With any luck, I'll end up like one of those old hobbled blind dogs who can get around the house okay just from having trod the hallways and rooms a million times in the past. Except instead of going from the food bowl to the doggy bed, I'll be slow-walking my way back and forth through surf history. And when that time comes I sincerely hope that, every now and then, I will still bump into something that surprises me, something I hadn't noticed before. Like last Monday, when I found this segment on Stanley "Savage" Park, at Pipeline, from MacGillivray-Freeman's 1967 movie Free and Easy. "Found" is the wrong word. I've seen this bit at least 20 times before, but all of a sudden it hit me just how smooth and flowing and dialed-in Park's surfing is. Very David Nuuhiwa. And maybe a little . . . Gerry Lopez? Can you surf like somebody when they're a year or two ahead of you on the timeline? Or wait a second. Maybe Lopez was surfing like Park! Hello, Gerry?

In this Free and Easy clip I'm looking at, Stanley's riding Pipe as well as all the big studs of the day: Jock and Eberle and David Nuuhiwa. He looks a lot like David in fact, really smooth.

Stanley was a really great surfer. Great style. Jock and Jackie were sort of the two main guys out there around that time, 1967. I watched them a lot. But both of those guys, their style was a little mechanical, you know? Working-man surfers. Where Stanley was just so fluid and soulful. He was a real artist. And a sweetheart of a guy, too.

There's some Park in your surfing, I think.

Definitely. I mean, the idea for me was just to be a better surfer any way I could, so I was stealing bits and pieces from everybody. But yeah, I just loved how smooth and clean Stanley was, and I watched him very closely.

From Nanakuli, yeah. He lived right by Maili, grew up surfing around there, mostly at a place called Tracks, and there were no crowds whatsoever. Stanely must have ridden a million waves by himself. Then all of a sudden he shows up at Ala Moana, and right away he was one of the best guys.

I don't how somebody that good can be so far under radar. All I've ever seen of the guy is a photo or two and that little clip in Free and Easy.

He had a moment; it didn't last too long. But '65 to '67, man, everybody in Hawaii was so impressed with Savage. And that was a hard place to make an impression. If you spent any time at Ala Moana back then, up until I'd say the early '70s, you'd be looking at 

 many good surfers in the water at the same time. It was ridiculous. I remember when I first got out in the world and starting traveling, I expected the caliber of surfing to be like what I was used to at Ala Moana—and it never was. That spot had more top-notch surfers than anywhere in the world. And Stanley was pretty much at the top of the pyramid.

I've only seen the Pipe footage. Tell me what he was like at Ala Moana.

Smooth, like I said. But he also could really put it on edge. I mean, it was still longboard days, but he got pretty radical. He could get it up on rail. You know that picture Severson took of me, the off-the-top on the red board?

Yeah. That was all Stanley. That was me trying to surf like Savage.

I had a friend who lived in Foster Village, in Honolulu, and every Friday night they'd have these dances. That's where I first met Stanley. He had this beautiful blond girlfriend, and you kinda couldn't help but look at the two. Cause, I mean, Stanley was 

Like I say, he was real dark-skinned, and had these dark eyes, and people just started calling him "Savage."

I don't know, but it sounds maybe kind of racist? Did the name bum him out?

No, no. Not at all. Everybody called him that, he liked it, and it was cool. I mean, it was meant to be a cool-sounding name for one of the coolest surfers around.

I read something where you had one of Stanley's boards. Did he shape?

No, he had his own model, the Savage Special. Have you heard of Ramsey-Jay Surfboards?

Newport Beach, just south of the Frog House. Larry Felker was the shaper; great shaper.

I don't think the shop was around for very long. But for a while it was kind of a hot label; Ramsey-Jay built 

 great boards. Stanley must have gone over the Mainland at some point because he was on the Ramsey-Jay team, and he and Felker worked on this board together and called it the Savage Special, kind of a takeoff on the Trestles Special. So then Stanley comes home, he's back out at Ala Moana on his great board, this was 1966, and he just rode the 

 out of it. I remember sitting there, watching him, thinking, "Man, I have to get one of those boards." I was on a Jacobs, and it was fine, but now I just wanted to surf like Stanley. So I went home, picked up the phone, and ordered a Savage Special from Ramsey-Jay. It took fucking six months to arrive!

