Pulitzer Prize-winning Surf journalist Bill Finnegan introduces New Yorker readers to “world’s best surfer” Jock Sutherland

"We used to call him the Extraterrestrial because he…he could smoke more hash than anyone, take more acid, and still go out there and surf better than anyone.”

Do you remember when you couldn’t walk outside without tripping over another fawning review of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bill Finnegan book Barbarian Days? 

The Wall Street Journal called it “gorgeously written and intensely felt… dare I say that we all need Mr Finnegan… as a role model for a life, thrillingly, lived.”

The LA Times said,

“It’s also about a writer’s life and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.”

The Pulitzer Prize committee praised it as, “A finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a distinguished writing career.”

The Pulitzer Prize, of course, is America’s most prestigious award in journalism. It also includes ten thousand dollars in prize money to each category winner.

It threw me under the bus of a two-day obsessive read. Photos scattered through the pages showed the author to have visible obliques, was long-haired and tanned. Finnegan could surf, write and was a stud.

It’s a been while since ol Billy has touched surf, but this oversight has been rectified with a long piece on switchfoot maestro and king of Pipe before ol Gez Lopez swung onto the scene, Jock Sutherland, in the latest issue of The New Yorker. 

You can read it all here, and I beg that you do, but here’s a few lil bites on the neck to get you in the mood. 

Jock built a different sort of life on his home coast. He’s seemingly everybody’s favorite roofer, a part-time farmer, a revered elder with garrulous tendencies. I’ve heard him called “the mayor of the North Shore.” My old starstruck view of him was pure projection. In truth, he was, from an early age, leading a strange, half-wild, quite complicated existence.

When Jock was twelve, his mother sent him to stay with a man known as the Hermit of Kalalau, on the island of Kauai. The hermit lived in a cave on the Nāpali Coast—a roadless wilderness where sea cliffs rise as high as four thousand feet. “That was actually his summer cave, down by the beach,” Jock told me. “He had a winter cave up the valley.”

The hermit’s name was Dr. Bernard Wheatley. “I was the object of his displeasure,” Jock recalled. “Being a kid, I was unaware of the imperatives of his existence. There was a good little bodysurfing wave out front, but he didn’t want me to swim out there. He was responsible for me. I started whining, and I ended up bodysurfing it.”

Audrey Sutherland was a one-off. She grew up in California, went to U.C.L.A. at sixteen for international relations, worked as a riveter in the Second World War. She became a long-distance swimmer, married a sailor, worked in commercial fishing, and moved to Oahu in 1952. There she did substitute teaching, taught swimming, got her Army job. Her kids, growing up in the decommissioned barracks at the ocean’s edge, were all water babies. After their father left, they scrounged. “When you’re poor,” Jock told me, “you learn how to find food on the reefs, hunt, pick wild fruit, trade with your neighbors. We set out lobster traps. Spearfishing, night diving. Got a lot of fruit from the hills.”

Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:

—Clean a fish and dress a chicken

—Write a business letter

—Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord

—Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes

—Handle a boat safely and competently

—Save someone drowning using available equipment

—Read at a tenth grade level

—Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy

—Dance with any age

This list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.

But it was not in contests that he made his name. It was at Pipeline, which sits roughly halfway between Waimea and Sunset Beach. A few surfers rode Pipeline well, notably Butch Van Artsdalen, a hellion from La Jolla. But most people were afraid of it. When Pipe is working, it breaks with stupendous force in shallow water, producing one of the world’s most beautiful, deadly tubes. Jock and his buddies started riding it on small days. “I made one or two out of ten,” he said.

He kept at it, refining his approach. He started making the takeoffs, and seeing how to avoid the heavy lip, by quickly finding a ridable line and “pulling in”—crouching close to the face and letting the barrel envelop him. Then, with perfect positioning and a bit of luck, he would be thrown into the clear by the explosive force of the lip’s impact. Jock seemed to have more time as he rode than anybody else did. Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin.

The wave of recreational drugs that flooded American youth culture in the late sixties was a tsunami among surfers. Cannabis and psychedelics—LSD, mescaline—seemed designed to make you surf better. Jock took this inspiration to the limit. “I was pretty wild,” he says today. “I worried that I set a bad example.”

Outlandish stories swirled around Jock, who was sometimes called the Sunshine Superman, for a popular variety of LSD known as Orange Sunshine. On the North Shore, he and his pals liked to start their acid trips in the mountains of the Ko‘olau Range, which runs down the east side of Oahu. They knew the mountain streams, and where to find the old work camps from the sugarcane plantations, which had been abandoned as Hawaii’s sugar industry shrank. The workers had kept fabulous gardens, which were now full of wild fruit and vegetables. At some point, Jock’s troupe would head for the coast, to rinse off the day’s psychic grime in the surf.

Psychedelics weren’t harmless—we all came to know many acid casualties. But they had, as many contemporary researchers know, the power of revelation, the potential to expand self-awareness. Jeff Hakman, the other young haole phenom of the period, told an interviewer that the best surfing experience of his life had been enhanced by LSD, and shared with Sutherland. “We used to call him the Extraterrestrial because he was so good at everything,” Hakman said. “He could beat anyone at chess or Scrabble; he could smoke more hash than anyone, take more acid, and still go out there and surf better than anyone.” You never knew what Jock would do on a wave, except that it was likely to be something you had never seen before, like side-slipping in the barrel at Sunset or switching stance at big Waimea. It was no surprise to anyone that he took the top spot in the 1969 Surfer Reader Poll.

A gorgeous long read. Complete your education here.