More importantly, how does it feel for this once
golden haired cutie pie with brown nipples like hard currants to
have reached the stately number of 63?
Two days back, the world was sent into a bit of spin with the
news that Tom Carroll had, likely, busted his neck while
surfing windy little two-footers at North Narrabeen.
Instagram posts urging for thoughts and prayers were circulated
and mainstream news outlets breathlessly
reported the injury as grave and serious etc.
I call Thomas and he is at the local shopping mall picking up a
few things from the Black Friday sales, getting a spike of
coffee.
“I got so malled,” he laughs.
Thomas, who turned sixty-three the day before the wipeout,
describes the attention as “weird” and says it came down to someone
on the beach with a camera “getting a nice shot of me in a neck
brace. It makes for good drama.”
So how is he?
“Well, I’m walking around! I had a few stitches and a shaken up
neck. As anyone who’s had a spinal injury can attest, it’s a
fucking bitch. I think I’m just lucky. I had a real shock.”
More importantly, how does it feel for lil Tommy Carroll, golden
haired cutie pie with little brown nipples like hard currants to
have reached the stately number of sixty-three?
“I was feeling pretty good until I fricken head-butted my board
and fucking got scorpioned over my neck. That told me how old I
really was. Fucken hell my neck was really crunched. You’re so
vulnerable in that position.”
Do you reflect on the passage of time? You’re well on the way to
seventy; Occ turns sixty next year..
“Yeah, it’s a trip. We’re all travelling through life and doing
our thing and a lot of stuff is going on and it gets quicker as you
get older. Life doesn’t get any slower and you wake up one day and
you’re sixty three! Oh shit! And Occy is sixty next year and
that’s extraordinary! All my fondest memories of Occ
are from when we were on tour and the early days together fucking
singing karaoke, ripping the bag out of waves, just pure fun. It
doesn’t make sense that we’re in our sixties. A big part of me is
in that kid zone. In a childlike and hopefully not a childish
manner.
Thomas reflects on those times he meets people, thinks, Jesus,
these guys are old and has to pull himself up, like, ‘This
person is twenty years younger than me.’
“I’m blown away. I never thought at sixty-three I’d be riding a
five-one. That wasn’t in the manual. I thought we had to have
retire from our competitive career at thirty, have a family. I
conditioned myself that way and that’s exactly what happened to me.
I had to bust that conditioning out although I wouldn’t say it’s
all gone. But I had to try and move on to fresher ideas and be open
to new ideas.”
Nostalgia and bolted on beliefs, he says, are a killer. He
recalls, back in the eighties, the revulsion in the lineup whenever
someone appeared on anything but a light variation of the
thruster.
“That was it! If you came into the lineup with a
bodyboard or a longboard, the boys would kick you out. I saw people
bleed over it! I always thought it was kinda crazy how people
fought over waves but now you can see how open it is. You can ride
anything. The collective mind has broadened. There’s more surfers
on the planet than ever yet, for the most part, we can surf
together on these different crafts in the most extraordinary ways
without killing each other – which is what we would’ve done in the
eighties. If some people want to go bak to that, go for it, run the
experiment. My experience tells me it won’t work out well.”
Thomas says he got “kickback” for riding a standup back when it
first turned on and that he loves longboards, bodysurfing, foiling,
any kind of surfing.
“Any way of surfing, fuck it, I’ll try it. Let’s do this shit.
My pathology is, fuck, if I can’t do a kind of surfing I’ve fucking
gotta do it. The challenge ins on! That’s helped me engage with a
real enthusiasm again. Foiling brought a new enthusiasm that bled
back into my surfing. It’s a way of elongating our froth which, in
turn, gives us life. Always have a little chuckle, or outer when
it’s appropriate, when people say to you, ‘What are you fucking
doing that shit for?’”
He says he looks now at the busy lineups as he flies past on his
foil and thinks, ‘Look at all these people fighting over this strip
of vertical wave.’
“Foiling we’ve literally got the whole ocean compared to a bit
of vertical water. You fly past ‘em on teh foil and they’re sitting
there looking at ya, going ‘Faaaark!’ They’re hanging around
waiting for that vertical wave, and nothing against it, I love it,
but it’s a limited resource. And when you start foiling, it’s
unlimited.”
I ask if he’s counting the days left on this gorgeous spinning
ball. Does he ever think, man, I got ten more summers left
surfing?
“I never do the math. I dunno what the fuck’s going to happen.
It might be a shock for me to do the math but I do think it takes
away from what I like to do in the present.”
Recently, Thomas bought a red cattle dog called Rumi, a mad
little cunt, primitive as can be, filled with the joy of running,
fighting, dominating. It’s changed his life.
“I had to surrender my preferences to a new life all of a
sudden. I didn’t know it was going to be a beautiful experience but
fuck, two months in, I was thinking, ‘What the fuck have I done?
This guy is a fucking unit!’ Or am I the unit? God, I’ve only got
so much surf time left and I’ve gotta it to a dog! This is fucked!”
Fucking hell, it was like picking up a sabre toothed
toddler!”
I tell him I try to live by the maxim, be like the dog. Leave
the phone at home, chase the ball, wrestle, live not just for the
present but for the exact moment
“Your heart fills up and he feels when you connect. And you
learn to connect with him, you learn to be a leader. There’s not
much talking, more signs and sounds. He’s trying to understand
English and I’m trying to understand dog. Too many commands and he
fucking wigs out, yes, fuck you, I’ll do what I want to do. He’s a
lot of dog but he’s fucking awesome. Such a good spirit. Man, he
can see through people. He’s feeling the whole
time.”
We talk dogs, we talk cats and what killing machines they
are.
“I want to get a kitten to see if he can stand his ground. It’ll
be the biggest lesson for this guy. He annihilated a bandit the
other night. I went, you cunt, you just brought in a big, fat
bandicoot, a beautiful thing. Fuck mate, you need a cat to claw
your fucken nose.”
Thomas reflects on the time he had two cats and the time one of
his daughters brought his attention to one of ‘em eating a rabbit
head caught.
As the cat tore the rabbit apart, she explained the process to
her dad.
“He goes for the brain first and he’s flicking the skull out of
his teeth, then he goes for the eyes. She really checked it,” says
Thomas. “Then they disembowel em through the anus, chew the neck
off, then pull everything out through the arse so the entrails are
sitting outside, then they go into the carcass and around it. But
they’ll eat the brains first. It’s what all big lions and all the
cats do.”
The primitive impulse!
“It’s an imprint,” says Thomas. “It’s fucking awesome. I love
it!”
