Frieda Zamba Rides High on Surfing’s New Wave : The Three-Time World Champ Revolutionized Women’s Pro Surfing

YOU COULD SAY it was a girl who started the whole thing. So OK, not surfing itself, which probably had its origins somewhere in Polynesia. What I have in mind here is something a good deal more recent: the beginnings of surfing--not simply as sport, but as a phenomenon of popular culture. The date was 1956. The girl was Gidget. In the 1959 film she was portrayed by Sandra Dee--lithe, tan, blond, pint-size, but full of energy. The characters around her had names like the Big Kahuna and Moon Doggie. They rode the crest of what amounted to surfing’s first big wave of popularity. The thing came down on us--I see it kind of wobbling along--like a beach break at high tide, reeking of cocoa butter, bouncing to the rhythm of “Surfin’ USA.”

Now, more than 30 years after Fredrick Kohner’s book about the Malibu surfette, the second wave appears to be upon us. Perhaps it will be even bigger than the first. It comes with much of the same baggage--movies, clothes, hairdos, a pair of familiar faces, Frankie and Annette, plus a few new twists like wave pools and a revitalized professional tour. There is even, in the midst of this familiar sea of hype, a young, blond-haired girl, lithe and tan with a board beneath her arm, so that you might imagine the Gidg has come back to us as well. Which in a way she has. Except that this time around her name is Frieda Zamba. (With a name like Zamba you can skip the Gidget stuff.) And this time around, she can really surf.

This is her story. But it is also the story of what that first Gidget was a part of, a certain spirit, if you will, born of this activity that has served both as a sport of kings and as outlaw subculture, and which is with us still, amid the professionalism of the ‘80s.

It seems now that that first wave was a bit like one of those mysterious comets some believe are responsible for life. It passed without noticeable damage, but it left its spores. Where there were spores, there were, in time, surfers. The spores fell in many places, from Oregon to the Mexican border, from the chilly coast of New England on down to the tiny southern town of Flagler Beach, Fla. The surfers in Florida, much like those in the movie that had helped send the wave on its way, had funny names, like Beaver and Flea. And, just like in the movie, there was a girl on the beach, watching. And just like in the movie, she got tired of watching and decided she wanted to take a shot at it herself. And then something unusual happened. The girl got out there, and pretty soon people were watching her.

Flea Shaw was one of those people. He was a surfer and a good one. He’d spent five years as a professional. Surfing’s never been the easiest sport to make a living at, even now, and Flea’s time was then, the trough between the waves. When he hung it up he returned to Flagler Beach. He kept his hand in, however, surfing, shaping boards, even coaching the Flagler locals. He shaped Frieda’s first board for her when she was 15. And then he began to watch, seriously, that is. “I’d been out on the pro tour,” he says. “I’d seen how the other girls were surfing. And I’d seen how fast Frieda was progressing. And I just knew she could do really well.”

In 1982, Flea got a chance to test his judgment. Mazda was sponsoring a women’s pro event in Solana Beach. Flea found out about it, and he entered Zamba. He had to talk her into going. Frieda was 17. She’d never been out of Florida. “It was,” Flea admits, “kind of a big thing. She’d never even been on an airplane. It was a big step.” When Frieda speaks of it now, she laughs. “I didn’t know any of the other girls on the women’s tour. It was kind of like I was standing by myself all the time, on the beach. Surfing by myself. It was really weird.” It was true that Frieda was by herself a lot. By the end of the contest she had blown everyone else out of the water, something the Californians thought was kind of weird, themselves. Flea, it seems, knew a surfer when he saw one.

The event, in a way, echoed another, earlier event that has since taken its place in the annals of surfing lore--the 1966 world championships in San Diego, an event many now see as the end of one era, the ushering in of a new. David Nuuhiwa was the man to beat in those days. A Hawaiian by birth, possessed of a catlike grace, Nuuhiwa seemed the archetypal California stylist, everything smooth and fluid, each move blending effortlessly into the next, the master of hang 10. Nuuhiwa was supposed to be a shoo-in. He lost. He lost to a 19-year-old kid from Australia known as the Animal. Also known as Nat Young. Many cite Nat’s performance in those championships as the beginning of the modern school of surfing. Nat was not cool. Nat was aggro , dude. The man didn’t cruise, he ripped. Not content to ride in a straight line across the wave’s face, Nat was a pioneer of the vertical move, the hard drive off the bottom, the hard turn off the top. Nor was his aggression limited to moves on the waves. He went after them with aggression as well, out-paddling competitors, stealing waves, occasionally pausing to pound the deck of his board with his fist. Now it is not clear whether Frieda Zamba did any deck pounding at Solana Beach, but at a time in which girls were supposed to exhibit a little femininity out there, what Zamba did was what the Animal did back in ‘66: She ripped, and women’s surfing would never be the same.

