Matt Warshaw on surfing’s remarkable first world champion Phyllis O’Donell, dead at 87

"I can't think of anyone, at her level, who was less interested in surfing as a path to money or fame."

Phyllis O’Donell, who won her final in the 1964 World Championships at Manly Beach about 45 minutes before Midget Farrelly won his, and thus became our sport’s first world champion, died this week at age 87.

She was private and level-headed, intense but funny, upbeat by nature. Zero pretense. Sure-footed in every sense of the word. O’Donell loved getting in the water, and for 15 or so years loved riding waves most of all, and clearly she was ambitious and goal-driven—but I can’t think of anyone, at her level, who was less interested in surfing as a path to money or fame.

Back to the ’64 championships. It was a mild late-autumn Sunday afternoon, with a huge crowd on the beach and along the seawall. Fun sandbar waves, mostly rights. Sydney-born O’Donell was the newly-crowned Australian national champion but she paddled out as a longshot underdog to Linda Benson of San Diego.

Five years earlier, Benson, as a tiny high school sophomore, hot-dogged her way to victory in the Makaha International, was then featured in movies and magazines, and had basically become surfing’s own Doris Day. O’Donell, 27 in 1964, hadn’t yet started riding waves when Benson won Makaha, and was all but unknown outside her local beaches.

But roll the film (watch here and here) and O’Donell, to my eye anyway, is the more advanced—or at least more fluid and polished—of the two surfers. She was a fan of Bobby Brown, the young but doomed regularfooter from Cronulla, and it shows. Smooth as silk but not above throwing a spinner or two into the routine.

O’Donell’s win wasn’t a fluke, in other words.

Surfing World editor and filmmaker Bob Evans not only thought the same, he devoted six paragraphs in his contest write-up to the women’s final—other publications dashed the women’s event off in a line or two—lauding Benson and O’Donell both, but ending thus; “[O’Donell’s] placement in the wave was ideal and her trimming and arching through the hollow sections was pretty to watch. Every ride these great girl riders made earned spontaneous applause, [but] Phyllis O’Donell was a decisive winner.”

What happened after the contest, though, is just as remarkable. Phyllis smiled and took her trophy, drove home and—did nothing. In terms of career advancement, anyway.

She continued to surf and compete. She entered the ’64 Makaha contest. A few years later she would move briefly to Southern California to work for Dewey Weber Surfboards. She took third in the 1968 World Championships.

But O’Donell might as well have invented the concept of life-work balance, and surfing for trophies and titles was in a gray area but leaning toward work.

This quote, from an interview Phyllis did in 2000, makes the point: 

In 1964, you became the first women’s world champion. Did it change your life?

I was living in Banora Point [near the Queensland border] at that time, and it would have been more beneficial career-wise if I’d moved back to Sydney after winning the world title, but I wouldn’t do that. I had a good job in the local ten-pin bowling alley, where I was an assistant manager. I worked two days and three evenings each week so I could surf a lot. I wrote a surfing column for the Sunday Mail. So all told I was doing fine.

(Ain’t nobody knows surf history like Matt Warshaw. Chip off five bucks a month or fifty bucks a year to get these weekly missives from Matt as well as access to his treasure trove of archives, old interviews, movies etc.)