The surfing legacy of Joyce Hoffman

Female surfers have are an integral part of surf culture, from beginners all the way up to professionals. Joyce Hoffman helped open the door for many of them.

Today, the idea of brilliant women surfers isn’t so radical. Surf media celebrates incredible women surfers like Carissa Moore, Stephanie Gilmore, Sally Fitzgibbons, and Bethany Hamilton who absolutely dominate at top-tier competitions. But it wasn’t always like this. It took 43 years from the inception of pro surfing’s top tour in 1976 to 2019 for the World Surfing League to finally offer equal prize money to both male and female participants at their events. That’s four decades of women fighting for a seat at the table. Female athletes had to break barriers and smash glass ceilings to ensure that the likes of Moore, Gilmore, Fitzgibbons and Hamilton could have a piece of the proverbial surfing pie.

To celebrate the strides that have been made in women’s surfing, it’s important to honor the women who helped pave the way. In January 2022, the Billabong Pro Pipeline made history by hosting the first-ever women’s Championship Tour event at Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii. This steep, barrelling left is one of the largest and heaviest waves in the world. Before reaching the shoulder, a surfer needs to execute a precise takeoff that can send them over the falls if miscalculated. The first-ever woman to be recorded tackling Banzai was Joyce Hoffman, who took off on her 9-foot-6 single fin into an eight-foot wave back in 1968. She’s also often regarded as the first-ever female surfing icon. But who was this pioneer of women’s surfing?

Joyce Hoffman helped blaze a trail for all the female surfers that have come after her

It seems fitting that this pioneer was born in Dana Point, the area known as the birthplace of US surf culture. It’s here that she began surfing at the age of 13 at Capistrano beach. Her step-father, Walter Hoffman, an accomplished big-wave surfer, introduced her to competitive wave-riding from a young age. In fact, her first-ever surfing competition entry was a tandem ride with her stepfather, which initiated her into what became a groundbreaking surfing career. Her passion for surfing took her all over the Southern California coastline to ride the best waves. As a teenager in the 1960s, very few women surfed at the time, so she often found herself in competitive, male-dominated lineups. But her talent for the sport quickly earned her respect among her male counterparts.

“As soon as they saw you could surf, and in fact, they saw you were better than most of them, they were so welcoming,” Hoffman explains to OC Surf stories. “My career was filled with men being super supportive and helping me make it as far as I did.”

Hoffman began winning contests throughout California from the Bay area to San Diego. These initial wins propelled her to travel all over the world to compete. Between 1963 and 1971, Hoffman absolutely dominated at women’s surfing competitions. Her long list of surfing accolades include winning the US Surfing Championship for women from 1965 to 1967 and then again in 1971, as well as the Makaha International Open in 1964 and 1966. In 1965, she won the US Women’s Championship in Huntington Beach, the World Championship in Peru and the International Surfing Championship in Makaha.

“My whole focus was the competitive side of surfing,” Hoffman says to OC Surf stories. “Nobody trained back then, but I trained, I cross-trained, I ran, I surfed. It was the men that were really pushing the envelope of what you could do on a surfboard, so my mentors were the male surfers.”

Stephanie Gilmore is arguably the most recognizable and highest-paid female surfer, with total gains of $1.7 million dollars and sponsorship deals with Roxy, Nikon, Sanitarium, and DHD Surfboards. But back in the 1960s, that title went to Joyce Hoffman. Her success transcended the surfing industry, as she became a recognizable name in US popular culture. By age 18, Hoffman was named the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year, as the only surfer in history to have made it onto the list. Hoffman also graced the pages of international publications including Life Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Seventeen, and starred in a series of commercials for British auto brand, Triumph.

“Timing is everything in life,” Hoffman explains to OC Surf stories. “When I was first coming on the scene and winning contests, I was the epitome of what Madison Avenue thought of female surfers. I was fortunate to be sponsored, and I had advertisements in not the normal surfing magazines. Since then, surfing is everywhere because they are selling a lifestyle, but at that point, these brands were just emerging. I was just lucky enough to be there at the time.”

Hoffman was voted best woman surfer in the world by the International Surfing Hall of Fame in 1966. By 1971, she had won four United States Surfing Championship titles and three Women’s World Surfing titles. Through her sponsorship by Hobie Surfboards, Joyce also became the first woman to have her own signature surfboard – which was approved by her friend Hobie Alter and shaped by Terry Martin. In 1994, Hoffman was the first-ever woman to be inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach.

Hoffman has always understood the responsibility that comes with being a pioneer of women’s surfing. In her interview with OC Surf stories, she says, “I always tried to reflect well on surfing. I was good in school, had good grades, I always tried to present myself like a champion, and I felt a lot of responsibility for that because of the fact that surfing had given me so much. I always wanted to be sure that I didn’t take it for granted, and I gave back as much as I possibly could to the sport. I’ve built my career on that.”

In January 2022, at age 75, Hoffman’s long list of accolades was topped off with yet another first. Her surfing legacy was honored with the first-ever life-size statue of a US female surfer, which was unveiled in her hometown of Dana Point. The bronze statue is situated at Watermen’s Plaza, on the Pacific Coast Highway, alongside the figures of other prominent pioneers who helped to shape the surfing industry as we know it who are from the same area, including Bruce Brown, Hobie Alter, John Severson, and Phil Edwards. The statues were created by artist Bill Limebrook, who grew up in Dana Point and befriended many of the surfing icons that he has memorialized in bronze.

During the unveiling ceremony, Hoffman was invited to cut the ribbon on her own statue. Of the honor of being the first US women’s surfer to be memorialized as a statue, she humbly said, “I can’t even put it in words. It’s absolutely incredible, it’s such an honor, and it’s so humbling. I guess I’ll have to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve it and live up to it.”

She also gave a nod to the importance of her legacy, saying, “While this statue is of me, I like to think of it as an honor to all the women surfers who came before and after me. All the trailblazers who didn’t accept the concept that surfing was a man’s sport, that women were expected to stay on the beach while the guys had all the fun. These were women who wanted to challenge themselves and the assumption that they did not belong in the surf.”