Where’s Erica?
By OCinSite | August 23, 2011 11:18 AM
By Kedric Francis
Photos by Sean Armenta
Late bloomers, don’t you love ’em? It seems like top actors and models from are always going on about how homely they were as kids. The girls were all tomboys, the guys all nerds, we’re led to believe, with their early awkwardness, coltish limbs, wide eyes and puffy lips somehow not quite fitting into the “cute kid” paradigm of the day. It’s hard to believe that Newport Beach surfer and model Erica Hosseini was ever less than tan, fit and beautiful, but she lays claim to a pre-surfing, late-blooming background: “Being the tomboy that I was, growing up I played every sport imaginable,” Erica says. “Surfing was the one that stuck.”
Though she was skiing at age two, she didn’t get started in the sport until she was 11, and by age 14 she was the youngest surfer to make it to an Association of Surfing Professionals final. In 2008 she made it to the quarterfinals of the Roxy Surf Festival at Woolamai Beach, Australia, eventually losing to shark attack survivor Bethany Hamilton.
“She’s a hard-charger,” says one old salt surfer who shares waves with Erica at her 54th St. home break. If the attention Erica gets from the media is off-putting to some soul surfers, the fact is mixing modeling and surfing is a time-honored way to avoid getting a real job. Though the ASP currently ranks Erica No. 37, there’s no doubt she’s a professional surfer, traveling the world surfing in contests and for editorial modeling jobs and representing her sponsors. She’s jet-setting so much, that she started a “Where’s Erica” website to track her travels (whereserica.com).
But Erica always returns to Newport Beach, where her family lives. “This is the only place I consider home,” Erica says, having just returned from Europe. “I’m fortunate to say I’ll be home this summer, not traveling.” Erica is obviously a Newport girl at heart. She went to Harbor, loves Wahoo’s, Alta Coffee and Fashion Island (True Food Kitchen is a new fave: “I like things organic, fresh and healthy,” she says), and her guilty pleasure is frozen yogurt. “It’s hard to live without my go-to vanilla yogurt, granola and fruit when I go to foreign countries that aren’t up on the trend.”
Erica is sponsored by brands that include Body Glove, Flip Flop Shops, Sector 9, Baby-G, Filtrate, Jack’s Surf Shop and Jose Cuervo. And though she boasts a tequila brand as a sponsor, she’s not a big partier. “I’m more of a homebody,” Erica, 24, says. “But when friends are in town we might ride our bikes on a typical Newport pub run: The Alley, Malarkey’s, Cassidy’s and NB Brew Co.” With the Nike U.S. Open set to hit O.C. in early August, Erica and her family will be hosting a group of visiting surfers she’s befriended in their spacious West Newport home.
Erica plans to continue to do print work, travel and surf for as long as she can, but she also hopes to do more in the entertainment industry. She hosts The Weekly Grind show, an action sports show that’s part of Yahoo Sports and the Action Sports Group, and her blogs and websites are among the most popular in the industry. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there are lots of shots of Erica at work in front of the camera, where her uniform is most often a bikini. Hey, it’s good work if you can get it!
