Love him or hate him, South Africa's Corran Addison is making waves in the world of whitewater
August 1994:The annual Outdoor Retailer trade show in Reno, Nevada, has just ended, and a pod of kayakers has converged on California's American River to test paddle the latest boats on the market. At a playhole called Maya, one paddler links freestyle moves effortlessly in a boat markedly different from any other. The boat is called the Scorpion and the person at the controls is as radical a departure from other designers as the kayak is from other boats. He is Corran Addison, a native South African whose personality and approach to business is personified by the 16-inch Mohawk hiding beneath his helmet. |
September 1997:The finals of the World Rodeo Championships on Canada's Ottawa River have just begun and the announcer calls bib number three out of the eddy. Instead of competing, Corran floats into the current holding a protest banner high overhead. Competitors and organizers can do little to quell the tantrum. He follows his stunt by announcing to television cameras that until the International Rodeo Committee reverses its rule-change decision, he will never compete in another IRC-sanctioned rodeo again. Less than a month later, he begins forming his own competing rodeo circuit. |
Whether he's playing at a local rodeo hole or protesting a world championships, few can deny that Corran Addison is making waves in the world of whitewater. And as with any eccentric self-promoter, his antics haven't gone unnoticed. Thumb through recent issues of Outside and Men's Journal magazines--publications not known for following the small world of kayaking--and Corran can be found espousing upon everything from the conservative state of the industry to his unabashed prowess in the bedroom. Likened to everyone from Dennis Rodman--accentuated by a giant tattoo across his chest--to the Alexander Graham Bell of boating, he is as unpredictable as the Mississippi River in flood.
His brash personality and approach to business is exemplified by an ad campaign he helped launch for Savage Designs, a kayak company he co-founded in Asheville, N.C., in 1994. One ad depicts a naked woman--Savage owner Selene Thoms--covered in gold paint next to the words: "It doesn't matter if you're male, female, or confused; black, white, brown, red, green, yellow; gay, lesbian; redneck cop, stoned; jibber, racer, weekend warrior, creeker, beginner, expert, ugly; military style, doggy style; fat, rich or poor; vegetarian or cannibal; bum, hippie, virgin; famous or drunk...you're either an asshole or you're not!" Chastised for his unorthodox marketing antics in the conservative paddling world, he followed with another ad showing a picture of a tranquil tree. This one reads: "We have decided to up our public image...so up yours!"
No matter what image he conveys, few can deny that Corran backs up his brashness with his boats. Instead of going with the tried and true, he has ventured off on design tangents that have helped open new doors in the world of whitewater: cavitating hull bottoms--like the dimples on golf balls--to decrease friction and water tension; flat planing hulls to aid in surfing; sidecut to facilitate turning. And he couldn't care less about his image. "There are two schools of thought as to how I'm perceived," admits the 29-year-old designer, now a co-owner of Riot kayaks in Montreal, Quebec. "One group sort of idolizes me--I received an e-mail from a pregnant couple who wanted to name their child after me. Another thinks I'm the biggest asshole on the planet."
Addison's attitude goes hand-in-hand with his designs: both rebel against conventional norms. When the Scorpion came out in 1994, most agreed it was one of the ugliest crafts on the market. But he used it to win six of the eight rodeos he entered that year. "I think the industry looks at me and knows I'm pushing the envelope with regard to boat designs," he says. "But I also think they feel my designs are too hard to paddle." Peers--and mentors--are quick to agree. "Corran designs boats for Corran," says Perception founder Bill Masters, who hired Corran when he first came to the U.S. in 1987. "He has razor-sharp reflexes, and that's what his boats promote. Corran likes boats that he can paddle. But he's an extremely gifted paddler--I don't care if you put a log out on a river, he can paddle it...or he'll learn to or die trying--especially if people are watching."
Others concur that Corran is not your run-of-the-mill designer. "Corran's got a unique world view," says Landis Arnold, who distributes Prijon kayaks in the U.S. and sponsored Corran in his earlier years. "He is an extremely visible personality, and you can't help but be engaged by him. But the problem is it's hard to see what he has done for the sport because his personality is so domineering." Arnold adds that marketing-wise, he's not sure Corran is barking up the right tree. "He has tried to create a generation gap in the sport, and I don't know what the real purpose behind that is," he says. "He perceives the important realm of kayakers to be Generation-Xers and to hell with everyone else. That's important, but the market is a lot larger."
