New York's Big Break: Surfing Sees Opportunity - New York Times

The teenager from Long Island was so comfortably gliding through the barreling waves of G-Land, the storied Indonesian surf break, promoters on hand from Quiksilver came to a realization: there must be waves — real, contest-worthy, maybe even tubing waves — just beyond the flat, gritty concrete jungle of the big city.

"He was riding the barrel so well, and we were like, 'How did this kid get so good coming from New York?' " said Rod Brooks, Quiksilver's director of contests, referring to the surf prodigy Balaram Stack. Describing the scene that day last year when Stack and other young surfers were attacking the surf for a video shoot, he added, "Everybody was pretty impressed."

And so began Quiksilver's unlikely quest to stage one of the riskier gambits of modern professional surfing history, a full-on, world tour contest in the waters of New York — an incongruous stop on an annual surf odyssey that otherwise includes breaks of world renown along the Gold Coast of Australia, at Teahupoo in Tahiti and at Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii.

That contest starts Sunday off Long Beach, N.Y., Stack's hometown, under the auspices of the Association of Surfing Professionals, and with Quiksilver as its main sponsor. It is one of 11 competitions that determine this year's world champion.

The top professionals in the world, including the reigning champion, Kelly Slater, and his leading challengers, Joel Parkinson and Jordy Smith, will be competing not only for their place in the standings but also for a record $1 million purse. Thrown into the mix will be Stack, 19, and two other Long Islanders trying to win a wild-card entry during Sunday's trials: Leif Engstrom, 23, of Montauk, and T. J. Gumiela, 21, of Long Beach.

Set to take place during a nearly two-week window, the contest is a major coming-out for the burgeoning New York surf scene after years of being the butt of jokes like, "Where do you surf, the Sound?" The Long Beach-based surfers Mike Nelson and Dave Juan, who have taken a lead role in nurturing local talent, heard that one so many times that they named their surf shop UnSound when it opened in 1997, Juan said.

Still, New York's new place on the world tour has been as much of a surprise to the top riders as it has been to the city that is more or less hosting it. (Long Beach is some 5 miles east of the New York City limits at Far Rockaway, Queens.)

"I was a little baffled at first," Slater said in a telephone interview from Tahiti, where he won last week in 12-foot hollow surf breaking over razor-sharp coral. "The first thought that came to mind was, How's the surf going to be?"

It was also a question for the contest planners, who stand to gain from the marketing exposure that only New York can deliver if all goes well, but risk embarrassment and ridicule if the Atlantic enters a late-summer flat period. Organizers conducted extensive research on the surf scene and the ocean mechanics that make waves. They were hopeful that Hurricane Katia would move to the northwest just enough to send some high-quality waves to New York by midweek but not to swamp the area as Hurricane Irene did.

During the last several years, surfers from around the world have come to realize that very fine waves can break in and around the city limits, especially in hurricane season. More city dwellers have joined in the surfing renaissance, and magazines as diverse as Us and Surfer have written about the waves of New York.

The growth spurt may rankle some longtime surfers who resent the crowding it has brought to their coveted home breaks. But it has helped produce the area's most promising crop of potential professional surfers in memory. They include Stack, who has Quiksilver as a sponsor; Engstrom, whose acrobatic style has gained national notice; Gumiela, who was the first New Yorker to win the youth division of the Eastern Surfing Association Championships, in 2005; and Quincy Davis, 16, of Montauk, who surprised the surf world by landing a coveted slot on the elite women's junior USA Surf Team sponsored by PacSun three years ago and racking up several competitive accolades since.

None of it has been lost on Quiksilver executives, who had a license with the Association of Surfing Professionals to add a contest to the world tour and had been wanting to hold one near New York City for the promotional value.

"The New York area is the biggest media center in the world," said Bob McKnight, the Quiksilver chief executive, adding that his staff had fielded "a million media requests."

Even if Stack's performance in Indonesia helped embolden planners to pursue a New York contest, they have too much riding on a world tour event to take it on faith. So they enlisted Sean Collins, the president of the California- based Web site Surfline.com and an expert wave forecaster, to do analyses of New York surf breaks and, as a backup, those of Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

"I didn't have much confidence," Collins said. "I'd known it could get good, and I'd seen photos, but the consistency variable — it didn't look like it would be consistent enough for an event."

Surfing contests generally require waves with clean, long walls of steep water and, whenever possible, tubes. Analyzing maps of the nearby sea bottom, Collins determined that under optimal conditions, Long Beach had the best elements for contest-worthy waves.

The secret is the Hudson Canyon extending dozens of miles from the harbor between New York and New Jersey. It is one of the world's deepest underwater canyons, formed thousands of years ago when the banks of the Hudson River ran that much farther to the East. When a strong incoming swell hits the trough in just the right way, it refracts to form optimally peaking and sometimes tubing waves in the vicinity of Long Beach, Collins said.

Culling through roughly 15 years of wave data, Collins also determined that Long Beach was likely to produce at least three to five days of quality waves during the first two weeks of September, enough for a competition.

"We need to be careful not to expect Teahupoo or J-Bay to miraculously come to New York," Collins wrote in his report, referring to famous breaks off Tahiti and South Africa. "But we could score some very, very good surf for a great event."

That was enough to persuade Quiksilver and the Association of Surfing Professionals to make New York one of its 11 tour destinations for at least three years.

Even in perfect conditions, Long Beach will provide a jarring contrast for Slater and the other professionals as they arrive from Tahiti. The waves at Teahupoo are lightning fast, with the swell emerging from depths of nearly one mile and smashing into shallow coral reef that creates hollow crystalline monsters of often perfect shape and size.

The silver-tinted waves of the Northeast coast generally roll in more slowly because of the vast continental shelf, which catches the groundswell earlier in its travels from the deep and gives it a gentler approach.

Juan, of the UnSound shop, said that the local conditions could force the pros to work a little harder for their waves.

"Here, you've got to use your paddling, deal with the current — it's all the elements of the ocean," he said.

That could be an advantage to surfers like Stack who are familiar with the territory. And if the waves never materialize?

"Quiksilver is probably more worried about that than any of us," said Slater, acknowledging that he looked forward to some time in the city, which would provide a break from his usual workplace, tropical paradise. "If there are no waves, we'll just have fun in the city."