And loving every dang second!
The former world number four Matt Hoy, whose frontside cutback in the nineties had surf fans from Bells to J-Bay clapping like thunder, stands under a blue velvet twilight sky on the back porch of the beachfront house his grandfather built sixty-eight years ago.
The old asbestos shack has remained in the family despite his death and the three mill or thereabouts that could be pocketed from a sale, a testimony to a lineage that ain’t seduced by the glitter of cash.
Hoy will often take a solo mid-week pilgrimage to the beach house, an hour or so north of his home in the industrial port city Newcastle. He will surf the blue-water beachbreaks on one of his shaper father Brian Hoy’s voluminous forty-litre 6’6” channel-bottoms ‘cause what he’s all about now is going fast and maybe, here and there, a barrel.
He likes that the area, which is firmly on the east coast’s Great White Superhighway, is raw and not for the fainthearted. A few months earlier, a woman had come running down the beach screaming that her children were in the water while a Great White swam in the shallows.
“It’s a wild place. I saw one of the other week right in front of the house, cruise in and cruise past,” says Hoy.
The upper limb of the moon has disappeared from view and a shooting star steals Hoy, whose hand cradles a tin of VB, a beer rarely drunk by anyone but the most core of drinkers and therefore perfect for taking to parties for its inviolability, attention.
He is fifty-four now and has been retired from the tour for a quarter of a century. Jobs as a concreter, a brewer and a boat delivery deckhand have helped fill the fiscal gaps post-tour and post a divorce that divested him of sixty percent of his wealth. Hoy is unemployed at the moment and begrudgingly seeking, as they say, new opportunities.
His seed has created three children: Tex, a rugby league player of note, twenty-five and living and playing in England; Ginger, twenty-three, who works with the disabled via Australia’s National Disability Scheme (NDIS) and Axel, twenty, who delivers and removes furniture for properties being readied for sale.
Hoy is slimmer than you might think but then four months in a Newcastle hospital after surgery to remove the last remnants of a troublesome gall bladder will do that.
He wears black Converses, black Levis and a sweat by Former, the surfer start-up brand part-owned by neighbour and friend Craig Anderson, whom he calls Nando.
It’s been thirty four years since we last spoke, he as a cherub-faced blond with shoulder length hair and a skin mostly untouched by the tattooist’s needle and me as a reporter on his first assignment. The eight-page feature appeared in Surfing Life magazine and the pages still form a tetraptych in his mum Leslie’s hallway, the wall of fame and shame, as Hoy calls it.
So, Hoy, last time we spoke it was 1991. What’s been happening?
Oh Jesus, 1991, that was a fucking long time ago, mate, time sure does fly when you have children.
You were on the tour for, what, ten years?
Eleven years from memory, eleven years of travelling and having a good time. Winning Bells is the best memory, the best thing I’ve ever done in surfing. But, the travelling, man, going to places that I look back now and think I’ll never see them again. Everything about the tour I loved: the camaraderie, the surfing, travelling the world and having a good time.
Hoy pauses,
“It was always important to have a good time. Whatever you’re doing, that’s what it’s about. It’s always important. I don’t have a motto but if I did it would be, live and let live!
What did you do when you quit the tour in 2001?
I worked for Quikky doing all the air shows. I was an ambassador for them for ten years after the tour, maybe even longer. The Director of Nocturnal Activities was my job title, I had a business card saying that. They looked after me after the tour. I was with ‘em for twenty-six years, half a lifetime which is pretty radical, paid to do that from a company that helped you out your whole life.
How did it end?
End? All the companies went corporate is how it ended. They all fell by the wayside and now they’re all owned by same company. It’s all about the money. But that’s cool. I’m not bitter about it. I had a hell time, the best time ever with Quiksilver. That was sick fun, thank you.
And then you had earn a little cash, first as a concreter. How was that snap into reality?
