Not just any bodyboarder, though. Paul Roach! THE
Paul Roach!
He comes screaming down the line like a slippy, slidey
salsa dancer. Like a liquid torso’d Cirque du Soleil
acrobat. Onlookers, standing on the beach, gape. “How is he
throwing so much spray? How is he snapping so damned hard? A 360?
Right in the middle of the wave after that snap? How is he getting
so barreled? Isn’t this wave a dumpy three-footer?” He blows apart
their preconceptions. Some of the onlookers, though, bury their awe
beneath a rude and heavy sneer. “Booger.” “Fucking speed bump.”
“Dick-dragging kook.” The rudest. If only they knew this
“dick-dragging kook” was the one, the only, Paul Roach, their jeers
would soon turn to admiration. And if they didn’t soon turn to
admiration? Well, then those particular onlookers should rot in
hell because Paul Roach is beatific. He is the Patron Saint of
Choosing the Wrong Historical Side.
Yes, culture perpetually comes to forks in the road and there
are groupings that choose the Right Historical Side and groupings
that choose the Wrong Historical Side. Millions of years ago, for
instance, there was a fork with one path leading to Hominini and
one path leading to Panini. Those who walked with the Hominini
became Homo sapiens—humans—like you and me, while those who walked
the Panini can now be visited at the zoo. They are chimpanzees.
Almost one hundred and fifty years ago there was another fork
called the Civil War with one path leading to freedom and one path
leading to slavery. Those who walked the freedom path became
thoughtful, well-bred Americans like you and me, while those who
walked the path of slavery live in southern backwaters, inbreeding
and screaming incoherently that, “The South will rise again!” A few
decades ago there was another fork with one path leading to VHS and
one path leading to Betamax, and shortly after this, yet another
with one path leading to surfing and the other leading to
bodyboarding. VHS and surfing have had respectable runs—you and me
have enjoyed both—while Beta and boogie clog the darkest corners of
embarrassed garages.
The history of bodyboarding shares the same fine root as the
history of surfing, like Panini and Hominini share the same root,
like democratic principles and dictatorships share the same root,
like VHS and Beta share the same root. Both began in the mists of
ancient Polynesia (or Samoa, depending on where you happen to be
vacationing and who happens to be cracking their knuckles in your
direction), and Captain Cook’s men observed the practice of each in
Hawaii. The natives were riding the surf, some on their stomachs,
some on their knees, some on their feet. It was the feet varietal
that became popular, later. Still, the alaia, ridden
prone, and later, the paipo, continued on as semi-viable,
though not widely practiced, alternatives. This all changed,
though, one bright Big Island morning in 1971 when Tom Morey stood
on the beach dreaming.
Tom Morey wearing a moustache, a Speedo, and a glint of weird
baha’i in his ey’e dreamed of riding faster than
heavy, single-finned surfboards of the ’70s would allow. They were
all soulful but all sluggish. And Tom wanted all fast. He had toyed
with the idea of a board, to be ridden prone, with a polyethylene
foam deck and a fiberglass bottom but, when he actually crafted it
in Waikiki, it broke under the crushing lip of a tiny wave. So it
was off to the Big Island—to dream.
Morey had one piece of nine-foot plastic foam left from which he
could have made some sort of plastic surfboard but he did not. And
a fork suddenly appeared in the path when Tom Morey cut that piece
of plastic in half, shaped the rails like Vs, squared the nose, and
took it surfing. Or, no, not surfing, he went and laid on it. He
“paddled” out and “caught” a wave without ever getting to his feet
and claimed that he could “feel” the wave through the “board” in a
way that he had never “felt” before. He put his body on a boogie
and shebang! He knew he had “something” “spectacular.” He asked his
Baha’i brothers and sisters for some cash to return to the
mainland and sell the feeling. They ponied up. He flew to
California. And another Wrong Historical Side was fully
realized.
Bodyboarding, though, was not realized by its patron saint—the
Patron Saint of Choosing the Wrong Historical Side—until some time
later. Paul Roach was born in San Diego, only two years after the
Boogie, to a father who loved the ocean. “My father loved to
bodysurf and he had me on a board by the time I was 4 or 5.” The
board of which he speaks was a surfboard, not a bodyboard. Paul
spent his early years on the Right Historical Side. “We lived down
by Mission Beach and I was always out there,” he says, glowing an
aura of serene nostalgia before taking a sip of frosty, cold Stella
Artois. He is handsome now, tall and lanky, strong arms, strong
chest, the brunette version of an all-American face, partially
obscured by a gray knit cap worn low. I’m sure he was handsome in
his youth, too, handsome but poor. “Yeah, really poor. I slept in a
bed with my two sisters, with my parents in the same room on a
foldaway bed.” But it ain’t as hard to live a
pre-Willy-Wonka-meeting, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
life on the beach, and Paul’s parents moved to Encinitas when he
was 11. He was always in the water there, too, always surfing. But
one of his first North County friends did not surf. He rode a
bodyboard. Paul’s initial reaction to this was not negative. He
mostly thought, “That looks easy.” When his friend told him of an
upcoming bodyboard contest Paul thought, “That sounds easy.” And,
for him, it was easy. He won. It was the first thing he had ever
won. There was no cash prize, but for an 11-year-old kid sharing a
bed with two sisters, the brand new bodyboard and the brand new
spring suit felt too good.