We did, yeah. But let me back up a little. That same year I got my Savage Special, 1966, I went to California for school. The first time I'd ever been out of Hawaii. I went to Whittier College.

Whittier? That's a haul to get to the beach.

I know. But there was no traffic back then, you could actually do it pretty easy. Anyway, I went to the Ramsey-Jay shop one day, walked in, and—shit, I could barely surf at that point, you know? I was still a kook. But they welcomed me, were incredibly nice, and next thing I know its, "Hey man, we want you on the team! Pick any board in the shop!" Which was a total shock. I think they just thought it was cool that I was from Hawaii. Fine by me. So I took a board, and there were a couple of other Hawaiian guys around at the time, and we'd all go surfing at River Jetties. In fact, my first picture in a magazine was shot there, a Photos from the Readers deal, and then right about that time Ramsey-Jay put my name in an ad—and that was pretty much it for my college career.

No, I finished the year, went back home with a couple of new Ramsey-Jay boards, and me and Savage surfed a lot together that summer at Ala Moana, and that's when we started hanging out a bit. A couple months go by, and I think it was his idea, but all of a sudden it was like "Hey, let's go back to California this September. The Ramsey-Jay guys will take care of us." I had to break it to my folks that I wasn't going to enroll at UH, which had been the plan; instead, I'm going to go on this California trip with my friend Savage. And they took one look at him, and were just thinking "Oh my God."

Acid. We were all taking a lot of acid. So my Dad pulled me aside and said, "You dumb shit, you're going to get drafted." This was 1967, right? I was 18. So dumb. But we went anyway, and somehow it all worked out. One of the Ramsey-Jay guys had a trailer down by the power plant between Huntington and Newport, so we had a place to live, we had plenty of boards; David [Nuuhiwa] and Stanley were friends, so he'd come around, take us surfing, drive us around in his new Porsche. We had a great time. Fat Paul Paterson, another friend of ours, he moved into the trailer too—it was a huge trailer—and he had a car, so we drove up and down the coast, surfed Trestles a lot. I remember one afternoon me and Savage hitchhiked all the way up to the Santa Monica Civic to see the Doors. We made it all the way to the front, right up against the stage, and Jim Morrison and Stanley locked eyes and I swear to God for just about the whole show Morrison was staring at Stanely, and Stanley was staring back at Morrison. It was like he was performing just for Savage! It was a trip!

Not long after that. In our trailer, Fat Paul had all these vials of Purple something-or-other in the fridge, and one day he's checking the levels on his vials, and they were all different. They were supposed to be the same. Turns out Savage had been going in and taking little tiny sips, then putting them back. He thought nobody would notice. And that was kind of the beginning of the end. He got pretty spacey. We went back to Hawaii, and he wasn't surfing as much, and just kind of dropped out of the scene altogether. I didn't see him for a long time, in fact.

 time. The drugs took him out pretty bad. I'd ask around now and then, "Hey, whatever happened to Savage?" but nobody knew anything. That went on for years. Then in the 1980s I was in a Longs drugstore, and I look over and there he was. "Stanley!" We starting talking, and he'd had this complete resurrection. This is the really great part of the story. He was clean, looking good, had his captain's license and was piloting a tugboat in Honolulu Harbour for Young Brothers, the big shipping company over there, been around forever. And that's a good job, man, a lot of responsibility. Then later I heard he was back in the water, I think he was living around Solana Beach, doing a lot of stand-up paddling . . . and was good at it, of course! I mean, Stanley turned it around, completely. Which wasn't usually the case, right? Most of the guys I knew who went down that path didn't come back, or at least not all the way back. Stanely did, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

[Photos: Greg MacGillivray, Dave Darling, John Severson, LeRoy Grannis]

GERRY LOPEZ ON FORGOTTEN SURF-ACE STANLEY "SAVAGE" PARK

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