I’ve been to quite a few action sports trade shows over the years. They were big, loud and filled with people and items I don’t understand. For the most part, it was about the clothing you were supposed to wear before and after surfing, rarely about the act of wave riding itself.
Maybe I failed to understand because I grew up in a time — the early 1960s — when surfers and skateboarders shopped at army surplus stores or Goodwill. It was a time when clothing, transportation and housing revolved around one thing: riding waves.
Because of my upbringing, I’d show up at the trade show with a bad attitude. Everything looked overpriced, silly and excessive at best, and polluting at worst. Whenever I spotted the real thing in the form of a booth containing beautiful surfboards, I’d spend the entire day there.
The only person who liked these trade shows less than I did was Skip Frye. Once I had left the industry, he offered me his trade show badge. Wearing that badge was the litmus test — it’s impossible that I could ever be confused for Frye. When anyone approached me and asked for an autograph, I’d say, “Sure, but I’m not Skip Frye.” No stranger to understanding irony, Craig Stecyk commented, “This is the only place in the world where you could get away with this.”
It was the equivalent of Elvis ballooning up, donning a sequined suit and moving to Vegas. Only a real surfer could change all that, and in 2007, Del Mar hot stick Scott Bass invented the greatest show on earth and called it Sacred Craft. While Sacred Craft was eventually rechristened The Boardroom, the show remained the same, revolving around surfing’s only essential item beyond a wave and a human: a surfboard. Board makers came from up and down the coast and from as far away as Hawaii and Australia to see what was new in surfing.
A crown jewel of the Boardroom is the Icons of Foam Shape Off. Sponsored by U.S. Blanks, the competition invites shapers to duplicate an iconic surfboard. Icons of the past include board makers who reshaped our lives: Dick Brewer, Ben Aipa and Bob McTavish rank highly among them.
This year’s Icons of Foam honoree is Australian ripper and innovator Maurice Cole. Cole was coming on hard as one of Australia’s young guns when he was arrested for possession in the early ’70s. Once he returned to his beloved waves, he became serious about a unique board design that flattened out a board’s bottom without interrupting the rail rocker.
Meet Maurice Cole and many of surfing’s greatest legends on Saturday, Oct. 10, at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.
Tickets on sale for The Boardroom International Surfboard Show
