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WATERSKI MagazineThe early-morning fog has turned into a late-morning humidity trap on South Africa's Vaal River. Finished with his last set of the day, Warren Fine dances on top of a barefoot jump ramp as it's being towed to shore. His hands are on his hips. His eyes dart around the water, focusing on everything except the men in the boat. Fine must know that whatever existed of serious training talk inside the MasterCraft earlier has mutated to back-porch-speak.
“Look at his arms,” says Evan Berger, looking back at Fine from the transom. “They almost hang to his knees.” Berger and Rael Nurick, two-thirds of South Africa's most esteemed barefooting triumvirate, proceed to roast their partner. An uproar ensues. Seeing this, but oblivious to the subject of the amusement, Fine cracks too. All three laugh so hard they could cry.
For these three, Saturday mornings have been like this since their pre-teens. Another day, another story. Like the day they encountered an agitated hippo while training for the 1992 Barefoot Worlds, or the time Fine and Nurick built an Air Chair from scratch, only to see it crumble their second time on it. Fridays were even better – getting out of school for the weekend and riding to the family cottages on the river. The boys would bunk together in one of the cottages, usually the Nurick family's, wake up at dawn to the command of Rael's dad Zack, eat breakfast together and then walk bleary-eyed to the water.
“We skied together every day in the summers,” says Fine. “That was our life.”
The hijinks might have welded these three guys into harmony, but it made them no more memorable than the San Pedro Beach Bums. What set them apart was “the trip” in 1991. That year Berger, Fine, and Nurick, now 24, 23 and 22 respectively, were three of the seven barefooters who went to the European Barefoot Championships in England as the first official international competitors from South Africa. They still get emotional when thinking about how they helped blot out the symbols of racial injustice that had stained their country. (All three are of Jewish descent, so they know something about persecution.)
The following year the three led the South Africans to the team gold at the European Championships, and in 1994 they captured bronze at the Barefoot Worlds in Liverpool, England. In June of this year they were the only non-Americans to finish in the top eight at the ESPN X Games. They've literally carried South Africa to world-class status since that trip in '91.
“It was a dream come true,” says Berger, “to be the first to wave the flag, and to do it together.”
Yep, this is the way it's been for about as long as they can remember. And this is the way it should continue to be for as long as they can imagine. But it won't. The 1997 season probably is their last together. Berger and Nurick are taking opposite paths out of South Africa. They're tired of being prisoners of a national criminal epidemic that has spiraled out of control over the past six years. Every week another friend or family member becomes a victim of a car jacking or a mugging. People are fleeing the country in droves, winding up oceans apart. Just like these three heretofore inseparable friends.
Berger is a lead wolf. He's taken over Zack Nurick's duty of pulling the fellas out of the hay at dawn on the river. He has 20 national titles to go with his gold in wake slalom from the 1991 Europeans. He's the former chairman of the South African Barefoot Association, the national team captain and current chair of the country's wakeboard association, which the three guys founded in the summer of 1996. The only time he doesn't seem to be in total control is when he comes off the jump ramp with all four limbs and a ponytail flailing.
“Evan is brilliant,” says Fine, as if he's talking about his big brother. “He handles so much – his day job [developing software for the real estate market], wakeboard work, barefoot work, school.”
But Fine doesn't completely understand how Berger can leave home. Not with so much fun to be had on the river, and another shot at the Worlds coming up.
“I still love South Africa,” says Berger. “But I'm tired of looking over my shoulder. It's time to get out.”
After all those “embarrassing” years of being associated with apartheid and then leading the march into international competition, Berger is pointing the way back out of the country. Every week he hears from a friend or cousin who was car-jacked. Armed robbers recently cleaned out his family's home, were caught and then vanished from the law. Berger's home is now surrounded by high walls, a gate, trained dogs and 24-hour patrol.
“It's like this everywhere,” says Berger. “You can't come to a complete stop at a red light because of fear; you can't leave your doors unlocked. I was glad to see apartheid come to an end. The oppression was awful. But in the transition there's been a breakdown of the legal system.”
The final straw came in May when Berger was walking down a sidewalk in the east coast city of Durban. A few steps behind him, a 19-year-old boy was shot in the head. Berger stood over the dying boy, trying to help while the victim's buddy held a finger over the bullet hole. The boy died. The suspect walked on $800 bail.
