The famed Mavericks surfing contest drowned in acrimony. Can it be saved?

For decades, almost no one knew this spot existed; its beauty was hidden by a bluff along the road between San Francisco and Monterey. The few locals who realized it was there resisted the wave’s seductive curl, fearing their boards would be splintered and they would be hurled onto nearby rocks.

Since the rest of the world discovered the site known as Mavericks in the early 1990s, those who surf here are drawn by the euphoria and danger of proving themselves on what has become one of the world’s fiercest big waves. They tell stories of being thrown face-first into surging ocean, of being sucked beneath the surface or caught on the underwater reef, uncertain if the moment was their last — only to say they couldn’t wait to try it again.

“It’s like a really scary roller coaster,” said Sarah Gerhardt, the first woman to surf Mavericks. “You go up and up and up, and you know what’s coming, and then it drops and you’re like, ‘Ahhhhhhhh!’ ”

But as the surf’s appeal boomed, so did a desire to make money off its power, mainly in an annual one-day surfing contest that became a global sensation, bringing big crowds to the beach and bluffs around Pillar Point and more recently drawing millions more to watch online. For those devoted to big wave surfing, the Mavericks contest became a kind of Super Bowl, a one-day survival test for a handful of the world’s very best surfers, held only when the waves were the right height, with just the right wind and perfect visibility, which meant it happened just 10 times between 1999 and 2016.

Then, for reasons ranging from politics to small-town territorial disputes to gender equity debates, it hasn’t occurred since. An event that has propelled many surfers into stardom has dissolved into a string of financial debacles filled with complaints about delayed prize payments, broken promises and a bankruptcy.

“You have this Yosemite of a wave, and it’s blemished by lawsuits,” said surfer and filmmaker Grant Washburn, who has competed in every Mavericks contest.

The contest’s best hope of happening again is a 24-year-old woman in San Francisco who doesn’t surf and is locked in a distant verbal battle with the event’s founder, a man she has met only once. Mostly using money from a college internship and the salary from her first job, Elizabeth Cresson has obtained the permits to run a Mavericks contest, including perhaps the most important: a five-year lease with the California State Lands Commission that has been at the center of much of Mavericks’ recent troubles.

Cresson says she wants to do this because she grew up near Half Moon Bay, a place her grandfather and father helped develop, and she wants to help local businesses by putting on an event that “won’t be an embarrassment.” But she also wants to do this because as a teenager she was appalled by what she saw as a contest that glorified an exclusionary cabal of surfer dudes who resented women on their waves and defined the world’s best surfers as the world’s best male surfers. She wants her Mavericks contest to look exactly like the Olympic surfing competition, with equal divisions and prize money for men and women. And she wants to have it as soon as the next open season between November and March, when the perfect swells race across the Pacific.

“Women are equal participants in the [Half Moon Bay] economy, and that wasn’t what was happening with the competition,” she said.

A half-hour drive north of Half Moon Bay, Cresson sits at an outdoor table in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley trying to figure out how she can get $1 million. Since acquiring the World Surf League’s abandoned rights to hold the contest in 2019, while she was still a student at Georgetown University, she has found a partner for the project in Paul Taublieb, an extreme sports documentary maker and event promoter. But after looking at the costs — from tens of thousands of dollars for permits, marketing and operating costs and the $100,000 purse — Cresson realizes she needs $1 million to run the event.

“Or at least $750,000,” she says.

Cresson, who works in the finance department at Slack, knew it would be hard to bring back Mavericks, but she hadn’t imagined the pandemic that wiped out any hope of a contest in the winters of 2021 and 2022. She had hopes for this year until the economy changed and potential sponsors who once sounded enthusiastic started using phrases such as, “We’re holding off until 2024,” and, “Our budgets are already set.”

Still, she remains determined. Since taking over the coastal commission lease, she has acquired a long list of permits to hold the contest, a process she calls “byzantine.” With three more years on the lease, she is confident that corporate budgets won’t always be tight and that if she keeps pushing the money will appear.

“She doesn’t just have the keys to the car,” Taublieb says of the permits. “She has the whole car.”

Securing permits is not the same as dancing with death at Mavericks, however, and Cresson is paddling into perilous waters. Though she grew up a few miles outside Half Moon Bay and her grandfather helped develop the town in the 1980s and her father, George, keeps an office in the village’s downtown, she is an outsider to the clique of surfers who have made Mavericks their own. Surfing, especially in the small towns along the California coast, is a territorial sport in which each spot is governed by its own codes.