At the bottom of Corran's new-fangled designs and Rodmanesque image is his screw-authority-and-go-paddling persona, which has been with him since he first set foot in a two-man downriver kayak with his father at age 5. "We didn't know anything back then," Corran says of his early river forays. "We didn't even know there was something called the Eskimo Roll for another five years." Unbeknownst to him at the time, these early years laid a foundation for a future in design. With no real equipment to chose from, and no finances to tap into, necessity became the mother of invention. As a boy, Addison nailed pieces of plywood onto closet dowels for paddles; wore a pair of water wings on his arms for a lifejacket; and cut a hole in a plastic tablecloth to use as a sprayskirt. He also tinkered with boat design, reshaping his father's two-man kayaks so they could accommodate more gear. "From the first day I started kayaking I also had to be inventing," he says. "I think that's given me a headstart in the business. We had to think about every piece of equipment we used."
Corran's father, Graeme, respectfully known in local circles as "Old Man River," takes up the story: "By the age of eight Corran was accompanying me on trips. We scouted the estuary of the Kowie River, then tackled the rapids of the Great Fish River, and finally undertook several explorations along hundreds of kilometers of the Orange River. All this turned Corran into a paddling prodigy." After his parents divorced and he completed boarding school in Cape Town, Corran moved to Belgium with his mother for two years until returning to Durban for high school. His mind, however, was on boating instead of books, a tangent fueled by his father starting a kayak outfitting business. Although most of his friends were surfers, Addison began hanging out with an older paddling crowd--to the point of getting suspended and whipped by the headmaster for playing hooky to go kayaking. On another occasion he took two months off from school to paddle with the Cape Kamikaze Club, a group of rock climbers-turned-kayakers. Still, he was a misfit among his peers.
"On one occasion during Corran's school years," recalls Graeme, "we were out trying to catch some ocean waves when some surfers recognized him and surrounded us in the water like sharks. Surfers don't like kayakers much, and I sensed this must have happened before. One yelled, 'Take those fucking kayaks back to the river where they belong and get off the waves.' Corran, 14, taunted the leader. 'Come on,' he shouted. 'Try me.' The surfers kicked and flayed at him from their boards, but Corran just backed off with a few strokes and taunted them again. It was heroic."
Heroism aside, Corran grew into anything but a typical teenager, focusing every ounce of energy on kayaking. At 14, his entry into the design world took a leap when he met South Africa's Jerome Truran, who became the Downriver World silver medallist in 1981. "He was a pain in the ass, but he was so enthusiastic about kayaking that it didn't matter," says Truran, 14 years Corran's elder and now owner of an outdoor retail shop in British Columbia. "He'd show up at our boathouse, never with any money for gas, and then run harder stuff than all of us. He couldn't drive, so he always just tagged along. None of us knew then that he would go on to establish himself in the industry like he has." Corran's real foray into the design world came when he found a mold for an old 1973 slalom design and began making boats in the sports department of Grahamstown's Rhodes University where his father was a lecturer in journalism. "That was a huge step for us," he says, adding that he and his father made 40 kayaks out of that one mold. "We learned a lot just by trial and error." The next breakthrough came when Corran saw an ad for a Perception Mirage in a British magazine. He ordered two, but the company shipped Dancers by mistake. "They were horrible," remembers Corran. "They were way to short and couldn't go straight." He quickly began to like the design, however, and learned there was more to kayaking than just simply paddling downriver 60 miles a day.
He was also learning about growing up in South Africa, and was hotly opposed to the politics of apartheid. To avoid conscription and of his own stubborn free will, he left the country in 1986, age 16, to live with his mother in Belgium. Barely a year later, after meeting and paddling with members of Germany's Alpine Kayak Club, he returned to South Africa and wasted no time in designing the AquaBat, which Peter Wise of Roamer Rand began manufacturing commercially. "To get to the factory from my flat (apartment)," says Graeme, "Corran would jump on his skateboard and hang on to the backs of trucks. I got to hear about this when he complained that the skateboard was worn out. It was then I began to suspect he was out of his mind. But happily so." Addison also knew that unless he got help with his kayak designs, he was out of his league. Even though he never finished high school, he took the Aquabat to Perception in the U.S. and so impressed them that he got a job, at age 17, designing boats. "You could tell he was pretty green around the gills," says Masters, who took Addison under his wing and let him live at his house. "He showed up with a kayak, a girlfriend and a backpack." Masters quickly put him to work, but kept him on a short leash. Addison helped design the Corsica X and the Matrix--and when no one was looking, he took the liberty of dabbling in unconventional designs. "He was a very good mold maker, and he learned incredibly fast," says Masters. "But many of his designs were very radical. We had to soften-up most of what he did. We make boats for people--not egos. I admire the guy's genius, but he has a strong need to be looked at."
