DANE REYNOLDS: The SURFER Profile

According to Kelly Slater: "Dane's average is most pros' great." Evidence on offer.

According to Dan Malloy, this is the crux of the problem for Dane: “You don’t get to where Dane is,” he says, “without being ridiculously obsessed and inspired. And I’m not sure where competitive surfing fits into that.”

Further, it is in this sense that Dane is very much a product of his Ventura environment. “It’s not cool to be a pro surfer up here at all,” says Dan. “And unlike a place like Australia, we weren’t raised to be competitors. We wanted to be really good surfers before we wanted to win contests. I didn’t want to be like Tom Curren because he won three world titles, I looked up to him because he surfed so good.”

Dane has endured a continued questioning of his competitive drive, but that might miss the point.

“I think he’s intensely competitive,” says Al Merrick, who has shaped Dane’s boards since Dane was 12 years old.

Al, of course, is right, whether Dane knows it or not. It may very well be true that Dane doesn’t like surf contests, but, as Dan Malloy says, “Dane competes every time he surfs. He’s not forced between two flagpoles, there aren’t any judges there, and he doesn’t have to burn a guy to do it, but he’s still competing.”

Here, in his living room, on a Friday afternoon in the fall—the first day I come to see Dane in the company of his manager and the rest of the crew—while we’re kicking this topic around, Dane seems to be trying to figure it out while we talk.

“I’m going to do it,” he says of the tour. “I’m going to do it full on.”

But then, in the same breath, he adds, “We’ll see what happens. I still haven’t made the decision on if that’s what I want for my career, but—“

Directly on cue, his manager, Blair Marlin, who had been in an adjacent room, walked in to give his client a break. It was a classic and transparent move of a manager stepping into stop his client from saying something regrettable, and Blair did it under the auspices of breaking news. He had a jubilant Ian Walsh on speakerphone. Walsh, the young big-wave surfer from Maui, had just gotten one of the best waves of the season at Teahupoo on the best swell of the year, and was excitedly reporting back to the Mainland while frantically trying to make his flight to Hawaii in time for the Xcel Pro at Sunset, four-star WQS event on Oahu’s North Shore. Blair hung up and Dane was visibly puzzled.

“Why would you care about the Sunset contest after you got the biggest wave ever ridden at Teahupoo?” he asked.

And that, in essence, is the question Dane Reynolds is trying to answer.

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The blue house on the corner, the one in plain view of the break where he learned to surf, the one across the street from the beach—the spiritual home, in some way, to Dane’s love for surfing—that’s his now, the fruits of only a fractional lifetime of soft labor. Escrow hasn’t closed yet, so we drive past it and he points it out to me in the fading light of the day, tells me how much they wanted for it, and how much he paid for it, and I am reminded that, at 22, Dane Reynolds is a wealthy young man.

I ask him if he bought it outright, and he laughs, looks at me like a horn has grown out of my head and says, “No, I don’t have that much money,” and then we talk about property taxes.

Since the time that Dane Reynolds was 15 years old, surfing for him has been a job, and it has been combative.

“When I first signed with Quiksilver, I got wildcards into a lot of ’CT events, and I think a lot of guys thought, ‘Who’s this guy? He’s just getting everything handed to him.’ And that was a bummer, because I felt like if I could talk to them, they wouldn’t feel that way about me. I think they had this idea of me being some punk kid that wanted to come take over the world or whatever, and that wasn’t me.”

Since the time he was 15, Dane has also been bought, sold, and traded as a commodity on surfing’s burgeoning talent exchange, a heartless realm where questions of how much a surfer enjoys or doesn’t enjoy the lifestyle are rendered irrelevant.

“For a while I was so caught up in trying to capture everything I did and trying to film every day and doing contests or making everything worth it on a career sort of level,” says Dane, freshly returned from a month-long surfing sojourn to Tahiti, Iceland, and France. “But especially in Tahiti and Iceland, I realized that I lost sight of why I love surfing. I lost the enjoyment of just riding a wave—how cool it is to just ride a wave—and I don’t’ really care if I’m on the cutting edge of surfing, and can do airs and shit. I’m just stoked to be in the ocean. I don’t know, I kind of had this realization of just how lucky I was to be where I’m at.”

