Nat Young at the Billabong Pro Tahiti in 2017.
Nat Young has enjoyed a relatively successful career as a professional surfer. He came onto the Championship Tour scene with a tremendous rookie campaign in 2013, making the Finals at Bells and in Portugal and sprinkled in some near-wins over the next few years. While he did eventually fall off the full-time tour roster, Young was one of the first surfers to fight his way back onto the CT via the Challenger Series in 2021. All said, the Santa Cruz native won enough heats through the years to sustain a decade-long run on, or within reach, of surfing’s elite tour and that’s nothing to scoff at.
He also arrived on that stage at a time before the surfer-content creator hybrid was the dominant route for professional talents. His career path followed the old school get a main sponsor, go win heats, and score the occasional magazine cover blueprint that ran surfing when print was still a part of the game. That makes Young an interesting mind to pick on the topic of making a living as a professional surfer. How much money would an athlete make in terms of prize money and sponsorships in that mold of a pro surfer?
“There’s probably 10 guys in the world that make a lot of money,” Young told the Athletes & Assets podcast. “Nowhere near baseball or basketball money or football money, but upwards of a million dollars,” adding that “I guarantee if you took that money away they’d still be doing it.”
The podcast conversation is an interesting one in that Young gets to offer firsthand insight on how much the industry and the profession have changed over the past decade-plus. It misses a lot of nuance, however, when the interview is headlined Why Surfers Are Making Less Money Than Ever, which isn’t specific or accurate.
Surfing has changed, but there are plenty of athletes making plenty of money. For example, the WSL famously overhauled its pay structure in 2019 to ensure equal prize money among men and women. The bias in that headline misses that women clearly have the opportunity to make way more money in competition than they did even a decade ago. The “less money than ever” angle likely comes from Young pointing out that when he won the Coldwater Classic in 2008, he thinks he won $15,000. Young says the winner got $2,500 this past year. The host takes this as an apples-to-apples example of how prize money has somehow drastically dropped in surfing, which isn’t the case.
The CWC was a 4-star event on the ASP’s WQS schedule in 2008, placing it in the top half of events (four to six stars) offering more points toward world tour qualification and higher prize money as a result than one to three-star events. In 2012, the CWC was one of the ASP’s 10 World Tour stops. And in 2023, it was a QS1000 event, feeding regional qualifiers toward the Challenger Series rather than offering world tour qualification points. Surf fans can see how analyzing the prize money of the same event across three entirely different or random years would be an apples-to-oranges comparison.
With the Challenger Series standing between the QS and the CT in 2023, as well as the Cold Water being a QS 1000 event now, you can start to wrap your head around how comparing that 2008 prize purse and the 2023 prize purse for the same event is like comparing cucumbers to tomatoes. The prize money isn’t really what’s changed, it’s the entire systemic evolution of professional competitive surfing to accommodate new tiers of competition, new paths to CT qualification, and pushing the QS to a regional format that made this year’s CWC less relevant than it was 15 years ago.
Still, the interview with Young gives some great insight into how he was able to carve out a living as well as giving some shout-outs to athletes whose earning potential didn’t stop after winning heats.
“Everything (Josh Kerr) touches turns to gold,” Young says. “Kelly’s probably the top dog when it comes to that but he’s also in a league of his own in terms of his name.” He goes on to explain that some of the athletes he’s seen succeed financially were often working on that prize money and competitive success for investment capital. Young says his mother helped manage his finances when he was competing because, “all I knew was how to surf.” Then, when he was 23, he bought an apartment complex in Santa Cruz. He’s continued investing in real estate in the area, which, if you’ve ever looked at housing in the Bay Area, you know has paid off.
“I’m thankful because Santa Cruz is insanely expensive. Nowadays it’s ridiculous.”
