards, personal life and confidence were all in synch. It was at this juncture that Mark asked the crucial question.

Pam replied, hesitantly: "Yes." In time this firmed to: "Yes, I really want to win and I'm going to win," and the pair launched themselves on a mission of total commitment. "I haven't done that since," Pam tells me. "Putting everything in and failing might be too much to bear."

Mark took over the business side of Pam's career, which in part consisted of the pair selling off many of their possessions to travel the globe like a pair of gypsies. The story is told in detail in Pam's biography. I'll jump to the end, when Pam placed ahead of Botha in the final event, at Sunset, to at last win her world title. All the defeats and near-misses, all the obstacles and pain, were washed away. Pam had achieved her life-long goal. Anybody who'd been following along all those years—even casually; even from a distance—rejoiced at the news.

I ask Pam what she thinks would have happened if she had never won a title. "Financially, I would be a lot worse off," she says, by way of stalling. She stops and thinks for a few moments. "You know, I don't really think my personality is suited to being a competitor—an amazing thing to say for someone who's been at it so long. I once did one of those pop psychology quizzes on competition—and failed. On the other hand, I've got a pretty severe perfection streak, which makes me want to work on certain things. I enjoy performing. I'd love to have an unreal surf in front of a whole bunch of people and win money," she laughs. "I don't know if that makes me competitive or not."

At the end of 1993, three years after her world title victory, four of the women's top five retired at once: Pam, Wendy, Jodie and Vanessa Osborne. “It just wasn't paying,” says Pam. Lisa Andersen, who finished ninth the previous year, went on to win the next four world titles with a newborn daughter and a bad back. If not for the mass retirements, Lisa probably would've had to make main events from the trials. But Pam bears no resentment at Lisa's road made easy. "She's been the best thing for women's surfing ever. She's a great role model, attractive, huge in the States."

Later that year, Pam and Mark moved to Bendalong and Pam had what she calls her "turning 30 crisis. For the first time, I questioned why I'd been surfing my whole life years, why I’d made certain choices, and it freaked me out." But her retirement, temporarily as it was, was good for Mark and Pam. It gave them a chance to set up their lives, and for Mark to start exporting surfboards.

"Have you suffered any local backlash since moving to Bendalong?" I ask.

"I was a local at North Steyne," Pam replies, "yet I never surfed Queenscliff because you're not allowed past the pipe. It was that severe. It's not like that here. I'm not a local yet, for starters. When I surf here, I like to get my waves, but without snaking. If anyone else snakes, I'll give it to them. Locals should get the best waves, anywhere in the world, and I respect that. A bit of localism is healthy. A pecking order, a bit of trepidation, a little bit of fear, is always good,. 'Ooh, I better not burn that person. He might be a local!'" You don't want things too aggro in the water, but that kind of respect is good.

On arriving at Bendalong, Pam set up some free surf coaching clinics for the local kids ("I don't like getting paid for that"). However, this sparked a fearful rumor that Pam was using the clinics as a base to organize some sort of surf tours out of Sydney. So the coaching fizzled out. Nevertheless, she and Mark are members of the local volunteer Bush Fire Brigade. "So we know everyone over 70," Pam jokes. "Seriously, I've been well received and my privacy has been respected. If I had children, I'd be a lot more connected to the people. That's a reason and an excuse."

Her comment hangs in the air for a moment before I decide to jump on it. "What about children?" The $64,000 question.

Pam hesitates, then says: "I'll get super hormonal, and I feel my body aching to have kids, but then I'll have a super session and think, 'What if I never get to do this again?' I think I'd respond really well to being a mother, but it scares me also. God, how many times have I said, 'That scares me?”’

Pam made a part-time comeback to competition in 1996. Kelly Slater said to her: "Why did you ever retire if you wanted to come back?" But as Pam explains: "You come back so refreshed!" She did well in Oz, got a wildcard to J-Bay, then found she needed only one more result to requalify. So she went overseas for the first time in three years, won in Japan, and finished her comeback year at #3, a feat she repeated in 1997 with a string of eight second-place results—not bad at all considering the chronic back injury she was toting. As a comeback, it was second only to Occy's. And like the eternal Occster, our Pam ain't done yet.

I ask if she thinks she has another world title left in her, a question Pam nimbly side-steps. "I genuinely feel I'm still getting better, competing against 20- year-olds who give you shit if you go soft." She thinks for a moment. "When I do hit a point where I'm not improving, I'll step aside. I'm not a groupie."

It's not hard to imagine that Pam will in fact step off the tour soon, on her own terms. "I still like being out there at times, but it's too hard on my partner, my home life, my dogs. I feel like I'm ripping them off. I've been doing this for 20 years now, and I'd like to think I have value as someone other than a competitive surfer."

At times I can almost see Pam's mind ticking over, analyzing my questions, but more her own answers. She has an introspection that comes from a self-doubt so rare in pro surfing as to be endearing, one made doubly incongruous in a woman who has achieved so much, who literally weathered eras. Her ability to look at both sides of an argument, she says, "comes from a lifetime of sitting on the fence," but really it is the rare ability to walk in another's shoes.

That said, I drive out of Bendalong an hour or so later utterly convinced that this extraordinary person I've just spoken with will, one way or the other, when the time is right, not only chose the right path for herself, but walk that path with great style, and in her quiet way be an example for the rest of us.

[Photos: Mike Balzer, Mark Mohell, Tom Servais, Bill Morris]

"QUIET TRIUMPH," THE PAM BURRIDGE STORY, BY DC GREEN (1998)

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