“I want to be patriotic and ski for South Africa again,” says Berger, who hopes to wind up as a real estate developer in Australia or south Florida. “Believe me, it will be different when I'm in Australia or wherever, Rael is in the States, and Warren is back in South Africa. It won't be so great. But that kid could have been me.”
There's nothing new about athletes leaving South Africa. Water skiers, including barefooter Gary Neimen, who taught Berger and Nurick the craft in 1983, emigrated during the '70s and '80s so the world could see their talents.
“People gave up their lives to compete,” says Nurick. “For us to compete internationally for our own country for the first time was huge. You wouldn't understand what that was like.”
Yet Nurick will be in New York by the first of the year because South Africa has become “scary.” And when Nurick makes a decision, you don't want to get in his way.
The X Games bronze medalist in 1995 and '96, Nurick is to barefooting what 18-wheelers are to the open road. He comes off the ramp full steam ahead with no wasted motion. This is a microcosm of Nurick's personal life. He completed his finance degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in just three years. By December he'll finish an honors program and move to the world's business epicenter, a galaxy away from the river.
“I love the pace of Wall Street,” says Nurick. “You can smell the success.”
Water skiing will be nudged to the periphery. So too will South Africa's barefooting team, despite the presence of 15-year-old phenom Nadine de Villiers.
“They were going to be tough with all three of those guys,” says Sam Spano, chairman of the World Barefoot Council. “But they can still train in another country and go back [to South Africa] to compete.”
That's not likely to happen, though. Nurick says, “The Worlds was a goal when I was 10, but priorities change. I have to start thinking about where I want to raise a family. I could get mugged in New York too, but in South Africa it's like you're living in jail.
“It's not that I want to leave. I'll really miss family, friends, the river. It isn't easy to leave your whole life behind.”
The guy who refuses to budge from his homeland is the same one who can't sit still: Fine – Warren Fine, that is. If a body rolls backward off the side of the boat, it's his. After breaking Berger's wakeboard last year, h
e shuffled around while holding the pieces, but was unable to hold back an unsympathetic grin.
“When Evan and I were busy with school [at Witts], Warren couldn't understand why we had to study,” says Nurick. “He'd say, 'Just come down for one ski, one ski.'”
Fine is also the most naturally gifted of the three barefooters. He made up for the five-year head start Berger and Nurick had on him in three years. He's believed to be the first barefooter to do feet-to-feet toe turns in competition. After the guys were introduced to wakeboarding at the 1996 X Games, Fine went home and learned 21 inverted wakeboarding tricks in six months.
“You'd never know how talented he is just by looking at him,” says Berger.
Even his body is laid-back. It comes off the ramp as straight and pliable as warm taffy, then bounces off the water into a front flip. South Africa is Fine's playpen, and he intends to keep it that way. He is, according to Berger, one of “maybe 2 percent” of his friends who doesn't want to leave the country.
“I love the lifestyle,” says Fine. “I live for weekends, skiing on the river from sunup to sundown. We're still young. We still have room to grow.
“I know it's a dangerous place. I had an uncle and a cousin car-jacked. Leaving has crossed my mind, but I'm content on the river. Take that away and I wouldn't want to live in South Africa either.”
If he's the only one of the three to hold down the fort, Fine will remove barefooting from his life. He'll go to the Barefoot Worlds next April in Australia only if Berger joins him. Rather than try alone to build upon the legacy that he and Nurick and Berger started, he'll make a clean switch to wakeboarding and start new memories with new friends. It was something Fine didn't even want to think about as recently as the X Games in June.
“I don't know if they realize it, but this is our last trip together. Such a big part of our lives, gone.”
Fine is bounding on a trampoline. He can't help being fidgety, which is why the guys hung the nickname Ritalin on him as a teenager. He'll go flying nearly 90 feet off the end of a ramp upside down a dozen times over, but he's timid about doing a simple back flip on dry land, strapped into a safety harness. After some unsubtle prodding, Fine goes up and over, yelping as if someone stepped on his toes. All three bust out. This is the way it's been for as long as they can remember. Soon it will be different. For now, though, they laugh until it hurts.
