FOCUS
Ride the trend

By Mike Markrich

For much of the past decade, serious-minded people have searched for the one idea that would bring prosperity back to Hawai'i.

Surfing has been part of Hawai'i's allure, drawing visitors to the Islands, since the beginnings of tourism here. From surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku to Eddie Aikau, the sport and its association with Hawai'i has generated excitement in international youth culture. Advertiser library photo

During this process, surfing and other activities on Hawai'i's beaches were largely ignored. Tourism was seen as part of the old economy. The ambassadors wanted something new.

While they were out, a curious thing happened. The high-tech sector stalled. However, the sport of surfing (together with its fashion sportswear component) grew into a $3.2 billion industry worldwide, with participants in Hawai'i increasing rapidly. To give some idea of what this means to Hawai'i, the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, the six-week local world championship of surfing, has increased its annual budget from $100,000 to $1.3 million in the past 15 years. A preliminary survey indicates that it contributes nearly $8 million in spending to the economy.

Places like Banzai Pipeline, Waimea and Jaws (on Maui) are internationally known. The phrase "Eddie would go," about late local surfing legend Eddie Aikau, has become a mantra of international youth culture.

Sometimes it's hard to see the obvious. While looking all over the world for an advantage, our business and economic leaders have not yet realized that one of their greatest sources of new visitors was in front of them all the time.

Once viewed largely as a sport of dropouts from productive roles in society, of adolescents fighting over turf and rowdy parties, surfing — according to the latest figures reported by American Demographics, the nation's leading marketing journal — generates average per-capita yearly income for professional surfers and windsurfers of $73,414, higher than that of golfers and tennis players.

Countries such as France and Australia have seen this trend and invested millions to promote surfing and water sports to attract a new generation of affluent visitors to their resorts.

Even China is said to be interested in developing surfing for the same reasons.

Moreover, the sport has been at the forefront of generational change. Not only do more girls and women surf, but actresses, attorneys, physicians and even politicians now see the sport as chic and trendsetting. Surfing is associated with its Mainland spinoffs, snowboarding and skateboarding.

Although the sport has relatively few practitioners — 1.8 million in the United States, 1.3 million in Japan and approximately 1 million in Europe — they have a huge impact on their peers. According to the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association, there are an estimated 20 million young people across America who buy clothes based on surfing and related board sports. This is a significant market of young consumers who are establishing lifelong buying habits.

The potency of the young is known to those in politics. As a way to help reach the youth vote in his 2002 campaign, U.S. Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawai'i, bodyboarded on camera at Sandy Beach. Sen. Fred Hemmings, whose portrait hangs with that of Duke Kahanamoku at Duke's Restaurant in Waikiki, offered to teach Gov. Linda Lingle how to surf.

"Whenever I go anywhere in the world and tell people I am from Hawai'i, they want to know about surfing," said Hemmings, who started his marketing career as a promoter of professional surfing. "Surfing is what we are known for."

Overcoming the Hawai'i bias

During the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, O'ahu's North Shore resembles Cannes during the film festival, attracting movie stars, models and promoters. Bernie Baker • Special to the Advertiser

Contrast Hawai'i, where surfing is not sanctioned by the state Department of Education. Although a subcommittee of the state Board of Education recently approved a draft proposal to permit surfing as a public high-school sport, the process is slow-going.

The DOE's position is that the sport poses too much liability. Never mind that football and baseball incur far more serious injuries.

"We have data from physicians that say surfing is safer than other sports," said Kahuku science teach-er and surfing coach Iris Gonzalves, who has fought for acceptance of surfing in public schools since 1995.

To see surfing's status in Hawai'i, one statistic tells it all. Hiking, which draws perhaps 14,000 visitors a year to the Islands, gets a million dollars a year from the Hawai'i tourism budget for marketing, trail management and park development.

Surfing, which draws many times that number, gets nothing.

To those who participate in the sport, the bias is understandable. "For a long time people thought of surfers as these long-haired people who come to Hawai'i to surf and do drugs," said Randy Rarick, the organizer of the Vans Triple Crown.

"This is how surfing was seen during the '60s. Local people didn't think of surfers as being in the same league as golfers or professional football players. I am not saying that all the surfers are perfect now. But most of the serious surfers who earn six-figure incomes are careful about how they take care of themselves."

