God-Shaped Hole: How Fame Hollowed Out Surfing’s Greatest Legends

What's the buzz, tell me what's a-happening!

In all the time I’ve been writing for surfing magazines, no other story of mine has received a more positive response than the long-form series Dark Lineage, published in 2023.

People still talk to me about it.

For those who didn’t see or read it, the story’s subtitle explains what I set out to document: The Bad Boys of Australian Surfing and Why They Self-Destruct.

I explore not only how the eight legendary surfers, Kevin Brennan, Keith Paull, Michael Peterson, Joe Engel, Nick Wood, Shane Herring and Chris Davidson were similarly driven to succeed, but also how they were equally driven to destroy themselves; seemingly disappointed by the fact that achieving their goals didn’t make them feel how they hoped it might. I researched their past and discovered absent fathers, childhood abuse and neglect, finding solace in the surf, and a recurring lone wolf mentality.

But something that has occurred to me over the last few years is that the crisis they suffered from was fundamentally spiritual. The downfall of these surfers stems from a lack of inner grounding, an absence of a stable identity, inherent self-worth, or connection to something greater than themselves.

Without such a foundation, their sense of self became fragile and dependent entirely on external validation, leaving them hollow when success failed to provide the redemption they sought. This is sometimes described as a “God-shaped hole in one’s soul.”

An existential event that has led to many abusing drugs and alcohol or going mad.

I wondered whether the tragedy of the preternaturally blessed members of the Dark Lineage was the curse of equating achievement with salvation. The series exposes the dangers of tying identity to performance and the spiritual void that fame, money or power cannot fill. Through this lens, the story reveals the fragility of ego, the relentless search for meaning, and how talent can become both an asset and a trap, perpetuating a cycle in which men mistake ability for identity and accomplishment for true fulfilment.

​But just as an active alcoholic might curse his bad luck to be addicted to grog, if the journey is completed and he enters recovery, it can also lead to an even more exquisite experience than surfing: a spiritual awakening. In this way, the diabolical path of many addicts has forced them to surrender. By having even the slightest willingness to believe that there might be a power greater than themselves that has their own best interest at heart, they embark on what has been described by the mystics as life’s real journey. It’s what the religious refer to as “Letting go and letting God,” while the spiritual – or philosophical – call it “Just letting go.”

Over the past seventy years, perhaps because of the West’s inability to comprehend a series of horrific wars, the decline of spirituality and religion has paralleled a surge in mental health challenges. Where faith traditions once offered a shared sense of meaning, identity, and community, their erosion has left many individuals to navigate existential questions alone, fuelling anxiety, loneliness, and psychological distress.

The rise of radical individualism has further weakened social bonds, with the support once found in religious communities now often replaced by the pursuit of fame and money, and consumerism and therapeutic culture, which rarely provide the same deep existential anchoring.

Notably, contemporary psychology’s embrace of spiritual concepts like mindfulness and meaning making underscores a growing recognition that humans require some form of transcendence to maintain mental well-being.

​It was 60 years ago, in early 1966, when I was four years old and sitting in a little chair at a little desk in kindergarten, that I first heard about God during a class called Scripture. Until that point, my father was the one whom I thought was the bearded one in charge. Back then, parental roles were divided, and while Dad provided and protected, Mum did everything else, including comforting and encouraging.

Every morning, the entire school recited the Lord’s Prayer together. Something that has saved me on many occasions, during the intervening half-century of pagan and heathen shenanigans, as I both metaphorically and literally fell to my knees and asked God for help.

It’s extraordinary how naturally praying to God comes to even the most ardent atheist if he finds himself in enough of a jam, particularly if he thinks his life depends on it.

The old saying goes, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

In my surfing life a few of the times I’ve found myself desperately praying that very prayer to a God that I didn’t know or understand included when I nearly drowned at Life and Death in Angourie in 1975; when I was caught in the G-Land tsunami in 1994; or when my legs were pinned under a load of surfboards in the tray of a ute in New Guinea which had spun out on a bend and was sliding sideways at a high speed along a muddy road and I thought we were going to flip and roll down the side of the steep mountain; or when I was held underwater the entire length of Laniakea after wiping out on the take-off of a set; or getting stuck inside at Supertubes during a big swell and being washed onto shore a kilometre up the beach frozen and only semi-conscious; or getting stuck in a rip while shooting water footage in Chile and getting sucked out to sea and being surrounded by seals, which I initially thought were sharks. Each time, praying that prayer came very easily to me. And after surviving each of them, I thanked God and, in doing so, felt His presence.

It could be argued that a spiritual experience is merely the fleeting absence of ego. By contemplating a power greater than ourselves, we momentarily transcend the bondage of self and our desperate clinging to our identity. And maybe this allows us to “lose ourselves” momentarily and opens the possibility of entering a “flow state.”

During our finest moments, surfers concentrate so deeply that we leave our egos behind and become one with nature. Think of the magnificence of some of the greatest surfing performances you’ve either seen in real life or on film or video. Times when the surfers became one with the wave and danced like crazy demons, touched by God, while not just walking on water, but running.

My best experience with this was in 1984, my finest hour – or more precisely, my finest 10 seconds –when I pulled into Speedies at G-Land for the first time, a moment captured by chance, by my cousin Paul, on Super 8. I remember clearly, looking at the water ahead of me going flat as the long wall reared up vertically, and praying, “God, please help me now!” as I pulled into what appeared to be a closeout.

Then, most recently, as a Christian, when a three-metre White Pointer thrashed through a bait ball only a few metres from where I was paddling through deep water to my home break.

Only then, as a believer, my prayer was no longer “Please God, get me out of here,” but instead “Thy will be done.” This transformed the moment of horror into something completely different. It was both a revelation and a transformation.

I recognised, for the first time, the interrelationship between fear and truly letting go and trusting God.

And herein lies the resolution of what Joseph Campbell describes as the hero’s journey: the arc in which an ordinary person is called out of their familiar world, undergoes trials and transformation with the help of mentors and allies, and returns home changed, bearing new insights.

I now believe that the hallmark of the madness of these times, and we as individuals, is the truth of where Godlessness goes, particularly societally. Unless one can attribute good things to God, there is a high probability that we will be tempted to take the credit for ourselves. This is not only a disaster because it breeds arrogance and deprives us of feelings of gratitude and of the recognition of grace, but also because it prevents creativity from flowing through us.

​And so now I believe that if any of the members of the Dark Lineage found God, or at the very least spirituality through overcoming ego, they might have continued to enjoy even greater achievements. But this is a lesson we need not learn from our own mistakes.

We can, in fact, learn it from theirs.

The problem arises when we mistake ourselves as our own saviours, or as the saviours of others, instead of recognising that it is we who need to be saved.