Bigger Than The Sport - Cole Houshmand
By: Shannon Thornton
photos: Tom Servais, Marcus Paladino, Shane Kreutzer
Cole Houshmand is a quiet guy. The plan was to meet him at his house in San Clemente, walk to the stairs at Lausens, and then shoot the breeze in an informal interview. I was there for the whole thing, and until the camera started rolling for the interview I seldom heard Cole talk, unless he was asking photographer Tom Servais how he should stand.
He’s big, too, which is something other articles about Cole get right, and his baggy clothes make him appear even larger. On this day he wore an oversize, dyed wool jacket, and wide-leg black jeans. His hair was bleached in the design of a spider web, and its color scheme faded into the fur of his coat, contributing to his wild, almost barbaric air.
Cole radiates the kind of energy you might expect from another professional athlete – a basketball player or football player – an energy of lavish tastes (Lambos, Ferarris) and an appetite for street-cred fame (Rap, Rodman, & Jordan), but he also understands that he is a surfer and has chosen the surfing lifestyle over other sports. It’s important to note here, as well, that to Cole surfing is (most of the time) a sport – not an activity, nor a pastime, but an occupation with a set objective: to win. “It’s been my life” Cole says, reclining against the wall in his backyard, “it’s how I make my money. It’s cutthroat, so, for me, I have to go out there and win.” But Cole also acknowledges that, in order to be successful in such a unique sport as surfing, that: “the only way to do this, and compete at a high level, is to make sure that you can go out and have fun and actually enjoy what you’re doing.” For Cole, he claims surfing is balanced 80/20 for him: 80% of the time he is going out and working to be competitive, and 20% of the time he is just going out to enjoy himself. “I’m sure when I’m older and I’m done competing,” he laughs, “I’ll enjoy it way more.”
This competitive mindset extends itself throughout the offseason, with Houshmand focusing on training and preparation. “As a bigger guy I definitely feel that it is more important to train. The bigger you are, the more coordinated you have to be, and you just have to have that much more awareness of your body. I take my training pretty seriously, and when I’m home I’m in the gym three or four days a week. On the tour – that’s when the fun stuff happens, and I can surf.” His workout routine? Cole wouldn’t reveal a lot, but we know that strength training and long-distance cardio are on the menu.
Of further note, and brought to light before, is Cole’s unorthodox signing with apparel brand Santo Studio, a company that is, noticeably, not a surf-lifestyle brand. “I was with Vissla for almost twelve years,” Cole begins, “and [Santo] came at the right time. It gives me the opportunity to express who I am and my style - and reach a broader audience.” He pauses a second, thinking, before continuing: “I see myself as being bigger than the sport, in that sense, and wanting to go through different avenues of media. I think what it really boils down to is that I’ve found a brand that fits my style and my personality. It’s fun, it’s new, it’s interesting… I’m at the point now where I want to do different and new things.”
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Drawing this question out, we asked Cole what his views were on surfers signing with non-surf brands. He outlined two trains of thought with regards to this topic, the isolationist “core” surf community, who desire to maintain surfing as its own sphere, supported solely with surf-related businesses and separated the rest of consumer culture, or the interventionist surfers who believe that in order for the sport to expand and have wider influence it needs to be injected with money and support from larger corporations outside of the surfing world. With surfing straddling mainstream media, we asked Cole whether he thought it was beneficial or not.
“From an athlete’s perspective, as somebody who is trying to make a living out of the sport, I feel like the only way to do that is for the sport to go mainstream and grow. [Surfing] has to see more eyes and reach more people – especially people who don’t live by the coast. The sport has to grow for you to make more money. I think the Olympics, and all the pools, are helping it to reach a broader audience.”
Before the interview began, Cole voiced his reluctance at being the center of a recorded interview: “I’ve got a whole entourage watching me talk right now,” he said, and he also made clear that he didn’t want to adhere to the formality of a mainstream interview (like this was 60 Minutes!). By this time, however, he had grown more comfortable and was beginning to offer more detailed and articulated responses.
I say this because being comfortable elicited from Cole something of his aspirations, and by calling himself “bigger than the sport”, Cole hinted to us that he doesn’t just want the sport to grow, but he wants to become the image of the sport. To be a household name – a Kobe, a Jordan, a Gretzky - an image of pure drive and absolute athleticism, this is what Cole desires. He understands that he has the potential to be a top surfer, and that he has the result (with his victory over Medina in his rookie season) to prove it, but he is just not there yet. Outwardly, Cole is serene and humble, but one can tell that he has the Mamba within him - that transformed and hyper-fixated Ego with one striving desire: to win. He could be an athlete for any other sport, but, as he said, he’s bigger than that. Surfing is his alternative pathway to athletic stardom.
But this isn’t to say that Cole is an egotistical try hard, because, while he let slip his desire to be the best – who doesn’t want to be the best? That’s the point of the tour, isn’t it – to come back every year and see who the best surfer? There is no animosity between Cole and any of the other surfers on tour and, if anything, they get along because they all have the same goal in mind.
“I was genuinely surprised with how cool everyone on tour is,” Cole said of the atmosphere on the CT, “it’s not all impersonal like ‘hi’ and ‘bye’, but you actually get to know everyone. I made some great relationships with the other guys, and they are all down to earth.” In particular, Cole clicked with Gabriel Medina.
“Growing up, he was my favorite surfer, and I looked up to him a lot. When we got to Bells and had that heat, everything just blew up. You know, he was frustrated, and on top of that Brazil is very passionate and was coming after me, and for a while there was a lot of tension between us. I thought there was going to be a lasting rivalry, but eventually everything just blew over. It was actually in Fiji, when we were both eliminated somewhat early in the contest, where we had some great nights and hit it off. Then he invited me on a trip to Bali, and I was like, ‘yeah!’ I wasn’t going to give up the opportunity to go on a trip with one of my favorite surfers.”
In the offseason, Medina and Houshmand are doing their own things, but still stay connected. “Just the other day,” Cole says, “he just facetimed me out of the blue to check in and see how I was doing. He’s a great friend, and I think it’s just crazy how he went from one of my idols, to one of my rivals, and now one of my closest friends on the tour.”
What we took away from our time with Cole is that he embodies the athletic surfer; a driven and competitive individual who wants to see the sport grow and reach wider audiences. Along with reaching an expanded viewing base, wave pools would be needed in more areas, and we would possibly see professional (or at least competitive) surfers coming from the Midwest and other land-locked areas. We asked Cole whether he thought this would take away from the naturally alluring aspect of surfing, to which he responded: “Yeah, it will take away something of the natural beauty that you experience when surfing, and it will definitely change the sport (and I don’t know where that is going to go), but surfing is special because you are in the ocean, connected to nature. It’s the unknown aspect of surfing that keeps you drawn into it. With pools, you always know what you are going to get, but in the ocean you don’t know whether you’ll get that wave, or that barrel, or the wave of your life.
“I think people will always come back to the ocean.”
