BELLS WHEN SURFING WAS FOR BUMS AND BOARDS WERE
LONG
Back in 1963 it was called the Victorian Surf Board Rally, and pretty much
everything was different then.
For one thing, few surfers had that new invention called the wetsuit. When
Sydney teenager Doug Andrew won the rally at Bells Beach that year he wore a
footy jumper with the sleeves cut off. "Warmer than nothing," he said. "Your
water down here in Victoria isn't exactly tropical."
In 1963, the second year a surfing contest was held at the now-famous surf
beach but the first at Easter, no one was a professional. The surfers were
just blokes who surfed (and only blokes surfed). They couldn't even dream of
earning a living from their hobby.
The road to Bells, where a long, deep wave breaking over a reef is framed by
a spectacular natural amphitheatre, was rough. Only three years earlier
local surfer Joe Sweeney asked 30 mates for one pound each, hired a grader,
and made the first road to the beach.
Surfboards then were long and made of balsa, foam or ply. There were no
grandstands at Bells as there are this weekend for the RipCurl Pro, no
scoreboards, no sponsors, no TV cameras watching every cutback. Today, the
Bells Beach event is the longest-running surf event in the world, attracting
the sport's top male and female competitors. The elite are
multimillionaires.
Doug Andrew hasn't been back to Bells since he won the event 45 years ago as
an 18-year-old surf bum from Sydney's northern beaches, but this year he's
there, on a whim, and he admitted that the glamour of the event was hard to
comprehend. The skill of modern surfers, such as champion Australian Mick
Fanning, was also a world away from his era.
"They're brilliant," he said. "I don't know how they stay on the board
pulling some of the moves they do. I'm damn sure I wouldn't." Andrew, 63,
lives on Queensland's Sunshine Coast now. In 1963, he and a friend drove
down from Sydney in a Holden and stayed at a Torquay caravan park.
Some of their surfing mates had already experienced Bells. One of them,
Glenn Ritchie, won the contest the year before when it was held on Australia
Day.
"We knew the waves were going to be good," Andrew said. They surfed in footy
jumpers, 12 of them out in the water at once, three or four on a wave at a
time. The judges, local surfers, sat at card tables on the beach with
clipboards.
On Thursday contest organisers presented Andrew with a traditional Bells
trophy, 45 years late. "It's a different world now," he said. "I can't
believe how advanced it has all become. The only thing that has stayed the
same is the beach and the wave."