ABOVE: Ross Williams at Ehukai Beach.
Cruise the aisles of the Pupukea Foodland when the winter circus is in town, and you'll see something like a surf-industry career expo. Touring pros from all the planet's points and reefs, local heroes and moms-with-groms. Big-name board shapers and backyard ding-fixers. YouTubers with one hundred thousand-plus followers and would-be models looking to be discovered. Photographers, lifeguards, surf instructors and the occasional feral surf rat, shirtless and well brined after what looks like a night or ten spent sleeping on the beach. No judgment on any of them: Everyone on the North Shore has their own path, and there are far worse dragons to chase than living the surfing dream.
A few miles farther uphill, in a house with a view all the way out to the horizon's blue curve, Ross Williams is taking a different path: husband, father of three, dog daddy of two and all-around likable dude; occasional surf contest commentator and full-time coach to a stable of the world's best surfers, including two-time world champion John Florence and perennial contender Tatiana Weston-Webb. There was a time when Williams made his living as a professional contest surfer, but as can happen in that world, a short run of bad luck left his future up in the air. Safe to say, he nailed the landing.
Williams' family moved to the North Shore from Toledo, Ohio, in 1979, when he was six. He began surfing not long after, and at 15 won the boys division of the United States Surfing Championships, the premier amateur title in the United States. By the early 1990s he was traveling the world on the professional surf tour. This was also when a friend of his, Taylor Steele, began making surf videos. "When I was young my goals were very simple," Williams recalls. "It was just becoming a tour surfer, hanging out with Taylor and making surf videos with all my buddies, which back then was a great recipe to be a professional surfer."
Ross Williams has coached surfer John Florence to two world championships so far. “The guys who win the titles are freaks—they’re just so talented,” Williams says. “So you better have something intelligent to say or it’s not going to land.”
This was the era when VHS still walked the earth, and two of Steele's earliest videos—Momentum and Momentum II—became counterculture touchstones, thanks to soundtracks featuring then-underground artists like Jack Johnson, Blink-182 and Pennywise. They also starred a group of buds who were to become the next wave in modern surfing: Williams, Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Shane Dorian, Kalani Robb, Taylor Knox, Benji Weatherly, Todd Chesser, Pat OConnell ... today collectively known as the Momentum Generation. The videos gave all of the surfers a huge visibility boost—the first video sold around twenty thousand copies. But their release also coincided with the period when the World Wide Web first went public, which in turn would completely alter the industry recipe.
"Back then, certain people were in charge of your career," Williams explains. "The editors of magazines and the marketing directors of companies who would green-light endorsement contracts—man, you'd better impress them or your career would really be stifled. These days young surfers are expected to promote themselves on social media—on the one hand, it has blown the doors open, but the dark side is you need thick skin to be OK with people commenting. Nathan Florence [brother of John Florence] is a good example of someone who has made a nice career for himself as a social media guy: He's got a bulletproof personality and just laughs at anyone who says something sassy—he couldn't care less because he's just traveling the world and getting barreled."
“I knew I’m a surfer and was always going to be a surfer,” says Williams, of the point in the early 2000s when he was contemplating a transition away from competitive surfing. That he is: At 50, he still drops into waves—like the one seen above right at Waimea Bay last Thanksgiving weekend—that are the envy of surfers half his age.
The majority of those who make a bona fide living from surfing still do so thanks to sponsorships; their livelihood is tied to visibility, and that in turn is often tied to success on the competitive surfing circuit. While the tours have changed since Williams was competing on the Association of Surfing Professionals' championship tour, the general contours are the same. The World Surf League, the ASP's successor, is made up of multiple tours for men and women: The Qualifying Series feeds surfers into the Challenger Series, which is the route to the ultimate goal, the Championship Tour (CT). At the beginning of each year, there are thirty-six competitors on the men's CT and eighteen on the women's; midway through the year, the bottom twelve men and six women are cut.