You might assume the rest was history, but not quite. There followed one crazy year on the pro circuit that was many things to a quite young girl pushed suddenly from the serenity of Flagler Beach to life on the professional tour. It was exciting, frustrating, at times humiliating and, in the end, instructive.

Exciting, because suddenly “it’s like you get to go all over the place, surf all these good waves you read about in the magazines. You’re traveling on your sponsor’s money, so it’s like, it’s great, you know.”

The flip side to that can be found in the fact that these places don’t come free. There are dues. Hawaii, for instance. “I was excited,” Frieda says, “because that’s where I’d always wanted to go, but then when I got there it was like, ‘God, these waves are big .’ It was like anywhere you went it was big , all the time. Then there’s this reef you’ve got to deal with, and crowds and locals. . . . “

Another surfer from Florida, a friend of Flea called Beaver, had to deal with the reef at the Banzai Pipeline on the North shore of Oahu. He’d gone into it head-first on a bad wipeout and stuck there. The rescue crew had gotten to him by following his leg leash down from the surface. Months of surgery and rehabilitation were to follow. And each year there are injuries, everything from what happened to Beaver, to ruptured disks and eardrums, to torn muscles and ligaments--the results of trifling with impact zones as ferocious as any you are likely to see in the NFL. “I had my boards,” Frieda says. “But I didn’t know where to sit (to wait for the waves) or where to paddle out.” It was frustrating. It was also scary. She remembers surfing Haleiwa for the first time, getting held down long enough to forget which way was up. She lost in her first heat. At the time she was glad. “I just knew I wouldn’t have to go out there anymore.”

But it wasn’t just Hawaiian Juice--a term surfers use to describe a wave’s power--it was the whole scene. Surfers on the tour might have sponsors, but it’s not exactly tennis. “You wind up in these really cheap rooms with a bunch of other girls. You sleep on the floor. You want to go to sleep because you’ve got this early heat, but somebody else wants to party. So what happens is, you can’t concentrate. You do lousy. Your friend does lousy. You say, forget it, let’s go get a beer.” Frieda wound up getting quite a few beers that first year on the tour. Her weight went up. Her contest results went down, and it was time for Flea Shaw to step back in. He had, after all, discovered a surfer, not a party animal. Next year Flea went out on the tour with Frieda as her coach. She was the only girl to have one. She finished second. In 1985 she won it, the world title, and Flagler Beach put out the welcome mat. They even gave Frieda the key to the city. “I was so embarrassed,” Frieda said recently in an interview with Sports Illustrated. “I didn’t go downtown for a week.”

Now you might be inclined to say at this point that you always thought beers and beaches went together. I mean, like remember all those crazy parties Frankie and Annette used to have? Everybody twisting the night away--which they could do, of course, since no one bothered to get a job. And you figured that was what the surf scene was all about. Well, it was and it wasn’t. By that I mean there may be serious reasons for not having a job. In order to say something about that, it will be necessary to digress for a moment, back into the reckless ‘60s and the birth of a subculture, to insert a brief story from surfing’s past into this one of its present.

The surfer image as most imagine it today, was, of course, born in California, with the early beach flicks playing their part. The sun-blitzed buffoonery of Frankie and Annette was only one side of it, however, even then. Surfing has always had another face. In those early days you might have said that, ironically, it was a face that appeared in many of those very beach movies its owner loathed. It was a dark, handsome face. The name that went with it was Mickey Dora, also known as Da Cat, the King of Malibu.

