Big-wave pioneers George Downing, far right, and Buzzy
Trent, on the fin. "Was Downing a salty bastard? He had a temper,
and didn’t suffer fools. I’m guessing in his younger days he was a
scrapper, and a good one."
Warshaw: “George Downing was the
master!”
By Derek Rielly
Surf historian on the death of a Hawaiian who "knew
all the secrets."
On Monday, the great Hawaiian surfer,
shaper, pioneer of board design and big-wave surfing,
George Downing, died at home in East Oahu. Read his obit
here.
I knew a little about George. He was the contest director for
The Eddie. Could handle a planer and had the surfboard biz
Downing Hawaii. Was one of the first guys
to push ’emselves in big Hawaiian waves. One kid won the Eddie,
another made it to the finals of the Pipe Masters.
For a little perspective, I got Matt Warshaw, surf historian,
met Downing a few times, onto the keys.
BeachGrit: Son of a bitch, that fifties big-wave era is
almost gone. George Downing. Yeah, he was old, but he’s taking a
piece of the sport with him. Pioneered some of the heavier spots on
the North Shore, was heavily into surfboard designand so on,
yes?
Warshaw: If you ask Billy Kemper and Shane Dorian who their main
big-wave surfing influence was, then ask THOSE guys who their main
influence was, and so on and so on, at the end of the line you end
up with Buzzy Trent and George Downing. They started big-wave
surfing, along with Wally Froiseth. And Buzzy absolutely bowed down
to George. George was the master. He was the first to go all-in.
Downing put a fin on the hot curl board and invented the big-wave
gun. He was the first surfer of note to geek out on weather maps
and swell forecasting. He invented the pin-drop bailout. And he had
a beautiful, smooth, high-line style. Downing was quiet, smart,
ambitious, creative, and kindly, but in a powerful mafioso-don way.
He had a lot of juice.
Born and raised in Hawaii?
Yes. I’m not sure what happened when he was a kid, but I believe
George was pretty much raised by his uncle, Wally Froiseth.
If you ask Billy Kemper and Shane Dorian who their main big-wave
surfing influence was, then ask THOSE guys who their main influence
was, and so on and so on, at the end of the line you end up with
Buzzy Trent and George Downing. They started big-wave surfing,
along with Wally Froiseth. And Buzzy absolutely bowed down to
George. George was the master.
Y’ever get to talk to him?
A few times. He was great friends with Steve and Debbee Pezman,
and when I lived in San Clemente I’d drop by their house often, and
when Downing was in California he’d stay in the guest room. I was
nervous around him, but he was always friendly. Watchful guy, kind
of reserved, dry sense of humor. We faxed back and forth a couple
times when I was doing Encyclopedia of
Surfing. He’d never done a profile piece in a
surf magazine. There was no information out there about him, or
very little. It took some convincing from Pezman to get him to play
along with EOS, and he make me sign a agreement that the biographic
information he gave me would only be used in that book. But once we
got that out of the way, he was right into it. Answered all the
questions, came through in a big way.
How did he end up being called The Guru?
Downing just knew more about surfing than anybody, or surfing in
Hawaii at least, and if you knew how to approach him he was really
open about sharing his knowledge.
Tell me about his relationship with Waimea Bay. Pioneer,
first. And, later, Eddie contest director.
No, I don’t think George liked surfing Waimea. Or rather, he
didn’t like it near as much as Makaha, which was his heart and
soul. Downing was a finesse surfer, he was slender and kind of
slippery with his line. Waimea was better suited for Greg Noll;
big, thick, grunty guys. Waimea, you want to be a sledgehammer.
Makaha, at size, you want to be an arrow, like George. For the Quik
contest, though, Waimea was the right call. Waimea was Eddie’s
wave, and it breaks more often, and the spectating is better there
than Makaha. George wasn’t all that stoked to surf it, but he knew
Waimea was what Quik needed for the event.