Making it to the CT typically takes years of competing on the lower tours, along with immense skill and a fair bit of luck: The playing field changes from minute to minute, and though there are judging criteria, scoring is ultimately subjective. Even the world's best surfers can have a heat where the waves simply don't come or in which their scores fall a tenth of a point short based on the judging panel's aesthetics. Unlike other sports, where it's fairly clear when an athlete has lost a step, in pro surfing a relatively short string of bad luck at the wrong time can drop a surfer to the lower, less visible and less lucrative tours. It can be a sudden reckoning for young athletes still in their prime: Pack your bags and spend a bare minimum six months trying to requalify for the main stage, or pull the plug and find a new way to make a living.
This was the choice that Ross Williams faced in 2001, when at age 29 a bad competitive season cost him his CT spot. The mid-year cut, established in 2022, is one of the major differences between the current and former tours: In Williams' day, surfers had an entire year on the tour to requalify for the following year, but this also meant a minimum of a year on the lower circuit if one failed.
Then he broke his foot surfing. "It required two surgeries and a year of being sidelined," he says. "When I started surfing again, I was only 30 but had zero ranking—everything's progressed a bit in the surf world, and now people in their thirties are in their prime, but back then it felt very old. At the same time, I'd met [current wife] Jen, wanted to get married and start a family. I was fine being sort of retired, but I didn't know quite what that meant. ... There was a good four or five years where I was just trying to find myself again."
Williams was lucky in that he'd recently signed a six-year contract with the surfwear company Ezekiel, which didn't require him to compete. "My sponsorships weren't super lucrative, but it was still a decent living. After Ezekiel I started riding for Reef, which was much more casual—basically, my friend Heath 'Nutty' Walker was the team and marketing guy, and I was doing some promotions for them but it was not a very serious deal. ... They were basically just sponsoring an older guy that they liked."
But Williams' relationship with Walker ultimately led to the next step in his evolution, which was also facilitated by the internet and the rise of live-streamed surf competitions. At the time, Reef sponsored the Haleiwa Pro, one of the jewels in the coveted Triple Crown of Surfing—the others being contests at Sunset Beach and Pipeline. While still on the pro tour, Williams had made the finals in each of the Triple Crown events and had a wealth of experience when it came to competing in the world's heaviest waves. Over the years he also surfed in multiple Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitationals at Waimea Bay, finishing as high as fourth place in 2001. (He had a shot at winning the 1995 contest after getting a near-perfect score on an extremely rare barrel, only to have the event called off midway through when the surf dropped below the requisite forty-foot faces.) "Nutty, [Haleiwa contest director] Marty Thomas and [Triple Crown director] Randy Rarick, those three guys kind of said, 'Hey, Ross has got a little thing here. We should see if he wants to commentate.' So I did Haleiwa, and Randy liked it and said, 'You want to do Sunset and Pipe?' And of course I was really happy to do that."
“There’s no one type of professional surfer, and that’s what’s so engaging about coaching,” says Williams, seen above at Log Cabins. “I get to moonlight being a psychiatrist, just getting in their heads and vice versa—it’s a vast area to play in as a ‘job,’ and each surfer is different … I really like that.”
A WSL webcast is as polished as any other sports broadcast, though with a fair bit of sand between the toes. Many of the WSL's commentators are themselves former pros, with varying degrees of verbal adroitness, ranging from the occasional word salad to made-for-drinking-game catchphrases—speaking for a friend, one former world champ's "calm, cool and collective" caused more than one hangover in its day. In that sea, Williams stands out for his clear analysis, salted with super-genial dad-adjectives (dadjectives?) that one just doesn't normally hear in bro-speak: Words like "sassy" and "saucy," used to describe a heavy cutback or massive aerial move. You can't help but love the guy.
Williams spent three years, from 2013 to 2016, traveling the CT as a full-time commentator. He still maintains a relationship with the WSL, though he's scaled back to working events on the North Shore and occasionally overseas. It was during this period that Williams was approached by an old friend, Jake Mizuno, about coaching his son Noa. "I had done zero coaching up to that point, never even thought about it. ... I think Jake just liked how analytical I was with commentating," he says. "It was also just a new world as far as a career goes—today there are maybe twenty or thirty people at most who coach for a living, and probably far fewer than that are coaching on the tour. I did that for a couple years with Noa, and then John John [Florence] approached me in 2017." That year, after six years on the CT, Florence won the first of two back-to-back world championships. A coaching career was born.