Now I won’t pretend to know all the facts about Dora. Facts have a funny way of changing on you when you’re dealing with legends, anyway, of running together with certain fictions. What I knew about him then was probably about what every other guy who followed the sport knew. Mainly, what we knew was that if surfing was what was cool, then Dora was as cool as it got. We knew he got good before it got crowded, and we knew he liked it better before, before it got spoiled, because that was part of it, a love of things as they were, before a lot of morons decided it was hip to throw a little peroxide on their heads, call themselves surfers and trash the beach, his beach if you were talking Malibu. Because we’d all seen him in the surf films--the real ones--a James Garner look-alike with a board. We’d seen him cranking bottom turns at the bases of huge Hawaiian walls. We’d seen him nose-riding at the Bu. And in those days, no one did it better. So when we heard that he’d kicked some kook off the beach, we understood. We’d also heard about the time he single-handedly rescued a pair of fishermen from a monster storm surf. Eventually however, the legend began to darken, with Dora on the run, wanted by the law on bad-check and credit-card charges, the magazines laced with Dora sightings--Bali, Peru, the South of France. But then he always had been a prophet of doom, for the sport, the state, the world at large.

If one way into a culture is through its myths, its heroes, then the phenomenon of Dora should tell us something about surfing. What one is tempted to say now is that Dora was surfing’s Kerouac, his riffs blown on a wave, on a nine-foot chunk of foam--but a statement, nonetheless. And if the masses thought the beach-blanket movies were what the surfing culture was all about, lots of surfers knew better. They knew it had to do with what Dora, more than any other surfer of the day, seemed to have become a symbol of--a symbol whose message was in fact not so dissimilar from that of the Beats. It had to do with experience as a way back to something we were fast losing sight of in a sea of counterfeit. It had to do with the ability, perhaps, to see surfing metaphorically--a link to a trust we were rushing to betray. Guys who never knew him could say: “Long live Da Cat.” And other guys would know what they meant.

Now the point of all this is simply to say there has always, at the heart of the hype, been a core of seriousness to this sport, something that grows out of the act itself. It has to do with a respect for what the act can teach if one will let it, the scale of things, as it were--a lesson about as far removed from most of what Hollywood has given us so far as Jack Kerouac was from Maynard G. Krebs. And that, in a roundabout sort of way, does get us back to Frieda Zamba. Because what we’re talking about are surfers, those who have gotten beyond an image. And you sense that about Frieda, that the accolades that have come with three consecutive world championships, interviews, sponsors (she recently considered an endorsement offer from Nike), enough money now to travel more comfortably on the world tour, are, in many ways, beside the point. It’s the act itself that counts.

It’s been more than five years now since Zamba left the home-grown surf of Flagler Beach for life on the world tour, and today she’s sitting at a dining-room table in Huntington Beach and looking a lot like the Gidget of old, sun-streaked yellow locks spilling out around a white sun visor. Flea is here today as well. The two of them are married now. They are in Huntington Beach to defend Frieda’s world title, and we’ve been talking about a few things. Among them, what to do when Frieda’s days on the pro tour have ended.

When I put this question to them, they look at one another. It doesn’t take long to come up with an answer. Surf. Of course. The places there aren’t time for now. The places far removed from the judges’ stands and bikini contests. Soul surfing, as it is known to surfers, a way of designating surfing done for the simple joy of it. And this strikes a cord because it’s very similar to what the men’s world champ, Tom Curren, recently said to me as well, describing his preference for soul surfing to that done in competition. One also hears in these comments the echoes of something Duke Kahanamoku once said--the Duke being an early legend whose bust now marks the entrance to the Huntington Beach pier, where this year’s OP Pro was held. “I’ll still be doing it when I’m 90,” he said. “Just pick the right board and the right wave, and keep on riding.”

And one might even think of that now-legendary act with which Da Cat himself chose to close out his competitive career. He was 30 at the time. He’d made it into the finals of a championship event at Malibu, a spot he had often surfed alone, before the hype, before the judges or the crowds. He stroked into a good wave, pulled up off the bottom and set his line across the face. He walked to the nose, his back to the beach, dropped his trunks and mooned the judges. When the ride was over, he retrieved his board from the white water and walked away. They say he never looked back, and it is a fact he never competed again. They do say, however, that he kept on riding. One imagines they will say it of Frieda Zamba as well.