Girls Can’t Surf: Doco lifts lid on grit and determination of trailblazing female surfers

Less than three years ago, when world champion Stephanie Gilmore sat alongside Kelly Slater as the World Surf League announced female surfers would get the same prize money as the men, Jodie Cooper was overwhelmed with emotion. The first wave that hit the former champion and trailblazing big wave surfer was elation. Equal pay, finally, after her generation had fought and scraped and struggled to be given a fraction of what their male counterparts commanded. Knowing that their refusal to lie down meant the next generation of young women would now be rewarded fairly was a satisfying feeling. Then another wave hit, smaller and less welcome, but inevitable: envy. Cooper, who grew up in Albany, won 13 international Championship Tour surfing events in her decade-long career, each of which would now attract prize money of $100,000. She couldn’t help but do the maths. “You can see how beneficial it has been for women’s surfing; now that they have backed it and put the money in, the sport and talent has improved so much. They can fly around the world to practise on the reef break they’ll surf in six months’ time, they have trainers, they have physios, they can buy top quality equipment, so there is so much excitement and stoke for them,” Cooper tells STM. “But there is also a feeling of, shit man, I am still slogging my guts out and if I could only have had a bit of that, I won 13 events in my career so I would be retired by now! There is a bit of that, I can’t lie. But everyone cops that in life ... I’ve been so lucky, I can’t whinge. I have had some great cards dealt to me and I’m grateful.” And how she played those cards, as a pivotal member of the group of renegade surfers who fought tooth and nail against sexism, discrimination, ignorance and homophobia to create the women’s sport in the early 1980s is told in an eye-opening new documentary, Girls Can’t Surf. The sexism they encountered is jaw-dropping: being sent out when the waves weren’t good enough for the men, then criticised for not surfing as well as them; being instructed to wear skimpy swimwear completely impractical for surfing; cheques that barely covered airfares and had them sleeping 10 at a time on lounge room floors; sponsors who called them “fat pigs” if they didn’t fit a bathing suit and refused to fund those they didn’t deem attractive, even when they were the best surfers. Case in point was Cooper’s close friend Pauline Menczer, a pint-sized Bondi shredder who overcame crippling rheumatoid arthritis to win the world championship in 1993, now considered one of the great underdog stories in sporting history. But there was no prize money that year, just a broken trophy, and Menczer could never get a sponsor, often sleeping in her car or in her board bag and employing a slew of side hustles, including selling jeans, just to survive. (Last week, fans raised almost $40,000 to replace Menczer’s 1993 prize money, leaving her in tears). “It pissed me off that Pauline had it so hard and the men could have heads like robbers’ dogs and still get really good sponsorships,” says Cooper, with her trademark forthright humour. “If a woman didn’t look the part, she got nothing. Women had to perform and were judged on very different criteria and it was unjustified. I spent a lot of my career trying to change that. “My brother would say, ‘You’ve got a bloody chip on your shoulder, let it go, just promote yourself and don’t stick your head up’, but I’m not that type of person. When I see an injustice, I can’t let it go without doing my bit. I’ve always been like that and I’m glad I’m like that.” Girls Can’t Surf captures the warmth of the camaraderie but also the fierce rivalries, with interviews with Wendy Botha, Pam Burridge, Menczer, Frieda Zamba, Lisa Andersen, Layne Beachley, among others. There are moments of levity and humour and others of anger and sadness. In one heartbreaking section, Burridge, a surfing prodigy from a young age, tells of a sponsor saying to her that if the girls could lose weight, they would promote them. “Is it a coincidence that two years after that, I was anorexic and on the verge of death? I think not. The only reason I didn’t die is because I started to drink again and it took the edge off.” Burridge was a hero and confidante for Cooper, who was “a real grommet skateboarder” until about age 14, when she told school friends she could surf, then realised that meant she’d have to learn or be caught in the lie. Her older brother was a surfer, taking off for weekends camping and surfing along WA’s wild south coast in his EH Holden, his board in the back. Cooper would tag along and it quickly became an obsession. “I was absolutely addicted,” she says. “I went to Year 12 in high school mostly because I loved sport, so I was captain of this and prefect and sports captain and playing hockey and basketball and softball. As soon as I learned to surf, I couldn’t be bothered doing any of that. I remember surfing with my brother on a Saturday morning and he’d drop me off and I’d have wet hair, salt in my eyes, running on to the field still pulling up my hockey socks because I’d been out at Salmon Holes. I just loved it.” Last year, when Cooper was inducted into the Australian Surfing Awards Hall of Fame, her brother Russ told the Great Southern Weekender his little sister at that time was “fearless, only 55kg dripping wet, yet charging”. “I remember one day she surfed Sunset Point at 22 feet (6.7m) and was snapping boards and heading straight back out there,” he says. Locals told her, in a good natured but unfortunately prophetic way, that she surfed really well for a girl, then Cooper saw an article in the Australian Women’s Weekly about surfer Burridge, who was a year younger than her. Desperate to escape small town life, she took off around Australia with a friend and when she lobbed on the east