Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

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, when reigning world champ Tom Carroll told an Australian newspaper he was going to boycott that year’s three-event South African leg of the pro tour, as a protest against apartheid. There was plenty of context for such a move. South Africa had been banned from Olympic competition since 1964, and since then the country had been steadily more isolated from the international sports community, and foreign athletes who competed there after 1981 risked being put on the United Nations’ anti-apartheid blacklist. There were no legal ramifications to being named; it was more like crossing a picket line. Listees included Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman, and Billie Jean King. World tour surfers who competed in South Africa were so far under radar that they'd escaped the UN’s attention, but the sport was growing, and Carroll was a better-known figure than any of his predecessors. If anyone in surfing might be targeted by anti-apartheid forces, it was him, and avoiding the blacklist may have factored into Carroll’s decision to boycott.

Still, career considerations weren’t the only motivation. Carroll was a classic “fair go” Aussie; he’d been to South Africa four times already and didn’t like what he’d seen. “The father of a guy I surfed with there once told me we were lucky in Australia,” Carroll wrote in his autobiography, “[because] all our Aborigines had been killed.” Carroll also knew that Hawaiian pro Dane Kealoha had been ordered from a whites-only restaurant in Durban, and that another Hawaiian surfer had been beaten up at a disco for talking to a white woman. Boycotting the South African contests, Carroll said, was just “a basic humanitarian stand.”

The day after Carroll’s announcement, a banquet was held at the newly-opened Australian Surfing Hall of Fame, in Torquay. Carroll by then had already talked to a few other pros about joining the boycott. The whole thing infuriated Shaun Tomson—former world champion, 

 hero, and member of the South African Sports Hall of Fame—who was receiving an award at that night’s event. By 8 pm, the Hall was packed, and the tension was exquisite. Not only was Carroll seated near the front of the stage, he was the top teamrider for Instinct, Tomson’s surfwear company, and he’d recently defeated Tomson for the world title. Grim-faced and holding a speech he’d written that afternoon, Tomson made his way to the podium and looked out at a crush of pro surfers, journalists, manufacturers, and contest organizers. He’d long been known a gracious but cautious speaker. But now, as he raised the topic of the boycott, Tomson's voice became sarcastic. “Suddenly the surfers have principles. Suddenly we have political aspirations.” From there, Tomson passionately defended the South African pro contests, then asked rhetorically if the surfers should also boycott the American contests because of US support for the Nicaraguan Contras, or boycott the English event over that country’s heavy-handed presence in Northern Ireland. “Where will it all end?” Tomson asked, caught up in his doomsday political scenario. “I’ll tell you. It will end with the destruction of pro surfing as we know it!”

Tom Carroll didn’t believe it. Neither did Tom Curren, Cheyne Horan, and Martin Potter, pro surfing’s fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-ranked surfers, respectively, all of whom agreed to join Carroll in the boycott. Carroll, as world champ, got the most attention. But Potter’s involvement was just as important. The other four were all outsiders—Potter was South African. And not just 

 South African, but heir to the Springbok surfing throne that Shaun Tomson himself had occupied for so many years.

In 1981, at age 15, Potter had made a fireballing entry into the pro ranks by finishing runner-up in his first two world tour outings, both in Durban. He was light, fast, and relentless, especially in small waves. After watching the prodigy for the first time, Mark Richards raised an eyebrow and announced that Potter’s “problem” was that “he keeps doing turns and cutbacks even after the wave has stopped.” Despite his fast start on the world tour, Potter, by 1985, hadn’t yet disciplined himself in competition; he’d win now and then, but more often he’d find a way to lose. It didn’t really matter. After Carroll, Curren, and Mark Occhilupo, Potter was the sport’s biggest star, loved in part for his 

 of discipline. He threw his board into crazy high-speed turns, outdrank all challengers at post-event parties, gorged himself in the lineup (“I’m not a very aggressive person until a wave comes through . . . then it’s every man for himself”), and in general stomped around the surfing landscape like a little emperor.

Potter brought the 1985 anti-apartheid boycott into sharper focus. It was fine for Carroll to say his stance on South Africa came from “the realization that things weren’t getting any better for blacks.” When Potter said he’d personally watched black surfers get arrested for riding waves on Durban’s whites-only beaches—the point was that much stronger.

 editor Phil Jarratt covered the boycott for 

, and framed what was now being called “the South African question” simply and articulately: “There was a time when sporting organizations could fence-sit on apartheid, but it has long since passed. The ASP cannot win on South Africa. There is no forward position. Retreat is the only honorable stance. Apartheid cannot win, and tacit support of it through sporting contact is a loser’s position. The boycotters are on the side of right; from the world champion on down, they will be seen as the surfers who knew when enough was enough.”

ASP officials didn’t blink, however, and the pro tour visited South Africa as scheduled. Never mind that civil unrest forced the government to declare a state of emergency in 1985, just before the pro surfers were due to arrive; or that new economic sanctions by the US and most European communities had been declared; or that South Africa’s free-falling currency meant that none of the three pro tour contests would meet the minimum prize-money requirement for ASP sanctioning. Executive director Ian Cairns’ terse public statement on the tour’s justification for returning to South Africa was, “We don’t have a political policy.”

The ASP never backed down from that position. The world tour visited in South Africa annually all through apartheid’s final years—even while the prize money stayed low, the number of boycotters went up, and magazines like 

 dropped their coverage of the South African contests altogether.

Tom Carroll’s 1985 boycott announcement was surfing’s highest-profile political moment. Nearly ten years later, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke said he could find “no example in the history of Australian sport where a champion has been prepared to put principles so manifestly in front of his or her own interests.” Furthermore, the issue stayed with the sport, in one form or another, until apartheid itself was fully dismantled. Cheyne Horan caused a minor stir when he returned to compete in South Africa in 1986 with “Free Mandela” printed in huge black letters across the bottom of his board. In 1989, a young Cape Town regularfooter named Cass Collier—star of the just-formed and nonracial South African Surfing Union, and the son of one of South Africa’s original black surfers—became his country’s first nonwhite competitor on the ASP tour.

Surfing’s involvement with anti-apartheid politics came full circle in 1990, when a Virginia Beach pro named Wes Laine told 

 magazine that he “loved South Africa, [and] couldn’t 

 go there, because the waves are just too good.” Laine felt that a surfing boycott wasn’t going to have “any impact on South Africa’s politics, period.” Three months later, Laine landed in Barbados, a black-majority country with close ties to the anti-apartheid movement, to compete in a regional pro contest. After Laine’s 

 comments were brought to the attention of contest officials, however, he was told that he wouldn’t be allowed in the country.

Laine was furious. He immediately did another interview with 

, and swore that he would retaliate on the Barbados event—by organizing a surfer boycott.

Reigning world champ Tom Carroll boycotted the contests in South Africa. One of his Hawaiian friends had been ordered from a whites-only restaurant in Durban, and another was beaten up as a disco for talking to a white woman. Boycotting, Carroll told the press, was "a basic humanatarian stand."

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Surfers vs Apartheid

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