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I went to write about the 1999 Lacanau Pro, a professional surfing event wherein the Top 44 surfers in the world compete against each other on a French stretch of the Atlantic, down southwest with the Bordeaux grapes. I don't know that much about surfing, but I have a deep (if dilettantish) affection for it, and I read Surfer magazine every month, because for me it's sort of a semi-extreme sports version of Tiger Beat.

The most famous pro surfer is naturally the six-time world champ, the emerald-eyed and demure Kelly Slater, a sleek wave yogi light years beyond the rest, Neptune's Beautiful Son who rose fully formed from the seas of Florida and joined mankind to dance with the veiled and giggling ocean mysteries, and who also had a minor role on "Baywatch" for a few seasons. The international press got out of hand for Slater earlier this year when he was schtupping Pamela Anderson; Tommy Lee was released from jail or rehab or wherever he was and there was an unceremonious breakup and all the lager-dribbling press yobs in Australia and the world hounded the shit out of Kelly, because Pam Anderson is way more incredible to them than unprecedented quantum leaps in surfing artistry.

There wasn't much driving need on Slater's part to be the official Best in the World for the seventh time in a row since everyone knows he is anyway, so Slater took a break from the limelight this year, which left professional surfing without its biggest mainstream face, but it also gave everyone else in the Association of Surfing Professionals' Top 44 a fighting chance for the G-Shock ASP World Championship title.

Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives

I was dying to see the ASP in Lacanau because of my slavering personal interest in the careers of several pro surfers (I disclaim in advance the accuracy of these assessments):

1. Cory Lopez. I have a Cory Lopez screen saver. He's not the greatest surfer, but he's a fabulous, scowling young malcontent with diamond-hard, grapefruit-sized balls, who will take off on anything -- anything, even the glass cliffs of death in Tahiti. And he can really spice up a mushy little wave session with all manner of whippy skate park aeronautics. He's a rudely talented, visceral show-stealer with unpredictable bolts of infernal genius; a monosyllabic, antisocial strange boy from an essentially mom-less upbringing. As a former juvenile delinquent, my bosom heaves and aches for him; I wish I was his favorite aunt or waitress or something. My main ambition for the whole trip was to see Cory walking around Lacanau with some preposterous-looking slag girlfriend, so I could ogle.

2. Shea Lopez. Cory's long-suffering Good Older Brother, kind, handsome and helpful, who seems blessed with a totally serene brain chemistry and an amazingly triangular waistline, which is pleasantly obvious due to the fact that he wears his pants slightly below his pubic hairline. Shea, though a connoisseur of greasy kid tricks, seems more elegant than flashy, and appears to have a diligent and mature aesthetic approach. He's also done a remarkably graceful and ego-less job of being Cory's Brother (second in line for the Lopez limelight). I read an article once that said that when they were kids, Cory used to hit Shea for breathing too loud.

3. Mark Occhilupo. Aka "Occy," a big koala bear of a boy, the most charming, affable, regular Australian human ever, with a big, square, blond head and an underbite. He was headed for a serious shot at the World Championship in the late '80s when he decided to stop surfing, lie on his couch, watch TV and get really fat for a few years. Now he's 33, he's trim, he's back, and he wants the title, and it's kind of weepily inspirational how great he's doing.

There was also a gaggle of surfers that I was crazy to see because I so love to hate them:

1. Ken Bradshaw & Layne Beachley. Ken Bradshaw is not a surfing professional but an older, veteran hard-ass -- a surfboard shaper and Sunset Beach local, with an ancient reputation for ultra-hardcore big wave surfing and a general tone of ass-holically judgmental macho outdoorsmanship. Bradshaw seems to have built Layne Beachley, his much younger girlfriend, out of the refuse of his own frustrated ambitions. He coaches the living shit out of her. She is his creature; they walk around the beach smug and tan like the Tom & Nicole of the watersports set, and he shapes her surfboards with obnoxiously classified measurements and she publicly gushes over him whenever she wins anything and its all kind of grimy. Beachley, last year's women's world champion, is fearfully unstoppable and most likely going to be world champ again this year.

2. Damien "Iceman" Hardman. A two-time former world champion and Occy's biggest threat to this year's championship, he is monstrously capable but strangely cursed to be the Richard Nixon of the surfing world. He's rigid with media unlovability, broody, uncute and super ambitious. He also colors inside the lines and racks up the points by being a ruthless and precise techno-surgeon. The Iceman is coldly serious and basically impossible for teenage girls to get a crush on. The utterly heart-melting bonhomie of Occy makes Hardman come off like everyone's Evil Stepdad.

3. Andy Irons. Andy has a knack for showing up on videos half drunk and talking in an especially depraved-sounding Hawaiian patois -- a nearly unintelligible melange of surfer dude-isms and mangled English -- and coming off like a real parking lot alky with a big foam head. But on the positive side, he's a really exciting surfer with the kind of brute animal energy that makes your blood pay attention. You can find Andy on the last page of the latest issue of Surfer, charging the tube holding a can of Bintang Pilsner, with his eyes rolling half up into his head, looking red, bloated and poisoned like fat Elvis.

Andy's little brother Bruce is another legendary surfer; I keep having this horrible "Afterschool Special" plot premonition about the Irons brothers, wherein Andy gets dropped from the ASP Top 44 as soon as Bruce qualifies, then Andy gets thrown in jail and Bruce's career drags down after him in some hopeless brother-loyalty drama, filled with lots of painful sunset shots and loud young manly agony.

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