Surfers Looking for Breaks

Change is in the air at the Huntington Beach Pier. Many of the top young surfers in the United States will converge on this legendary surf spot over the next nine days, displaying their finely crafted 360-degree aerials and razor-sharp bottom turns.

The youngest compete through Sunday at the inaugural USA Championships, where amateur titles will be on the line as well as berths on the overhauled U.S. Amateur team. A few will remain to hone their craft at the U.S. Open of Surfing, a World Qualifying Series event that runs through Aug. 1.

Knowing how to impress judges in competition has been a thorn in the side of younger U.S. surfers, especially when competing in foreign countries. Peter Townend, who won the sport’s first world title in 1976, said young Americans tend to surf shoddily when they compete away from their familiar breaks.

“You can’t win the NBA season unless you can play well on the road,” Townend said. “Our guys can’t play on the road.”

That’s why Townend helped form Surfing America, the new national governing body for amateur surfers. With the top U.S. surfers on the elite World Championship Tour averaging 29 years old, he felt it was time for the sport to develop a stronger pipeline of talent, and he began patterning the new umbrella organization similar to the one in Australia.

“When we got beat by Switzerland, that’s when things really got pathetic,” Townend said of a series of losses by the U.S. at the International Surfing Assn. World Junior Championships last year. “The last time I checked, Switzerland didn’t even have an ocean.”

Townend said his organization has taken “baby steps” in the last five months, but this weekend’s event will serve as its welcome mat, concluding with the selection of a national team that will compete in December at the World Junior Championships in Tahiti, an event the U.S. will play host to in 2005.

“The biggest thing is, it’s the first time the best young talent in America will come together to decide who is the best among all the up-and-comers,” Townend said.

Topping the group of young prodigies are the Gudauskas brothers from San Clemente. Twins Dane and Patrick, 18, are two of the top teenage surfers in the U.S., winning the last two National Scholastic Surfing Assn. titles. They will compete this weekend in the amateur championship open division as well as in the U.S. Open as amateurs.

“The up-and-coming generation definitely needs to push for more Americans on the WCT,” Patrick said. “What [Surfing America] did was pretty cool. It has allowed the best surfers in America to represent the amateur and, hopefully, the professional ranks.

“From what I’ve gathered, it seems like the Australians and Brazilians are real strong in terms of nationality. There hasn’t been an organization in America like Surfing America. Hopefully that will increase all the camaraderie.”

But to make a splash on the WCT, the sport’s highest level of competition, surfers must finish in the top 16 on the World Qualifying Series, a more crowded and less glamorous tour.

The only male from the U.S. mainland currently in position to qualify among the top 16 in the World Qualifying Series is Chris Ward of San Clemente. The only others from the U.S. mainland in the top 50 are Floridians Kelly Slater and Damien Hobgood, who are among the top five on the WCT.

Entering the year, two of the Southland’s biggest hopefuls to qualify for the WCT, Bobby Martinez, 22, of Santa Barbara, who made the final of the U.S. Open last year, and Ventura’s Dane Reynolds, 18, are not even in the top 100 on the WQS.

After five events on the WCT, U.S. surfers hold six of the top 11 spots in the point standings. Two other Southland veterans, Tim Curran of Oxnard and Pat O’Connell of Laguna Beach, who have each finished third at stops this year, are in the top 28, which is the cutoff to qualify for the WCT next year.

But the average age of those eight surfers is slightly more than 29 years. And recent Southern California products such as Rob Machado (30), Shane Beschen (32) and Jeff Booth (35) have each finished among the top four in the world in the last 10 years only to disappear from the tour shortly after.

“It’s a bunch of old guys,” Townend said. “Slater, [Taylor] Knox, they’re all in their 30s.”

The age factor is especially relevant when compared with the top Australians. Taj Burrow (26), Mick Fanning (23), Joel Parkinson (23), Kieren Perrow (27), Michael Lowe (27) and Dean Morrison (23) finished in the top 10 on the WCT last season. Australians took 10 of the top 16 spots overall.

But despite the next wave of Americans struggling to make the WCT, surfers such as the Gudauskas brothers and Brett Simpson, 18, of Garden Grove, can’t wait for the opportunity to compete at the highest level.

“Within like three or four years, there’s going to be more [West Coast] guys” on the WCT, said Simpson, whose father, Bill, was a defensive back for the Los Angeles Rams in the 1970s. “Everyone just has to put it together.”

*

U.S. Open of Surfing

* Where: Huntington Beach Pier.

* When: Today through Aug. 1.

* Defending champions: Cory Lopez of Florida for men; Chelsea Georgeson of Australia for women.

* Cost: Free.

* Fast facts: About 500 surfers from around the world, including 13 of the top 16 men on the World Championship Tour, are scheduled to compete in the World Qualifying Series’ highest-rated event. The scheduled contestants have accounted for more than 40 titles from junior to the international level. The beach festival will include 600 world-class BMX and freestyle motocross riders, volleyball, live concerts, demonstrations and an interactive lifestyle festival.