Energy levels were low, a gray sky was anchored overhead, and an outgoing tide had drained the life from a small swell. The surf crumbled in at one to three feet. The sorry conditions were similar to those found so often on the Atlantic coast of Florida, where inconsequential surf sloshes onto beaches for hundreds of miles.
But this was Southern California, surfin’ capital U.S.A, not Florida, and some of the best surfers in the world were gathered for the 1995 U.S. Open. Seemingly just as incongruous as the conditions was the presence of the defending women’s champion, Lisa Andersen, a Florida native whose rise to surfer stardom is no less a stretch than a skier from North Carolina winning a gold medal in downhill racing at the Winter Olympics.
“Maybe Florida waves are so bad they just make world champions,” Andersen, following in the remarkable wakes of two other world champions from Florida, Frieda Zamba and Kelly Slater, has suggested. “Determined people live there, and you’ve got to have determination to win.”
Determined or not, it wasn’t looking good for Andersen on this August afternoon in Huntington Beach. She got off to a lousy start in Round 2, and few in the crowd of 5,000 mostly impassive spectators seemed to notice.
Under more energy-charged conditions, Andersen, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Ormond Beach, commands real attention. “She really rips,” marveled one fan. “She’s insane.”
Many surf journalists concur, describing Andersen as the “best woman surfer in the world” and the “best woman surfer ever.” But today, without the waves to match, so far Andersen is no more impressive than a kid at the beach flailing away on a boogie board.
July and August are the two worst months for surf in California, a basic oceanographic fact known to contest promoters, sponsors, competitors and fans. Less explicit was the idea that the U.S. Open, the world’s biggest and richest surf contest, had been designed not as a forum for high-performance surfing but as a two-week corporate beach rally. Huge banners for Chevy, Hard Rock Cafe, Budweiser and United Airlines hung from the pier, which formed a right angle to the shoreline bleachers, a judges’ tower, a press room, a competitors’ area and a long row of VIP tents. All of which defined the perimeter of Surf Expo ’95, where more than 80 exhibitors had set up promo booths.
Andersen usually rides a plain white surfboard, but here she used one with hot-rod flames airbrushed on the deck, in what seemed a gesture to call attention back to surfing. No luck. The halfway point of Round 2 came and went, and Andersen, still trailing her opponent, continued to bob unnoticed a few yards offshore. She finally picked up a waist-high wave, angled to the right and did a series of fast, smooth, diagonal turns across the face to begin her comeback. But conversations in the bleachers continued uninterrupted a few minutes later when Andersen was announced the winner.
Which is not to say women’s professional surfing had been ignored all day. A top official for the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP), the organization that runs the 20-year-old world tour, had earlier mused on what has recently become known as the “image problem,” saying that “the girls really ought to look at how the Brazilian bodyboarders have done it.” The reference was to a group of Brazilian women and their relatively high profile in the surf world. The Brazilians’ reputation comes partly from a fearless approach to big Hawaiian surf- and partly from their virtually nude presentation. The ASP official’s point was that a breakthrough in women’s pro surfing will depend as much on adaptation to the thong bikini as improved athleticism.
Not mentioned is the fact that Lisa Andersen and Australian Pauline Menczer- the latter was world champion in 1993 and runner-up in 1992- had a few months earlier dueled with some flair to close out the 1994 season. The two surfers almost perfectly divided the 11-event schedule. Andersen began the year with two wins and three seconds and at the halfway mark was considered a lock for the championship. But with three contests left she threw out her back in Brazil, was taken off the beach on a stretcher, diagnosed with two herniated disks and was more or less dry-docked until the end of the season. Menczer then won two contests and forced a showdown at the final event. Andersen, surfing at about 75 percent capacity, needed to lose in the first round, and Menczer needed to win the contest, for Menczer to retain the title. Menczer did her part, posing her third straight victory. But Andersen, psychologically fit in a way that would have been hard to imagine in years past, advanced to the quarterfinals, and the championship was hers.
