EXCERPT from the SUNDAY JOINT
Seventeen-year-old Pam Burridge lost the 1983 world title to Debbie Beacham by a mere 40 points, and I’m not totally sure, but that may be the closest finish in pro tour history, male or female. A year after that, near the end, just as Pam pulled down a big win at Cronulla, the final two women’s events of the year were suddenly dropped from the schedule—leaving Pam stuck at #3 for the year, without a major sponsor, and just pretty much sick of the whole thing.
Which brings us to 1984. Burridge does not mince words when talking about how burned out she was. “I was very anti-surfing at that stage of my life,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to be called a surfer.” In another interview, Pam said she “hated everything about surfing except surfing.”
This was the beginning of her short but intense King’s Cross nightclub period, which may not have been as hard rocking and alcohol-soaked as legend would have it, but was nonetheless—and very much intentionally—well removed from the surfing world.
Mostly it was, anyway.
Pam didn’t pull a Shane Herring. She surfed almost daily, for starters. She kept competing and wound up #3 again. More impressively, she ran an extension cord from the nightclub to her pro career. Damien Lovelock, the louche and extremely handsome singer for a Northern Beaches band called the Celibate Rifles, was Burridges’s new boyfriend, and it was Lovelock’s idea to raise Pam’s profile, and thus bait potential sponsors, by having her cut a record and make a video. “Summertime All ’Round the World,” a surfy bit of New Wave bubblegum written by Lovelock and recorded by Pam and the Pashions—Burridge and a handful of excellent Sydney-area musicians—came out in September, and the accompanying video was shot and directed by soon-to-be director to the stars Keir McFarlane.
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