Kids at play. Photo: Bradley Masters
The day I meet them, the kids have just returned from a boat trip to the Mentawais with a number of other child stars. Jessie in particular had impressed at overhead Rifles, apparently, and Dean tells me it is a priority from now on to get the kids on one such trip a year. Only if the kids decide they’re into it though. “The only pressure they get is if we put them under some. There is no pressure from anywhere else. We keep it pretty simple and fun, but by the same token, if we’re going to travel to see (surf coach and former world champ) Barton Lynch or some contest, we’re not gonna spend 1,500 bucks to go on a family holiday. If you’re gonna go there and enter it, we’re gonna put the effort in,” says Dean.
A couple of days earlier, I’d watched Jessie try to surf a chaotically crowded wave in Bali. Dean, a former SAS commando who toured Afghanistan, had quite impressively swum out into the channel among the four to six feet of swell and tried to call his son into sets. But Jessie seemed overwhelmed by the chaos and failed to catch a set wave, which is fine with Dean. Apart from encouragement and support, the Parkinsons will go no further in pushing to achieve a career as a professional surfer. “At the end of the day, it is still their own journey and obviously at this age you’re still directing them, as in helping them, to grow up and grow into the sort of people other people like to be around, ” says Julie.
Not all parents are so free-range, however, and the Parkinsons admit they’ve been troubled by some of the things they’ve seen while taking their kids around the various kiddie contests in Australia.
At one Gromsearch event, they watched the mother of a girl who had just lost to a contentious judging call in the final unleash a tirade on the young winner, before turning on the judges and continuing to heckle all the way through the presentation ceremony. At another event, Dean and the boys had watched a heat with three of their friends with one of the competitor’s dads. When they made the mistake of cheering for all three surfers, the father blew Dean up. “The father of surfer C, who is a good mate of mine, gave it to me and brushed me, just flicked me,” he says. It began a lengthy feud between the two, with the other man refusing to answer Dean’s calls for a reconciliation. When he did eventually reply, via email, he told Dean the outburst had come because of the money on the line in the heat.
“We just went ‘Woah!’ Because that’s a whole ‘nother level,” he says.
Lorraine Allen, mother of 14-year-old O’Neill rider, Sonny, has witnessed some similar scenes and agrees that introducing money at this stage of a kid’s career can “cloud things a bit.” She sees nothing wrong, however, with the newfound professionalism permeating the junior ranks. “I can see endless value in pushing the sport forward, having a goal at that age and a purpose,” she says. “And where does the sponsorship come in? It’s validation. He’s put in a lot of time and a lot of work.”
For Sonny, whose sponsorship deal with O’Neill took a lot longer to come around than Jessie and Jye’s, it taught him the value of persistence, says Lorraine. “If you hope to make a living and its a competitive world, it’s par for the course. You have to be really good at what you do and you have to be better and it progresses the whole industry,” she says.
The question is whether these external pressures at what has traditionally been the most innocent time in a person’s surfing life are going to corrupt the culture? Julie isn’t sure. “Whether this trend toward younger and younger sponsorship, whether that’s good for surfing as a whole, I don’t know,” she says, though she adds it will hopefully come down to the wishes of the kids and, “the people that want to be involved in that part of surfing will be involved in that and the people that don’t will go and do something else.”
