But likes to fight! "Raging drunk, (he) staggered
over to Sam George intending to beat the shit out of him, and had
to be pulled away."
Last week I mentioned Damien Hardman, two-time WCT champ
(1987, 1991) from Narrabeen, and Filipe Toledo as the two male
title-holders most lacking in big-wave
credibility.
At the time I was thinking
Hardman and Toledo had been treated more or less equally in terms
of attention paid to their deficits.
If anything, I felt we’d been crueler to Toledo.
Boy, was I wrong. Hardman got it so much worse.
The opening of Damien’s first SURFER profile, in
1988, written by Phil Jarratt just after Hardman won his first
title, reads as follows:
Never having met Damien Hardman—the man who would soon
become world champion—I asked around about him. “He’s kinda like
Simon Anderson in his approach to life,” said one person. “It’s
that Narrabeen thing, I suppose. But I wouldn’t put Damien in
Simon’s class. He hasn’t got the brawn or the brains.” I asked
someone else whose opinion I respected if he thought Damien would
take the title. He said: “Damien just hasn’t got the balls to go
all the way.”
After making the obvious point that Hardman had defied
expectations to win the title, and then highlighting the new
champ’s grit and tenacity, Jarratt seems to lose interest, with
vague praise about Damien’s recent championship death-match heat
against Gary Elkerton at Manly Beach, and an exit line in which
Hardman promises to be a “good ambassador” for
surfing. Jarratt, by nature a playful and engaged writer, was
clearly bored.
Ten years later, with Hardman still a world title contender at
age 33, pop culture diva Cintra Wilson, in her coverage of the French leg of the
1999 WCT, called him pro surfing’s “Evil Stepdad.”
A two-time former world champion and Occy’s biggest threat
to this year’s championship, [Hardman] is monstrously capable but
strangely cursed to be the Richard Nixon of the surfing world. He’s
rigid with media unlovability, broody, uncute and super ambitious.
He also colors inside the lines and racks up the points by being a
ruthless and precise techno-surgeon. The Iceman is coldly serious
and basically impossible for teenage girls to get a crush
on.
Hardman had zero interest in being a surf media personality.
Which makes sense, given the way he was treated. It’s a
chicken-or-egg question. None of the surf writers of the
period looked much past the fact that Damien was from Narrabeen,
that he didn’t perform in big surf, and that he was a grim,
methodical, merciless competitor. Rarely mentioned was the fact
that, on his best days, Hardman was as
frictionless in the water as George Gervin was on the
hardwood. Maybe we iced him, in other words, not
the other way around.
In 2001, the just-retired Damien Hardman was a judge Op Pro
Mentawai Islands specialty event, which I covered, and which ended
up being my one and only Indo boat trip.
There was a short bus ride at some early point in the gathering,
while we were still on Sumantra, and when I was reintroduced to
Hardman—we’d met a few times in the 1980s—he just nodded and looked
away.
We loaded into a trio of boats, one for the six male
competitors, another for the four women competitors, and another
for media and judges. Damien, not surprisingly, bailed off our boat
and stayed with the surfers.
It was an amazing time.
We floated and lounged and surfed, ate well, ran the event, and
stayed out there for a week or so before returning to port. My two
most distinct memories of Damien both come from that trip.
First, near the end of an all-hands party one evening on our
boat (which was biggest), Damien, raging drunk, staggered over to
Sam George intending to beat the shit out of him, and had to be
pulled away.
Sam had done nothing to provoke Damien. I don’t think Damien
even knew who he was talking to at the moment; Sam was a ranking
surf media figure, a stand-in for all of us, and that was
enough.
Second, Op had secured some kind of Indonesian governmental
permit that allowed us to clear the water at any break we chose.
Which sounds incredible, but was in fact weird and wrong and
depressing.
A pair of surfers out alone at Bank Vaults when
our flotilla pulled up, the first day of our trip, and dropped
anchor. They were called in. Twenty years later I remember the
looks on their faces—confusion fermenting into anger—and feel
ashamed.
But of course it didn’t stop us, we did the same thing day after
day, and eventually that was how Damien Hardman and I ended up out
alone in perfect overheard surf at Macaronis.
It was the second-to-last day of the trip. The contest had just
finished (Mark Occhilupo and Keala Kennelly won), at which point
Damien and I, at the exact same moment but from different boats,
darted into the lineup.
A decision had already been made to motor north to catch Hollow
Trees before dark, and the other surfers from our group were
already aboard the boats, which were now idling in the
channel.
My thought was to grab a wave or two before we left. I did, but
then sneak-paddled back into the lineup because if it wasn’t the
absolute best surf I’d ever seen, it was without question the best
uncrowded surf I’d ever seen.
Damien was sitting there when I returned.
We looked at each other, and he wasn’t the Iceman or the
two-time champ or a media-hating drunk—he was the person who could
extend this perfect moment.
Some version of the same thought ran through Damien’s head, “I
will if you will,” he said, or some variation thereof, and over the
next 20 semi-illicit minutes I caught another three waves, and
maybe I am a cheap date but that is how Damien Hardman warmed my
heart.
(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf essay every Sunday,
PST. All of ’em a pleasure to read. Maybe time to subscribe to
Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, yeah? Three bucks
a month.)
