A Day at the Office : Sports: Top 30 pro surfer Mitch Thorson says there are pressures to holding your own in the ocean. At age 25, he is trying to relax more.

The waves rolled in, the surfers paddled out and a July morning sun burned through the haze at Emma Wood State Beach in Ventura. The scene was “Beach Blanket Bingo” all over again--but the casting wasn’t quite right.

Mitch Thorson, neither carefree nor copper-toned, ran his hands along a surfboard at the rear of his gray jeep. He is Ventura County’s top professional surfer--ranked in the world’s top 30--and at age 25, he is sure he has reached a crossroads in his work and life.

“If you don’t have the right attitude, you can get really stressed,” Thorson said, squinting out at the breakers. At his temples, gray hairs had sprouted.

“You’ve got career pressure, the pressure of traveling and the pressure of your sponsor waiting for results. So if you let that build up, it can really eat away at you.”

Conventional wisdom does not associate surfing with job anxiety. But then, the conventionally wise don’t spend their workdays on six-foot-long slabs of fiberglass, trying to outperform 19-year-olds with nothing to lose, defying jet lag, and striving to appear both out of control and in complete command.

“It’s probably one of the toughest things that an athlete can do, and it just hasn’t been examined,” said Duncan Campbell, a partner in Campbell Bros. Surfboards of Oxnard, which sponsors Thorson.

“There’s a guy who lives in San Clemente named Matt Archbold who I would consider one of the most incredible surfers in the world,” Thorson said. “But he’s one of those guys who just doesn’t seem to have the focus. He can’t play the game.”

But there is also such a thing as too much focus. Thorson believes that his performance has been hampered by self-created stresses, emotional and physical, since he turned professional seven years ago. He felt the strain most strongly last year and early this year. And so this spring, Thorson resolved to relax.

In April, Thorson modified his diet, which was already vegetarian, to mostly raw foods. He became a return visitor to the Optimum Health Institute of San Diego, where wheat-grass juice and detoxification are the watchwords. In three months, he was 25 pounds lighter and feeling “like a cat, instead of a bear.”

He gave up push-ups, sit-ups and weight training, and instead threw his energies into a more spiritual fitness regimen of hiking, rhythmic breathing exercises and body positioning prescribed by hatha and siddha yoga. After two years of toying with meditation, he began doing it daily, sometimes for hours.

And he began to punctuate his conversation with reminders that competitive surfing is his job, not his life. On the beach in Ventura under a July sun, he had become persuasive on the subject.

“You’ve got to keep perspective,” he said, pulling on his gear. “Otherwise, you can get consumed by your form of employment. You might be a businessman, you might be a professional surfer, you might be a zookeeper who is too involved with his animals.”

On the pro tour, where 25-pound weight drops are seldom seen, some have said they’re worried about Thorson’s health. Thorson turned that subject away.

“I was sort of bashing my head against the wall, the way I was doing things in the past,” he said.

He may have been thinking of his most recent competition, the Coke Classic in Sydney, Australia, which ended April 22.

Thorson was one of several favorites beaten in the first heat of the tournament. He finished tied for 33rd place and “really disappointed. I knew that I should have dusted the guy without much trouble.”

The next tournament, and the first since Thorson’s resolution to change his life, would be the Life’s a Beach Classic from July 10 to 15 in Oceanside.

“Oceanside is going to be really interesting because I’m only about 50% to 60% in terms of stamina and strength,” Thorson said before the tournament. “But mentally, I’m about a million percent of what I was for the tournament in Australia.”

All through the conversation, Thorson had been scanning the ocean horizon. Then he pulled on a wet suit and paddled out to practice. Oceanside would indeed be a telling test--but probably not in the way Thorson visualized it.

Before the ocean complicated Thorson’s life, it may have saved him.

He was a 6-week-old baby in Rottnest Island, a western Australian resort town near Perth, when a doctor told his parents that he had a potentially chronic asthma condition. The doctor recommended water sports to strengthen his lungs and respiratory system.

“I just grew up in the ocean,” Thorson said. “At Christmastime every summer, I’d get a new surfing device.”

At 15, he “unexpectedly” won the state junior surfing championship of western Australia.

He defended the title at 16 and 17, spending steadily more time on a surfboard and less on the rowing, Australian football, tennis and swimming offered by his teachers at Scotch College, the private school he attended in Perth.

“It got to the point where the school headmaster said to me, ‘Look, you’ve got to give up the surfing and concentrate on rowing and football,’ ” Thorson said. “So I left. . . . I thought it would be unreal to go around the world surfing and make a few bucks out of it.”

That was the beginning of his full-time amateur surfing career. The beginning of his professional career began, sooner than he expected, when he was 18.

Thorson found himself shut out of a major amateur tournament at North Point near Australia’s Margaret River--a tournament for which he thought he had qualified. But because he was already at the beach, Thorson paddled out in the morning, before competition began. The waves--”my favorite waves on the whole planet,” he said--were in rare form. And when tournament officials tried to wave him in, Thorson ignored them.

It was a fine gesture of defiance, a great day of surfing and the end of his amateur career.

“I turned pro,” Thorson said. “I had no option.”

In 1984, at 19, Thorson finished second on the Australian domestic pro circuit. In 1986 and 1987, he finished 16th in the world. In 1989, he finished 21st.

