Not all doom and gloom by the sounds of it
A Chance Encounter
Notes from the Lineup
Words by Tim Baker
It's a pleasant Monday morning at the Alley - small, fun peelers running down a nicely groomed sandbar buffed by the whisper of an offshore. Sun shining. Mellow crowd. A few SUPs who seem to be minding their manners, the regular longboard crew, a couple of energetic rippers on retro fish.
My six-year-old has a late start due to a school excursion and I figure we have time for a quick paddle. It's grommet heaven out there - a knee-high, sand bottom J-Bay running for hundreds of metres. My boy rides a few while I watch on, spellbound in the shallows, until one carries him too far down the beach and ends in deep water. He's a little freaked out by the distance between us and wants to come in.
We arrive in the shorebreak at the same time as a mature-age standup paddler. He cuts an unobtrusive figure with his slim build and sunhat. He and Alex are in animated conversation by the time I reach the sand.
To be honest, I'd heard the great man was out there, visiting our fair shores as part of a promotional tour with Wayne Lynch for Patagonia, while spruiking his latest book. But the timing of our exits from the water is sheer accident. It's a slightly surreal scene I take in as I wade out of the water, watching my young fella' chatting amiably with Mr Pipeline himself, Gerry Lopez.
I've met the Master a few times over the years, and I introduce myself and my boy."This is Gerry," I tell Alex. "You know, like Tom and Jerry." I immediately want to take back the naff comment, as if it's a bit undignified. But Alex pounces on it."You're the cat ," he grins cheekily, "and I'm the mouse. You've got to chase me." Gerry grins back, apparently enjoying an audience not entirely awestruck by his presence.
From Left to right - Lopez, Ron Adler, Jack McCoy and Mick Dibetta
It's a big morning for surf legends at the Alley. Larger than life surf film maestro Jack McCoy has been shooting Lopez. He comes ambling up, video camera in hand and points it at my boy, who has no issue with being the centre of attention.
"I got a couple of waves of yours," big Jack tells little Alex. "What do you like best about surfing?" he poses, bringing the camera in close. "I don't know," Alex ponders, then decides: "Getting barreled!"We all laugh and make our way up the beach to the car park.
It's interesting to observe Lopez up close. I'm not normally in the thrall of surf legends but the man emits a definite aura. He moves slowly but deliberately, seems to give whatever's going on around him his full attention, makes unblinking eye contact with whomever he meets.
He's been speaking to packed houses throughout this Australian tour. A slightly-built 62-year-old, who only ever won two pro contests, who now lives miles from the ocean and snowboards more than he surfs, still has a gravitational pull like few other surfers.
Now, my local spot isn't normally such a hub of surf luminaries, especially on a quiet Monday morning, but suddenly it's as if someone's pulled out a surf legend magnet. There's local elder Ron Adler, the man who produced one of the first lines of surfing boardshorts in Australia back in 1963, still a fit and active daily presence in the lineup. Lifeguard Mick Dibetta, normally stationed at Burleigh and one of the world's great ocean paddlers, turns up. Mick's the man who taught Jamie Mitchell his craft and won the Molokai Challenge four times, and set a new course record, before his prot?g? Jamie took over and won it the next 10 years running.
Mick hardly gets mobbed in the streets here, but he's big news in Hawaii, respected as the consummate all-round waterman. He and Gerry exhibit a warm mutual respect. Next, four-time world title runnerup and world masters champion Cheyne Horan arrives in his surf school van ready for the days' lessons. He looks like a veritable grommet amid the surfing seniors.
I've got to get my boy off to his school excursion but I leave this gaggle of surfing identities ensconced in a cosy bubble of animated conversation. It's not often a quick morning session with my boy leaves me on such a high. I'd like to think it's not just the chance celebrity encounter. That it's more to do with the generational interaction - surfers in their 60s, 50s and 40s all finding inspiration and common ground in their various life stages, and able to share in the simple delight of a six-year-old just taking his first steps on a lifelong aquatic journey.
A lot of the time, I find it hard to believe in the existence of any kind of "surfing family" with shared values and a common bond, struggle to see much evidence of "community" in the so-called surfing community. Surfing's always been too keen to relegate its elders to the dustbin of history, I reckon. With its youth fixation popular surf culture's like a forest where all the mature trees are cut down. It doesn't provide much shade or foster great bio-diversity.
In those packed houses Lopez and Lynch have been fronting, I see the stirrings of a hunger for some kind of cultural continuum in surfing. I wander down the hill from my place to the SurfWorld Museum that night to hear Gerry speak, along with a couple of hundred others. We're not disappointed. He sells and signs dozens of his books, posters, even an old Lightning Bolt gun of his some collector has dragged along for the occasion. The legends are again in force - McTavish, Rusty Miller, Cheyne, and Baddy Treloar,
He speaks for close to an hour, quietly spinning yarns and philosophy to a rapt audience, in turns funny, poignant, profound. Among other startling revelations he describes the genesis of the shortboard revolution in Maui, credits Wayne Lynch as showing the world how to ride the new shortboards, and hints at a raucous road trip he and Baddy shared up the east coast, from Bells to Noosa after the 1970 world titles. He reckons when a news reporter hounded him to name the best surfer in the world back in the '70s, he nominated Tommy Zahn. "Who? Why? I've never heard of him. What's he done?" the reporter blustered. "He slept with Marilyn Monroe," was Gerry's cheeky riposte.
He makes me feel better about my odd vocation when he quotes the great Phil Edwards: "'The best part about surfing is talking about it afterwards.' In a sense he was right because the actual moments on the wave are so very brief and really quite fleeting that unless we talk about them afterwards we don't really get to look at them, examine them, maybe understand them," says Gerry. And he has this to say about being a mature-age surfer. "The first 20 years I surfed was just a test to see if I was really interested."
I stumble back out into a humid Summer night with a signed poster for my boy from "Uncle Gerry," and a warm inner glow that is not entirely due to the free beers.
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