Waves Are Bringing Him Back : After Traveling World, Deffenbaugh Is Ready to Be Home For Op Pro

His short, bleached hair stands like a tomcat’s before battle and his red eyes peak out at the midday glare through puffy slits.

Jeff Deffenbaugh looks like something out of a documentary on a rock group.

In one sense, however, he’s a most common denominator of life in the suburbs, just another young businessman suffering from jet lag. Another few thousand dollars, another 16 days. Another sometimes-exhilarating, often-boring, hassle-filled road trip away from his fiancee and son.

But Deffenbaugh is different from the waves of men and women who roll down the jet ways next to him and wake up wondering what time zone they’re in. He surfs for a living. No, not the ‘net, the best waves in the world.

And talk about frequent flier miles. He just spent two entire days returning from the Reunion Islands, a tiny French territory in the Indian Ocean 350 miles east of Madagascar.

Deffenbaugh, 22, is a rookie on the Coca-Cola/Assn. of Surfing Professionals World Championship Tour. He’s currently ranked 34th in a lineup that includes the 44 best pro surfers in the world and he’s trying to find the take-off spot that will launch him on a long and prosperous career. But there are so many perils, some mind-twistingly intangible, others excruciatingly real.

It can be hard to concentrate on the next maneuver when your board is slicing through the crest of a 10-foot wave and you’re looking down through ocean so clear that the huge flower of razor-sharp coral, five feet below the surface, appears to be only inches deep.

Deffenbaugh still has a large lump above his ankle, a reminder of a bout with a powerful wave and a hard Brazilian reef eight months ago.

Still, the physical dangers, however real, are not the true obstacles.

Overcoming the depression of being separated from your family, the hassle of finding a decent meal when you can’t speak the language and there are no pictures on the menu, and the anger of discovering that the bills you handed to the taxi driver are worth six times the fare can weigh heavily on a 22-year-old mind.

“In Japan, I ordered a dinner by pointing at some other guy’s meal,” Deffenbaugh said. “One guy said it was sea snails, another guy said it was cow’s tongue. I still have no idea what it was, but it tasted OK.

“In Peru, this cab driver kept making stops to buy more beer that he was drinking while he drove. Then he started waving this gun around. When we got to the hotel, I just grabbed my stuff and ran for the door.

“Some guys like the adventure, but sometimes I like to know where I’m going and what I’m eating. Everybody thinks it’s such a great life, but they only see what’s on TV. It’s a hassle and it’s depressing sometimes.”

Add the ever-present fear of failure--always lurking just below the surface like coral--and the stress can be overwhelming, sapping a newcomer’s enthusiasm and draining his determination.

Then the horn sounds and you have to try and ooze confidence as you paddle out to compete with a guy who has adorned more magazine covers than Cindy Crawford.

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“It’s all about confidence,” Deffenbaugh said. “It’s like riding big waves. It’s all about knowing you can do it. You don’t hesitate. You just do it. But if you do hesitate, you eat it.”

Maintaining rock-solid faith in his abilities has not been a strong point for Deffenbaugh. Often, his conviction has wavered and he hasn’t surfed up to his potential as a result.

“Jeff gets in a bit of a bad run and then he really starts to doubt himself,” said Ian Cairns, director of the U.S.-based Bud Surf Tour. “He’s been through times when he was really torn between pursuing pro surfing or getting a job. But then he seems to manage to lift himself out of it. It’s, ‘Oh God, the world hates me,’ and then he snaps out of it and surfs very well.

“He didn’t do that well in the first couple WCT events (losing in the second round) and he was talking about quitting, wondering what he should do with his life. I said, ‘Just go surfing, man.’ He’s a surfer. This is his chance to become someone in something. Is he going to become a nuclear physicist? No. This is his chance to leave a mark.”

Deffenbaugh has rebounded and advanced to the third round of the last two WCT events, including the Oxbow Pro-Reunion in the Reunion Islands. He’s not only had to adjust to the travel, the waves and the currency exchanges. The tour’s format is also a bit of a shock.

The WCT’s mano-a-mano approach to competition--most surf contests employ four-man heats with the top two surfers advancing--features a do-or-die drama in every round. It makes for good surf theater, but it’s a difficult genre for the new player.

“It’s totally different,” Deffenbaugh said. “In a four-man heat, you pretty much say, ‘It all depends on me,’ and you just go out and surf the best you can. One-on-one, you also have to pay attention to the other guy, listen closely to the scores and keep track of who’s ahead by how much. Strategy is so much more important.

“And only one man advances, so you can have the best heat of your life and still not win. You get heats where two guys are really ripping, then, maybe one where a guy who isn’t as talented sneaks by a great surfer who’s having a bad day.