The Life of a Concreter, the LOC, that was gnarly. Gnarly! Reality! The reality check is you can’t spend what you want to spend. You can’t have an extravagant lifestyle like on the tour when you were travelling the world surfing, doing what you want and spending whatever you wanted. It was a mate’s company and I worked with hard living, hardworking people. Concreters deserve all the money they get and they don’t get much. Four am starts every day, five days a week. It was crazy but it was cool how they work together and get something done. I was blown away by the magnitude of the work. Life of a Concreter, motherfucker!
After that I did a bit of NDIS work and started a beer company, Steel City, for a couple of years. It was the best job I’ve never had. I was delivering kegs and cartons of beer but it didn’t pan out like we thought it would. We got out without spending all of our money, which was cool. Everyone worked hard but we needed investors when we wanted to get bigger and they weren’t there. We didn’t go into it expecting to be millionaires but we had a go. I loved it. Delivering kegs and drinking beer with people, you can’t go wrong.
What do enjoy about beer?
Beer? Ha! The effect! The social aspect. There’s nothing better than having a beer with your mates and taking shit. It’s good for ya! A lot of men need it. Not the alcohol, the social interaction. I like being social. I like hanging out with people, drinking beer and going surfing. Blokes need to speak to more blokes. They get stuck in life and they don’t hang out with their mates like they used to because of family and work. You don’t do the things you did when you grew up and it wrecks a few people.
What happened with your gall bladder?
I had a couple of years of real bad pains in my stomach, worst pains I had ever. The doctors said, oh yeah, it’s heartburn. Then it got so bad at four am one morning I drove myself to emergency and they checked it out and told me it was my gall bladder. I had to wait six months until it had settled and they could operate. It was a radical operation. I was in hospital for four months. Then they left some in and I had to go back and have my stomach cut open. I’ve tried to get it out of my memory. It was fucked. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. That was a radical couple of years. I don’t mean to make it sound dramatic but I was in hospital for a long time. I was skinny, grey skinned and had a bag hanging out of me to drain the fluid. It was shit. I was still sponsored by Quiksilver at that stage and I was still getting paid. I think they thought I was going to blame it on them. No chance. It was just a random thing that happens. It had nothing to do with my lifestyle because if it did, I would’ve deserved it.
What’s an average day for you?
I haven’t worked for a while so I’m spending all may savings which sucks. I have to find me a job but I’m unemployable. No skills. Fuck. I ain’t going back to LOC. I just helped deliver a party boat with two of my friends from the Gold Coast to Adelaide (1600 nautical miles). It took six weeks and because it was a party boat we could only travel at six to ten knots and only when it was flat and there was no wind. It was wild. He was a pirate and she was viking and there were three of us on a one hundred-foot boat. At night you have no perception of anything. It’s gnarly shit. We had breakdowns, broken steering rods, it was madness, but a sick thing to do.
Do you still love surfing?
Of course I still loving surfing! It’s the best thing ever! You don’t stop loving it but I get why older surfers stop. They ride the wrong surfboards to enjoy it. I ride my Dad’s hand-me-downs and of course you don’t surf like you used to, but if you can get a barrel and do some turns, there’s nothing better in the world. Now I just want to go fast. I don’t need to turn anymore. Someone said, I want to see you do a hack and I said, I’ve done enough hacks, I just want to go fast. I’ll ride a wave and not do a turn and flick off and go, how sick was that? For the last six months, since I’ve come good, I surf as much as I can. You gotta keep surfing as you get older. It hurts, I know that. You surf for an hour and a half and your shoulders and neck are aching. You’re not whining about it. It fucking hurts! But it’s worth it. If you stop it, it’ll get worse.
How did you react to events like your old tour pals Sunny and Shmoo passing?
It sucks they were even in that world. You go through those dark times and think you’ve got nothing else to live for and you’re a burden on other people. (Suicide) is not the option. You’ve gotta get on with it. Have a go. My mum was would say, ‘Matthew, you’l be fine. You’ve done this before. Don’t stress about it.’ That’s true, Mum, thank you.
Are you looking forward to returning work?
If you don’t have to work for a living, why would ya! It sucks!
(Note: this story first appeared in The Surfers Journal 34:6, still the best surfing magazine in existence.)