The greatest competitor in women’s surfing was spending her 40th birthday last March where she’d spent so many others: Australia’s Gold Coast, more than 7,000 miles from home. Surrounded by close friends and surf-industry staffers inside the giant, scaffolded, tentlike structure of the 2009 Roxy Pro, she was buzzing, as usual, at the end of the day’s competition. But the informal birthday party that followed was far different than any thrown for her at past events.
One of the assembled turned on a nearby monitor. Everyone gathered to watch a 3-minute video that Andersen’s pals had produced just for her birthday. In it, her mother, husband, and two kids back home in Huntington Beach pledged their love and told her they missed her.
Tears slipped from Andersen’s intense blue eyes, roiling up, a tidal tug. She felt the same ocean of emotion that had pulled her for as long as she could remember. But for the first time, she felt it pulling her home. For the last 20 years, home was usually about the last place Andersen wanted to be. But now, the home in Huntington Beach she’s made for herself and her family is a sanctuary. A place she hates to leave.
“I said to myself on the plane yesterday: ‘This is the last plane I’m getting on,’” she recalled one recent morning in her office at Quiksilver headquarters, also in Huntington Beach.
That’s impossible, of course, because of who she is. Lisa Lorraine Andersen was born in New York and grew up the free-willed tomboy nicknamed “Trouble” in the non-surf-centered lands of Maryland and Virginia. Finally, at age 13, she learned to ride on borrowed boards off Ormand Beach, Fla., a few blocks from the family home. “I started surfing right after my parents told me I couldn’t do it,” Andersen told a Brazilian TV reporter many years later.
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