Bruce Jenkins' article on Pat and Tom Curren ran in the March 1995 issue of SURFER Magazine.

The road to Pat Curren’s place leads to nowhere. It is the province of emaciated cows, soft-eyed burros and green iguanas, lurching to attention as the odd vehicle rolls by. It's a slice of the Old West, stark and remote near the southern tip of Baja, and the few people who live there find solace in the desolation.

Most of them are surfers, prominent names from the sport’s glorious past. All of them crave the privacy that comes with a barren landscape, dirt roads and seldom-ridden pointbreaks. Not one of them, however, is as committed to the lifestyle as Pat Curren.

He lives in an old, beat-up trailer with his dog, his surfboards and a set of tools, because that's exactly how he likes it. Not even the incredible career of his son, Tom Curren, arguably the greatest surfer of all time, has brought the man out of the wilderness. The two haven't seen each other on Pat's turf in nine years. They both seem to fancy the idea, but the breakup of the Curren family left scars, and somehow the reunion just hasn't happened.

Pat is now a full 30 years removed from his glory. From the fall of 1957 through the spring of 1962—the first five seasons of Waimea Bay’s history—nobody rode the Bay bigger, better, or with more calculated precision than Pat Curren. He also shaped the finest big-wave guns of his time. His legend is duly acknowledged by the likes of Greg Noll, Mike Doyle and Peter Cole, who says without hesitation, “Pat was the master, the king of Waimea, To this day, I've never seen anybody get bigger, cleaner waves or ride them so well.”

The rewards? None, by his own choosing. Curren was always one to flee before a place got spoiled: Windansea, the North Shore, even Costa Rica—and he is found today in full retreat from civilization. He’ll surface occasionally for a gathering of old-time surfers or the chance to shape some classic guns for discerning buyers. But mostly it's just Pat and his Jack Russell terrier in the wilds of Mexico, and everybody else be damned.

He is not easily reached, in any sense. I had the good fortune of tackling the washboard roads with Jim Hart, a transplanted South Bay surfer who has lived and worked in the Los Cabos area for eight years. He knew how to find Curren, and we approached him together on a sweltering August day. But we arrived with trepidation.

For one thing, Curren had sent a very direct message that he did not want to be interviewed. That came as no surprise to Noll, who said, “This guy hardly talks to people he knows. He's very quiet, and can be very intimidating. It’s the first two minutes you gotta worry about, because this guy can spot bullshit from a mile away. You'll know within 30 seconds if you’re an asshole.”

“You're going down there?” said Tom Curren. “Well . . . good luck. Bring some beer. That might help."

We brought a case. Pat Curren had no idea what to do with his unexpected visitors, but the beer got his attention. We bought ourselves a minute or two as he stashed it in his refrigerator.

"Got a couple messages for you,” I volunteered nervously. "Peter Cole says he’s still mad at you for stealing his Thanksgiving dinner in 1959. And Greg Noll says you're the best chicken-stealing partner he ever had.”

A thin smile of recollection crossed Curren’s face as he cracked open a beer. Somehow, the three of us got seated in some old, creaky chairs, signifying progress. But I was still far from an actual interview. “Didn’t you get the message I sent?” said Curren. “Because to tell you the truth, I don’t want to do this.” Just on a lark, I mentioned Jose Angel, the great big-wave surfer from Curren’s day. Another little light went on. "Jose was the best man at my wedding,” he said, admiringly. “Toughest man I ever knew."

Thus began about an hour of conversation with one of surfing’s most reclusive figures. Knowing I was walking the thin line of intrusion, I didn’t even think of hauling out my notepad until Curren got up to take a leak. Right then, a bit of the Curren mystique took hold. I had a little tape recorder in my bag, and while I intended to keep it there, I figured I’d just turn the thing on, maybe pick up a few choice sounds or comments.

It wouldn't work. Here was a tremendously reliable machine, never gave me a single problem before, and it worked beautifully that very same night. But I swear, it would not work on Pat Curren’s property.

After a few minutes he asked, “You guys ready?” and I knew we had passed inspection. He was offering more beer. Hell, I said yes, and I wasn’t even ready.

They were all crazy back then. Not modern-day crazy, with gangs and crack cocaine and drive-by shootings, but innocent crazy. To be a La Jolla surfer in the '50s meant you never held back: in your drinking, your partying, and especially your surfing, where the test of skill was a double-overhead day at Windansea. Nobody savored that life, or typified it more, than Patrick King Curren.

Everyone took pride in his home area, but just as surely, everyone in California knew there was something different about the La Jolla guys: Curren, Mike Diffenderfer, Wayne Land, Al Nelson, the Eckstrom brothers, Ricky Naish, Buzzy Bent, Tiny Brain Thomas, Billy Graham, Butch Van Artsdalen. "The most rebellious group of people I ever met,” says Fred Van Dyke, who came out of Santa Cruz. “I’m sure some of them came from rich families, but they rejected that kind of life, ridiculed it. If a guy made some money, he’d go out and buy everybody food and drink, and the next day he’d be scrounging for a cup of coffee. They were like wild animals.”

With the Mexican border beckoning, groups of them would go on blind-drunk Tijuana rages for days, waking up on some roadside without a clue where they were. Pranks and daredevil stunts were the very essence of their lives.

They all surfed big Windansea—out of sheer determination, if not raw talent—and when the first films and still photos arrived with big-wave images of Hawaii, nearly all of them made the pilgrimage. Curren didn’t even start surfing until 1950, the year he turned 18, but by 1955 he was among the first serious wave of California surfers to take on Makaha and Sunset.

“Nobody taught me,” Curren says. “Does anybody teach anybody? It’s kind of like learning how to ride a bike. Somebody gives you a push, then watches you crash into a pole.”