These days, Williams works with six surfers, three currently on the CT—Florence, Weston-Webb, Bettylou Sakura Johnson—and three who are working their way up: Finn McGill, Luke Swanson and Tama Hannemann. At 31, Florence is the eldest of the group; 15-year-old Hannemann, the youngest. At 27, Weston-Webb is a tour veteran and perennial contender, having finished as high as second in the world in 2021; 18-year-old Sakura Johnson first qualified for the CT in 2022 and was ranked tenth at the end of last year. How does Williams handle such a range of talent and experience?
"It's so different from most sports, especially ball and bat sports, which are very structured," he says. "Surfing is so artistic, and there's just not one type of professional surfer. With someone like John, you're working with that last five percent—there is not a whole lot of room to work with in terms of improvement. But he has really high standards and a really solid work ethic, and nothing is ever perfect: He has funny little techniques in his style that sometimes don't go great with being a consistent contest surfer or that just don't look right to my eye personally. Surfing is like food ... everyone has their tastes. So I'll tell him what I don't like about his surfing, and if that resonates with him, that's fine. ... He takes it if he wants it."
“I like to converse with my surfers and come to a conclusion together,” says Williams, seen above with up-and-coming surfer Bettylou Sakura Johnson. “What’s the best way to win a heat? There’s no freaking perfect recipe.”
Beyond this kind of practical input, Williams plays an important role in maintaining the overall mental health of his athletes. "In my opinion, digesting a bad score from a judge is the toughest part about being a pro surfer," he explains. "We all go up and down with how we're feeling day by day, whether we feel really confident or fragile and insecure. Now imagine someone throwing numbers at you all day long, and then on social media being an easy target because you either won or you lost, you're either performing or you're not. That's where I dip into the psychology of it and try to be there for them, shifting gears from pumping them up before a contest to bringing them back to where they can compete mentally. And then somewhere in the middle of all that, we still need to get in the weeds and ask, 'OK, but what did you do wrong?' It's the same with Tatiana, it's the same with Sakura, all the people I coach, especially at that level."
In the early days of his coaching career, Williams was back on the full tour, doing things like organizing travel in addition to coaching. Over time his job description has shifted to something more manageable. During the offseason all of his surfers live within a few miles, so it's relatively easy to put in the long hours of working on technique and dialing in what surfboards to ride in what conditions. During the competition year, which these days also begins on the North Shore, his travel schedule is largely dependent on what individual surfers are feeling and what they need. "I am here at home for the first two events, which is convenient. Then I'll go to Bells [Australia], which is a big event, trying to keep the momentum going, and from there I'll periodically go to events just to check back in and refresh their memories on anything that we worked on in the offseason—the idea is to find that balance of them being very confident and independent and them benefiting from a coach."
These days, that balance is shifting back toward in-person. In 2023, Williams traveled to most of the CT events, and in 2024 he plans to be at every stop on the tour. "The ocean is just so unpredictable. For each heat of a contest we're trying to figure out their opponent, trying to figure out the water for that thirty minutes, and then they have to get out there and just improvise. I've been to all these venues a hundred times as a competitor and then as a commentator and as a coach, so I have a really good, intimate knowledge of everywhere they're surfing. So it's pretty good. ... We've got a pretty well-oiled machine."
All of this adds up to a full-time job and then some, especially during the contest season. Even so, "work/life balance" takes on a slightly different shape in this context. "I still surf almost every day, and it really helps me as a coach, because no matter where you are skill-wise, you are always captivated by surfing and how hard it is," he says. "When you're young and surfing at your best, let's say you're a pro, you're really trying to perfect a big aerial or something else really crazy and exciting. At my age I get really satisfied if I do a nice bottom turn or carve where I stay on-rail for a long time—it doesn't matter; it never gets old."
