This is something of a big week for anniversaries.
Gough Whitlam’s electoral triumph of December 1972 is covered elsewhere in these pages, but here I want to touch on a considerably less known surfing anniversary from 20 years ago.
The fact that Ramzi Boukhiam looks set this weekend in Hawaii to make history as the first Moroccan surfer to make the cut for the WSL World Championship Tour reminded me that 20 years ago this week my project manager and great mate Barry McGrath and I were in Safi, Morocco, tying up the loose ends and putting the final touches on the Quiksilver Maroc Masters World Championships, the first world surfing championship event to be held in that extraordinary country, scheduled for late January.
Baz and I had been in and out of Safi from our base in France for more than six months, working on the details.
Because of the event’s potential to put a global focus on Morocco as a surfing destination, and to encourage the best young surfers there to strive to make the world tour, as Ramzi is about to finally do, I had been able to get the full support of the Wali (governor) of Safi and through him the sanction of the Royaume du Maroc (royal family).
Safi was the kind of ragtag old fishing port where I felt right at home, but because it had a world class righthand point break just beyond its harbour and the civic fathers had tourism aspirations, they were putting huge bucks into this, reinventing a rundown clifftop hotel for our exclusive use, and replacing the winding dirt track that led to the break with an access road to the car park we would use as the contest base, known locally as the Serpent’s Head.
So Baz and I were in Safi, which by now seemed like a home away from home to us, but winter was kicking in and I was ready to sign off until mid-January, when we’d be back to prep for the Masters, and head home to Noosa for a family Christmas.
The renos on our clifftop hotel hadn’t quite been finished but at least we had CNN, so I was well aware that the drums were beating in Washington with George Bush’s war on terror threatening to explode into an invasion of Iraq, which is a long way from Maroc, but apparently not far enough for some Americans.
I’d had a couple of competitor cancellations from California, but nothing like the Quiksilver Pro France the year before, which we had to cancel in the wake of 9/11.
So I wasn’t expecting the phone call I received as Baz and I paced out the site for a concrete slab for our judging and communications base with a contractor one unseasonably warm December morning at the Serpent’s Head.
The PA of my boss, Bernard Mariette, the president of Quiksilver Europe, told me to get to an airport immediately and fly back to France to take a conference call that evening with the board of Quiksilver, Inc in California.
Couldn’t I take it here, I asked?
No, too risky.
I had no idea what that meant.
Back in our apartment in Guethary I chucked back a couple of glasses of wine to settle my nerves while I waited for the call to come through close to midnight.
When it did, Bob McKnight, the company’s global chief executive officer, spoke first and he didn’t hold back.
“We’ve decided that we’re not going to conduct a Quiksilver event in a Muslim country at this time.”
When I started to protest, Charlie Exon, the company counsel, cut in: “Phil, I think you’d better shut up and listen.”
They all weighed in and emotions were running high.
Realising that I was just giving them a reason to fire me on the spot, I bit my lip and listened to the tirade. Then I hung up and opened another bottle of wine.
Two days later, on a bitterly cold Paris morning, Bernard Mariette and I visited the Moroccan ambassador to France to apologise, through him, to the Wali of Safi, the Royaume and the King himself for Quiksilver’s last-minute withdrawal from the deal.
Like so many of the Moroccans I’d met, the ambassador was polite and gracious, but I still walked out of there feeling like crap.
I wondered how polite and gracious the people of Safi would be when the news filtered down.
It’s only a surf comp, I told myself.
We made it home for Christmas in Noosa and a couple of days after New Year I was flying to Hawaii. Having cut the heart out of Maroc, the Yanks had cut a deal and moved the event onto home soil, if you could call The Rock that. We had less than two weeks to create the Makaha Masters.