“Lots of times the best competitor, not necessarily the best surfer, wins.”

Deffenbaugh admits to having advanced a couple of times when he “didn’t really have it going,” but a rookie soon learns those heats are the exception. The best competitors are usually the veterans. And the veterans are all talented or they wouldn’t be able to hang onto their spots on one of sport’s most competitive short lists.

“Everyone is so good,” Deffenbaugh says, shaking his head. “Man, it’s a whole different level.”

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One year ago, Deffenbaugh embarked on a month-long surf safari that began a couple of blocks from his Huntington Beach home and ended on the next level.

Nineteen ninety-four was a typically weird year for him. He had won the 1993 West Coast Pro-Am Tour, an entry-level tour, sort of a minor league for the Bud tour, advancing to the finals in contest after contest and winning often.

From March through July of ‘94, however, he seemed unable to get out of a heat. Deffenbaugh, who had won the National Scholastic Surfing Assn. high-school division title in 1991, was a two-time most valuable surfer on Huntington Beach High’s state-championship team and had second-, third- and fifth-place finishes at the Op Junior, was in the worst slump of his life.

Then came the Op Pro, the highest-rated World Qualifying Series event in the United States, at Huntington Beach Pier.

“He was home, at the beach break where he grew up and in front of a home crowd,” Cairns said. “But I also think he was relaxed because he felt like the season was a waste and he had nothing to lose. And bingo , he surfs brilliantly.”

Deffenbaugh made the quarterfinals and earned one of three wild-card spots into the following week’s U.S. Open, the mainland’s only WCT event, also at Huntington Pier. It was the beginning of streak that carried him to a $4,000 victory at Virginia Beach later in August, a second-place finish on the Bud Tour, and a WQS ranking that earned him a spot with the big boys on the WCT.

Deffenbaugh, who will again surf in both events--the Op runs Monday through July 30 and the U.S. Open will be held Aug. 4-6--is looking forward to spending time at home with fiancee Susie and son Justyn and another boost from the hometown crowd.

“I’m sure there were a lot of people at the Op last year who didn’t really know who I was and were just cheering because I was from Huntington,” Deffenbaugh said. “But it’s still a really good feeling.

“And you get the full arena effect at Huntington because of the pier, you can hear everything. You’re sitting out there looking in and all you see are thousands of dots, people’s heads. It gives you an idea what it’s like to play in the Super Bowl. It’s really exciting.”

The excitement was just beginning. In the first round, which was a three-man heat, Deffenbaugh beat Australia’s Shane Powell, who finished No. 2 in the world last year, and Brazil’s Fabio Gouveia (No. 12).

“The winner of the first heat skips a round and then I got Rob Machado, who had just come off a win in the Op and was absolutely on fire,” Deffenbaugh said.

Machado, who finished the WCT season No. 5, is considered the best small-wave surfer alive. The waves were about two feet for their heat.

“I beat him and that was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me in surfing to that point,” Deffenbaugh said.

Deffenbaugh went on to defeat Australia’s Matt Hoy, currently ranked fourth in the world, and eventually lost to No. 18 Michael Barry, of Australia, in the quarterfinals.

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Because he was a wild-card entry, Deffenbaugh didn’t get any qualifying points toward the WCT, but the confidence was enough to lift him to another level.

“I was on a roll, I was on top,” he said. “Instead of thinking, ‘I have to do well,’ I wasn’t even thinking at all. There were so many contests in a row, I reached a point where I’d think about it for five minutes before a heat and then go out and do it.”

Deffenbaugh now realizes he can’t “muscle it,” that surfing is a sport where you have to “relax and just let it happen.” So he’s working on maintaining an even emotional keel.

“I’ve matured a lot and having Justyn has been a big part of that,” he said. “He certainly wasn’t planned, but I’m really happy with the way things have worked out. Susie and I have been together more than five years, we’re getting married soon and we know what we want from life.

“Sure, there have been times when I wished I could go on a two-week surf trip with my buddies, but I understand my responsibilities and it just seems like everything is coming together really well.”

Deffenbaugh hasn’t hit surfing’s big time with a move-over-Kelly-Slater-here-I-come attitude. His goals are modest: “I’d like to work up to 28th with consistent surfing.”

Cairns believes he will thrive, if he can master his mind.

“I like guys like Jeff, guys who work hard to get results, guys who defy the odds and leave their detractors in the dust,” he said. “But right now, his results are dictated by how he feels. That’s fairly normal for an inexperienced athlete, but what he needs is to get a level of performance that isn’t impacted by emotion.

“If he can work on that this year, he’s a good surfer, he has the potential to rise higher. There’s nothing working against him.”