You can even credit him with the removable fin.
True?
True. The other bit was, he had these templates from the 1950s
that were magic, and when Barton Lynch won the world title he was
riding a board George made him, from those same templates.
He asked Nat Young not to include him in his History of
Surfing. What happened there? Was he a salty bastard?
In the early editions of Nat’s “History of Surfing,” Nat had
this brief Afterward saying that Downing asked to be left out of
the book. Nat complied — which is like doing a book on NBA
centers and leaving out Bill Russell. Was Downing a salty bastard?
He had a temper, and didn’t suffer fools. I’m guessing in his
younger days he was a scrapper, and a good one, but none of that as
far as I know carried into adulthood. George had an almost visible
aura of power, though. When Vince Collier died,
people were calling him the Godfather. But George was
the godfather. Wise, helpful, generous; a guy who’d seen it all,
done it all, knew all the secrets, could get things done. There
isn’t a replacement for George Downing.
George Downing, a surf pioneer and icon, died
in his sleep yesterday evening at the age of 87. He was one of
those out-sized figures who was there when it was all really
beginning in pre-war Waikiki. The first to surf Laniakea and
Honolua Bay, he spent much of his life pioneering the Hawaiian
islands’ bigger waves. He was a standout at Makaha, winning events
there while writing the textbook on how to approach it, and also
radically altered the sorts of boards that were ridden.
Downing’s encyclopedic knowledge of the sport, meanwhile,
was looked upon with awe. He was referred to by the world’s most
knowledgeable surfers as “the teacher”; ’60s big-wave rider Ricky
Grigg called him “the guru.” Downing mentored dozens of top
Hawaiian surfers over the decades, including Joey Cabell, Reno
Abellira, and Michael Ho.
For the past 30 years he acted as contest director for The
Eddie, officially calling the event on or off. Kelly Slater wrote
that it was an honor to surf the Bay on Downing’s call.
He is survived by his sons Keone and Kainoa, daughter Kaiulu,
grandchildren Kaohi, Kirra, Kainoa, Keola and Nalei, and two
great-grandsons.
Loading comments...
Load Comments
0
From tour hopeful to prison greens to triathlons to the
big-wave game. The remarkable, and anything but dull, life of Clint
Kimmins.
Long read: Mav’s Wipeout Star’s Wild Life
Story!
By Derek Rielly
From WCT wannabe to prison greens to triathlons to
big waving!
In November, the Gold Coast surfer turned noted
triathlete, Clint Kimmins, who is thirty-five, was filmed
parachuting from the lip of a twelve-foot wave at Mavericks in
northern California. It’s contender for the WSL’s wipeout of the
year award, although one imagines there’ll be some poor soul who’ll
detonate himself in an even more ghastly fashion before the winter
season is out.
What is interesting about Kimmins is his career trajectory. He
was headed towards a likely swing on the WCT when a fight at a
pal’s 21st went bad and Kimmins, who was acting in self-defence,
swung wildly with a glass, it hit its mark and he ended up in
prison.
Back when it happened, I’d just started a magazine, called
Stab, and I commissioned Fred Pawle to visit Kimmins,
whose company I had always enjoyed, in prison, see him again once
he got out and then write about the experience.
Like most stories Fred writes, it’s a fascinating piece of
reportage.
And, with his permission, it’s reprinted below.
It’s visiting time at the maximum-security Borallon
prison, near Ipswich. A queue of about 30 people are
waiting for the gate on the perimeter fence to be buzzed open. At
the front are a mother and teenage daughter, their matching faces
expressing a mixture of familiarity, resignation and excitement
about the two-hour visit ahead. I’m standing behind them with Carly
Wadsworth, whose boyfriend Clint “Clipper” Kimmins, 22, is nearing
the end of a six-month stretch for stabbing a bloke in the back
with a broken bottle at a party in Tugun in 2004. Carly’s been
doing the 90-minute drive from Kingscliff twice a week for five
months. “Not long to go now,” I tell her. She smiles discreetly.
