"A stallion, a revelation, god-like!"

One week or so ago, on the occasion of surf icon Terry Fitzgerald’s birthday, Seattle scrabble aficionado and surf archivist Matt Warshaw published a moving tribute on his Encylopedia of Surfing website called, Ode to a Sultan and which you should read, and published without Warshaw’s permission, below.

Fitz was a rock star. Not in our newly popularized middle-management use of the phrase (“thanks for getting these numbers to me so fast, you’re a rock star!”), but more like he belongs to a species of performer that includes Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey, more so than Gerry Lopez and Jeff Hakman. Had Fitzgerland picked up a guitar instead of a surfboard, his biography would be spiked with trashed hotel rooms, dozens of groupie-spawned bastard children, and a messed-up hush-hush story involving a mudshark.

Anyway, as it was, Fitz played stadiums (Sunset and J-Bay), and performed all the way to the back seats. Striking poses. Moving and grinding that 28-inch-waist. At the end of a well-executed ride, it would have been fully appropriate, rather than throwing a two-fisted claim, for Fitz to bang a huge flaming gong.

Two or three weeks ago, Lewis Samuels got up in my business after one of my periodic Barry Kanaiaupuni swoons. BK’s surfing, Lewis said via Twitter, “hasn’t aged well,” and I’m 97% sure that Samuels’ feels the same about Fitzgerald. I’m so sure, in fact, that it makes me wonder if I am maybe a bit too enamored of my little gang of Zeppelin-age favorites. Fitz, especially, is open to critique. If the surf didn’t have the requisite push and thrust, he’d try and make up the difference by amping up the hip wiggles and arm gyrations. Oversell. I cringe a little when I see those clips. (And edit my own clips accordingly, using just the flower-top stuff.)

On the other hand, Fitz was operating in shortboard surfing’s Great Age of Style. In terms of basic performance—cutbacks, bottom turns, off the tops—those gunned-out, wide-point-forward single-fins everybody was using were being ridden to their outermost limit. Twins and tri-fins would reset everything, but those were still a few years off. What to do in the meantime? When 15 other top surfers have a fiberglass-buckling bottom turn and a G-force line off the top, how do set yourself apart? Form. Interpretation. Presence. “Skill and style,” said Wayne Bartholomew, who came of age in this period, “has never been more closely related than in the early ’70s.” Nobody understood this better than the Terry Fitzgerald.

As much as any other single surfer, Fitzgerald made the early ’70s. But the early ’70s also made Fitzgerald. I can’t imagine him in the pre-shortboard-era. And in the multi-fin era, Fitz’ vogue-heavy style of riding was left in the dust. Other surfers of the period, you can trace their stylistic progeny: Lopez to Machado to Craig Anderson. MP to Kong to Bourez. The Fitzgerald method, though, began and ended with Fitzgerald. (Derek Hynd was and remains a great Fitz disciple, but Derek, true to the master’s example, crafted his own unique way of riding waves.)

When I was a kid, older guys raved about Joey Cabell and “speed surfing,” but nobody in years to come picked up on his style, and looking back at video of Cabell from the late ’60s I don’t really get what the big deal was.

Will the same thing happen to Fitz? I wonder. I’ll put this question to anybody reading this under the age of 35: in the clip posted at the top of the page, the last shot, of Fitz going Mach 3 at Jeffreys Bay—does that ride sing to you at all? Or am I a sentimental old fool?

(Editor’s note: You gotta subscribe, here, to see the vid and the photo.)

All pretty above board, yeah?

The great Nick Carroll, howevs, was having none of it.

“Matt, there’s a lot of cheap shots in this mate. Not cool,” Nick wrote on Facebook, prompting surfing’s first men’s world champion Peter Townend to chime in, “Agreed! As one of my peer group, slightly older, Fitz had his unique approach to his surfing as many of us did as well as the equipment we shaped and road, that was the beauty of that Seventies era!”

Warshaw, of course, ain’t afraid even of mighty Nick and superstar PT, although he was diplomatic.

“What about the part where it goes: “you might say—I would, for sure—that Terry Fitzgerald is one of the greatest surfers of all time, just as surely as Robert Plant is one of the greatest rock singers of all time… My take on Fitz is just that he’s maybe the ultimate “horses for courses” surfer. But on the courses that counted most—Sunset and J-Bay—he was a stallion, a revelation, god-like. Less so in waves that didn’t suit his style, or that bored him. Same could be said for half or more of those in the all-time-greatest pantheon, to which Terry is a platinum-card member. Apologies if my comments came off disrespectful, that was not my intention.”

Now, where are the cheap shots? Can you find?

The greatest piece of surf real estate in the world?

Johnny Jenkins, a former editor of Surfing Life and semi-pro surfer sponsored by various brands, lived the sorta childhood that, even in the third or fourth retelling, I still find hard to believe.

His daddy John, an international flight attendant for Qantas back when the job had money and prestige, made the very sensible decision in 1976 to begin accumulating parcels of land which would become three-acres of cliff-top dirt on the ridge behind Whale Beach, also home to the then counter-culture surfing magazine Tracks.

On it, a small wooden house, which would grow, organically, with mismatched doors and windows, and a shed, which little Johnny commandeered, that had a mattress on the floor, an old wardrobe and a cable running electricity from the main house, and with gun-barrel views straight into the Whale Beach Wedge.

With daddy away, sometimes for two weeks on an international haul and with the Wedge beckoning, Johnny, now forty-six, achieved the Barrenjoey High record of most late attendances in one year, a never-to-be-broken fifty seven late notes.

He was also privy to the belle epoch of the nineties when the Wedge was populated by Barton Lynch, Tom Carroll, Martin Potter, Stuart Bedford-Brown, Kelly Slater, Lisa Andersen, Michael Rommelse, Ces Wilson and co.

Now, with daddy almost eighty and unable to keep the land free of brush and whatever to stop fires, and the spectre of COVID putting the wind up the fam, they figure, time to sell.

(Last year, they carved two pieces off the original 11,000 m2 for three mill, leaving 8000 m2.)

Price?

Seven-ish mill for 8000 m2 or roughly two acres. Convert to US dollars and y’gonna own the best joint in Sydney, a city relatively free of lethal bugs, for a little under five mill.

“Two mins from the balcony to putting your legrope on at the sand at South Whaley,” says Johnny.

The real estate sell is a little underwhelming, but if you know the joint, and know the wave, ooowee, it don’t get any better.

Apply here.