I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.” – James Salter, Burning the Days
CLASSICS is a new series that provides insight, life advice, and general words of wisdom from surfing’s most respected individuals.
Ian Cairns on rail at Off the Wall Photo: John Matheson
“I guess the story of my life is that I’ve always wanted to do the opposite of what everyone else wants to do.”
Ian Cairns has the one thing that everybody else wants. It’s the first thing you notice when he opens his mouth, and his presence oozes it. While others may try to cultivate it, learn it, or even fake it, Cairns possesses it in the most raw and genuine capacity I’ve ever experienced: confidence.
Cairns has a confidence that comes only from winning a staring contest with death itself. A confidence that doesn’t just overcome fear, but erases it. It’s something that cannot be taught, for it comes only from within. He possesses a unique and unshakeable belief in himself that few on this earth possess, and he owns it with the entirety of his being.
Plenty have experienced this brute determination in the water with Cairns, and others have experienced it in the boardroom. However, most do not realize that it doesn’t stop there.
Ian’s confidence is evident in every single thing he does. You can see it in the way he raises his kids. The way he coaches. The way he tackles new ventures. Even the way he drives (he once drove us USA Team kids the wrong way up a freeway onramp in New Zealand, and he somehow pulled it off). Ian’s confidence has been the trait that has carried him through every season of his life, no matter how different each may be, and it’s what allows him to succeed at whatever he puts his mind to. In a conversation we had a few weeks ago, he was kind enough to impart some of his wisdom – the kind that only comes from a lifetime of learning.
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The period of your life when you’re competing at your highest level as a champion athlete can never be matched. That’s the kind of stuff that drives you for the rest of your life. There’s nothing like it. You just want to do that forever. There will never be anything else in your life that will be equal to those experiences.
You might have competitive pressure when you’re traveling around on the tour, but you don’t have all those responsibilities that you have when you actually grow up. You don’t have a real job or have to make a mortgage or raise kids or deal with a wife. Your life is just like, “Oh I’ve got to leave in an hour to head down to Hossegor” or “Where are we going to dinner tonight?”
I grew up in a pretty conservative home. My parents worked; my dad was an engineer. I really had to work it was just how I was brought up. So I had to make my passion my work. I became a shaper; I probably shaped a thousand boards. At the Smirnoff in 1972 I won on a board I shaped. I found a way to make an income being a surfer. I won $5000 in 1973, which was a lot of money back then, and I realized like, wow, I can do this, and I want to do more of this. So I thought, “how can I?” Luckily, I had a group of like-minded peers like PT, Rabbit, and Shaun Thomson- all of us had had the same revelation. We realized we wanted to find a way to continue that life where we’d be able to travel to all of these places to surf. I think that’s really the genesis of pro surfing. A lot of us realized that when we were traveling the world and competing in these contests, we were living a life that was actually better than we would have had back where we came from. And we wanted to do more of it.
We did it in a time where it was supremely opposite of the existing culture in surfing. In those times, California was very anti-competition. In Australia, the surfing culture was all about escaping the cities. It was about going out and living what we called country soul. It was about abandoning life in the city and living in the country, eating vegetarian, smoking dope, and eating magic mushrooms- all this kind of cool hippy shit. So the representation of surfers in the media was basically that we were all “dole bludgers” living off welfare. And it was pretty correct. It was strict anti-capitalism hippy lifestyle, and suddenly we wanted to be pro athletes.
I guess the story of my life is that I’ve always wanted to do the opposite of what everyone else wants to do. I have different ideas from what so many of people in our culture have, and I’m motivated to make them happen. But being motivated is just the polar opposite of being the dopey hippy smoking out on the farm. So the group of us that wanted to do something different, we not only had to fight the perception that surfers were dole bludgers, but we had to fight another fight within our own world to create pro surfing. We had to fight against the prevailing culture within surfing itself. The idea of pro surfing just didn’t come easy.
However, crusading is one of my favorite things. Alongside doing what I believe in regardless of consequence. If I believe in something passionately I’ll just keep doing it. I made a career in surfing, which ultimately satisfied my parents. We made pro surfing happen. We traveled internationally. We had the opportunity to found the ASP.
What you do is you roll up your sleeves, and you work harder, faster, more efficiently, and more creatively than the next guy. You keep your head down, and you keep going to work and doing this stuff. And then one day you open your eyes and you’re there. Opposition falls by the wayside. I’m a pretty persistent person, often obnoxiously so I’d imagine. I know that everyone has to win for it to truly be successful. If you can make the pie bigger then your slice is going to be bigger too.
