Poll: Surfing’s most principled stand?

No need to throat-go Nick. I don’t think it crossed Tom’s mind for a moment that his contract with Instinct would be a casualty of his decision. (He did totally know what it would cost him in terms of a shot at another world title.) He is a funny little bloke, not very worldly by nature, but with a very tough resistant core of right-and-wrong that he got from our Mum and Dad via osmosis. (Our Mum was a staunch left-winger and very alive to issues of race, and Dad has made one or two similar decisions in his life, one being not to work for Rupert Murdoch. But I digress.) He also took the role and responsibility of world champion very seriously; the world champion roll-call to us at the time felt not just like a sporting achievement but a position in which you were placed almost by Fate, where you could choose to do important stuff on behalf of the surfing world, or fail to do so and somehow fail the sport as a result. There was also a bigger context about which many Americans, for instance, might not have been aware at the time; many sporting teams from Commonwealth countries were engaging in a boycott of South Africa in the hope it would swing the politics of the nation against apartheid. Given all that, Tom’s decision might seem a bit easier to understand, but it did not save him from a lot of significant nastiness in various quarters of the surfing world, including from many of his fellow pros, and from many in the South African surfing community, who did their best to spread rumours about Tom’s motives. The fact is that Instinct dropped Tom almost immediately after his announcement — their choice, not his — and he was pretty lucky to have Manstead around to pick up the pieces via Quiksilver, who had dropped Tom three years beforehand in a bid to throw all their resources behind Rabbit for a world title, and who had since been rueing their decision. To me, my little brother’s decision stands as the only time in surfing history when a champion has stood up and made a call on a serious moral issue to his potential detriment, without any concern other than doing the right thing as he saw it. I thought it was great that other surfers like Tom Curren and Pottz etc followed his lead but it’s not the same as being the leader. Sadly it has permanently affected my long term view of professional surfers, particularly those who have been paid a fortune by the surf industry yet failed to do anything with their renown other than prettify their own images. For a long time I expected more of them as a result of Tom’s actions, but now, ha.
Oh BTW re the wetsuits, there were no exclusive contracts back then, and Tom was sponsored also by Rip Curl. That was the rubber at JBay.