DANE REYNOLDS: The SURFER Profile

Dane and Yadin Nicol, daytripping.

He mulls it over, and quickly delivers an answer with meaning. “I’m pretty psyched on Dan Malloy,” he says. And, as unexpected as that is, it makes sense.

“You know,” Dane says, “Everybody looks at Dan and says, ‘oh, Dan rips. It’s a shame he’s riding all those weird boards. If he got on good boards, he could surf really good.’ But Dan’s just doing what he wants to do, and he seems to be enjoying surfing more than a lot of people out there.”

In his prime, Dan Malloy was undertaking the career expected of him—slogging his way around the world in WQS heats, advancing minimally, allowing his surfing to hit what he calls a “three- to four-year plateau.” He was climbing the rankings slowly, such that qualifying seemed a distant possibility. And anyway, he didn’t like competing. He walked away from competition, saying that he didn’t want to lose his love for surfing.

It would seem that something about that resonates with Dane.

Over breakfast several days later, I ask Dan Malloy what it was that pushed him over the top, and he relays the story of being at a WQS contest overseas. Sitting there in a pack of his contemporaries, he watched as a surfer—he can’t remember whom—did a big snap and everybody around him let out a giant shout of approval.

“I looked around, and I thought to myself, ‘any of us, on our day, can do that snap right there.’ But these guys really got pleasure out of that, and I didn’t.”

The seed was planted for Dan. On a more profound level, and to the likely dismay of many, the same seed may be germinating within Dane right now. At 22, after only spending one semi-dedicated year on the World Qualifying Series, he has qualified for the World Tour. But now that he’s achieved it, Dane is outwardly ambivalent. He’ll be going on tour next year, he assures me, but five months from the first event, he goes back and forth between saying that he’s excited, and that he’s fairly sure that he doesn’t want to be a competitive surfer.

These are perhaps the trademark wafflings of a competitive rookie of whom much is expected, but the facts do bear out his competitive nonchalance: Most of his peers celebrate their qualifications with lavish sponsor parties and champagne baths, but when Dane qualified, there was no party, no celebration.

And then there’s this: “When I qualified, I felt guilty,” he says. “Because I felt like there’s so many guys out there that would love to be in my position and I wasn’t really as stoked as I should have been. There’s so many guys out there that deserve it, and surf so good, and have been doing it for five years and have come close every time, and then I just hop on and have this weird, lucky streak, and I’m on, and it’s almost like I didn’t do the…whatever they call it.”

The grind?

“Yeah, the grind.”

Writing off his success as the result of “some weird, lucky streak” and failing to take credit for his accomplishments—this is Dane Reynolds, and it is perhaps inevitable, as it is his fortune to be preternaturally blessed as one of the best surfers in the world, and it is his misfortune to be categorically resented for the same.

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Dane Reynolds is sitting crosslegged on his couch in his Ventura apartment, describing what coming of age as surfing’s golden child feels like.

First off, it was unlikely. Born in Long Beach, raised in Downey and Bakersfield, Dane Reynolds did not grow up with a surfboard under his arm. The son of an air-conditioning mechanic, his father relocated the family as he received promotions. When he was 10 years old, Dane spent the summer in Ventura with a friend, where he surfed every day, and the hook was set deep.

His dad got a promotion in Glendale, and Dane lobbied hard for the family to move to Ventura, a good hour-and-a-half away. Rather than drive his son to the surf, his dad complied, and has endured the daily commute to Glendale for over a decade.

And so, it wasn’t until age 11, well past the time that most of his peers had already perfected the art of applying their sponsors’ stickers without air bubbles, that Dane negotiated the world of learning to surf, and well.

The particulars of Dane’s amateur progression are well documented and standard, up to a point. Like most of his peers, he earned his sponsors, began competing in the NSSAs, gained a presence on the amateur surfing scene, but then, unlike his peers, and for reasons that remain mysterious to him, he was appointed Second-Coming status, a distinction he didn’t want and never asked for.

It was a lot of pressure, and it came to a head in 2003, when Dane was 18 years old. By that point, every conceivable label had been placed on him: America’s Great Hope. The Next Kelly Slater. The Best Next Surfer In The World. His contract with Rip Curl was set to expire, making him a free agent, and igniting a bidding war, all of which was based on hype that he didn’t believe in. In the end, he signed a contract with Quiksilver.

“I never really felt like I was what they thought I was when they picked me up, because there was all this hype around me like I was the next big thing, and I didn’t feel like it was true.”

The expectations were there. Dane would be a world champion one day, and be the world’s next best surfer. But, in his mind, there was a disconnect.

“I didn’t want to be exposed as a fraud, because I felt like I was a fraud. I felt like one day everybody was going to realize that I wasn’t as good as they thought I was, and then I’d be the laughingstock.”

Far from it. Traveling widely and surfing obsessively with an unmatched sense of imagination, Dane pushed the boundaries of progressive surfing to their current limits. But in a society and a surf world that demands results to justify its hero worship, Dane was not sticking to the script. He didn’t even attempt to qualify until he was 21, at the beginning of 2007, and when he did, it was precarious.

“I did a few events and was doing really bad and was pretty much over it—I was going to quit,” Dane says. “I was almost trying to lose. We were in Australia at the event at Margaret River. There was a swell coming, and all my friends were all going up to Craike’s [Ry] house, and I was just thinking that if they left I’d be staying in the house solo. And then somehow—I rode like a brand new board in every heat, and just wasn’t even trying to do well—somehow I did well like that.”

He got third in that event, continued on to the next legs of the tour in South Africa and Scotland, and soon was sitting sixth on the world rankings. He continued competing, and soon, he had earned enough points to qualify for the 2008 World Tour.

Good for Dane. Only that the more time he spent around contests, the more he realized that he didn’t want to surf in them.

“Even in the last few years of the NSSA, I was just there to be there. I would purposely lose so I wouldn’t have to stay the night,” he says. “Because if you make two heats at every event, and do well in one of them, then you’ll make it to Nationals.”

This, of course, begs the question: Why care about Nationals?

“I would care about that. I would totally care. But I don’t know if it’s one of those things where you care because people tell you that’s what you should care about. It’s only recently that I’ve started to realize that maybe that’s not what I care about at all.”

For Dane, a competitive reluctance is intertwined in his surfing priorities.

Dane credited his success on tour with learning to pull back in a heat, in getting a 7 if he needed to, rather than going for a 10 on every wave.

“That sucks. It totally sucks. Sometimes you win heats on the QS and you still lose all your dignity.”

He continues, “I don’t feel like competitive surfing is near the cutting edge of surfing, which doesn’t quite make sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to have to take a step back to win heats.”

The best surfers in the world, it seems, haven’t spent much time on this problem, choosing instead to stay inside the format.

“You have to be restrained to win heats. There's no two ways about it,” says Kelly Slater. “But how do you expect to win against anyone if you’re just pushing and not pulling things off. Contests make you wrap what you know in a nice package to present to other people.”