After a falling out with management ("They didn't want to do anything new or innovative," maintains Corran. "I had all these great boat ideas that they didn't want to pursue"), Corran left Perception and spent the best part of the next three years as a "kayak drifter," moving between Europe, South Africa and the U.S. selling clothing to raise money to enter rodeo events. It was a hand-to-mouth existence but he used it to make contacts and develop a reputation for the extreme--going so far as to paddle off a 100-foot waterfall in France (an unofficial world record) and 75-foot Looking Glass falls in the U.S. in a Batman costume. In 1992, Corran returned to South Africa to train and compete with the Olympic slalom team. He would return again in 1997 to compete in the famous Raid Gauloises, an event which taught him a thing or two about being a team player--something Corran always said he wasn't.
Corran then joined the rodeo scene in Europe, signing on with Prijon, which picked up the tab for him to compete in its latest design, the Hurricane. In 1993, Addison racked-up wins in eight of the 12 rodeos he entered, with second-place finishes in two. "A lot of his aggression and personality comes out in his paddling," says Prijon's Arnold. "The caliber of paddler he has been is as high as anyone ever in the sport." Feeling he could improve the performance of his sponsor's wares, Corran approached Prijon with an idea for a new design. The company wasn't interested. "At the time," says Arnold, "the Hurricane was a cutting-edge design. We didn't feel you could make a Hurricane better than a Hurricane."
Corran took his idea from paper to production anyway and gave a prototype to a friend, Pat Miljour, to test paddle. Miljour was so impressed that with backing from actress Selene Thoms, the two co-founded Savage Designs in March 1994. Thoms admits to being struck by Corran's passion and energy. "Becoming the plastics queen of America was never my lifelong childhood dream," she says. "But I bought into his vision. Anything he said sounded so brilliant that it had to work."
Thoms' intuition was right, and before competitors knew it, another kayak company was born with the Scorpion leading the sales sting. "I think the Scorpion changed the industry," says Corran. "People realized you could get radical with design by simply shifting volume around. But it had a lot of resistance from consumers. Everyone thought it was too hard to paddle." Lack of consumer confidence in the design, says Corran, spelled lackluster sales. His next design, the Gravity, was made to be more user-friendly and debuted the whitewater world's first planing hull. Compared to other leading boats on the market, however, the Gravity was still considered an anomaly. "Everyone was whining about the Scorpion being too hard to paddle, so we came up with the Gravity," he says. "But people were scared to try it." That same year, Corran began designing his next creation, the Fury. He shortened the length and gave it a flat planing hull and hard edge for surfability. He also consulted a submarine engineer and gave the boat cavitation; introduced the concept of anti-trip chines, or subsurface rails; and borrowed the sidecut feature from the ski and snowboard industry to make it narrower in the middle than on the ends. "People definitely noticed it," he says. "I wanted to do a boat that was good on waves, and it was. Anyone could surf it and perform cartwheels." Unfortunately, Corran--who competed in the boat all year--feels others in the industry "borrowed" his design ideas and churned out similar models that competed for a piece of the playboat pie.
Others in the industry don't necessarily agree. "Corran has asserted in public that he's been responsible for every innovation in paddling technique and design in the last five or 10 years," said long-time expedition kayaker Doug Ammons in Outside magazine. "That's bullshit. If he believes he is the Leonardo da Vinci of kayaking, he is deluding himself."
Delusional or not, by the time the Fury was in full production Corran already had another design up his sleeve. This time, however, his partners at Savage didn't jump at the bait--or its target market. "The boats weren't taking off as much as they thought they should be," says Corran. "They wanted to downplay the company's radical image and go after a more standard customer base. But I didn't want to chase the same market other companies were going after--I wanted to stick with Generation X marketing. And I didn't want to see them drag my brainchild into the ground."
Savage owner Selene Thoms sees it differently. "Corran's an idiot-savant," she says matter-of-factly. "He's a genius, but in his genius there's a certain idiocy. He is always reading, looking, getting ideas and converting them for his own use. Unfortunately he won't listen to anyone else's opinion and his ego often shoots out of control. Corran's team is Corran--you can't get him to belong to any team."
