A MIX OF SURF AND ART
By MORRIS SULLIVAX • Currents magazine summer 2009
When he was 14 years old, Jimmy Lane decided to try surfing. "I was pretty athletic - I played basketball, football and ran track," he says. "But I lived in New Smyrna Beach and all my friends had started surfing. So I tried it and I found out I liked it." Soon, Lane was one of the best on the waves. "I advanced really fast," he says. "So I started surfing the (amateur competitions) all the way to the east coast championships." Today, Jimmy "Fast" Lane is still ranked one of the 50 best surfers in The world. He shares his love for the sport not only by teaching others how to surf, but also by creating surt:inspired art to adorn surfboards and gallery walls--even sometimes turning surfboards into fine art.
But in the 1970s, he was busy riding the waves to surfing excellence, competing in ESA (Eastern Surfing Association) events. I got 10th place in [he championships - that was 1977 ," he says. "After that, I didn't enjoy the amatures as much, but pro surfing had started up." He decided to go pro and spent the late 1970's and early 1980's as a professional surfer, advancing into the Pro Leagues of the ASP East.
(Association of Surfing Professionals) and finally the World Tour of the ASP.
"I worked my way up, and was doing really weli," he says. His first big payday came in 1984, when he won $5,000 at a national competition in North Carolina. "Then I competed all through '85, and won Puerto Rico, which was a major contest where all the pros came," he says. "I beat a famous surfer who was rated NO.1 at the time, so for 30 days, I was the No. 1 surfer in the world." He took the $10,000 he won in Puerto Rico and headed to Australia for four months. "It was cool - I got my chance to try to become the world champion and ended up rated in the top 50 in the world." "My luck was OK he says, to win, you had to be in just the right place at the right time." Succeeding in competitive surfing takes a combination of luck and brains, Lane explains. "A competition heat is only 20 minutes long, and there might not be any waves in that particular 20·minute period," he says. "Then you might get wave after wave right after your 20 minutes is up.
"But it also takes brains," he says. "Kelly Slater is a nine-time world champion, and he's a very smart guy. To win that many championships, you can't rely on luck - you go down to the beach and study the waves, time them, and have a first plan and a plan B, in case they don't show up where you expect them. "There are a lot of great surfers today that don't use their brain as much as they should in competition," he adds. "But we're getting smarter kids surfing these days - they're going to college, making good grades and becoming great surfers.'" Lane returned from Australia to New Smyrna Beach, where he started teaching surfing and working as an artist. "I airbrush a lot of surfboards," he says. "The main label is Erie Surfboards, but I do a lot of different labels." Airbrushed designs on surfboards isn't the sum total of his art career, however. He also exhibits paintings and fine-art surfboards at outdoor festivals and galleries. "When I was traveling, I was always on a tight budget, so I'd stay with friends," he explains. "In every house I stayed in, I'd do a painting and leave it behind. That helped me out - people would invite me back."
He has entered the Art Fiesta in New Smyrna • Beach "for at least 25 or 30 years," he adds. "I've won some major awards, including a purchase award from the city." One of his works, a surfboard with an intricately airbrushed wave, now hangs in City Hall.
But his biggest love, Lane says, is teaching young people to surf. Every summer, he introduces hundreds to the sport with the Jimmy Lane Surfing Academy, which he runs in conjunction with the New Smyrna Beach parks and recreation department. Lane took charge of the city's summer surfing camp in 1985. Only a handful of students showed up that first summer. "But I took it from a dozen kids to 500 or more," he says. "It has turned into a nice city recreation program, and it's a nice business for myself. My name will be here forever because Of the surf school." The academy now offers one-week sessions all through the summer, beginning June 1 and climaxing with a surfing contest in August. "I get students from all over the country - and from Canada, South Africa and Australia. I've taught at least 15,000 people how to surf."
To keep the student-teacher ratio down to no more than five surfers per instructor, Lane long ago started hiring extra instructors. "They're all good surfers," he says. "But safety is first - they're all CPR-certified, and two of them are actually firemen. Some of them have been with me 12 years. Most of them started as students and started working for me part-time in the summer." Students have to be able to swim before they can learn to surf. Most are between ages 7 and 16. "The youngest I've had was four," he says. "But his mother was a swim teacher." Just about anyone can learn to surf, he says. "We do a swim test the first day, and have them run and swim through the waves," he says. "That lets us see which ones will need some extra attention. "Once they conquer their fear, they all turn into warriors," he says. "It's amazing to see." I have them write a paragraph about what they like about surfing," he adds. "They'll say the feeling of standing up riding a wave is like flying on water." But sometimes it goes beyond that, Lane says. "Some kids express their feelings-it really comes from the heart," he says. "It's very touching sometimes."