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WHOEVER SAID DON’T meet your heroes wasn’t talking about Bondi legend Pauline Menczer. Known on tour as ‘Naughty Pauls’ for her side-splitting antics – from stripping down to a towel for her sumo-wrestler party act or showing up to a contest with spiky blue hair and face glitter – Pauls joined the professional tour in 1988 as world amateur surf champion. After three consecutive top-five finishes, she was crowned world champion in 1993.
Unfortunately, the women’s championship title came with no prize money that year. Leading up to the era of Blue Crush – the smash-hit 2002 movie about a trio of babelicious working-class surfers – the mid 1990s saw the sport become a billion-dollar industry for everyone except the athletes. While audiences celebrated seeing blue-eyed, blonde-haired Kate Bosworth, Roxy model Sanoe Lake and The Fast and the Furious superstar Michelle Rodriguez fight for surfing success on the silver screen, they were less interested in the gritty reality.
While mega corporations banked off women surfers as style icons, selling boardshorts even to landlocked girls in Kansas, they failed to return a proportionate share of their riches to women athletes in the form of sponsorship or prize purses.
IN EARLY 2002, I was stranded on the Gold Coast, far from my home in California, fresh off the back of a failed surf reality show. As I licked my salty wounds, the show’s erstwhile interview subject, Pauls, saw something good beneath the mess that was me, a surf-obsessed nobody she affectionately called ‘Stinky’. Since I’d been WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) my way around New Zealand, Pauls offered me a similar deal. She invited me to help in her garden in exchange for board beneath her house on stilts.
Her generosity sparked a new period of creative activity for me. My mother demanded that I stop wallowing, wake up to the opportunity at hand and start filming. I was twenty-two, broke and clueless about filmmaking, but she bought me a digital video camera that I aimed shakily at Pauls and myself, capturing slices of my new reality. Despite my excruciating social anxiety and lack of budget, I hoped to capture the daily life of both the professional surfer and the so-called soul surfer.
Pauls snuck me...