A Surfing Icon Embraces a Mellower Wave

BEND, Ore. — Four hours from the nearest surf, 4,000 feet above sea level and 4 decades removed from the days when he was known as Mr. Pipeline for deep and daring tube rides at one of the world’s most treacherous wave spots, Gerry Lopez shouldered a board beneath ponderosa pines on his way to the banks of the Deschutes River.

Gerry Lopez with some of the boards he shapes in Bend, Ore.
He might have made his name and reputation along Oahu’s North Shore — and in Hollywood, where he appeared in cult films, including “Conan the Barbarian” with Arnold Schwarzenegger — but Lopez has made another life here in the Cascades the past 15 years.

He lives with his wife, Toni, and son, Alex, in a tidy Craftsman house next to the river, near Mount Bachelor, where snow clings to the peak through summer. He begins most mornings with yoga before driving to a shop in town to shape custom surfboards, a career that began during his heyday in Hawaii. And in spare moments, Lopez, 61, likes to glide along the green river on a stand-up paddleboard — maybe the most mellow surfing experience yet devised, and one that has expanded the sport’s reach to unlikely places and populations.

“There have been a lot of water-paddling sports here already — kayaking, rafting,” said Lopez, who started stand-up paddling a few years ago on lakes near his house. “Stand-up is different than surfing. All you need is water. You don’t need waves.”

You don’t need much experience, either.

“With a minimum of athletic ability, anyone can get on a board and say, ‘Wow, I can do this,’ and start paddling and cover a mile before they know it without a lot of effort,” Lopez said.

Pioneered by Honolulu’s Waikiki beach boys to monitor tourists during surfing lessons, riders stand upright on a long, wide board and use a six-foot paddle to propel themselves. Laird Hamilton, the big-wave surfer, revived interest in stand-up paddling — S.U.P. in industry argot — in Hawaii a decade ago. The trend soon spread to waves around the world. Now adapted to flat water, stand-up paddling has surged inland.

The languid pace of surfing’s latest offshoot suits Lopez. Even during his days as the undisputed leader of Pipeline, he embodied a Zen approach.

“Gerry was very competitive,” said Shaun Tomson, 1977 world champion of surfing and sometime Lopez sparring partner at Pipeline. “But he never displayed any sort of aggression.”

“When I think of Gerry, I always think of someone very calm with water exploding all around him,” Tomson said. “He was always very calm and unperturbed in that deathly situation he was in.”

Lopez last surfed Pipeline in December during an exhibition as part of the Pipeline Masters, an event he won in 1972 and 1973. Although fit and trim, he allows that he has slowed down.

“It’s a whole different deal,” he said. “I’m old now.”

About Pipeline’s famous lineup, Lopez said: “It’s probably the most crowded spot with good, top-level surfers. It’s like that any time it breaks. They really want it badly. I don’t want it that badly.”

He will most likely retire from surfboard shaping in a couple of years. In the meantime, Lopez is riding the new wave of stand-up paddling, which has caught on here along the Deschutes, especially a section that courses beneath a footbridge through the Old Mill District in town. Folks from Lake Tahoe to the Mississippi River, and from the Great Lakes to New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, have begun to figure it out, too. All of which has caught the surf industry somewhat off balance.

“I get media inquiries from Midwest outlets asking about S.U.P. because their lakes are starting to see more and more of it,” Mandy Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association, a leading trade group, wrote in an e-mail message.

The manufacturers association says it does not have sales figures on stand-up paddling because it is so new. But three magazines cover the sport. And Action Sports Retailer, a board sports trade show held in August in San Diego, will host a stand-up demonstration this year — on a lagoon, not the ocean.

Scott Bass, an early stand-up enthusiast in California, founded the Sacred Craft Surfboard Expo, an exhibition for surfboard shapers and manufacturers held in conjunction with the Action Sports Retailer show.

“If you consider stand-up paddleboards as surfboards, they are far and away the best sellers,” he said.

International Players Keep Rising to the Top in Major Tournaments

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The results of the last two major golf championships — a resounding seven-stroke victory by Louis Oosthuizen of South Africa at the British Open on Sunday and the United States Open win by Graeme McDowell of Northern Ireland a month earlier at Pebble Beach — have had an effect well beyond the borders of their countries.

Graeme McDowell of Northern Ireland won the U.S. Open this year, his first tour win.
They have reverberated in the United States. Last November, based on where the majors were scheduled to be played, 2010 had been expected to provide Tiger Woods with his best chance in a while to win two more major titles. Now with 14, Woods continues his quest to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18.

Instead, two somewhat obscure non-American golfers followed Phil Mickelson’s win at the Masters by taking down the best in the world on two of the biggest stages.

The unexpected results have put a spotlight on a trend in major championship golf that started in 2007 with Ángel Cabrera’s first United States Open win and Padraig Harrington’s first British Open victory. Since then, international players have won 9 of the 13 major championships, including three of the past four, dating to Y. E. Yang’s win over Woods in the 2009 P.G.A. Championship.

To grasp the significance of this international run, consider the dominance of American golfers since all four Grand Slam events resumed play in 1946 after a three-year interruption. From then until 1990, when Nick Faldo of England won the Masters and the British Open, and Wayne Grady of Australia won the P.G.A. Championship, Americans won 132 of the 180 major championships — 73 percent.

A five-year slump began in 1990, when golfers from the United States won just 7 of the 20 majors, including an unprecedented international sweep of the Grand Slam events in 1994. From then until 2007, international players had an average of one major victory a year.