Rules are often unspoken but intimately known to those who come there every day, and the culture is often contradictory. While newcomers are welcomed, there’s also a mistrust of outsiders. Things can get violent. In recent years, female surfers have been accepted, even encouraged, but it’s hard for surfers to trust anyone from the corporate world, let alone a woman who has never ridden a wave.

Cresson’s idealism is crashing hard against an establishment where control is confined to a small group of surfers who have dedicated their lives to one prestigious wave.

“Oh, my gosh, she has no clue,” Jeff Clark says.

No one knows Mavericks better than Clark, who built his life around the wave since the early 1960s, when his family moved to Half Moon Bay. He grew up hearing the story about the three men from San Francisco who stopped at the barren beach by Pillar Point and tried to surf the raging sea, then named the strip of sand after their dog, Maverick. For much of his childhood, Clark sat on Mavericks Beach, mesmerized by the wave that few dared to surf. And after he finally did, in the 1970s, he rode it mostly by himself for the next 15 years.

Some call Clark “The Mayor of Mavericks.” At his Mavericks Surf Company in a small strip of stores beside the local harbor, he sells his custom Jeff Clark surfboards, and from the bench in front, you can see the top of the wave crashing in the distance.

Clark welcomed the new surfers when they started to arrive in the early 1990s, and he was there when Hawaiian surfing star Mark Foo died surfing the wave in 1994 — the moment that sealed Mavericks’ menacing reputation.

After executives from Quiksilver approached a few years later, the first two Mavericks competitions were held in 1999 and 2000, garnering coverage from global news outlets and using the tagline “Men Who Ride Mountains.” But then Quiksilver pulled out, shifting its focus to contests in Hawaii.

Clark later joined with Keir Beadling, an entrepreneur from San Francisco with a marketing degree from Duke who spent eight years trying to build Mavericks into an enterprise, with a clothing line and a high-end webcast. Then in 2014, Clark partnered with Griffin Guess, a hip-hop producer and marketer who helped promote albums for Kanye West and Jay-Z. Guess’s company, Cartel, ran the last contest in 2016.

But the pairings ended badly, often in disputes that spilled out in public hearings and made headlines across the Bay Area. Despite the contest’s growing popularity — “Mavericks is like the 49ers around here,” Washburn says — the contest always seemed to be teetering financially.

“Jeff decided that if anyone is going to make money off of Mavericks, it should be him,” says Mark Kreidler, author of “Voodoo Wave,” a book about Mavericks and the contest.

The ugliest dispute was the last one, in 2016, when Clark alleges Guess and Cartel’s executives took his name off the permit applications, “stealing” the contest from him. Brian Waters, who ran the event for Guess, said he “has no comment about the business process.”

Sally Jenkins: The surfer, the scientist and the big-wave beach at a breaking point

When Cartel declared bankruptcy a year later, the contest’s rights were sold out of bankruptcy court to the World Surfing League for $500,000.

The WSL never held a contest and finally abandoned the rights in 2019, which is when Cresson went to the California State Lands Commission and got the lease for the cost of an application and processing fee.

“And during this time, we had a very, like, insanely activist, feminist just going off on us,” Clark says. “Sabrina Brennan … she’s the reason the contest didn’t happen for six years.”

Brennan, who moved to the neighborhood on top of Pillar Point’s bluff not long before the first Mavericks contest, probably has battled Clark more than anyone over the years. Her anger goes back to those first weeks in her new home when she saw a big story about the coming competition in the local paper under the headline: “Men Who Ride Mountains.”

“What about women who ride mountains?” she thought.

At the time, Brennan was an avid snowboarder with a creative design business and a side interest in pushing for equality in women’s sports. Though she really doesn’t surf, her wife does, and as she watched the all-male Mavericks contest over the years, she became more outraged.

Brennan pulled some of the best female surfers together, started a group called Surf Equity and stormed after surfing’s male establishment, demanding equal competitions with equal pay for women.

“There was this discrimination right in my backyard,” she says.

The topic of women and surfing has always been complicated. Gerhardt, the first woman to surf Mavericks, has felt generally welcome at the surf spot and fondly remembers how Clark, Washburn and her husband, Mike (also a big wave surfer), joyously lofted her over their heads the first time she rode a wave. And yet she was never motivated much to push to be in contests, in part because they “are boys clubs, and where do I fit in that?”

