Lynch Takes Shots . . . and Trophy

And now for a few words from 1991 Op Pro surfing champion Barton Lynch on the lovely host city of Huntington Beach:

“The place is a dump.”

“Most Aussies don’t like to compete here. As soon as the guys lose, they say, ‘I’m outta here’ and they’re on the next plane.”

“It’s hard for me to put it into words but the place itself is, um, not very attractive. There’s not any geography to look at, where you say, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful.’ ”

“It’s not that exciting, you know. Kind of a desert-by-the-sea.”

Hate to beat your best surfers and run, Huntington Beach, but over the years, Lynch has found that to be the best course of action. Win and bear it. Twice now--in 1987 and again on Sunday--Lynch has stuck around long enough to swipe the city’s prestigious surfing trophy, one of only two things he ever wanted out of Huntington Beach.

The other, of course, was out of Huntington Beach.

“Coming from Australia, Huntington Beach isn’t exactly paradise,” Lynch said after defeating Newport Beach’s Richie Collins in the Sunday afternoon final. “There are so many distractions, so many people, so much traffic.

“Australia doesn’t have the smog, it doesn’t have the freeways. It’s much more easy-going. The Aussies don’t look forward to competing here. It’s so intense, it’s overwhelming for us.”

Don’t take Lynch’s word for it. Look it up. By the third round this week at the Huntington Beach Pier, Lynch was the only Australian surfer left in the tournament.

But, then, Lynch is one tough Aussie. So tough, in fact, his hometown is called Manly.

And Manly is no place to be swinging in a hammock when there’s a $14,000 championship to be had, even if it means having to slum it for five days amid the desolate wilderness of South Orange County.

“I’m a competitive bastard,” Lynch said between bursts of laughter. “I hate just sitting around. And I’d hate to be sitting in Australia right now and wondering who won in Huntington. If you don’t come, you don’t win.”

So Lynch came. But before he conquered, he had to question the intelligence of his decision, shortly after his plane touched down at the world’s most misnamed airport: LAX.

“When you come out of the airport, you stand in line for an hour and you’re harassed by some bloke in customs,” Lynch said, beginning the litany. “And he’s asking you idiotic questions like, ‘You carrying any pot?’ ‘Oh, of course, I have a little bag right here.’

“Then, you’re stuck in your car for two hours on the way to Huntington and you’re thinking, ‘Why did I do this to myself?’ ”

Especially when Lynch added in his Huntington Beach record since winning the Op title in 1987: 1-3. In 1989 and 1990, Lynch couldn’t even get out of the first heat.

“Once I won it,” he said, “it lost something for me. ‘I don’t want to go back there. It’s too crowded, the waves are no good.’ So I’d go there and lose right away. . .

“(But) this year, I’d become kind of a jack-of-losing and I was tired of being down. So I decided to dwell on the positive aspects of California life style, rather than the negative.”

And Lynch found some?

“The place itself is a dump, but the American people make it good,” he allowed. Nice of him. “The food’s fantastic. The convenience, the service, the entertainment--that’s right up my alley.”

The surfing, too. Sunday’s water conditions played right to Lynch’s strengths and away from Collins’--the waves were small, slow to crest, and there weren’t many of them. Lynch played Tony Gwynn to Collins’ Jose Canseco--going with the pitch, so to speak, and racking up points on conservative, disciplined runs through the white water. Collins, the rad master of such gnarly maneuvers as The Ballistic Floater, kept waiting for a fat curveball to jerk out of the park--a pitch that never came.

“You take whatever Mother Nature throws at you,” Lynch said.

In a sport where 23-year-olds complain of burnout, Lynch turns 28 next month. He is the old man in the sea and, like it or not, this was his ninth Op Pro in Huntington Beach.

“Obviously, after nine or 10 years of doing the same thing, it does start to get old,” he said. “It used to be that 28 was kind of getting up where you start looking at the retirement stakes.

“But I’m not slowing down. I’ve won two of the seven events so far this year. As long as I keep winning, I’ll keep surfing.”

Lynch only shows his age after he lays down his surfboard. After the awards ceremony, a young reporter from a surfing magazine asked Lynch to name a rock band he’d like to see accompany the world tour.

“Vivaldi?” Lynch suggested.

And while colleagues discuss the shape of their new board or the blonde in the green thong bikini, Lynch gets asked about running for political office. Already, Lynch sits on the executive board of surfing’s governing body, the Assn. of Surfing Professionals, and back home, Manly residents would like to see him shoot the tube of Australian politics.

Thanks, Lynch says, but no thanks.

“Politics is boring,” he says. “It must be one of the worst jobs a man can ever get involved in. Even if you try to do good things, you’ll only catch (grief) in the process.

“I’m pretty much an anarchist, anyway. I don’t believe in government. We have far, far too much of it already. In Australia, they just passed a law that requires you to wear a helmet when you ride a pedal bicycle. Who the hell are they to tell me I have to wear a helmet?

“Government is in business just to create more and more rules so it has more and more reason to exist. I’d only go in there to break it down. I’d probably be thrown out after a couple weeks.”

He probably can forget about the Huntington Beach mayoral race, too.