Marcelo Nunes

He’s always smiling, this handsome Brazil Nut. What’s the deal? Is he cuckoo? Abnormally well endowed? What is his secret? What is behind the smile?

One of the things you hear about Brazil is that surfing is a way out of poverty and into the middle class for a lot of surfers, and that is true for Marcelo Nunes. This is a guy who learned to surf literally on a door, and is now traveling the world, earning more in one contest than most Brazilians make in a year.

According to the worldprosurfers.com website, Nunes is a “Mameluco” which means he is a mixture of Native Indian and African. He grew up poor in a poor fishing village, bodysurfing and catching a local fish called a Pintadu. Nunes’ first boards were made from pieces of a door and driftwood and while Nunes was stoked to be riding waves in a wave-lashed corner of northeast Brazil, only five degrees from the equator, his mom was afraid that surfing would destroy his schooling and his life.

But it didn’t work out that way. At some point Nunes got a fiberglass surfboard and that is what got him out of Natal and around the world. Propelled by his mother’s expectations and the hope of a better life for himself and his family, Nunes won every title Brazil had to offer and then set out to conquer the world. By 2000, at 21 years old Nunes won the Algarve Millenium Pro, taking home many thousands of dollars, which was many more thousands of Brazilian reais. He finished fifth on the WQS, and that started a three-year run on the WCT which ended when Nunes dropped off for 2003. He got back on in 2004 and is there, smiling and happy and playing soccer on the beach when he isn’t surfing.

At the 2005 Foster’s Expression Session in Japan, Nunes won $2000 for boosting the Best Air. Add that to everything else he has won in his ten years as a pro, his $339,275 over 10 years might buy a mobile home in the United States, but makes him middle class in Brazil. Beyond that, Nunes is just a guy who loves to surf, and his time as a pro has allowed him to get intimate with the best waves in the world, sometimes with only one other surfer in the water. Nunes was known as a small wave, aerial specialist at first and sometimes he seems like he spends more time in the air than on the water, but he has also found he likes the juice. Nunes might not be Brazil’s Great Brown Hope for a World Title, but it’s possible that he is the happiest guy on Tour, because it is possible that he has come the farthest.