At the U.S. Open, Menczer, 25, had good things to say about Andersen’s surfing, and dismissed the idea that she and the new world champion have a special rivalry. But then Menczer, with some deftness, offered up her fellow competitor as evidence of the second-rate status of women’s pro surfing. “How do you think it looks,” Menczer asked, “when the world champion is married to the head judge.”
The judge she referred to was Renato Hickel, a Brazilian who has been an ASP official since 1991, and Andersen’s husband since 1993. Menczer continued. “OK, Renato doesn’t judge the women’s heats anymore- great, fine. And Lisa’s earned everything she’s got. But it’s just ridiculous anyway. No other sport would allow it. The world champion and the head judge? And she wins the title one year after she gets married?”
Andersen lost in the U.S. Open semifinals the following afternoon, collected a check for $1,850 and retired to a room at a nearby motel.
The room was messy but quiet. Andersen’s mother, Lorraine Lemelin, who lives in a senior community in Holly Hill, Fla., had just left for the hotel pool with Erica Hickel, Andersen’s 2-year-old daughter. The 26-year-old blonde, wearing a flower-print bikini top and denim shorts, looked trim at 5 feet 7 inches and 126 pounds, relaxed and slightly boyish as she sat on the floor doing a series of stretches.
Newspapers, magazines, TV and the surf media have made stacks of PR hay out of Andersen’s singular career path: from teen-age runaway to national amateur champion in two years, followed by seven long seasons as a professional, when her whopping natural talent was often canceled by mental lapses during competition, then, in a 20-month burst, marriage, childbirth, injury and a dramatic stretch run to the world title.
The Andersen-Hickel romance, in particular, with its changing international backdrop, has become a surf journalism staple. Contact was initiated when she aced him on a peeling eight-foot wall at Jeffreys Bay in South Africa in July 1992. Hickel was forced onto the rocks along the shore, while Andersen blithely surfed her way down the point. An apology was offered one month later as the two danced at a nightclub on Reunion Island, near Madagascar. A secretive courtship began and moved with the world tour through France, Japan and Hawaii. They were married in Daytona Beach in March 1993, and Erica was born in August. The story has been recycled endlessly over the past few years, and Andersen, in her motel room, dismissed the topic with a blank expression and a little shrug.
Andersen isn’t the cipher she was a few years ago, when depravity or greatness might have been read into her future, depending on her mood. But even today, her life defined by parenthood, the world championship, contractual obligations and a measure of international recognition, there are times when Andersen’s face shuts down and nothing about her seems knowable.
Still, the past two years have without question brought a new confidence, and for the most part she converses easily and openly. A third-place finish in the U.S. Open was only a minor disappointment. Andersen led the 1995 ratings with eight contests down and 10 to go. In Hawaii in December, she accepted her world-championship trophy.
Virtually no one in organized surfing thinks nepotism had anything to do with Andersen’s rise to the top. She’s a fast, aggressive, stylish surfer and has been regarded as the best in the world for six or seven years. Scrambled contest results from 1986 to 1993 were proof only of undeveloped nerves and poor gamesmanship (a tendency to come unglued during high-risk maneuvers; thoughtless wave selection), and the title all along was considered hers for the taking, if she could get her head together.
Erica, not Renato, was responsible for Andersen’s winning run in 1994, although the nexus between maternity and the long-deferred championship is hard to locate exactly. Andersen, who competed two weeks after giving birth, remembers feeling a kind of postpartum boost in energy, as well as a new sense of purpose, with the idea that Erica’s well-being was linked to Mom bringing home some hefty paychecks. Andersen smiles and says, “No, the real reason I won right after Erica was born is that I’d just been through the worst, most painful thing ever. Everything’s easy after having a baby.”
Except, maybe, raising a daughter through adolescence. Andersen’s mother remembers Lisa as “a wonderful baby, a wonderful child,” but when she and her husband moved the family from Virginia to Ormond Beach, over the loud objections of their 13-year-old tomboy of a daughter, “this beautiful child turned into a monster.”