Likewise, several of the men who surf at Mavericks say they have always welcomed women and are supportive of women not only surfing there but competing in contests. But in a sport where even the best surfers fight to make a living on small scraps of prize and endorsement money, every spot in a contest is sacred, and adding women means cutting out top men. Plus, Clark said some of the women didn’t want to try some of the most dangerous surf or compete with the men.

“I mean, there’s a reason there’s a WNBA and NBA, you know, and the feminists and activists don’t want to hear that,” Clark says.

Cresson, then in high school, watched Brennan’s fight play out in the local papers and television news and was inspired. She began talking with her father about trying to run the contest herself, with divisions for men and women. After the California legislature passed a bill in 2019 that required all events held on state land to have equal participation with equal prize money, the WSL walked away from the rights, and father and daughter got serious.

“They think women are going to suck and you will have less skilled [surfers],” Cresson said of Clark and others long involved with the contest. “And, like, maybe they’re less skilled because they [aren’t allowed to] actually compete.”

From in front of his shop, Clark shakes his head.

“All the women that have come here, they get in your face and they scream as loud as they can instead of coming up and going: ‘Hey, you know, we’d like to see women in this. How can we work together to make that happen?’ ” he says. “Never has that been said ever.”

Mostly, though, Clark and others with the contest resent Cresson’s tone in interviews, such as the video conversation she did last year with Surf Equity in which she called the dispute over women’s inclusion at Mavericks “one of the few things around her that felt so obviously, like, discriminatory” and said the only people unhappy that she is running Mavericks are “the people who had it before I had it, so you know [they’re] not too jazzed.”

“It’s like somebody’s daddy bought me a surf contest,” Washburn says. “It’s full of this entitlement.”

Washburn says he believes women should compete in surfing contests and has arranged informal events for female surfers in the area. He says his concern is about the fact that Mavericks is one of the world’s most treacherous waves — it’s where Foo and another top surfer, Sion Milosky, died — and he is terrified that Cresson and Taublieb don’t have a plan for safety and control. After years of watching outsiders try to monetize Mavericks, he sees another organizer who doesn’t get what Mavericks really is, what riding its waves really means.

Cresson and Taublieb insist they have thought a lot about details, running through their ideas for safety patrols and crowd controls. But none of this can be finalized without sponsors.

“I have been totally open with people I’ve been talking to, but I have nothing to sell,” Taublieb says. “The minute it’s real, then let’s talk about it.”

For years, Bianca Valenti, a top female big wave surfer who has fought to compete in contests, has watched people battle over the contest at Mavericks. She is exhausted by it.

“It’s like the Hunger Games,” she says. “Instead of helping each other, they eat each other. When people start behaving out of their trauma or their fears, they stop thinking straight.”

Valenti says she is rooting for Cresson and likes that she hasn’t backed down.

“The hardest part is just going for it,” Valenti says.

Last year, Cresson and Taublieb went to a local bar where many of the Mavericks surfers hang out, hoping to talk to Clark and others involved in the contest, putting herself in front to them as if to say, “Here I am in the flesh, like devil incarnate.” But aside from shaking a few hands and saying “Nice to meet you,” she felt ignored. The surfers talked to Taublieb, and that was it.

“It’s better that way,” she said. “I don’t want to have some sort of confrontation. Like, I’m not here to get in a fight with people. I just want to have a competition.”

For now, the lone event at Mavericks is a digital contest Clark runs called Mavericks Awards in which surfers are filmed each day riding the wave and a panel picks the winners at the end of the season.

It’s something, but it’s still not the mighty Mavericks contest that helped make the wave famous worldwide. Still, it forces the crux of the issue: With the financial challenges and uncertainty of when the perfect waves will come, is a real event even viable?

Taublieb pauses and considers the question.

“I don’t know,” he finally says.

Early last year, he and Cresson had lined up Outside as a media provider, but they weren’t able to lock in any other major sponsors.

“You can’t take someone’s money and then [say], ‘Oh, oopsies, we didn’t raise the other 500k,’ ” Cresson says. “You can’t really do that. We had a couple of big fish and then it just … you know.”

A late-afternoon wind picks up in the San Francisco park where she sits, uncertain if this contest she has dreamed of holding will ever happen. A half-hour to the south, the Mavericks wave breaks near Pillar Point, as it has for thousands of years and probably will for thousands more. Surging, rising, falling and crashing again and again and again; unable to be controlled, unable to be bought.

As always, free.