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ROBERTO, ROBERTO, ROBERTO!
To our Maui testers, Roberto Ricci was the Man of the Hour, an hour which lasted five weeks
The audience on the patio of Club Paradise was spellbound. Roberto Ricci had the floor, and he was talking about his sailboards, which is what these guest testers had come to hear about. Other manufacturers had given earlier presentations, but no one had captured the sailors like Ricci. He was dynamic, he was passionate, he was charismatic—he was Italian—and he was spilling over with rich information, speed-talking through the briefs of the 10 boards in this test that carried his name, Roberto Ricci Design. Four of which finished in the top six in overall ratings—and they were four different types of board.
Ricci was born in 1966 in the town of Grosseto, the son of one of what he calls the “Golden Hands People,” men who were able to fix or build anything. After the war, during a time when there was starvation on the streets in Italy, survival depended on such resourcefulness, as everything had to be either repaired, redesigned or created from rubble. And school was for the privileged. “My father is a self-made man who started working when he was eight, in a bicycle repair shop after the war with my grandfather,” he says. “He wasn’t able to finish his first level of education—the sixth grade—until he was 30, but he used his mind to understand how things work. And I learned from him how to make something with your hands.”
He learned from others how to work with water. The family has always lived in Grosseto, seven miles from the Tyrrenian Sea in the south of Tuscany—“the wild part of Tuscany, called Maremma, ‘the land taken from the sea,’ ” he says. “I had the passion for the sea since I was a kid. My first love was to be able to free-dive. I started free-diving when I was seven years old. My cousin took me out on a boat trip one day, and I was fascinated with the water, to be able to see under the water. Until I was 15 years old, I was going out on the ocean with older people, the
bigger guys. I was like their little mascot. That love for the ocean is still unchanged. It stuck in my brain. Anything you can do in the water is exciting, and
represents my real life-drive.’’
When he was 15, he blacked out at depth; luckily he was with a professional diver, who saved his life. “From that day I started to look into other possibilities, because I was really scared.”
In 1981, when he was 16, he was working as a swimming-pool cleaner, saving for an adventure to Madagascar with a friend. The friend broke his leg and couldn’t go, so he spent the money on a windsurfer. The rest is history.
“Whenever I had the possibility to be on the board, I was out there. I was skipping school to go windsurfing. An incredible love again. And still today, I have that special feeling.”
He studied English and American literature at a university in Florence for four years—he also speaks Spanish and French—mostly to prepare for the life of travel he planned. His brother Stefan is a history and philosophy teacher, and exposure to the worlds and ideas of both his father and brother has provided a well-rounded background. He quit school before he got a degree, to begin shaping boards for Drops, the Italian boardmaker. His parents were naturally adamantly opposed, as windsurfing offered no visible means for support, and their convincing was slow and gradual. But today it’s more than complete.
His father, Emo, now manages the small RRD factory under the large house in Grosseto, where the boards are designed and the prototypes are made (the production boards, 3,500 of them last year, are made by Cobra). “He’s the guy behind every RRD board made,” says Ricci. “He’s the man who designed the scoop-rocker machine, he’s the man who makes all the little tools with his hands, to finish up a board properly. He’s the man who directs the whole factory activities. He’s the main man.”
The operation today exceeds the vision that Ricci had when he went off to Maui in 1988. “I managed to qualify for the Aloha Classic wave event on Maui, and then finished 11th,” he says. “I was so stoked. From that moment, I said, ‘This is gonna be my life.’ “
And it has been. He began travelling the world on the PBA circuit, and only stopped touring in ‘97. But it’s been his designing career that has carried him.
He had made the first RRD-branded board by the time he got to Maui in ‘88, in his parents’ garage. “It was a course board for the World Cup in Guincho, Portugal,” he recalls. “My personal board. I used an old refrigerator engine as a vacuum pump, and the floor and a styrofoam cutout to make the rocker template. Very artesanal but very effective. I was so proud of it.”
After half a dozen years shaping boards for Drops, Fanatic, AHD and others, including
custom RRDs for individuals, in 1993 he shaped a race board for Anders Bringdahl, who blew the field away in New Caledonia, first time out. Ricci has never looked back. The quality of his work, and his personal quality as a workaholic, has driven his expansion to international corporate CEO.
“Having the factory in the house in Grosseto allows us to live and work non-stop,” says the guy who is always moving, with so many many things to do. “If we have an idea, in the middle of the night I can wake up and go downstairs to my computer, work on my templates, work on the board, work on my graphics, whatever. My life and my family’s life is like 24 hours, just on the factory.”
Today RRD production boards and prototypes are ridden and critiqued in conditions all over the world by some 35 team riders, most notably Bringdahl, Robby Seeger and Josh Angulo. But, says Ricci, “Ultimately I am the one that makes the final prototype. I test it myself, and myself decides if this board is gonna go into production or not.”
As a result of this involvement, he is intimate with every millimeter on every board. He can rattle off the specs and explain the whys of those dimensions in a heartbeat. And this is the kind of stuff that the audience on the patio at Club Paradise was eating up—especially since they had sailed many of the 10 boards, and they could now see the connection between concept and performance. Ah, so that’s why the board does what it does! Or, You mean it can do that? Maybe I should try again, and sail it as it was designed to be sailed.
“It’s been my continuation of university,” says Ricci of the last 12 speedy years. “Being able to tour around the world, to be actively part of the PBA—I was chairman for two years. It was really interesting for me to be able to understand what was going down with contracts, with event organizers, with TV. It just go to my understanding about law, about contracting, about negotiations, about commercial activities. It was really the school of life for me. It was
tremendous to be able to do all that. Allowed me to actually improve my skills as a designer, and at the same time as a businessman.
“Whenever I have a new kid coming along and telling me, ‘I really want to enter the World Cup,’
I always tell them, Don’t think that you’re gonna make your living through the World Cup, because it’s really tough to be a professional windsurfer. But if you take it with the right attitude, and you have enough financial support either from your family or your sponsors, you’re gonna be able to have an incredible school of life. You’re gonna be able to travel to different countries and meet people from all over the world, show your skill and put it into a challenge with other people. With a sport like windsurfing, you can really learn a lot. About life and about attitudes and about your own character, your strengths and weaknesses. It really brings up the real person in you. And that is what’s interesting.” What’s also interesting is our test of the 10 RRD boards. For the explanations and evaluations of those boards, turn to pages preceeding this. |
