Trailblazer Pauline Menczer overcame great odds to carve out her place in surfing history

Bondi’s only world champion surfer overcame great odds to carve out her place in history and she is finally getting the warm welcome she deserves.

It’s a walk Pauline Menczer has made hundreds of times before – through the streets of suburban Bondi to arrive at the world-famous crescent-shaped beach. Initially she walked it with a polystyrene board under her arm, then with her first fibreglass board, which she bought for $20 thanks to hundreds of recycled cans and a garage sale of items she’d taken from council clean-ups.

But last month, Menczer, now 54, made a point of stopping to really take in the scene at Bondi Beach, where she had surfed since she was a 13-year-old grommet in the 1980s. She’s not a woman prone to sentimentality, but before she walked into Bondi Pavilion for the launch of her book, Surf Like A Woman, Menczer allowed a single tear to escape.

She was finally being welcomed home by locals and a surf community that hadn’t always acknowledged the grit it took for her to become a world champion surfer – the only one ever to hail from Bondi Beach.

Menczer has shared how difficult it was to succeed in the sport in a new book. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

“I was staying at Hotel Revesis and I left the hotel to walk on my own to Bondi Pavilion,” she tells the Wentworth Courier. “As I got close to the footbridge over the carpark, I could picture myself as a little girl right there at the beach and then walking into the Pavilion, where it was all lit up, I had a tear because I thought all these people were here to see me.

“I guess I was just this nobody girl surfer down the beach before, but now I’ve done Bondi proud, the fact that Bondi has a world champion, and they don’t care whether I’m male or female now. To stand there now and have them hold me in such high regard – they all call me the Queen of Bondi – it’s really nice.”

Menczer grew up on Ocean St, Bondi in the 1970s and ’80s in a boisterous household with her single mum Margaret, twin brother Ben and older twin brothers Tracy and Trevor. She learned to surf out on the South Bondi break at 13 at a time when boys and men ruled the waves. And after a juvenile rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis at 14 that left her unable to get out of bed some days, surfing became her saviour.

Four years after she first stood on a surfboard, she won the 1988 World Amateur Surf Championship at 17.

Despite such early promise, Menczer recounts in her book a professional career marred by discrimination, poverty, the crippling pain of arthritis and homophobia. The dramatic arc of her book follows the challenge she faced during her 1993 World Title win at Sunset Beach in Hawaii, where her arthritis had flared up so badly her twisted hands couldn’t even wax her board and she needed help just putting on her wetsuit.

Competing in the US Open of Surfing at Huntington Beach, California in 2001. Picture: Pierre Tostee

Calling on a superhuman effort, Menczer beat her rivals, including a young Layne Beachley, to take out the world title. But she didn’t receive a cent in prizemoney and her trophy was broken.

“I was walking with one foot in front of the other because I was so crooked, my elbows were totally bent, my wrists didn’t bend back and I couldn’t turn my neck,” Menczer recalls of the day she won the world title. “Even if I took 10 steps, I’d get more and more twisted and then I’d just fall on the floor crying out of pure frustration. It was a real struggle trying to get up (on the board) because my wrists wouldn’t bend back so I was using my knuckles to get up.

“And I’d borrowed a big board off another surfer because it’s a bit easier to get in quicker and get up quicker, so I was riding a board I’d never even ridden before. My coach, Steve (Foreman), only told me a couple of years ago ‘I never thought you would even get to Hawaii, you were that bad.’

“The thing that stands out the most is someone came up and put a lei of flowers on my head and it was like a frangipani/jasmine smell. Later, I went and got a whole lot of jasmine and planted it in 10 different places on my property so one time of the year, every time I walk anywhere on my property, I think of that world title win.”

Menczer retired from professional surfing at the age of 32, mostly due to her arthritis, which had become bad enough that she needed a hip replacement, and partly due to the pittance female surfers were paid in prizemoney.

Menczer in 1996 with the Bells Beach Trophy and pet dog Speck.

Naughty Pauls, as she was known by her surfer mates on the circuit, had surfed 231 pro contests, winning 28 along the way. But she didn’t have a cent to show for it and on retirement, she moved away from her increasingly expensive hometown of Bondi to Brunswick Heads on the far north coast of NSW to become a school bus driver. The 2018 Surfing Hall of Fame inductee still lives there with her partner of almost 10 years, Sam Endell.

But where you would expect bitterness, there’s none; where you’d expect regrets, she doesn’t have any. She is who she is because of what she went through, she says philosophically. Ever the underdog, she has turned her attention to improving beach access for the elderly and disabled. And she has a little bit of fight left in her for a special project started by Chris Nelius, who made the 2019 documentary, Women Can’t Surf, featuring Menczer.

Nelius is trying to get council to approve a bronze statue of Menczer erected on the hill above South Bondi, where she learned to surf.

“The statue is so important, there are so many families that want to see it happen because they want their kids to see it and know the story,” she says. “They say ‘if you can’t see it, you can’t be it’.”

Photographed in 1992 at the beach. Picture: Michael Perini

You can keep Menczer’s legacy alive by donating to a GoFundMe to get her statue erected at paulineinbronze.com.
Surf Like A Woman is out now through Affirm Press. And Women Can’t Surf will show at the Sydney Opera House with a Q&A with Menczer on August 11. Tickets are $30 at sydneyoperahouse.com