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 into an Association of Surfing Professionals (now World Surf League) meeting. It was a stressful time post–9/11: the 2001 women’s tour events had been reduced by half, and my impression was that the athletes favoured by sponsors were manoeuvred into qualifying slots for the 2002 tour. Nothing felt transparent, except that the minimum prize money for each women’s contest was less than a quarter of the men’s. Pauls was facing another expensive year on tour without enough sponsorship to offset the cost. She tried to warn me that I’d never win her a sponsor, but I had faith in her talent and wanted to feel useful.

I emailed press releases to all the major surf manufacturers. The response most emblematic of the attitude of the industry was from a sunglasses rep. As I raved about Pauls’ latest wins and my new film project, his first concern was whether I was ‘an ugly dykey chick’ too. I was stunned by the implication: that Pauls was too gay to deserve backing and only pretty was worth his time. Champion, schmampian. Pauls’ reputation for outspokenness – and lack of T&A – made her persona non grata.

I was all bleeding heart then, naive enough to believe I could influence systemic bias by speaking truth. I remember feeling ashamed that I never found a sponsor for Pauls, nor a distributor for the independent film, Surfabout: Down Under (2004), that I sunk two years into, but Pauls never held that against me.

IN THE YEARS that followed, we’d catch up occasionally when she’d surf the annual five-star qualifying event at Huntington Beach, California. Once when Pauls and I met for a surf with my mother and her new boyfriend – the only decent guy in my mother’s life – Pauls proved what a loyal friend she is. Blissed out by rolling peaks and rollicking dolphins, my mother accidentally whipped out her tampon while changing under a towel. Her beau, mercifully, was as clueless as she. Pauls urgently signalled to me and I was able to kick the white-tailed cotton into the bushes for stealth recovery. My mother’s love story continued.

Life moved on for all of us: I embroiled myself in one drama and then another before coming down to Earth as a new mum; by then, Pauls was driving a school bus to pay the bills. Meanwhile, the landscape of women’s sports was beginning to shift. In 2007, Venus Williams fought for parity of pay at Wimbledon and was awarded equal prize money to men’s winner Roger Federer. In 2008, women ski jumpers sued for the right to compete at the Winter Olympics and a women’s jump was scheduled for 2014. In 2019, the US Soccer women’s team filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit.

Pauls had always been outspoken about gendered inequalities in sport – but, finally, the world was ready to listen.

PAULS WAS RECENTLY thrust into the limelight when the film Girls Can’t Surf (2021) premiered. Documenting the history of the 1980s women surfers who battled for a fair professional playing field, the film was critically acclaimed. Director-producer Christopher Nelius gave Pauls – alongside other Aussie legends, including Jodie Cooper, Pam Burridge, Wendy Botha and Layne Beachley – the platform to tell the truth of her struggles with the industry. Riding the wave of that success, Pauls collaborated with author Luke Benedictus on her memoir Surf Like a Woman (2024).

Surf Like a Woman is full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes of life on the tour, plus play-by-plays of surf heats. It dishes out exactly the sort of juicy insights we’d hoped to capture on that surf reality show back in 2002. Benedictus does a fine job of delivering Pauls’ straight-talking sass to the page: trash talk, surf lingo and all. The opening pages hook us in with a riveting story of Pauls taking on six-metre Margaret River waves at a championship tour event in 1990: ‘As the hooter for my heat sounds, I’m jacked with adrenalin, and tunnel-vision focus descends. Just pick your wave and be decisive. Half-arsing it is how you’ll get hurt.’

Scrappy as fuck, her takedowns of typical dropkick surfer dudes are hysterical. Pauls gives as good as she gets in response to the asshats who play macho in and out of the water, a fierceness that belies her pocket-rocket size. She does receive high-level harassment – in one scene, a trio of aggro surfer dudes dunks her head in a toilet and when one of them suggests, ‘Shall we dak her?’ another snaps back, ‘Fuck that. Who wants to see an ugly bitch like that in the nude?’ But she’s the chronic comic on tour who’s always got the gossip and whose keen eye for the hustle (buying Levi’s for $25 in California and selling them for $150 in France) and thirst for the win allow her to compete around the world.

It’s a joy to read longform versions of the stories Pauls regaled me with, like how she bought her first fibreglass surfboard with money made from recycling and garage sales. How, during the event at Sunset that clinched her 1993 title, her rheumatoid arthritis was so debilitating that she had to be wheeled through a grocery store in a shopping cart and stayed out of the water for weeks in preparation for the event. How that same year, she pretended her girlfriend was her surf coach because she’d witnessed the industry’s cruelty when Jodie Cooper came out. (Although, seriously, you’d have to be indoctrinated by the D to not lust after Cooper, who stunt doubled for the role of Tyler in the original Point Break.) The level of detail she resurrects from pre-millennial surfing lore is thrilling – in the acknowledgements, she names a bevy of surfers and friends who helped corroborate her memories. The result is cinematic.

Most of the book focuses on her competitive career, up until the need for hip surgery forced her to take a break from surfing in 2002. The fourth and final section picks up in 2018, when Pauls – by then living a regular life with her partner in Brunswick Heads – unexpectedly got the call from Christopher Nelius inviting her to participate in Girls Can’t Surf.

When Pauls writes about her traumatic family history – including the mysterious death of her father, whose body was found in his taxi when she and her twin were five – it’s only to contextualise the poverty she and her brothers experienced growing up. In real life you won’t find Pauls dwelling on tragedy – there are too many charitable causes to fight for. In 2022, when surf-industry veteran Sophie Marshall organised a GoFundMe campaign to compensate Pauls for the championship prize purse that she never received in 1993, she donated the $35,000 excess to the Disabled Surfers Association, the Autoimmune Resource and Research Centre and to an individual from the Philippines who lives with the same painful autoimmune condition (pemphigus vulgaris) as she does, and who could not otherwise access the costly medicine. Pauls has always been keenly aware of those who are less fortunate, despite her own experience of chronic pain. Where a lesser person might have retreated into bitterness, Pauls’ generosity of spirit sets an incredible example of how one person can face up to discrimination and push back in a way that creates lasting change.

WATCHING PAULS’ STAR arrive a quarter century too late to benefit her professional surf career is bittersweet. She was inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame in 2018. She was honoured with a mural painted by Megan Hales on the Bondi Beach Sea Wall in 2022. She was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame along Huntington Beach’s Main Street in 2023. But as her lifelong friend Steve Foreman advised: maybe it’s best that she wasn’t bought and sold, that she owed nothing to no one. It’s meant that she and a handful of gutsy women could dob in the surf industry at large. The injustices are recorded in the history books now – a fact that gives me hope. In 2018, World Surf League commissioner Jessi Miley-Dyer announced that all qualifying events under World Surf League control would offer equal prize money for men and women athletes.

Maybe two dozen people watched Surfabout: Down Under. For years afterwards, I hated myself for making a thing that was unloved. If only I had taken a page out of Pauls’ book, I would have understood that in the absence of commercial success it is the accumulation of a lifetime of practice that delineates the winners from the losers. I understand now that accomplishments are incremental and that character is everything.

Image courtesy of Pixabay