Surfing to the Top

Chris Cote sits in the big boss chair at the world’s best surf magazine. This, of course, is his opinion, because he practically gave birth to TransworldSURF way back in 1999. Like most successful people, he’s has had some big adventures on his way to the top. Unlike most editors-in-chief, however, Cote’s adventures include being a pro surfer, and a few years as a roadie for a top rock band.

Maybe destiny brought Cote to TransworldSURF. He started out as a toddler on a boogie board in southern California. Everybody around him surfed: his stepdad, his brother, and pretty much the whole the neighborhood. Surfing wasn’t really a decision—if you grew up where Chris Cote grew up, you surfed.

But Cote didn’t fall in love with surfing as a little kid. He had vicious ADD, and would alternate bouts of surfing with playing ninja and video games. That all changed in junior high school, when his focus honed in on the sport. 

“All I could think about was surf, surf, surf,” he says. “My friends and I started to compete in contests nearly every weekend and the better we got, the more we wanted to surf. I made it a point to surf as much as I could, and due to the proximity of my house to the beach, I could go every single day, two or three times a day on weekends.”

I killed and ate everybody in my way.
—Chris Cote

With that much practice, Cote got pretty good and won sponsors that paid him a monthly salary. Technically, he was a professional, but as Cote puts it, he was a “real half-assed pro.”

“I was always afraid of big waves and that really held back the progression of my surfing. But everybody liked my personality and thought I was funny, so they kept paying me and putting me in ads. I did well in some international surf contests, appeared in magazines, got free surfboards and clothes—life was good,” Cote laughs.

“Eventually, I realized I was never going to be one of the top dogs in the sport, but I still really loved being involved with the surf world. I think the marketing guys for the companies I represented thought the same thing because they started offering me jobs. It was like, ‘we can’t pay you to surf anymore, but we can pay you to run the team for us.’”

So Cote made the leap from team rider to working stiff and became team manager and marketing assistant for the surfing brands Billabong, Reef, Hurley, Spy and Arnette. The work was fun, but eventually he got bored and decided to take a gig as drum tech for the band Blink 182. Sounds random, but according Cote, life as a roadie is not so different from life as a team manager:

“The drums are like your team riders — you have to take care of them and make sure the boss is happy with the way they perform. And the rewards are fun — girls, touring the country, making a lot of money. I guess you get all those when you’re a team manger too — minus the money.”

After a few years touring with the band, Cote returned to California in 1999, where he got a call from an executive at Transworld Media, who wanted to start a new surf magazine.

“I had written for a few magazines in the past and had developed a reputation for being a smart ass, and that’s what Transworld was looking for in a writer. To make a long story short, I was hired as a staff writer and helped conceive the magazine in its infancy. I was one of the sperm donors to the fetus of TransworldSURF.”

In the early days, the staff at TransworldSURF was just a bunch of friends hanging out and doing what they loved — surfing, making jokes, partying, and getting paid to do it. They set out to make a magazine that broke all the rules and pushed the limits of what could be said in print.

“We pissed a lot of people off back then,” Cote says. “We got kicked off newsstands, people wrote angry letters, there were protests—it was awesome!”

That was ten years ago, when Cote was at the bottom of the totem pole. So, how did he get to the top?

“I killed and ate everybody in my way,” he jokes. 

The truth is, he was good at his job.  Cote found that he loved conceiving ideas for the magazine, and he inserted himself in every aspect of the business.

“I went to every meeting I could, I attended every industry event I could, and basically poured everything I had into the magazine. I selfishly did everything I could to make myself the face and voice of the magazine and eventually the website.”

When the founding editor left the company in 2006, Cote was offered the top spot, and he jumped at the opportunity. And a couple of years into the job, he’s still glad he did.

“It’s been the most exciting, challenging, frustrating, and rewarding experience I’ve ever had,” Cote affirms. “The best part of working for a surf magazine is traveling around the world surfing. When deadlines are looming and stress makes you feel like everything sucks, surfing cures you and revitalizes you like nothing else. I love to surf, I love to make people laugh, and to be able to combine both of my passions and make it my livelihood is truly a blessing. Damn, that sounded so sappy.”