Part of the promise of organized sports is a meritocracy. A means to provide the opportunity for anyone to prove themselves through raw talent and dedication – no matter where they came from. Surfing is no different, although true rags to riches stories are often a little harder to come by.
That’s because, despite its crunchy affectations, wave riding is by and large a rich man’s game. Getting into the hobby generally requires growing up by the ocean, and there are vanishingly few affordable beachside towns left in the world (even fewer in areas with surf good enough to train champions). Then, those who do manage to develop their skills enough to make it to higher levels of competition are faced with the grueling prospect of constant and expensive travel to far-flung destinations across the globe – all for an increasingly meager pool of sponsor cash and prize winnings.
Which makes it all the more remarkable when surfers actually do manage to come from nothing. And as a result, the rags to riches stories of surfing are some of the most dramatic of any sport. Here are five of them.
Italo Ferreira
The legend of Italo Ferreira is perhaps as powerful as his surfing – which is saying something. The 2019 world champ grew up in the small Brazilian town of Baía Formosa. As the son of a fisherman, he would have most likely followed in his father’s footsteps. “I would probably be a fisherman, there’s nothing where I live,” Ferreira explained in an interview with Red Bull.
It was a cooler, of all things, that changed that. After getting his hands on the lid, he was able to paddle out and catch a few waves, thus fueling an obsession that would eventually land him at the top of the Championship Tour rankings. Now, he’s more likely to be seen carving up waves on a Timmy Patterson board than perched atop a container lid, but he’s still never strayed far from his roots – he still owns a house in his hometown, in fact.
Kelly Slater
Compared to his current level of success, perhaps any normal upbringing would seem like rags in comparison. However, Slater was far from being born with a silver spoon in his mouth in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “My mom sort of barely had lunch money for us, when we were in elementary school,” he recalled in an interview with Graham Bensinger. “We’d go to school with some coins. Later she would talk about how she would go turn the coins in at the bank, so we thought we had dollars.” To his credit, in the same breath he shies away from aggrandizing his humble beginnings. “I had it better than a lot of kids,” he continues. “There’s homeless people out there, I always had a roof over my head. My mom made it work somehow. She made 500 bucks a week, kept a roof over our head, fed us and raised three boys basically on her own.”
It wouldn’t take long for the riches to come, though. He began surfing at five, and by 10 he was winning youth competitions up and down the East Coast. He went pro at 18 and, well, you know the rest.
Adriano De Souza
This veteran surfer’s upbringing could not be farther from the neighborhoods of pampered scions from CT hotspots like San Clemente. “Drugs, violence, all of that,” wrote De Souza of the Guarujá, Brazil favela he grew up in. “It’s so crowded, so dirty. Cop cars can’t even get through the streets. But they try. It seems like the sirens echo all night long. And sometimes instead of sirens, you hear the ‘pow-pow-pow’ of a gun.’
At the age of eight, his brother bought him what would turn out to be his ticket out – a second-hand surfboard that cost eight dollars. Not only was his eventual arrival on the Championship Tour a testament to his hard work and perseverance, it was also a herald of the oncoming Brazilian Storm that would change the world of competitive surfing for good.
Sheldon Paishon
Oahu may be paradise, but it also has a rougher side. In addition to immense natural beauty, the West Side of the island also has its fair share of crime, poverty and drug use. It’s also the home turf of pro surfer Sheldon Paishon. At the age of 12, his parents lost their house, forcing the family to live out of a tent for the rest of his adolescence. Eventually, he connected with Mason Ho – whose North Shore roots and surfing pedigree could not be more different from Paishon’s. Ho recognized Paishon’s talent and took him under his wing, after which he quickly rose to the world stage. He may not be a millionaire just yet, but his recent second-place finish at this year’s Backdoor Shootout feels like just a hint of what’s to come.
Garrett MacNamara
Big wave surfer Garrett McNamara had a unique childhood, to say the least. The 100 Foot Wave star’s mother took him and his brother Liam on a chaotic path that went from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California and across Central America. As he described in his memoir Hound of the Sea, sometimes they slept rough and begged for food, other times they ate out of trash cans and dumpsters, and there were stretches where he was left in the hands of complete strangers.
Then in 1978, McNamara’s mother moved him and his brother Liam to Hawaii, where they lived in Cement City, low income housing on the North Shore. “Back then it was a rough place,” he told The Inertia. “We didn’t have much, but we had what we needed. We lived on powdered milk, Frosted Flakes, and macaroni and cheese. Then one day my mom bought us a surfboard for $15 at a garage sale, and nothing else mattered.”
