THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
The Big Guys Are Taking Over

Australia's Phil Macdonald isn't the tallest guy on Tour, but there's some girth and strength in his compact frame. Macca's made a career of two things: punching hard and carving.

One would think that with the introduction of the lightweight foam/fiberglass board in the 1960s shorter surfers would have made up even more ground on the big boys. Easy to carry, much easier to maneuver, with footwork and subtle weight changes now replacing brute strength, in terms of simple function the modern foam surfboard should have defined the body size of our champions, tipping it downward. But by most standards this wasn’t the case. Yes, we had five-and-a-half foot Dewey Weber, “The Little Man on Wheels”, who is credited with perfecting modern hot-dogging and Mickey “The Mongoose” Munoz, the tiny terror who was one of the first guys to ride Waimea and won the sport’s first professional contest. But look at the results of the SURFER Poll from 1963 to 1983, the sport’s standard of measure for not only surfing skill buy notoriety and popularity. In that twenty-year period (skipping a few years for the 70’s beavertail soul period) only two male surfers topped the charts who were under six feet: Corky Carroll in 1967 and Jock Sutherland in 1969. The rest of the bunch—Phil Edwards, Mike Doyle, David Nuuhiwa, Shaun Tomson and Mark Richards—were all big guys when compared to their contemporaries. All relatively tall surfers who used the increased leverage that height affords to their advantage.

Much has been written about the affect height exerts on athletic performance, most of it broken down to arcane ratios of femur length versus tendon flexibility compounded by geometrically opposed forces of gravity and leverage. But put simply most kinesiologists agree that height significantly affects the leverage between muscle volume and bones, resulting in greater speed of movement. This formula is easy to understand when applied to a baseball pitcher of tennis player, not even taking into consideration the advantage of throwing a baseball down at a batter or swatting your first serve from well above the net.

How this theory applies to surfing isn’t quite so clear. However, if we take twenty years of SURFER Poll winners as examples, every single one of these champions shared a single characteristic: the ability to telescope their legs with speed and power. None of them (with the exception of David Nuuhiwa during his early 70s Fish period) surfed from a sustained crouched position, but rather used their increased height to generate power and speed from the hips down, depending more on coiling and uncoiling than on rotational torque.

If we continue to use the SURFER Poll, as well as the ASP ratings, as a benchmark, all this changed in the1983. Cheyne Horan topped the Poll that year, while, MR notwithstanding, “Horror” dominated the pro surfing scene with a low center of gravity, heavily rotational style of surfing that made the Old Guard’s upright approach look archaic. And then, seemingly it was welcome to Munchkin Land. Picture the mighty Tom Carroll in his size 28 Quiks. Derek Ho’s Ewok celebration at Big Pipe. Martin Potter’s Ron Jeremy look (albeit with bigger…shoulders.) The aggregate body weight of Bud Pro Tour champions Mike Lambresi, Dino Andino, Pat O’Connell and Vinnie de la Pina barely matched Allen Sarlo’s. And Tom Curren, the greatest California surfer ever, was more Lorrin Harrison than Pete Peterson, even after his brief workout-and Op lycra shorts jag in the late 1980s.

In fact Curren essentially set the body-type standard for the New School who, while including beanpoles like Chris Malloy, Luke Egan and Ross Williams (Williams deceptively tall, his full height and abilities often overshadowed by shorter running mate Shane Dorian) delivered up the latest archetype, personified by Kelly Slater. Slater’s ubiquitous profile has shaped not only the state of performance for the past 15 years, but the shape of its performers. Consider the Irons brothers, Andy and Bruce, Joel Parkinson and Mick Fanning. Lined up with Slater, body-wise the past decade’s top performers could be a set of quints (well, maybe with the exception of Fanning’s weirdly overdeveloped trapezoid back muscles) Roughly 5’11” to 6’0”, 165 to 175 pounds, with the broad shoulders, smooth chest and narrow waist of the classic Greek kouros statue.

Not all that long ago, purists were complaining about the absence of power in the top ranks, and they blamed the pursuit of silly tricks for the epidemic. But big surfers like Dane Reynolds have put those fears to rest, basing a wide variety of their future moves - above the lip or not - in a sea of power.