Bio

Eighteen year-old Balaram Stack is poised to be the single greatest surfer ever to come out of the tri-state area. A couple dozen trophies grace his mantelpiece, at least six sponsors have their hooks in him, and his quintessential surfer-boy face appears, larger than life, in Quiksilver’s flagship Times Square store.

Before he could even walk, Balaram was crawling around in the Florida shorebreak not far from where he was born, trying to keep pace with his two older brothers, who are both avid surfers. A few years later, he graduated to a boogie board. On the day his single mom moved the family to New York, when he was 5, his brothers took him out on a surfboard, thinking it would mark the end of their balmy beach life. But the Long Beach cold didn’t deter Balaram, and he was so adept at standing rather than lying on his boogie board that his brothers soon felt obliged to get him a real surfboard.

When he was 12, his mother entered him in Long Beach’s annual King of the Beach contest. Even before Stack’s third wave, the officials concluded he had won and he was called out of the water. That afternoon, they sent him back out in the superheat, a competition for first place among the winners from each age division.

They announced the results: Stack had won. But because they couldn’t pronounce his name, they called him “Bottle Rocket”so began a new nickname.

That winter, Stack surfed almost every day before and after school, sometimes trekking over snow to reach the water, sometimes wearing two wetsuits on top of each other to beat the sub-40-degree water temperatures. On weekends he was competing in the Eastern Surfing Association, an amateur league, and doing well. In 2004 Stack finally made it to the North Shore to ride his first big wave.

Today, it’s all about flying out to contests across the country, shooting with photographers whenever the waves are good, and spending winter break on Hawaii’s North Shore to work on his big-wave skills. He’s conquered his fear, and though big-wave riding isn’t a strong point in his surfing, he’s improving fast.

Some surfers, drawn to the glory of the double- or triple-overhead, will sit out the small stuff, but not Stack. At home, the small stuff is all he’s got. When the waves are flat, he’ll swim laps at the local pool. When they’re subpar,which is 90 percent of the time, he’ll put in fifteen-minute mock-heats in which he projects himself into make-or-break contest moments, and find ways to make even the smallest wave look powerful. The road to surfing superstardom has come to resemble Olympic figure skating more than the glazed-eyed hedonism of yesteryear, and Balaram Stack is leaving no stone unturned in his ascent.