Trestles Victory Helps His Hedge Fund
It’s 24 hours that 20-year-old Australian Nathan Hedge may one day look back on as the turning point in his professional surfing career.
Friday evening, he found out he had been offered a last-minute spot in next week’s World Championship Tour event in Tahiti. And Saturday evening, he was standing on the victory stand at Lower Trestles south of San Clemente, holding the first-place trophy after his victory in the MCD Defcon 4, a Panasonic ShockWave Tour world-qualifying series event.
“I’m stoked with the $6,000, but I’m even more stoked with the points,” said Hedge, who just missed qualifying for the 2000 WCT tour, which features the world’s top 44 surfers. “This has been a pretty great week.”
It was the first victory in a WQS event for Hedge, who didn’t exactly overpower the competition in the clean, four- to six-foot waves that blessed the competition on the final day. He barely edged out San Diego’s Dean Randazzo, who had the highest-scoring ride of the final and needed only a mediocre 4.65 on his final wave to win.
But Hedge managed to stay close to Randazzo as time ran down in the 30-minute heat, maintaining wave priority and forcing him to take a small, misshapen wave in the final seconds. Randazzo snapped a turn and then fell.
“There just wasn’t much there,” said Randazzo, who earned a wild-card berth into the WCT event at Huntington Beach this summer with his performances at Trestles and the first WQS event of the year in Santa Cruz in February. “The wave just backed down. I think the bigger mistake I made came one wave earlier when I went right and should’ve gone left. That wave probably would’ve done it, but I’m really happy with the way I performed this week. I just came up a little short.”
Hedge and Randazzo also had to feel good about the fact they left a couple of WCT competitors--San Clemente’s Shea Lopez, who was ranked 13th in the world at the end of the 1999 season, and Florida’s C.J. Hobgood (No. 18)--in their wake. Hobgood finished third Saturday and Lopez, who moved into a new house in San Clemente this week, was fourth.
Lopez was hampered by an injury suffered in the semifinals when he fell and the fin of his board struck his left arm. He fell on his first three waves in the semifinals but rebounded to edge Oxnard’s Tim Curran, who was No. 6 in the world last year and the highest-ranked surfer competing at Trestles. Curran lost his chance to advance to the final when he was called for interference after taking off on the same wave as Hawaii’s Andy Irons.
“It’s kind of gnarly with all the interferences going down in almost every heat,” said Hedge, who this week was surfing Trestles for the first time. “These waves go either way, so there’s a lot of hassling. But that’s just the way it goes.”
Del Mar’s Joel Tudor had very little hassle winning the longboard title. He was so far ahead of the competition by the midway point of the final that he merely had to stay away from the group to avoid an interference and wait for time to run out. “It’s always nice to be that far ahead,” said Tudor, a former world-champion longboarder. “I just found a rhythm and managed to say with it.”
San Clemente’s Josh Baxter was second, Devon Howard of Encinitas was third and Hawaii’s Bonga Perkins took fourth.
Australia’s Lynette MacKenzie won the women’s title, held in the biggest sets of the day, some double overhead. Countrywoman Kate Skarratt was third and Brazilians Jaqueline Silva and Tita Taveras were second and fourth.
Hawaii’s Fred Patacchia Jr. won the junior division and Jeff Hubbard won an all-Hawaiian bodyboard final.
Brazil’s Junior Joca and South Africa’s Simon Nicholson joined Randazzo in earning wild cards into the Bluetorch Pro WCT event at Huntington Beach July 19-23.