Corran himself admits to a certain self-centeredness--especially when it comes to paddling. His golden rule: "If you boat with me, you boat alone." Occasionally, however, even he becomes human and breaks it. A case in point came last spring when he helped save the life a Kiwi paddler in a heroic rescue on California's Dry Meadow Creek. While risking his life to save someone he didn't even know, visions of another rescue no doubt haunted him. When he was 16 he nearly drowned when attempting to rescue a woman caught in a hydraulic on France's Verdun River. "It was only a Class II-III river," he remembers, counting his blessings he's still alive. "It was pathetic...I was trying to rescue a girl caught in a hole, and I nearly paid for it with my life. I came up totally blue in the face and had to be resuscitated." He is reminded of the experience every time he takes off his shirt and looks in the mirror; just days after being revived he got a giant tattoo of a skeleton crawling out of a hole inked across his chest.
Even though Corran earned the silver with Savage at the 1995 World Rodeo Championships in Germany, the end result was a parting of ways, with Corran taking his ideas to Savage's Canadian distributor, Jeff Rivest, who owned a retail store with customers loyal to Corran's designs. The two formed Riot, a kayak company that produced two boats--the Rage and Antagonist--by October 1996 and another--the Hammer--in April 1997. And he isn't resting on his laurels. In 1998 he churned out the 007, Crysis, Glide and Kewl, and has plans in place for a new boat called the Saiko, which he says is as radical a departure from the Hammer as the Hammer is from the Dancer. At the 1998 Summer Market tradeshow in Salt Lake City, he also hit the industry over the head with a new price-point boat called the Showbiz, designed to carry a suggested retail price of only $649. Even though his boats have changed, some things never will--especially his in-your-face demeanor. "I take great pride in irritating people," he asserted in a recent story in Outside magazine. "This sport needed to be shaken up. Too many kayakers are gray-headed, bearded, tree-hugging forest fairies." One look at Riot's listing in a recent Buyer's Guide shows that behind the new designs is the same sophomoric Corran: "Riot does not discriminate on the basis on race, creed, color or sex. We do, however, accept full responsibility for instigating the bigotry targeted towards kayakers unwilling to enjoy all that is sick! Our designs come from the demented mind of rodeo champion and Olympian Corran Addison. These are the kayaks he's always wanted to do! We don't care if you like them, 'cuz we know they Rip! Maybe one day they'll have separate bathrooms for people who think like us, and the rest of you can sit at the back of the short yellow bus. They're not made in plastic rubber (we all know how that feels) or any other kind of hyped up trash can material. Just your generic space-age composite technology that some dorky technician told us rules. Rip yourself a new one!"
Corran's brashness hasn't changed since he accosted those surfers in the South African swell. And as he continues to make boats, he will continue to make waves in the world of whitewater. But no one can deny his heart-and-soul commitment to the sport. "For anyone to break out of the South African mold is very unusual--especially in the small world of boat design," says his self-described mentor, Truran. "He lives and breathes kayaking, and this is evident in his designs, which, in my opinion, are way ahead of anything else other people have thought of." Another South African, Felix Unite, also knew Corran would go places from an early age. When Corran was 13, Unite watched him become the first person to run an 11-meter waterfall on the Brandewyn River in the Doring River Gorge. It didn't take Unite long to turn to one of his colleagues and mutter, "That kid's some kind of little genius."
Just as he did as a 13-year-old, Corran continues to push the envelope, both in design and feats of daring-do. As well as working on new airborne, off-the-lip wave moves, he is working with Guinness to establish a new world record in waterfall running. "I can't tell you where it is," he says, showing an obvious distrust of the industry, "until after we do it." He also continues to be ahead of his time--a recent Riot press release announced plans to release Corran's latest creation, the Saiko, at 12 midnight in the year 2000.
Others, meanwhile, continue to shake their heads. "I don't think the paddling world is ready for all of Corran's antics," says Savage's Thoms. "He'd probably be better accepted in the entertainment or snowboarding industries." Corran couldn't agree more--and he plans to capitalize on it by introducing a line of snowboards for 1999. And whether it's a sign of maturation or not, he is also branching into the more conservative touring market--where there's not a Mohawk haircut or tattoo to be found--with a new line of Sun sea kayaks
Still, time seems to be creeping up on him. He might have been able to avoid conscription in South Africa, but even Corran can't avoid aging. "He's softened up a lot as he's gotten older," says Perception's Masters, who has seen Corran's designs evolve since the South African first set foot on American soil. "I hope he finds out who he really is someday once he gets a little older. He can call us old fuddy-duddies if he wants to, but Corran will be one himself one of these days." Until then, like the tattoo stenciled across his chest, he isn't showing any signs of fading from the limelight anytime soon.