Surfboat Races Represent a Serious Row for Lifeguards : Championships: Promoter hopes Sunday’s competition catches on with beach crowd.
Australian lifeguard Peter Hickey’s tanned face turned ablaze like a Hollywood spotlight.
The promoter of an obscure ocean sport with questionable market value, Hickey just heard Pacific Beach probably would be jammed with thousands of college students Sunday--the only day he could stage the Pacific Surfboat Rowing Challenge without conflict from another beach-related event.
San Diego State starts its fall semester Monday, which means Sunday is the last official day of summer-vacation sun worship for the 30,000-plus returning to the school. Pacific Beach is a favorite haunt of local college students.
Of course, the locals and the scores of “everyday” people will be there, too.
“Oh, really?” said Hickey, 38, anticipating the world-championship race between Australia, New Zealand and the U.S., beginning at 11 a.m. at Crystal Pier.
“I’m delighted. If we can show off in front of those guys and girls, we’re on a winner.”
That is, if San Diego’s beach culture can be entertained by four lifeguards paddling (and one steering) a 420-pound skiff 400 meters around a buoy in a race that typically lasts only five or six minutes.
With five men hurtling such a large hull (26 feet) into crashing waves, the competitors suggest those 300 to 360 ticks of the clock can be harrowing--and thrilling for the spectator.
“They’re dangerous races; I’ve been thrown out of my seat several times,” said Bob Schroeder, 42, captain of the U.S. squad from Santa Monica, which beat the San Diego Lifeguard Assn. team, the U.S. representative last year, to get here.
“If the surf’s choppy, (people) will be running up to watch us crash and burn,” he said. “I remember racing dory boats at Huntington Beach in 1970. We had eight-foot surf. Boats were flipping all over the place. People were screaming.”
Those are rare occurrences, however, in a sport that requires skill, strength and endurance, not to mention an affinity for saltwater. Lifeguards have long ruled the sport. But, in truth, it is the ocean that rules.
The Santa Monica team, one of seven that competed two weeks ago for the U.S. title, was 40 feet from the shore trailing San Diego when it caught the surge of a five-foot wave in the Oceanside surf and rocketed past the locals to victory.
“They caught the same wave,” Schroeder said. “The only difference is we used our oars and were kind of able to outlast the wave.”
High drama in moderate swells? Perhaps, but it all translates to boredom down on the Gold Coast of Australia, where the natives would much rather compete than watch. There, 250 teams raced for the right to compete in what is formally titled the Air New Zealand/Pan Pacific Hotel Group Pride of the Pacific.
It is a three-stage, point-building event. Six races will be held here, then the competition will resume Nov. 29 in Auckland, New Zealand. Hickey said South Africa and England will enter in 1993, and Japan, Canada and an U.S. contingent from the East Coast have considered testing the waters.
But there is virtually no marketing. No cash is awarded for winning the 5-year-old world title, and all Hickey can account for in 25 years of organized surfboat racing are three four-wheel drive trucks and $120,000 awarded over three years at an event in Australia.
Hickey said he has learned much from the Americans, like how to mesh the West Coast boardwalk society with a borderline sporting event. He has also taught the U.S. competitors a thing or two.
“When we first arrived here, the Americans were wearing . . . What do you call them? Boxer shorts?” he said. “We said, ‘If you’re serious, wear Speedos.’ They switched to Speedos and the girls whistled.”
Hickey’s biggest task, strange as it sounds, is to make surfboat racing a spectator sport Down Under.
“Surfboats, people don’t rush down to the beach to see them (in Australia),” Hickey said. “They’re as common as kangaroos.”
They are also steeped in tradition there, he said. Surfboats were once employed in rescue missions where navigation by other vessels was too difficult. They were also used by whalers in the 19th century.
“There’s a lot of history to them we probably couldn’t tell you,” said Owen McKay, a New Zealander who builds surfboats. “I’ve heard that ship’s crews used to race them as competition.”
By the time the Pride of the Pacific stages its final leg Dec. 6 on Australia’s Gold Coast, Hickey hopes the Aussies and Kiwis will have a new perspective, embellished by what he called “beach entertainment.”
By then, the San Diego event will have been televised (Prime Ticket is filming the race), and Hickey hopes cable viewers will have been caught in the undertow of a seductive California playground.
Bring Americans to Australia for competition and the people “go berserk,” Hickey said. The U.S.’s first appearance in the Pride of the Pacific final brought a crowd of 7,000, about seven times bigger than normal for a surfboat competition, Hickey said.
“We brought in an announcer with an American accent and he really hyped the crowd,” he said. “They started to roar.”
“They all wanted the Americans to win,” said Stephen Krielen, captain of the Whangamata, the New Zealand team and defending champion. Krielen’s squad was named Sports Team of the Year in its province, yet they were villains in front of the Aussie crowd.
“It was fascinating,” Krielen said. “That’s what the public wanted.”
Hickey said he hopes the throng at Pacific Beach--particularly the teen-agers--catches surfboat fever. “We want to show off for the younger generation, the 18-year-olds,” he said.
Chuck Davey, a native San Diegan and a Pacific Beach lifeguard who was a member of the 1991 U.S. team, said Hickey has no worries. He recommended the hot August date instead of the cloudy gloom that put on damper on the event last year.
“It will be crowded,” said Davey. “A lot of locals, a lot of tourists, too.”
Said Hickey, perking up in his chair, eyes widening, “Tell them the sexiest men from two nations will be there,” he said.