Lynne Boyer – Biography
Rather than her back-to-back world titles, Lynne Boyer’s legacy seems to draw more heavily on her inner struggles with addiction and sexuality. While Boyer reportedly battled internal demons that are not standard issue for surf champion biographies, she also ushered women’s surfing into a new era via her groundbreaking approach to giant surf. Competitively, her high-octane aggression in small waves propelled her into the surf stratosphere as she engaged in an epic struggle for supremacy against her nemesis, Margo Oberg. While Boyer’s personal strife is part of her story, it’s not the whole story.
Before busting out of the gate as a fresh faced red headed firebrand destined to change the game of women’s surfing, Lynne Boyer was just a baby born in Allentown, Pennsylvania who loved to paint and draw. She first stood up on a wave in Hawaii while her dad was stationed there, but the family soon moved back to the mainland. She was raised is Maryland where trips to the Jersey shore saw a young Boyer riding rubber mats and Styrofoam surfboards. Ten years before her first world title, she moved with her family back to Hawaii where she would soon pick up surfing full on at age 11. The creative and artistic elements of drawing lines across the wave face appealed to the small framed regular foot, and she was soon winning contests. She took 3rd in the 1973 Hawaii State Championships and 1st in 1975. The following year, Boyer turned pro.
Fresh from high school graduation, she grabbed 1st and a cool $1500 at the Hang Ten Pro in California. With a fast, radical style in both big and small waves, Boyer ascended the ranks of the newly formed professional surfing tour, eventually running head to head with the era’s dominant woman surfer, Margo Oberg. Oberg is crucial to Boyer’s story, since their mammoth career long battles defined the boundaries of women’s surfing.
Oberg’s traditional and precise style contrasted Boyer’s modern, aggressive attack, making for drama and spectacle in any heat. Oberg took the 1977 title by besting Boyer’s three contest victories for the year. This fueled the young Boyer to battle back the following year to win her first title and to then make history winning the 1979 tour as well, becoming the first back-to-back women’s world champion. She also won the Surfer Magazine Readers Poll that year.
Although she had reached the zenith of this brand new professional sport and appeared to be living the dream of every young surfer, Boyer would later tell stories of heavy drinking and cocaine use that would have her surfing heats sick and hung over. But the wins kept coming. During this time, she was also coming to terms her sexuality but felt that revealing her homosexuality would be a distraction from competition. This internalized conflict buried beneath a veil of substance abuse eventually took its toll on the young Boyer. While she placed second to Oberg in the 1980 title race and continued to set the standard for women’s big wave surfing well into the 80’s, Boyer consistently dropped in her world ranking over the next few years before completely vanishing from the surf scene. A classic story really. A young talent shoots off like a bottle rocket and burns out before reaching her potential. By 1985, as far as the surf world was concerned Boyer was gone. But she wasn’t done.
The time following her world tour heyday, Lynne Boyer worked in a surf shop and cleaned houses, eventually moving in with her parents in Kailua, Oahu, Hawaii in 1985. Coming from a family of hyper successful individuals, Boyer’s failure seemed even more clear. However, this same family supported her climb back. Boyer fought back to the sunlight to eventually surf competitively again, but the fire was gone.
Surfing was not the underlying inspiration in Lynne Boyer’s come back. Instead it was her budding artistic talents cultivated in the years after surfing that would define the next chapter of her life. She had begun painting the energy of the waves she rode all those years on tour. Nature: the beach and ocean; the mountains and trees became her muse. Her love for painting that started as an passion had become a career. Beginning with selling to tourists in Haleiwa, Oahu; she now sells art through 8 different galleries throughout the Hawaiian Islands and through her website. Her artistic life had been realized so too was her personal life completed as she fell in love with a Hungarian oceanographer. She now divides her time between Hawaii and Hungary. On July 28, 2008, Lynne Boyer was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame.
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