The new house was a half-block from the surf and a quick drive north of Daytona Beach. Andersen made an anonymous entry into the local beach scene, then quickly distinguished herself when she bought a second-hand surfboard and paddled into the shorebreak. She chipped her teeth learning how to push through waves. She felt a huge corporal and emotional rush as she finally stood up on a small, bubbly ribbon of whitewater and rode toward shore. The boys cheered her on. The girls, for reasons Andersen to this day doesn’t understand, stayed on the beach.
Two years passed, and Andersen became virtually amphibious. Other Floridian surfers also were charging hard into the surf. Frieda Zamba of Flagler Beach had just begun competing on the women’s world tour, where she would win four world titles before retiring in 1989. The preadolescent Kelly Slater of Cocoa Beach was collecting national amateur surfing titles and has since won the ASP championship three times.
At age 16, Andersen was determined to sneak out of the house at night to party with her beach friends. She was also chronically truant from school. Her grades fell, and her relationship with her family deteriorated. Surfing, in her parents view, was the source of her problems. One night, Andersens’ father, a restaurant manager, went to Lisa’s room and got her surfboard, dropped it on the floor and jumped on the deck, smashing the fins. Not long after, Andersen bought a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles and left a note to her mother saying she was going to be a world-champion surfer. Less than a day later she was in Huntington Beach. It was June 1985.
Andersen’s descriptions of the two years that followed are vague. There were brief periods of work in a yogurt shop, an Italian restaurant and a surfboard factory. With a nervous laugh, Andersen says her first four months in Huntington were spent living with “this guy who was a drug freak, who kind of beat me up a few times.” The surfer’s mother is ambiguous about this period as well, saying only that she was hurt and worried when her daughter left and that she consoled herself as the months passed by thinking, no news is good news. She and her husband were divorced that year.
Not long after arriving in Huntington Beach, Andersen forged her mother’s signature on an entry form, entered a local amateur surf contest and won her division. She took out virtually every contest she entered that year and the next. More important, she began a series of nonabusive living arrangements, first with one family, then another, followed by a couple of boyfriends. The teen-ager radiated both vulnerability and talent, and the reflex response from those nearby was, and largely remains, to provide shelter, food and guidance- and often, with men, romance. Andersen has long understood the effect she has on people.
“It’s always been like that,” she says. “Everywhere I’ve gone people have just taken me under their wing.”
Andersen began to send newspaper clippings of her surfing exploits to her mother, but it was a year after her arrival in California before she finally called home. In autumn 1986, Andersen returned to Florida to compete in the U.S. Championships in Sebastian. She won the contest and later had Thanksgiving dinner with her mother and younger brother. She flew back to California, but reconciliation had begun, and mother and daughter began to grow closer.
“Two peas in a pod” is Lorraine’s cheerful review of the relationship today. Andersen’s father was in contact when Erica was born but otherwise has been out of the picture for 10 years.
For a brief time after the U.S. Championships in 1986, Andersen moved back to Florida and was working at an oyster bar when Frieda Zamba came in with friends for a victory party. Zamba had just won her third consecutive ASP world title. Andersen was friendly, deferential and a little awestruck as she hustled beer and oysters to the champion’s table. But it’s not difficult to imagine the 18-year-old entertaining one or two predatory thoughts. Zamba was contemplating retirement, and Andersen had just signed up with the ASP as a full-time professional.
As a minority within a minority (less than 5 percent of surfers are female), the women’s pro tour was probably doomed to popular and economic indifference. Still, Lisa Andersen, in 1987, joined the guild at the right time. Pop culture was ready for another fling with the beach, millions of dollars were pouring into the front end of the surf industry by the late-’80s, and the trickle down to the women pros was welcome.
The first women’s professional tour was held in 1977 and consisted of five events, two in California and three in Hawaii, worth a total of $19,500. Ten years later, during Andersen’s rookie year, there were eight events worth $84,000. About 15 women, most in their early 20s, were full-time professionals. By 1990, after Andersen’s year-end rating had advanced smartly from 12th to fourth, the tour consisted of 14 events, worth $255,000.