Ancient origins

Instructor John McCallum, center, watches a student slip during a surfing lesson in Australia. The sport's popularity has also generated surfing camps and schools across Hawai'i. Advertiser library photo

When Hawai'i became subject to Western religious influence in the 19th century, surfing was one of numerous Native Hawaiian activities suppressed by the Calvinist missionaries from New England. After a thousand years of cultural development, surfing knowledge was near the point of being lost forever when in the early 1900s, Alexander Hume Ford, a publicist for the then-emerging Hawai'i tourism industry, saw a tie-in between surfing and the sale of Hawai'i real estate.

He formed the Outrigger Canoe Club, approached famous writers such as Jack London to write about surfing, and promoted the sport throughout the world. It wasn't long before Duke Kahanamoku became an international star during the 1920s largely because of this link.

During the 1930s and '40s, the Waikiki beachboys became a staple of Hawai'i tourism, teaching generations of visitors how to surf. The sport grew. By the 1950s, when the first large-scale surfing meets were held, as many as three-quarters of people who came to Hawai'i were first-time visitors, many drawn by the lure of surfing.

A decade later, famous songs such as "Surfing USA" by the Beach Boys and movies such as "The Endless Summer" created a cult following for surfing and Hawai'i. Surfing events were televised in prime time on all three television networks. Surfing became a major sport in Japan. All these promotions benefited Hawai'i by encouraging young people to visit the Islands.

Women join in

During the 1990s, surfing went through another major change. The successful development of the women's surf clothing line Roxy, by leading surf clothing manufacturer Quiksilver, led to rapid expansion of the sport among women and girls.

Roxy was given a "Hawai'i spin" with liberal use of local-style floral designs. In 1992, the first year it was on the market, the line did a million dollar's worth of business for a company built largely around men's sportswear. In 2002, Roxy generated $218 million, approximately 31 percent of the company's $705 million gross sales.

The Roxy line is growing so fast that Quiksilver expects it to outpace the men's line in a few years.

When the film "Blue Crush," created by producers who had studied the women's surfing trend in Hawai'i, was released in August 2002, the numbers exploded. In the past year, the number of women participating in the sport has increased more than 260 percent. There are now women's surf camps all over Hawai'i.

Increasingly, for young women as well as young men, a season riding waves in Hawai'i is seen as a rite of passage.

Youth appeal

The advantage of having so many men and women interested in surfing is that it draws more young people to the Islands. The hidden crisis of Hawai'i tourism is that we are drawing progressively fewer first-time visitors. In 1966, 68 percent of visitors to Hawai'i were coming for the first time. By 2002, the share had dropped to 38 percent, and is still falling. The decline eventually is reflected in repeat visitors, whose spending helps sustain the hotel industry.

By not supporting activities that attract the young, such as surfing, Hawai'i puts itself at a significant competitive disadvantage to other resort destinations. That is why strategic business planners such as Mike Fiitzgerald, the president and CEO of Enterprise Honolulu, are advocating surfing as a means of building brand loyalty for Hawai'i tourism.

Star appeal

During the Vans Triple Crown, the population of the North Shore of O'ahu increases from 18,000 to estimates as high as 40,000. The beaches resemble the Cannes Film Festival, with movie stars, models, photographers, exclusive private parties and glamour. The large clothing companies bring in production staffs and spend $10,000 or more for a month's rent on a house by the beach. Many plan their promotions for the coming year on the contests, which serve as marketing devices for their products.

Those promotions are so significant that other countries that depend on tourism spending, such as France, send official observers. France sends a representative from its Ministry of Sport to sit on the beach during the Vans Triple Crown and take notes so the newest trends can be incorporated into the major surf contest France sponsors at Biarritz each year.

From the standpoint of Hollywood, it was no accident that the reality show filmed by Warner Bros. last year, "Boarding House: North Shore" was one of their highest-rated episodes. Everybody in the world, it seems, wants surfing but us.

The sport may not be high-tech. It's not intellectual. It may not be the sole answer to bringing more first-time visitors. But it is who we are and what we've got. Each year, millions of young people express the desire to learn. We should be doing all we can to encourage them to learn it here.

Perhaps Hawai'i's greatest advantage is in setting trends, not in following them.

Mike Markrich produced a surfing impact report for the state in 1988.