Since 1988, when he and Denise Herrick of Ventura were married, he has made his home in Ventura for about four months a year. He surfs Emma Wood State Beach, Surfer’s Point near the Ventura Pier, Port Hueneme and the Rincon.

“He’s been steady,” said Al Hunt, general manager of the Assn. of Surfing Professionals. “He’s consolidating himself as a top 30 surfer.”

And when he surfs these days, Thorson wears all the trappings of a top 30 surfer, from his Westsuits wet suit, provided by one of his principal sponsors, to the sunscreen he smears on his nose.

“I’m not actually sponsored by them,” he said, looking down at the goo in his hand, “but they give me free stuff.”

Which is not to say that the business of sponsorships is a haphazard thing. Prize money in professional surfing still lags behind purses in other sports--1989’s biggest money winner was Martin Potter with $116,875--and top surfers count heavily on sponsorships and endorsements. Those commercial interests, insiders say, are likely to triple or quadruple a top surfer’s overall income.

Thorson’s winnings last year added up to $31,990. He estimates that his commercial affiliations brought him about twice that much. His patrons get some exposure every time he goes out in the water--surfboard from Campbell Bros., accessories from Gorilla Grip, a helmet from the Australian firm started by his friend Ricky Gath.

But this has been a mixed year for endorsement income.

On one hand, there are growing benefits from a gamble Thorson made five years ago. Courted by a fledgling Australian manufacturer called Westsuits, he left Rip Curl, one of the world’s leading wet suit makers. Westsuits has grown into one of the biggest surf wear companies in Australia, and Thorson owns a share of it.

But Thorson’s clothing sponsorship situation is another story. He had a lucrative deal with the makers of Offshore beachwear, but it went sour in May, he said, after a new owner changed corporate priorities.

“When the new advertising budget was submitted to the new president, I was the first guy to go,” Thorson said, “because I was getting paid the most.”

That move, Thorson said, cost him about $30,000 a year.

“So at the moment, I’m in the process of hunting down a clothing sponsor, which is a sort of hideous task,” he said. “There are companies that wouldn’t pick me up because I’m too mild-mannered and mellow, and there are companies that wouldn’t pick me up because I’m Australian.”

And no company will pick you if you’re unlikely to win.

“You want a guy who’s gonna do well in a contest, a guy who’s going to win and get you exposure in the magazines,” said Scott Werner, owner of the Waveline Surf Shop on Thompson Boulevard in Ventura.

For the surfer, said Werner, “there’s no security. Zero security. Eventually, you’ve got to work. The kids think, ‘I’m gonna grow up and be a A.S.P. tour member and life’s going to be peaches and cream after that.’ But even if you make it, there isn’t much of a shelf life.”

The surf was small at Oceanside. Thorson, who had arrived a few days early and stayed with friends, studied it carefully, surfing past 8 the evening before his first heat.

He was out in the water again by 7 the next morning, while workers applied last-minute touches to the inflated Jose Cuervo bottle, the twin grandstands, the tournament judges’ tower, the banners hanging from the Oceanside Pier. The program advertised $112,500 in prize money, including $10,000 for the men’s champ.

A few hundred beach people gathered on the sand while reggae music pulsed on the sound system. The first heats began at 7 sharp, and at 8:30, the public address announcer called Thorson to check in.

Thorson was seeded 21st. His opponent: Matt Archbold, 22, of San Clemente--the same mercurial surfer Thorson had been talking about the week before. Archbold had prevailed in earlier trials in order to win seeding in the 44th slot.

The two surfers would paddle out, take a wave each and then vie for priority on succeeding waves. Over 25 minutes, the judges would allow each surfer 10 rides, score them and discard all but the four best. A perfect ride--one in which the surfer executed several “radical” maneuvers while maintaining control--would be 30 points.

On his first wave, Thorson fell. On his second, he looked steadier, danced on the curl for a few moments and let it carry him most of the way to shore. Score: 14.0.

Archbold grabbed a stronger wave, exploited it more boldly and posted a 22.5.

So it went. Thorson built his wave count with middle-of-the-road scores and fell a few times. Archbold waited in the water, selected swells carefully and carved them well. Soon, Thorson needed a 24.5--a better score than had been seen in two hours--to take the lead.

Waiting for an ideal wave, he let several pass. Archbold grabbed one, scored a 20.5 on it and put Thorson’s back against the wall with less than five minutes left. Thorson needed a score of 29 or better to win. Out in the water, he paddled closer to Archbold.

“Twenty-nine,” Thorson told him, “is going to be hard to get.”

Thorson scored 16.0 on the next wave and waited in vain for a better opportunity in the final seconds. The horn sounded. Cumulative scores: Archbold, 82.0; Thorson, 68.0.

On the sand, Thorson shook hands, headed for the showers and faced the temptation to let frustration and anxiety rise. His tournament was over, and he was $850 richer for his trouble.

“I didn’t surf anywhere near as well as I have been surfing,” he said half an hour later in the grandstand. “I wasn’t as relaxed as I wanted to be. . . . But I had fun.”

He tilted his wide-brimmed hat against the sun, cradled a watermelon in his lap and squinted at the ocean.

“I learned a lot today,” he said. “I’m going to go home and think about it. And I’ll be a lot better prepared next time.”