“The way I was drawn toward it was, like, fully a monetary
thing,” he says now, after taking a sip of still-frosty Stella
sitting next to me at Encinitas’s favorite dive bar Mr. Peabody’s.
“There was a contest every month and I won every single one of
them.” A full monetary thing. There are always reasons to choose
the Wrong Historical Side. There are reasons based on fear of
change, on incorrectly discerning the arc of history, but money is
the purest reason to go Wrong. It is simple. It is powerful. It is
very powerful. Free bodyboards and free spring suits and Dell
computers pave the way to hell. Remember how cheap Dell computers
were? Remember how Apple crushed them?
Paul Roach was winning and things were going well. He had
sponsors like Morey Boogie—Tom’s company—and Beaver Sunblock giving
him free product and a few hundred bucks per victory. He
particularly liked Beaver. “I had this shirt that said, ‘Is that a
Beaver on your body?’ and I thought it was super rad. I think my
mom threw it away though.” Yet suggestive shirts, paychecks, and
all, he was still not completely satisfied. “So I started riding
drop-knee. There were others who where doing it too but not so
many. I cut Roach off and we drink half our Jagermeister shots.
Then I ask, “Why? Why drop-knee? What does it add? What is the
magic behind it?” I drink the other half of my Jagermeister shot
while he rubs his chin.
“You know, all I can think is that it is really fuckin’ hard to
do and I needed the challenge.”
“But,” I interject, “isn’t there some sort of leverage thing
happening that lets you get all that lightning quick wow-wow?”
And still rubbing his chin, he says, “No. It’s not functional.
It’s a really awkward position that’s only good for really hurting
your back or breaking your nose on your knee. The thing about it
is, though, if it is done right, it looks cool. It is a way to ride
a bodyboard and show style. It’s hard to show style while riding
prone but on a knee…It’s like drop-knee turning a longboard—not
functional but stylish.”
Stylish indeed. Drop-knee and Paul went together like
rama-lama-lama-ke-ding-a-de-dinga-dong. There was something very
specific about his glide and his power. He was good at it, and it
is a marvel to watch an expert no matter their field of expertise.
Have you ever watched an expert archer arch? Or an expert birder
bird? Or an expert dancer bowl? I mean, dance? The field matters
not when marvelous skill is employed. And, for whatever reason,
drop-knee and Paul went together like
shoobop-sha-wadda-wadda-yippity-boom-de-boom.
It was at this point on his journey down the Wrong Historical
Side, when he was 13, that he started getting rides to Seaside reef
in San Diego. There he met a young Taylor Steele in the water. They
hit it off and became fast friends. Taylor surfed. Paul rode his
bodyboard. And later, Taylor stood on the beach filming while Paul
rode his bodyboard. “He would throw clips of me into his high
school project,” Paul says after taking a bite of a chicken wing.
“It was really awesome. Sometimes as it was all happening, I gotta
say though, I would wonder, ‘Shouldn’t I be surfing right now?’ But
I was already too deep into it.” That high school project became
Momentum and there was Paul Roach in the middle of it
all—insta-snaps in the middle of a wave, 360-floaters, 360s in a
barrel. Drop. Knee.
Despite the groundbreaking surf footage, one of the most
memorable scenes in the film is when Roach boxes Kelly Slater. When
Taylor Steele called him, he could hear the rest of the
Momentum crew giggling in the background. Even though
Roach had some experience boxing, he remembers thinking, “Great.
Kelly’s gonna kick my ass and they are all gonna laugh at this
bodyboarder who gets beat up by Kelly.” Film equipment was set up
when he arrived. In comparison to Roach’s tall and lanky frame,
Slater was muscular and fit. “But I had reach and I used it,” he
recalls. “We started boxing and I got in a couple of cracks and
then he got all upset and ripped his gloves off and said, ‘Let’s go
film some surfing or something…’Now I consider it a real honor to
have boxed Kelly Slater, though his manager called me a few years
ago and asked if I would fight Kelly in a cage match.” (WATCH
KELLY GET ALL BENT OUT OF SHAPE RIGHT HERE!) I am sure the very
public loss Kelly suffered at the hands of a bodyboarder haunts him
to this day. He is as competitive as anyone on earth. And I am sure
it would have been a friendly bout, maybe. Just two old
acquaintances having a laugh whilst choking each other out but Paul
declined, he only loves to box. And Kelly is as competitive as
anyone on earth. It is good that they do not meet in the
octagon.