Nonetheless, virtually every female competitor, operated at a loss. The all-time career prize money leader, Australia’s Pam Burridge, who surfed professionally from 1981 to 1994, earned a total of $206,235- or about $15,900 a year. Women’s sponsorship from surf manufacturers has traditionally meant nothing more than free clothes, wet suits and surfboards. Meanwhile, by 1990, average annual gross earnings (prize money and sponsorships combined) for the top half-dozen male professionals was about $250,000.
“That’s why,” Andersen says, “the world tour for the guys means lots of partying and messing around. You always see them having dinner at these great restaurants, while the girls are all out food shopping together at the market. For us its saving money, looking for cheap places to eat, hoping you have enough to get to the next contest.”
Andersen is thought to be the first woman pro to turn a genuine profit. Obeying the pro surfer’s code of silence on personal finance, she won’t even hint as to how much money she makes, except to say she tripled her income when she won the world title after 1994. An educated guess would put her current annual earnings somewhere around $75,000. Andersen has distanced herself from fellow surfers in other ways. She denounced on-tour lesbians (recanting a few years later), and remarks about her inspiration and motivation coming exclusively from male surfers- not female- were not well received. She seemed to take yet another step afield in late 1994 when responding to a question on image.
“There isn’t a lot of interest in women’s surfing,” Andersen said, “because it’s not really a sexy thing. Some of the girls like to wear dresses, but a lot of them want to do their own thing and wear surf trunks and men’s clothes. We need some girly-girls to have it promoted.”
Female surfers have for years been righteously indignant at the T&A; bursting out of surf magazines, while women’s contest reports are pared to a few sentences or left out altogether. Surf movies and videos, if anything, are piggier yet. Editors and filmmakers, for the most part, ignored the protests. Then Surfing magazine, in early 1995, asked women professionals what might be done to improve their standing, and Andersen, surprisingly, seemed to be in line with her colleagues. Alisa Schwartzstein, a top-ranked pro in the mid-’80s, now an ASP official, said, “They [women competitors) need to look good and promote that aspect, be fit and look really good in a bathing suit.” Other pros made similar remarks.
In Huntington for the 1995 U.S. Open, however, Andersen seemed to be having second thoughts. “The thing I said last year about girly-girls? That was kind of a joke. All I meant was that its just really difficult to sell womens surfing to big-time sponsors, when all they want are babe surfers. Most of the girls or not most of, but a lot of them just dont have that kind of look.”
Two months after the U.S. Open, Andersen continued to reap world championship dividends. MTV, CNN, Life and Shape magazines were working on or had completed pieces on Andersen. Motorola had paid her $15,000 for a one-day promo gig at a cable TV trade show in Dallas. Even her surfing seemed to take on added shades of power and control.
And then Surfer magazine interviewed Andersen for a February 1996 cover story (the last time a woman made Surfers cover was 1981), in which the world champion obliquely announced that she was leaving her husband.
“A girlfriend of mine decided to forget about what people thought and follow her heart. That’s kind of what I’m doing,” Andersen explained.
Hickel, she said, would stay in Brazil, but Andersen didn’t seem to know where she would end up living. For most of her pro career Andersen has listed Ormond Beach as home, but her interest and attachment to Florida seem to come and go. She sounded convincing recently when she said, “I really miss it there; I can’t wait to go home.” But she sounded equally convincing when, a few days later, she said she was thinking about moving to Sydney, Australia.
Andersen had again become hard to read. Her competitive focus slipped in the early part of 1996. After nine events through April she was ranked 10th. Winning a third title in Huntington Beach this August will be more difficult.
The women’s tour was in a state of flux as well. After topping out at $302,000 in 1992, total prize money was down to $245,000 in 1995, while the minimum purse for a women’s contest dropped from $25,000 to $2,500.
Even so, officials expect the tour to survive, and a handful of women will sign on, travel, surf, compete, despair the lack of money and respect, but in general spend a few years of young adulthood in tremendously memorable fashion.
Lisa Andersen, meanwhile, is still the world champion, and raising her career profile with each passing month. But she seems to be speaking literally and metaphorically, for herself and her profession, when she says, “I guess I’m still looking for a home.”
MATT WARSHAW is a free-lance writer.