Beside me the teenage girl blinks to hold back tears, and looks
away.

In her formal double-breasted cream top, designer jeans, Chanel
sunnies and neat, medium-length blonde hair, Carly, a Virgin Blue
hostie. looks way out of place here. So too, I eventually realise,
does Clint. The gate is finally buzzed open, and we surge through
it, down a driveway flanked by big, glistening tubes of razor wire
stacked three high, into the reception area, where we sign in and
empty our pockets into lockers. We go through six heavy
steel-and-glass doors in groups of two or three, between which we
are scanned, turn out our pockets and are checked for residues of
drugs on our clothes. Finally, after about 20 minutes, we enter the
contact-visit area, which after all that, is kind of disappointing
— it looks like a school tuckshop area, with metal stools attached
to metal tables, and a couple of vending machines. The wire fences
either side allow a cool breeze to blow through. On the brick wall
at the back are a couple of gaudy murals, one of them depicting a
wave breaking in a bright South Pacific paradise. Clint, waiting at
a table with a few polystyrene cups of cold water, sees Carly,
leaps up and rushes to hug her.
“You look nice today,” he says sheepishly.
Clint hasn’t had his hair cut since he got here, and it’s grown
into a dorky mop. The rest is prison issue: dark brown T-shirt,
matching short-shorts and, something he’s cool with, a pair of
Dunlop Volleys. With the end in sight, he smiles a lot.
Clint’s been working out six hours a day, and he’s buff. We sit,
and he points to. the punching bag hanging about 100 metres away in
a cage across the yard, where he and a mate do crunches, sit-ups
and squats with a medicine ball. There’s a water tap next to the
bag, which he squats under when he wants to reacquaint himself,
however remotely, with being shacked.
He’s agreed to meet me again on the Gold Coast after he’s released,
when he’ll give me the full story about his dramatically altered
life. For now, though, I just want to get a glimpse of his living
conditions, if not his state of mind.
“Every day is torture,” he says, but won’t go into the details
just yet.
His body language gives away more than he realises: his
shoulders are hunched, his elbows are tucked into his lap, and his
hands are folded neatly on his knees; it’s not that he looks
uncomfortable in his current surroundings, he’s alien to them.
He’s been affected by it, but in a good way. He’s learned to be
positive. Even Carly agrees that he’s a new, better man now.
“Someone in here told me that there is no other place in the world
where you can put your life on pause, and it’s true. When they
lock us up at night (in single cells, from 7.20pm till 8.30am)
you’re completely untouchable — no one can ring you, no one can
talk to you…” He’s been sitting in his cell reading the 1997
self-help bestseller Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (from the
prison library), some passages three or four times over.
He’s had plenty of time to think about the five seconds of
madness that caused his incarceration. He acted initially in
self-defence, but then, a jury decided, he went too far. He knows
how differently it might have ended: had he not fought back, he
says, he could have been seriously hurt himself. Or, give or
take a few centimeters in the arc of his swing, he could have been
up for manslaughter or murder. He still can’t say whether he did
the right or wrong thing.
“I spent three weeks (at the trial) listening to a person who’s
never met me describe me as a complete thug,” he says. “It was the
weirdest experience ever. You’re not supposed to show any emotion
or interrupt when you’re in the dock. There were times when I just
had to drop my head (in disbelief). I reckon there’s no such thing
as a justice system.”
***********************
A month later I’m back on the Gold Coast. It’s
early evening, and Clint and Carly are going to meet me on their
way home from dinner at a friend’s house. While I wait for them
outside the Coolangatta Hotel, I call Dru Baggaley, the bloke who
Clint stabbed, to see if I can arrange an interview for the next
day. Dru was, according to one newspaper report, “shattered” when
Clint was sent down. I’m hoping he’ll want to elaborate on how
shattered he was.
