A lil backside tuberiding clinic at Desert Point from tattered former top tenner…

Did you think that one day Chris Ward, that tattered San Clemente surfer better known for his flashes of temper than his preternatural tuberiding, would end up face-down in a ditch? He just fights and fights and fights, no cause too small, no sex too weak etc.

Ward, who turns forty in December, is the protagonist in this surprisingly satisfying five-minute short filmed at Desert Point by Ricky Serrano during the so-called swell-of-the-decade three weeks ago and just before a series of earthquakes that sent a hundred or so souls into Allah’s arms. 

There’s a middle-aged softness to Ward now. He has the stomach of a drinker or someone who eats cider-cured pork loin for every meal. He still enjoys cigarettes (who doesn’t, let’s be honest) and his tube wrangling skill is so refined it pays any surfer to examine and study.

Pro-in-the-making eschews dazzling career as dancing bear for…art! Like the olden days!

Little Billy  Bain. Sweet Billy Bain. Some moons ago, the son of the pro surfing great Robbie Bain, was the finalist in a find-the-great-new-talent contest my magazine ran. He didn’t win, that honour went to the unknown jibber from Cabarita called Chippa Wilson, but he came very close.

I knew a little of Billy’s art, at the time it was quite naive and derivative, but like all things, the kid found his heart’s true desire, his passion, and began to grow it, develop it. Take criticism, move in unexpected directions, live it.

In this, the first of a three-part series by the wetsuit company O’Neill about its lesser-known but nevertheless interesting surfers, Billy’s pivot from surf to art is unpacked, as they say.

“I’m an artist and that’s what I do,” says Billy. “My purpose is to make cool shit.”