coast, sought out some surfing events and connected with her new mentor. Burridge told her that if she wanted to go pro, she needed money. Cooper came home to Albany and started fundraising — lamington drives, surf competitions and concerts where her aunt sold hot dogs and soup out of the back of her van, shifts at the tuna canning factory, local government grants, meat trays from the local butcher, donated kegs from the pub. Soon she had saved enough and flew out for the first event on the circuit, in the US casino town of Atlantic City. It was, Cooper remembers, “the most tragic, toxic place in the world”; one foot surf and neighbourhoods so dangerous they were warned not to wear jewellery. But it didn’t matter: “from that day on, my whole world changed”. Cooper and Burridge went on to New York, staying in the iconic Chelsea Hotel, “two 19-year-olds going on 15”. Cooper continued to travel the world surfing, often getting down to her last $10, before winning the Oakley Pro in her second year, netting her $4500 and a car. “For me, that was like going from rags to riches. It was like saying you had won Wimbledon,” she says. “I sold the car and my dad said, spend eight grand on a block and the rest on the tour. I bought a block in Albany, back when you could buy a block for eight grand, so it really set me up ... I never looked back from that day. I never got rich surfing, but I always got by.” Energetic, funny and well-liked, Cooper was sponsored by Billabong to the tune of $10,000 a year, enough to cover airfares and a bit of accommodation. “We still did a lot of sleeping on floors but I wouldn’t swap it for quids,” she says. “It was the life ... not many people can say they do what they love and travel the world. I was very lucky.” But Cooper was also dealing with something harrowing: being openly gay at a time when homophobia was rife. “My logic was how can this be wrong, how can loving someone from the same sex be wrong? I knew if we all just sat in the closet, nothing was going to change and enough was enough,” she says. “But I’ll be brutally honest, it was the hardest thing I had to deal with. The money, I can live off the smell of an oily rag, no problem. The being away from home, the training, all of it, no problem. But it was very difficult to concentrate on winning a world title and also dealing with my sexuality, how my family dealt with it, how my peers dealt with it, just trying to prove to the world that I’m not revolting. “I had people say the most horrible things to me, disgusting things, and I had to deal with that and stay confident in myself, enough to walk out in front of a crowd and in front of my peers and stand up for who I am. And I was also trying to live a life where I could be happy, like actually being able to go out and maybe meet someone.” Cooper remained a top surfer her whole career, carving out a particular niche in big wave conditions, but by her late 20s, she felt her frustration growing. Sponsorships were harder to get every year, the women were still surfing in impossibly poor conditions and she found herself losing the desire to surf, something she had once loved more than anything. Then she found herself at a banquet, sitting next to a man she’d known for years in surfing circles, when the waiters came around offering red or white wine. “I said to him, ‘Can I have a sip of your red, just so I can see if that’s what I want to drink?’ He says, ‘No, don’t touch my glass, you might have AIDS’,” Cooper remembers. “At that point, I just thought, ‘I have had enough of this, of these idiots who wouldn’t even know what AIDS is’ ... All those things came together and I thought, instead of being unhappy, let’s go out with a bang.” Cooper won two events that year, then another the following year, retiring as one of the top four female surfers in the world. She went out on top, just like she wanted. But then she found herself cast into the “civilian” world with no experience and no job prospects, unlike retiring male surfers who often found jobs with sponsors and surf companies. Cooper enrolled in a training course in bush regeneration and landscaping while on the dole and was the only person in her class to take up a local council’s offer to send a flyer out to elderly residents in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. “I ended up with my own gardening business, with a push-along lawnmower in the back of my old Valiant. I didn’t have a whipper-snipper so I had a pair of scissors I used to do the edges. True story. I was getting paid $12 an hour and eating a lot of old sardine sandwiches because the oldies would all make you one at lunchtime,” she laughs. Cooper built up the business until she severely injured her back, requiring her to give up surfing for three years and have major surgery. She now works in film and TV as a set dresser (Cooper has experience on film sets; she was the surf double for actress Lori Petty in the cult movie, Point Break). The enduring legacy of her time at the top of women’s surfing is the friendships she still cherishes; lifelong, do-anything bonds. With the passage of time, even her fiercest rivals, including the straight-shooting Wendy Botha, have become mates. They agreed to the documentary to ensure the story was told and preserved for future generations. Seven-time world champion Stephanie Gilmore described it as “an empowering history of badass women ... (that) has motivated me to continue their legacy and push through the remaining boundaries”. And that is all that Cooper asks. “It is important for those girls coming through to know that they are where they are because of a lot of women who really had to put up with a lot of shit,” she says. “They now need to do that for the next generation, because there are plenty of things that need to be done in surfing and society. Surfing gives you a platform and there is always something you can do to improve things for someone else.”