Event Will Encourage Some Risky Business

For all the living-on-the-edge attitude and spontaneous lifestyle associated with those who compete, surf contests have pretty much stuck to straight-ahead formats over the years: one-on-one heats with the winner advancing or four-surfer heats with the top two progressing.

Irvine surf-wear giant Op will offer a different spin on surf competition Thursday and Friday at the south side of Huntington Beach Pier with a tag-team event pitting four-surfer squads representing teams from manufacturers and local retailers.

Each team will consist of two pro-am competitors, at least one woman and one junior, age 16 or younger. During one-hour heats, each surfer will ride a maximum of three waves--the top two of which count--and then race up the beach and tag the next team member.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” said San Diego’s Holly Beck, the 1999 national amateur champion who will begin competing on the women’s pro qualifying tour this summer after she gets her degree in psychology from UC San Diego. “It’s a rare opportunity in this sport to be part of a team, to root for and depend on someone else and to compete with men and younger kids.

“It’s exciting, watching surfers sprint in and out of the water, trying not to trip over their leashes.”

The event may be more surf party than big-time surf contest--it precedes the industry’s annual Southern California trade show this weekend at the Long Beach Convention Center--but if the waves cooperate, it could be as fun to watch as what the Assn. of Surfing Professionals World Championship Tour has to offer.

The lineup of talent is impressive, including six-time world-champion Kelly Slater; C.J. and Damien Hobgood, hard-charging twins from Florida who finished No. 7 and No. 25 on the WCT last year; Oxnard’s Tim Curran, who fell to No. 31 last year but is one of the sport’s most innovative surfers, and Laguna Beach’s Pat O’Connell, an 11-year veteran of the WCT.

The judging will favor “progressive surfing”--which means high-risk maneuvers will be rewarded--encouraging surfers to go for the biggest airs, tail slides and rail turns in the most critical spots in the wave. And the scoring system includes, for each team, one “double whammy” per heat. At the end of a potentially high-scoring ride, a competitor can raise both his hands above his head and the wave will count double for his team.

“The scoring format is going to make it really exciting for the surfers and fun for all of us to watch,” Curran said.

Given her teammates--surf mag poster boy Gavin Beschen of San Clemente, who recently won $34,000 in a winner-take-all specialty contest for aerialists; longtime pro Jeff Deffenbaugh from Huntington Beach, who has been surfing the pier all his life, and Palos Verdes wunderkind Alex Gray--Beck likes Team Body Glove’s chances.

With only $2,500 going to each winning team member, the real winners figure to be the spectators.

“There are no tour points in jeopardy, no stressing about losing in the first round,” Beck said. “It’s all about representing our sponsors and most of all having a good time.”

CEO Dick Baker says Op is hosting the $20,000 event as “a way to give back to the surfing industry at the grass-roots level.”

It’s also giving surf fans a compelling reason to play hooky this week.

BIGGEST WIPEOUT OF 2000

Success, much like his fluid style on the waves, came fast and easy for Curran.

When he was 17, he was being pegged as the next Slater. When he was still a teenager, he had a six-figure endorsement contract. At 22, he had become No. 6 in the world.

Last year, all the good fortune turned into misfortune and he fell to No. 31, three spots short of qualifying for this year’s WCT.

Curran, who’s featured in at least three or four full-page ads in every issue of the top surf magazines and is a star in the latest big-budget surf video by the sport’s top filmmaker, Taylor Steele, plans to be a fixture on the World Qualifying Series tour this year. He could kick back and accept a wild-card entry to a WCT contest here and there and make a few boat trips to exotic locales for photo shoots, but he’s determined to requalify for the WCT.

“I feel really good and I’m more amped than ever to surf,” he said. “I’m determined to get back on the WCT because I think the next three years should be the peak of my career. I want to be on tour, putting everything into trying to win a world title.”

In 13 events last year, Curran had six last-place finishes.

“It was so weird, I was sixth in 1999 and last year I did the same things with completely different results,” he said. “In the last half of the season, I lost five times in the last five seconds of a heat, when the other guy caught just the wave he needed. It got to the point where I’d lost my confidence. I’d be expecting something to go wrong as I was paddling out.”

Curran says he is surfing more, training harder out of the water and is dedicated to finding out how good he can be, without worrying about the expectations of others.

“There’s no such thing as the next Kelly Slater,” he said. “A talent like that comes around once a generation. But when I heard that stuff, I was still a little kid and thought, ‘Maybe I am.’ People expected a lot of me, but I put a lot of pressure on myself too.”

Curran is sure last year was merely a slip and he’ll be back fighting for a world title in 2002. In any case, he has learned a hard lesson in perspective.

“I’ll never take being on the WCT for granted again,” he said.

WHO NEEDS RATINGS?

Bruce Irons, who will surf for the Costa Mesa-based Volcom team this week in Huntington Beach, is one of the most talented and popular surfers in the world, but has made only brief appearances on the WCT over the last few years, preferring to surf the world’s best waves for his sponsor’s photographers or stay home in Hawaii.

No one doubts his talent, however.

He recently fought his way to victory in the qualifying for the Gerry Lopez Mountain Dew Pipeline Masters, which some consider the real Pipe masters event because it features the hottest locals who surf the spot every day. Then he barreled his way to the semifinals of the main draw, beating some of the world’s top-ranked surfers along the way.

Who needs the grind of the WCT when you can star in videos and magazine covers every so often and remind everyone that the world’s best surfers aren’t necessarily ranked in the ASP’s “elite” 44?

SHOREBREAKS

San Clemente’s DynoComm Sports recently increased support for the Professional Surfing Tour of America and that has resulted in ASP sanctioning, which means the tour will not only offer more prize money in 2001, but the events will also have at least a one-star World Qualifying Series rating. That’s good news for mainland America’s emerging talent. Traveling all over the world to earn WQS points is a very expensive proposition. . . . Surfing Magazine and O’Neill are sponsoring a new aerial division for the National Scholastic Surfing Assn. The national final will be held at Salt Creek in Dana Point on June 24. The top six high-fliers will share $10,000 in scholarship money.