Starting the ASP was about building a surf tour where the rules and judging criteria of competitions were the same wherever you went. That just wasn’t the case when I was competing. Having the opportunity to have a big impact on the structures and systems within the sport was really exciting and really satisfying because it resolved issues that I had personally experienced when I was a competitor. I was able to think in multiple ways and look at one problem in multiple directions. Like how what is the impact on an athlete competing under these rules, how much will it cost to implement this rule, and what are all the ramifications of rule change.
It’s really satisfying to knowing I sanctioned the first ASP event in Europe, The Lacanau Pro. We linked it in with the world tour, and because of that you can see the growth of professional surfing and the growth of the surf industry in Europe. That’s a direct result of that one decision to actually sanction and bring the Lacanau Pro into line of what we were doing with the ASP.
We also sanctioned the first ever event in Brazil. Hello, Gabriel Medina, thank you very much to Ian Cairns and Alfio Lagnado. He [Gabriel] is a beneficiary of my desire to spread surfing into these other areas and the local people’s desire to be apart of something happening. I mean just think about how many Brazilians are going to be on the world tour next year. That’s because the ASP harnessed all of these different sources, but most importantly the desire to succeed as an individual. People want to be successful. They want to do things, and they want to improve their situation. So in Brazil all these kids come out of the flavela, and they’re able to be successful, buy houses, and have economic opportunity.
Thirty years later, we see can see amazing things happening and real changes in people’s lives as a result of the ASP. That’s really satisfying. It completely did change everything. The impact that the ASP had on the psyche of surfing and the opportunities it gave people is really a spectacular thing to see.
I didn’t go to university, but I grew up in a family that was about education. My father was an engineer. My education has just always been reading. I read all the time; I always have a book with me. I happen to know a lot of stuff. But its all things I read directly. I like history and all those sorts of things. It creates an environment in our house now where our kids read, and they’re interested in things. They have an open mind about things. Education is something that’s really an important thing in our house. We just want to foster an environment where you look out the door and you see exciting opportunities for your life.
That’s what my life has really been about. It’s been about being optimistic about opportunities and turning those into a reality.
The world is an amazing place. You would be shocked at the environment that people in my generation grew up in regarding the racial discrimination. In Australia in the ’60s we had the White Australian Policy. Additionally we had something called the Columbo Plan which stated that Asians could come to Australia and get a great education provided they left afterwards. In that same period, the Australian government was taking aboriginal children away from their families and putting them in foster homes in the cities in order to breed the black out of them. These are hidden truths about Australia through the ’60s and ’70s. It’s shocking stuff.
But my generation, especially surfers, we traveled. We went to places like Bali where maybe in Australia these people would have been perceived as brown people, but to us they were just people. We went surfing together and met families and made friends. It resulted in a really radical change socially in my generation. I think surfing played a big part in that. When I made the Australian team when I was 18 we competed at Bells Beach, and while I was there I made friends with people from Puerto Rico, guys from Japan, and surfers from Hawaii- it was really eye opening. I was just really fortunate because all those experiences helped mold my mind and see things differently.
Up through the half way through the final of the 1975 Duke Contest at closed out Waimea, I had never been afraid of a wave. I had one wipeout where I almost died. I realized I could die doing this. At that point I became afraid. I was 23 and absolutely bulletproof. That was when I discovered in one moment that the ocean was way bigger than I was.
However, I won Haleiwa when it was way bigger than that day, and I won it easily. I developed strategies. I’m a very rational person. When there’s an obstacle, I like to figure out a rational way to circumvent the obstacle. I don’t believe that I can’t overcome. I’m a confident person. I overcame that wipeout, and I surfed some really big waves. I had some horrendous wipeouts, but I approached them in a completely different way. I knew the risk; I knew I could die doing this stuff, but I developed ways to minimize this risk.
I grew up as a kid dreaming of becoming successful, of becoming a world champion surfer. It was so much harder than I ever imagined, but I succeeded. I had to overcome obstacles and all sorts of stuff. But in the end, I came out of that with this huge confidence that no matter what I set my mind to do, I could succeed at. That is kind of an unshakeable belief to this day. It happened from being a surfer.
Read previous installments of Classics with Doc Paskowitz, Gerry Lopez, Robert August, and Shaun Tomson