“Who’s calling?” says the man who answers, in a hostile
tone.
“My name’s Fred Pawle,” I say.
“Who the hell are you, Fred?”
“I’m a journalist from a surfing magazine.”
“He (Dru) is not making any comments,” he says, and hangs
up.
It wouldn’t be until the following afternoon that I learn why he
was so abrupt. Dru’s brother Nathan, a high-profile surf-lifesaver
and Olympic rower who won silver in Athens, had just been charged
with possession and supply of more than 700 eccies in Mermaid
Waters, and was all over the TV news that night. I leave a message
a few days later explaining that I want to talk about Clint, not
Nathan, and hope for a call back.
When Clint turns up, he seems almost as nervous as he was back
in the slammer.
“Slightly different circumstances,” he says with a big grin,
shaking my hand. He’s had his mop trimmed into a routine short cut,
and bronzed the skin, although his nose is flaking from its sudden
exposure to the sun.
I tail Carly’s new, black Holden Commodore to Salt, in
Kingscliff, an instant middle-class suburb of big homes done in a
uniform colour scheme of white and latte. It oozes the sort of
optimism that only money can buy. If you had to go to jail, this is
the kind of place you’d want to go to upon release. And if you
wound up at Salt, the place you’d really want to be is Peppers, the
resort in the middle of it all.
Carly and Clint are in a serviced, open-plan two-bedroom
apartment with cool low-rise furniture, glass prints of waves on
the wall and all the right stainless-steel appliances and fittings.
Carly has organised a week here while they wait for their new crib
at Main Beach to be vacated. She won’t tell me how much it cost,
although I later learn that the official rate is $590 a night.
Clint has a taste for the fine things in life (he swings 690MB
Titleist clubs when he’s on the fairway, and rides a Suzuki
GSXR600), but for now it’s the little things that turn him on… like
the smell of air freshener in the lift lobby in the basement
carpark.
“Everywhere you go, smells remind you where you are,” he says.
“That (the air freshener) reminds me I’m here, enjoying all this.”
And the smell that reminded him most that he was in prison? White
Ox rallies.
Even the softness of the old Rip Curl T-shirt he’s wearing is
noteworthy. What happened to the Dunlop Volleys, I ask.
“They gave them to me, but I threw them away,” he says.
He made one close friendship inside, but even that’s unlikely to
remain. Clint is not interested in anything that reminds him of
Borallon. Out on the balcony, he tells me about his first
dawn. For six months, he didn’t see one sunrise. Sunsets? He saw a
few, when the angle was right for his cell window. On his first
night of freedom, he got up at 3am, watched a few surf DVDs on his
laptop, then hit the beachside walkway for a 7km run under the
stars, full moon and rising sun. “I wanted to beat the day at
itself,” he says. “I knew the sun would come up at 5am or something
like that, but I wanted to do something before then. I’d been in
there for so long doing nothing. It might sound weird, but I just
wanted to start achieving again, just wanted to get out there. It
was just a beautiful, free feeling. It sounds corny but it was just
me and nature, and that’s everything I enjoy. Then I came back, had
cereal, went surfing, had a nice long surf at D-bah before 7am. It
was just the perfect start to the day.”
And the first night with Carly? “We had a nice dinner, saw some
friends, really enjoyed being in each other’s company. We wouldn’t
let go of each other, we were just cuddling like the classic love
birds. Then we were in the bedroom for a while. That was all right.
It felt like when you’re really nervous, when you really like a
girl, and she really likes you. It’s like the first time having sex
again, or first time with each other. It was great.”

But he’s not, as you might expect from a young charger, in some
sort of existential rush to make up for lost time. Instead, he
seems happy to ease back into normal life. He and I have one light
beer each and watch the last few overs of the final England-New
Zealand one-dayer while Carly reads Cosmo, before crashing out.
