Bobby Owens of Hawaii finished #10 in the 1981 SURFER Poll. Ahead of Larry Bertlemann, Larry Blair, Hans Hedemann, and a pubescent world tour giant-killer named Martin Potter.

Owens, 24, was a Sunset Beach grandmaster. He played that vast and insanely complicated lineup with more skill and knowledge and patience than anybody but Michael Ho. In big surf, his forehand bottom turn was a thing of knee-buckling beauty, long and deep-set, with Owens cantilevered over his board and driving it home like a Grand Prix motorcycle racer. He won the Pro Class Trials at Sunset. Beat Tom Carroll, in fact. Way back in 1977, as a pro tour rookie, Owens finished runner-up to Eddie Aikau in the Duke contest. He had chops from here to across the street, in other words.

Yet in many ways, Owens' placing in the SURFER Poll Top Ten is hard to fathom. The Poll is a popularity contest, a fantasy-fulfillment exercise, a chance to throw petals at the feet of stars. And here you have Bobby Owens. As glam-free as the day is long. Red hair, freckles, adult braces, Peter Frampton shoulders, suntan like an extreme D&D player. Bobby looked like your 10th-grade chemistry class lab partner. Or your new best friend from summer camp. It might not jump out at you while paging through a few 1981 vintage surf magazines, but there actually was a bit of flair in play, a little style to bite on, some flashes of cool here and there. None of it came from Bobby Owens. He put on the assigned Lightning Bolt team gear, showed up for heats on time, and that was that.

Now that I think about it, though, maybe Owens, without meaning to, flipped that Ralph Malph mojo to his advantage. Sure, SURFER Poll voters will lean into the larger-than-life figures, the godheads: Slater, Reynolds, and Florence in 2014; Tomson, Bartholomew, and Horan in 1981. But the Everyman constituency—that's real, too. Think Jack Lemmon holding up an Oscar. Think Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I can't recall if I voted in the '81 Poll. Probably I did. No doubt, working from the top down, I would have loaded my ballot with the usual suspects. I like to think, though, that if my pencil faltered over the #10 spot, I would have eventually wrote Owens' name. Out of self-respect. Hell, minus the freckles and courage the Grade-A surf talent, I 

THERE'S A LITTLE BOBBY OWENS IN ALL OF US

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