He is speaking candidly, unfiltered, leaving behind the posturing of the modern, professional-surfing scene for a fleeting moment, but then he pauses, sensing the inevitable. “I don’t know,” he says. “All this stuff sounds totally corny, and I bet when you write it down it’s going to sound corny, but I guess a lot of people have that turning point, and you can see it, and everybody ends up getting made fun of.”

By turning point, Dane is referring to a Dan Malloy moment, the time in one’s career, regardless of what that career is, where you decide that—fuck it all—you’re going to do what you want, and not what your manager or boss or anybody else wants.

The construct of “surfing as work” can be a difficult one for people to empathize with. After all, Dane is 22, fabulously wealthy, and his job is to surf all day.

But, as Dan Malloy, says, “Imagine right now that every single session you have, and have had, for the last five years was filmed.” He pauses for effect and asks me to really consider it. “Seriously think about that. Think about what it would feel like to drop in on a wave, and ride the wave and sit in the lineup. I’m willing to bet that Dane doesn’t have anymore than one session a month where he’s by himself.”

That is the curse. The world is watching, and it will always be watching, and it can be hard to enjoy something as simple as surfing when that’s the case.

And then there’s the matter of image creation. Part of the problem is that Dane Reynolds is imminently quotable, and it gets him into trouble. Writers love their quotes, and Dane can provide them, although he rarely means to, and they carry much different resonance in the cold, unblinking form of print than they do when they come out of his mouth. Most recently, a surf journalist came up to Ventura to write a profile on Dane, overheard Dane say a bunch of inflammatory things to a friend in the lineup, then ran them in his magazine in list form without any context and without having any tape to support the quotes, and relied on their salaciousness to carry his piece.

Even Dane thought he sounded like an asshole, and Dane doesn’t think of himself as an asshole. He spent the next month sending apology emails and cleaning up a mess that he never intended to create.

Still, Dane knows he’s fortunate, but even that leaves him feeling unsettled. “My brother—he’s working hard,” Dane says. “He does tile every day, and he works super hard. And I have all this money coming in for doing nothing. I’m just surfing. I feel guilty. I don’t want to feel guilty, but I have no choice.”

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In two days, Dane is going to Hawaii, where yet another label awaits him—the one that says he can’t surf in Hawaii. There, he will surf in the Triple Crown events under the scrutiny of the surf world that knows that he will be on Tour next year, and also in light of the latest surf-media construct that has befallen him—suddenly, for no apparent reason, Dane has been diametrically opposed to 19-year-old South African surfer Jordy Smith, who also qualified for next year’s tour, but whom Dane barely knows and doesn’t particularly feel any competition with.

“That’s just ridiculous,” says Dane, scoffing at the idea of the invented fierce rivalry. “He lives to win heats and he loves winning, and I just know that he’s going onto be world champion, and that’s not where I’m headed. I don’t like to be compared to him, because I feel like I’m being put on this big disappointing sort of thing where I’m going to let people down, but I’m just not headed there.”

If there is one piece of good news to be taken from Jordy’s ascendance, however, it’s that it has relieved, at least momentarily, some of the pressure from Dane. “I like that Jordy’s kind of ‘that guy’ now,” says Dane, laughing. “He can have all that pressure on him.”

The truth is that nobody knows what’s going to happen to Dane Reynolds, and that it doesn’t particularly matter. He may very well go on tour next year and win the world championship—the talent is certainly there. Or, he may go on tour and decide he doesn’t like it, or doesn’t have an aptitude for it, and move on.

At 22, Dane, in his own words, is “just a kid.” He’s got a lot of figuring out to do. And he will do it.

“Whatever the media created around me when I was young,” he says, “I was aware of, and I felt a lot of pressure to live up to what they expected. I’ve gotten over that now. I’ve taken it like this: They’ve created this image of what I should be doing, and if I let them down, then it’s their own fault because I never asked for anybody to say anything about me.”

And, like that, come springtime, Dane Reynolds is going to go see what makes sense to him.