*********************
A weird thing happened a couple of days after he was
released. A light plane crashed in the water 600m south of
Peppers, killing the pilot. Within minutes of it happening, a mate
from Channel Nine rang him and told him to rush down to get some of
the rescue operation on video. Which he did. He finds the irony
amusing: six months ago he was being portrayed as a villain on the
Nine news, now they’re paying him $100 for his services as a
cameraman.
Clint says he got a rough trot from journalists during the
trial, which got regular coverage for the whole three weeks.
“Some days I’d come out of court and think, ‘That went well.’
Then the next day I’d pick up the paper, and if there’d been one or
two bad things said, that’s what would be in there, and none of the
good stuff,” he says.
He shows me the scrapbook of clippings Carly kept, which is
sprinkled with some of her own thoughts, like “We all know you
don’t deserve this, darling. I love you.” Given the treatment he
got, he is unreasonably magnanimous towards the press. “They were
just doing their job,” he says every time he recalls an instance of
apparent distortion. Neither does he bear any ill will towards
Dru.
“From what I’ve heard he’s a pretty cool guy,” he says.
So this is what happened. Clint and his friends were at Troy
Hipwood’s 21st at the Tugun Surf Club in April 2004. So too were
Dru and his friends, footy players/surf-lifesavers from Byron Bay.
A blue started, then continued outside. Amid it all, Clint hit Dru
twice with a broken bottle – first in the neck, then the back. Soon
after, the two tried to arrange a meeting to talk over the
incident, and hopefully resolve it. Dru, the victim of the attack,
insisted it should be in Byron Bay. Clint, fearing an ambush,
suggested his lawyer’s office on the Gold Coast instead. The
meeting never occurred, and two years later charges were laid. At
the trial, the versions of events presented by the prosecution and
defence differ fundamentally, as you’d expect. Kelly Slater and TB
gave character witness via phone for Clint. At the end of the
trial, Clint gave himself an even chance of being found not guilty.
After four hours of deliberation, the jury half agreed with him:
the first blow with the bottle was in self-defence, the second was
unlawful wounding. The prosecution asked for three years, but
Clint’s top-gun lawyer, hired by Carly’s dad, got him 18 months,
suspended after six.
When Dru calls me back, he says he bears no grudge. “I never
wanted him to go to jail,” he says. “I’ve been in trouble before,
and I hate the court system.”
Was Clint going to be ambushed in Byron? “I said, ‘All I can
give you is my word that no one’s going to touch you. It’s a pretty
serious thing (that you’ve done), and you’re just gonna have to
take the risk. I promise you right now it’ll be you and me. I don’t
ever break my promises. I just want to sit down and talk with
you.’
“Dane Hurst, a good friend of his said he was a good bloke too.
I’m sure that being drunk, young and full of testosterone, these
things can happen. Glass rips through skin easily. It’s just a big
brain explosion and he’s just done it. I sort of thought at the end
of the day it’s bad but maybe it’s not that bad. I’d heard he was a
good bloke, (and I should) give him a chance. But he didn’t come
down (to Byron), and that’s what turned it into the next step.”
Clint’s not bitter about the verdict. “I’ve accepted it, I’m
moving on. Everyone makes mistakes, and I guess in the eyes of the
court that was a mistake. It’s something I never thought would
happen, or would ever want to do to somebody. It happened, and I’ve
gotta move on.”
The fall was huge. “I was on a monthly retainer with Rip Curl,
getting great money, for my age. They dropped me after my appeal
didn’t go through. They did the right thing. They hung on till the
appeal. No one in their right mind is gonna pay some young guy to
be sitting in a jail cell. They could have (put the contract on
hold), but I can see why they didn’t. I don’t hold any grudges.
“I went from the best possible lifestyle, surfing every day,
travelling, driving a nice car, buying nice things, doing
everything I want and being really happy to the next day in a jail
cell, thinking, ‘Wow. am I ever going to surf professionally again?