Whether this latest resurgence by international golfers can endure until the 2016 Olympics is an open question, but it certainly comes at a good time for those who are working to build international interest in the sport in the prelude to golf’s return to the Games.

A look at the world rankings shows 7 American players in the top 20, 8 in the top 25 and 11 of the top 30. But top-ranked Woods is 34, No. 2-ranked Phil Mickelson is 40, No. 4-ranked Steve Stricker is 43 and No. 5-ranked Jim Furyk is 40. Of the 11 American golfers in the top 30, just three are in their 20s: Anthony Kim is 25, Dustin Johnson is 26 and Hunter Mahan is 28.

The two most promising young players in the world are international stars: Rory McIlroy, 21, of Northern Ireland, and Ryo Ishikawa, an 18-year-old Japanese marvel. Ishikawa, who tied for 23rd at the British Open, shot a round of 58 earlier this year to win on the Japan Tour, the same day McIlroy — who opened at St. Andrews with a record-tying 63 — shot 62 to win at Quail Hollow.

That brings us back to the 27-year-old Oosthuizen, who outshone McIlroy and Ishikawa at St. Andrews. He apparently has come of age after knocking around on the Sunshine Tour in South Africa and the European Tour. The question is, how could a little-known golfer with a lone win on the European Tour deliver such a thorough thrashing to a British Open field that was among the year’s best?

Peter Dawson, the chief executive of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, said he thought the victory by Oosthuizen was well earned.

“The margin of victory, his demeanor on the golf course, the quality of his game and the steady progress that he’s been making in the world rankings and in Tour events, I think, very much mark him as a player on the rise,” Dawson said, adding, “I, for one, would not be surprised to see him win again.”

Nor would most who saw him.

But how they perform from now on will determine whether McDowell and Oosthuizen are one-off’s or part of a deep and talented wave of international players.

Armstrong Pushes for a Stage Win but Falls Short

PAU, France — In the closing moments of Tuesday’s stage of the Tour de France, just as in the old days when he dominated this race, Lance Armstrong tried to win.

Pierrick Fedrigo celebrated his stage 16 victory of the Tour de France.
He rose from his seat and began to sprint to the finish line, churning the smooth, muscled legs that helped him win seven Tour titles. But this time, unlike so many times in the past, there was no happy ending for Armstrong, the most successful rider in Tour history.

In what Armstrong says will be his final Tour, he was just not good enough.

Armstrong finished sixth on Tuesday in Stage 16, the Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo outsprinting him to the finish line. Afterward, Armstrong spoke briefly before remounting his bike and riding to his hotel, initially with a police escort — and a grimace.

“It was hard; it’s been a while since I sprinted,” Armstrong said, his face still sweaty and covered with a film of dust. “Just not quick enough.”

Armstrong — who at 38 is one of the oldest Tour riders — had hoped to win a stage as consolation for not winning the whole race.

With four stages left, though, his chances are running out. His best opportunity for a victory was very likely on Tuesday, when he made it into an early breakaway along the 124-mile route, which included four grueling climbs. In the final stages, he will probably not be able to keep up with better climbers, sprinters and time-trial specialists.

Armstrong’s hopes for an overall victory vanished about eight days into this three-week event because of bad luck and crashes.

Several times, he was caught behind riders who had crashed. Twice he fell, including once in Stage 8, when he hit the pavement going about 40 miles per hour. That day, he finished nearly 12 minutes behind the stage winner, an example of how tumultuous this Tour has been for him, on and off the bike.

Earlier this week, Armstrong — who has 25 Tour stage victories — said he did not want other riders to let him win one final time just because they felt sorry for him.

“Back in our heyday, we didn’t give anything away,” he said. “So I don’t want anybody to say, Hey, let’s let the old man have one.”

And no one did. No matter how much power Armstrong once wielded in the peloton, there was no mercy Tuesday.

Fedrigo, the sixth French rider to win a Tour stage this year, saw his fans and family along the route and was motivated to win for them.

“I wasn’t afraid of Armstrong in the sprint,” he said.

The Belgian rider Jurgen Van de Walle, who finished seventh, sensed how much Armstrong had wanted the victory. But at the Tour, every rider wants to win, he said.

“He was a great champion and he has a strong head, and I think he didn’t want to leave the Tour without success,” Van de Walle said. “Even with the bad luck he has had, he still stayed in the Tour to prove something. But there are no gifts in the Tour.”

The overall race leaders were unchanged after the stage. The defending champion, Alberto Contador, is still eight seconds ahead of Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck, who was the Tour runner-up last year. Spain’s Samuel Sánchez is third, two minutes back.

Though Armstrong finished third last year, he lags in 25th place, 33 minutes 46 seconds back. But that is by design, he and his RadioShack team manager, Johan Bruyneel, said.

Once Armstrong’s podium hopes disappeared, he and Bruyneel decided that Armstrong needed to save his energy for a possible stage win. So after plummeting in the standings in the first eight days, Armstrong proceeded to take it relatively easy. He finished way back nearly every day — in 70th, 114th and even 130th.

On some days, Armstrong acted as the Tour’s cruise director, laughing and chatting with fans, and thanking them for coming as he pedaled to the finish line.

“Once you know you’re not going to be the best guy, then I’m going to, like I said in the beginning, sit up and enjoy it,” Armstrong when asked about his deflated effort. “Look around, look at people, listen to people. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not going to win the Tour.”

Armstrong took some flak for it. In an article in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe last Sunday, a reporter wrote that Armstrong had started the Tour as a professional cyclist, then became a tourist on a bike, then was simply a tourist.

New England Swimming Senior Championships

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