The reception to his peculiar role in a game-changing film was
immaterial. Paul Roach did not have to care what surfers thought at
all. Life has its own momentum and his was on the upswing—five
figures up. It wasn’t the millions that many others in the Momentum
crew would go on to earn but he didn’t care. He was getting paid to
kick around in the warm, warm seas.
He turned pro at 16 and traveled the world with sponsors like
Quiksilver. “Board Fast. Rock Hard.” He competed, though he hated
it. He hated it because he would only ride drop-knee, which did not
have a separate division, so he was judged against the prone
riders. Silly business. Yet his sponsors required him to compete.
He remembers staying in the Pipe-front, Momentum-famous Weatherly
home, sleeping on the floor before the Morey Boogie Pipeline Pro,
and hearing third reef thunder—nerve-racking to say the least. He
woke up the next morning, though, and kicked out into the maxing
fray. “I’m in the Morey Boogie Pipeline Pro,” he thought. “I am not
going to ride on my stomach.” And he didn’t. He rode like he always
rode. Whack, whack, slip, slide stylishly. It is twice as hard to
ride giant surf drop-knee. The bodyboard has a propensity to go too
fast, and when it goes too fast the nose bends down toward the
water and pearls. It is twice as hard to keep the nose up whilst on
a knee but Paul Roach stayed true. He didn’t win. He never won. But
he stayed true.
As much as he hated the contests, he loved to travel. He rounded
the globe on magazine trips and video trips, drop-kneeing Teahupoo,
Indonesia, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Sometimes the trips would
include his surfer friends, and he’d stand-up surf on those trips,
too, but only when the waves were small. “When it was cracking, I
was on a bodyboard,” he says, while finishing the second half of
his own Jagermeister shot. “I was a cocky shit. I thought I was
rad.”
He sounded rad. He played in a death metal band called Niner,
even playing the Belly Up in Solana Beach for one of Taylor
Steele’s premieres. He laughs, “We opened for Sprung Monkey,
Unwritten Law, Pennywise—all these punk bands. We were on first and
it was just crickets. Death metal was the completely wrong sound
for the crowd. It was then that I kinda realized Taylor and I were
going in different directions.”
Twenty-three-year-old Paul Roach was at the height of his
career. He was buzzy. He was rad. He was coming into his own. Then
the bodyboard industry in the United States collapsed suddenly and
all the way. The magazines folded. The brands crashed. Quiksilver
pulled its sponsorship. “Stop boarding fast. No more rocking hard.”
It went from a fringy but robust business to absolutely nothing
overnight. Roach, with his young wife and younger daughter, picked
up an Australian sponsor that would never send him checks. He went
bankrupt, then picked up a hammer. “I had done a little
construction before and I really needed money quick. No training,
but a couple of local surfers took me on, let me start,” he says,
taking the final sip of a no-longer-frosty Stella. He has worked
construction for the past 15 years.
Is he angry that he chose the Wrong Historical Side? Kelly
Slater makes millions of dollars each year. Paul Roach, many years
ago, made only a small fraction of that. Angry? He laughs. “I
regret nothing.” The biggest cliché in the book! But I look at his
brunette all-American eyes and I see truth. “It has been a trip. I
surf whenever I can, whenever there are waves. I’ll get work
off—whatever it takes.” But what about
dip-dadip-dadip-doowop-drop-knee? And here his brunette
all-American eyes grow wistful. “Yes. When the waves are good for
it.”
This is what makes Paul Roach a patron saint. The Patron Saint
of Choosing the Wrong Historical Side. He still loves it. “There is
something about it on the right wave,” he explains. “That’s the
problem: the right waves for bodyboarding are not really in
Southern California…With no fins, and less structure, the bodyboard
does what the wave wants to do… It’s very functional. It’s like
music.”
He talks feeling. He talks shape. He talks nuance. And he glows.
Bodyboarding has been proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to be the
Wrong Historical Side. It is in ruins, probably to never return.
But Paul Roach sees the beauty. He sees art. He sees what the
masses, rushing headlong with virtually all others on the Right
Historical Side, fail to see. He sees nuance in an openly derided
deal. So easy to know that humans are smarter than apes, that
slavery is worse than freedom, that Betamax and Dell are shit. So
difficult to find appreciation, and not ironic appreciation like
I-once-voted-for-Ross-Perot-hee-hee-hee revelry, but real, true,
honest appreciation for something as ridiculous as drop-knee
bodyboarding.