Am I gonna get pumped by some big bloke tonight? What’s the go
here?'”
His first week was spent sharing a cell with a junkie doing cold
turkey. The junkie, who was on remand, hatched a cunning plan to
cobble sympathy during his imminent return to court: turn up with
two black eyes, and explain that he was being picked on inside.
Clint, seemingly unaware of the irony, recalls declining to help
the dude out. “He was fair dinkum. he wanted me to give him a big
wack,” Clint says. “Obviously I didn’t want to punch him in the
head. I don’t like hurting anyone, and I didn’t know how he’d react
to it. He might wake up the next morning and think, ‘He actually
did it’. and that might cause something. So I just said, ‘Nah, I
couldn’t do it to you. and it would come across in court that you
can’t stay out of trouble. It won’t help you at all.’ It was pretty
crazy.”
After a week with the junkie he was moved to units with single
cells. His next test was in the first-timers unit, where he got a
taste of prison morals.
“There was a lot of petty thieving going on. You had to guard
everything. I didn’t like that unit one bit. If I’d stayed in
there, it would have got pretty heavy because I’m really strong on
manners and etiquette, and having respect for other people. These
people don’t have respect for themselves, so as if they’re going to
give anyone else respect.”
Each prisoner gets 600ml of milk a day, the carton marked with
its owner’s personal number. Clint’s kept disappearing. He
identified the culprit, marched into his cell, and took the milk
back.
“What are you doing?” Clint recalls the dude saying.
“That’s my fucken milk,” Clint replied.
“Oh sorry, I’m on these really heavy meds. I didn’t know it was
yours. I got confused.”
“It’s simple, if there’s not your number on it, you don’t touch
it. simple as that.”
A few other prisoners started to gather round to see what was
going on. “He started piping up and throwing the chest out,” Clint
recalls. “I just closed the door of the cell so if it was gonna
happen it was gonna be me and him, no one else. I kinda just tried
to smart my way out of it. I wasn’t scared of getting bashed one
bit because I’m pretty confident about being able to hold my own,
but if I hurt this guy that would trigger the remaining part of my
sentence. I was sentenced to 18 months, suspended after six. If I
break this guy’s nose or throw a wild haymaker and this guy hits
the deck, who knows what happens in fights these days, I could have
been in trouble.
“He was really big but he was pretty fat and would have been
pretty slow, but if he’d got on to me he probably would have
knocked me out. It finished when I just lectured him and he kind of
snapped out of it. I just made him feel like an idiot, pretty much.
You can give people too much credit in there, of having too much
brains. You imagine they know what’s right and wrong, but they
don’t.”
It (sodomy) does happen in there, but you’d have to want it to
happen or be really stupid for it to happen to you. It does happen,
but it’s kept real dark because the majority of people don’t wanna
know about it because it’s disgusting. But there are guys who are
doing a lot of time, they’re doing a few things and it’s kind of
kept behind closed doors. It’s not so much rape, it’s pretty
mutual.”
Upon arriving at Borallon, Clint was given a copy of the
prisoner induction book, which explained how inmates could avoid
trouble inside, and what to do if it happened anyway. “It says if
you get raped, don’t have a shower because they’ve gotta do tests
on you and stuff. You’re like.’Holy shit! This is real, this is
heavy.’
“But you’ve got your own shower in the cell. It (sodomy) does
happen in there, but you’d have to want it to happen or be really
stupid for it to happen to you. It does happen, but it’s kept real
dark because the majority of people don’t wanna know about it
because it’s disgusting. But there are guys who are doing a lot of
time, they’re doing a few things and it’s kind of kept behind
closed doors. It’s not so much rape, it’s pretty mutual.”
***********************
Throughout the day and a half we spend together, Clint is
constantly upbeat. It’s difficult to say if this is his new frame
of mind or just a swing of the pendulum after his heavy stint. Time
will tell. For now, though, he’s adamant that young thugs should
learn from his experience.
“If (my highly publicised conviction) makes a couple of young
guys pull their heads in and stop going round trying to bash
people, I’m glad. There are just so many young people going around
fighting, thinking it’s the coolest thing in the world, and they
just don’t realise you can wreck someone’s life, a lot of people’s
lives – their family, their loved ones – just through throwing a
wild haymaker over nothing.
“It’s just the most pathetic thing ever. Whatever happened to
going out, getting a root and going home early, or having a good
night with your mates?
“It was really hard me being labelled as one of those people.
That really hurt me that people who don’t know me very well would
think that that’s the person I am. It’s so far from who I am it’s
ridiculous.”
We surf D-bah early the next morning, then the shorey in front
of Peppers. The second surf is ordinary, but he’s frothing because
it’s just the two of us out. Plus, there are ramps for air
reverses. A pod of dolphins swims past, and he recalls telling
inmates who had rarely even seen the ocean that he’s not only seen
dolphins but surfed alongside them. He says it as if he’s grateful
for having been reminded of his own luck, despite everything else.
Clint’s riding hand-me-down boards, and struggling a bit, although
there are flashes of flair whenever he gets a bit of speed up.
Also, he knows he’s got some work to do on his style.
“It’s really stiff… It’s pretty crook. I want to get a bit more
flow in my surfing,” he says.
The plan is to do the Australian leg of the WQS on borrowed
boards and the proceeds of the sale of his GSXR600. Sponsors? He’s
holding out a faint hope. “I’m getting a vibe from the industry
(that) no one might want a bar of me. I might be too risky or (in)
the too-hard basket – you know, the kid who’s been to jail. Or they
might see how positive I’ve come out of it and might take a liking
to it, see a decent story in it or a way to promote someone.
“(But) I’m not going to be a dream chaser my whole life, I don’t
want to wake up at 30 and realise I’m not gonna make it, not have a
career or an apprenticeship or have a house. I wanna be wealthy
early. I wanna start a young family with Carly.”
He makes no secret of knowing that this story will be a
significant factor. To his credit, he never wanted to talk about
the fight or his time inside, but concedes that that is what
readers want to know about. The future is his own worry. If he
hasn’t qualified in two years, he’ll take a job working five or six
days a week for Carly’s dad, a builder, to whom he owes 100K for
the lawyers.
“It’s given me motivation,” he says. “There are all these
new challenges that have popped up in front of me, and I’m like
greedy for them. I’ve promised Carly that the day I’m out of debt
I’ll drop an E.”
Drop an E? Oh, right. Drop a knee.
On my way back to the airport, I drive behind a car with a
sticker that says, Free Clipper. It’s true, I think to myself, he
is now. And he’s done it with a cool head. A lot of people helped
him survive the ordeal – strangers wrote to him, mates visited him,
and a bunch of pros (including Kelly, Andy and TB) donated boards
to an auction that raised $35,000 for him. He’s grateful to them
all. Now, the next chapter is his.
So today I went into the Surfer
magazine offices. If you have never been, they are located atop a
hillock very near Palomar airport some three or four miles from the
beach and two or three miles from a PF Chang’s pan-Chinese
restaurant outlet famous for orange peel chicken, soy dipped
lettuce wraps and girl’s night out.
The Surfer offices are mixed in with other titles owned
by The Enthusiast Network in a maze-like space that is very
difficult to navigate. I got lost and was forced to walk back and
forth near a wall and a break room that smelled like microwave
popcorn until being saved by a good friend who took me the right
way.
We passed Grant Ellis’ (the magazine’s famed photo editor. Look
at his gorgeous work
here!) work space and he happened to be there,
working, so I stuck my head in and thanked him for saving my life.
Last I had seen him, he had a large stitched cut on his forehead.
“Cancer” he told me and described the symptoms which I shared on my
chest.
Now, the large stitched cut is a perfect scar that blends in
with his forehead wrinkle. “I had mine done by an ex-military
plastic surgeon…” he said making me jealous.
“Well, you saved my life…” I responded. “I’m getting my cancer
cut out tomorrow. It’s one of those basal cell ones.”
“Hmmm.” He hummed. “Mine was a squamous cell. The basal cell is
sort of on the surface, squamous cell is deeper and a little more
serious and then there’s a melanoma which is more serious
still.”
I suddenly felt very sheepish. Of course I have the shallowest
cancer. Of course Grant Ellis’ is deeper and more serious.
Yes, he judged my cancer and it was found wanting. Tomorrow it
shall be gone. We’re born, we die. C’est la vie.
Loading comments...
Load Comments
0
Top Secret: “From Kook to Kelly”
training!
By Chas Smith
The ultra-wealthy have cracked surfing's code!
The very rich live better lives than you and
me. Sure there is a populist revolt shaking the globe
right now, trying through slogans on placards, to bring some form
of parity but it won’t matter. Nothing matters. The rich are a
rocket ship, climbing climbing climbing. Getting richer. The
non-rich are suckers writing slogans on placards. The rich have a
secret surf class taught only at select five-star resorts. The
non-rich have grouchy surfing uncles who dish unhelpful advice.
And how do I know about these secret surf classes? Oh. I read
the rich publication Bloomberg from time to time and learned of it
this morning in a piece titled The 10 Steps to Achieve
Surfing Nirvana. Here, I’ll distribute the wealth with
you. The writer has gone to Baja to ask his girlfriend to marry him
and also learn to surf. Let’s pick it up from there.
For a sport with a lot of unwritten rules about how to
behave, surfing doesn’t have many written ones. But Pinneo teaches
from an actual curriculum, which Tropicsurf (founded by Australian
Ross Phillips) calls “Kook to Kelly.” It’s in use at 16 of the most
luxurious resorts around the world, including Fiji’s Laucala,
Nihiwatu Sumba in Indonesia, and Mukul in Nicaragua. Think of it as
the surfing equivalent of ascending to a black belt from a white
one in karate. Its 10 levels range from the hardest, “Kelly,”
referring to Kelly Slater, the unofficial greatest surfer ever, to
“Kook”—surferese for a beginning, not-very-good surfer. A try-hard,
a gremmie, a grom.
For the past 20 years, Phillips, a former schoolteacher, has
been developing and refining one of the sport’s only written,
comprehensive, and standardized systems of teaching—the Eton of
surfing schools.
Satisfied with our stroke, Pinneo breaks down the levels:
We’re obviously Level 1. Level 3 surfers are starting to ride small
waves on their own. At Level 5, you’re finding your own style and
refining your bottom turn. By Level 7, you’re pretty good and can
ride the barrel—that quintessential picture of surfing, in which
you catch the inside part of the wave as it crashes over you,
forming a tunnel. If you’re Level 10, your name may be Kelly
Slater.
So it seems a bit like Scientology, maybe, like The Bridge to
Total Freedom. These steps, no doubt, cost much money and won’t be
shared openly even in a rich publication but the hints are
fascinating. A refined bottom turn seems like a real important
facet in moving from kook to Kelly. Step seven finds you in the
barrel. What do you think happens during steps eight and nine?
Which step are you?
Which step is Kai Otton?
Hmmmmm.
The piece ends with this:
There’s a scene in the 1994 surf movie The Endless Summer II
when Pat O’Connell, the shortboard star, is asked what his favorite
wave is. “The next one,” he says. I keep that as my mantra and,
about 15 next waves later, I stand and ride the board into the
whitewash. I still look like the poo-man, but for once on this day,
I feel the euphoria that drives hundreds of other kooks to keep
trying.
Poo-man. Which step is Adriano de Souza?
Do you think Tropicsurf pays Kelly royalties on using his
name?