Curren was a little older than the rest, and with his lifestyle honed by the La Jolla days, he set the tone for North Shore living. “He molded it into a state-of-the-art lifestyle,” says Noll. “He had this terrible old '36 Plymouth, probably the shittiest car of all time, and the cops gave him a bunch of crap about having the front windshield knocked out. Pat always had this way about him, getting from Point AI to B in the shortest distance, without getting real complicated. So he just jerked out one of the side windows and wedged it onto the driver’s side, and he got away with that for a couple months. That was his idea of a windshield."

The North Shore was nothing but farmland back then, "and you basically had a bunch of local people growing food, raising pigs and chickens,” said Noll. "When Pat and I went on patrol, there wasn’t a chicken or a duck that was safe. I can still see us running down the beach at Pupukea with a big fat chicken in each hand, calves burning in the soft sand with a couple of pit bulls on our ass. We'd barbecue ’em up later and have a hell of a dinner. Pat was also a pretty decent fisherman and a great diver. So between the ocean, the chickens and the ducks, he got along pretty good."

They lived out of cars and panel trucks, slept on the beach when all else failed, and occasionally got to rent an actual building. In a truly inspired moment, Curren created a surfer’s palace that came to be known as Meade Hall. "It was mostly Pat and the La Jolla guys—maybe 10 guys altogether,” says Van Dyke “It was a three-bedroom, fully furnished place for $65 a month acoss from Ke Iki Road. Pat went in there like always, checked it out, didn’t say anything. Then he lined up everybody for a meeting and the plan unfolded. Two days later, they had completely gutted the place. Just tore the insides out of it. With the leftover lumber they built surfboard racks along the side and a giant eating table down the middle. Pat got the Meade Hall idea from the old King Arthur books. That was the meeting place for all valiant gladiators.”

Ricky Grigg said Curren would sit at the head of the table, often wearing a Viking hat, “and he’d pound on the table, going, ‘Ahh! Eat! We hungry! Gotta surf big waves tomorrow! Take wife and pull her by hair into room!’ Just totally joking around. I mean, the most Pat would ever say in a day was about eight words, and I just said all eight of ’em.”

Needless to say, the landlord wasn’t stoked. When he showed up a month later to collect the rent, Meade Hall died a tragic death.

Quite against his will, Curren was becoming legendary around the North Shore. Mike Doyle made his first trip in the fall of 1959, and in his book 

From the way people talked about Pat Curren, I imagined him to be the greatest surfer in the world, a magnificent physical specimen, with an electrifying personality. But when Curren finally arrived and we met him at the airport, I was disappointed. He was gaunt and pale, with a pointed chin, sunken cheeks and worried eyes. He had a military haircut, was real quiet and moody. On the drive back to the North Shore, he didn’t say one word.

Little by little, I learned more about Pat Curren: He made his living as a professional diver working the offshore oil platforms back in California. He was close to 30 years old, a bit of a loner, and I soon found out that Curren wasn’t the dazzling surfer I had imagined. He had guts and rode the hell out of the biggest waves, but what really set Curren apart was that he made the most beautiful, streamlined boards any of us had ever seen. Each one of his boards was a cross between a work of art and a weapon, like some beautifully crafted spear.

Curren had shaped for Dale Velzy back home, and by the late ’50s, he was making the definitive boards for Waimea Bay. “Pat was putting rocker in his boards, which really set him apart,” says Van Dyke. “If you needed a board in a day or two, he’d have it right there on your lawn, and he did all this with some really crude tools. If challenged, this guy could shape a redwood board with a drawknife."

“A lot of people don’t realize that Pat and Mike Diffenderfer were shaping way ahead of Dick Brewer," says Cole. “Pat was the first guy to produce the ultimate gun. Joe Quigg and Bob Shepherd were making nice boards for all-around surfing, but Pat made the stiletto, specifically for Waimea, where all you want to do is go from Point A to Point B on the biggest wave that comes through."

“No question about it,” Grigg concurs. “He was the best shaper. Number One. He had a real concept of the elephant gun. First guy to shape it, first guy to ride it. He was so respected, he had a cult following, kind of like David Koresh (laughs). He was a guru."

"He didn’t want to be, though,” says Cole. “That was the amazing thing. He did not want to be a leader. Guys just gravitated to him."

They say Curren could easily go a full day without speaking—which was remarkable, for when it came to a pure sense of humor, he was an ace in any company. “He had that sly little grin, and almost everything he did had a taste of humor," says filmmaker Bruce Brown. "He's the kind of guy who would pour lighter fluid into his mouth, light a match and go, ‘Hey, watch this’ and poof! Big explosion. Then he’d give you that funny little grin and walk away. He'd be glassing surfboards in his kitchen, figuring you might sit there and watch for a while, and next thing you know, you’re stuck to the floor. One time he showed up in Hawaii with nothing but a 10-pound sack of flour for making tortillas. That was his luggage.”

In the words of virtually everyone interviewed, “There are a million Pat Curren stories.” Here are a few:

Van Dyke: "Tommy Zahn, Buzzy Trent and I did a lot of training at Ala Moana—running, paddling, swimming, the whole thing. Zahn was a real fanatic. Pat didn’t really care about training. So we’re all down there one day and Pat’s sort of standing around, smoking a cigarette with a beer in his hand. He says to Zahn, ‘Race you the length of the Ala Moana channel.’ Well, Tommy just starts laughing. ‘You gotta be kidding,’ he says. ‘I'll be kicking in your face.’ But everybody gathers around, knowing what Pat’s capable of. Well, Curren just kills him. Leaves him in the dust. I thought Zahn was gonna commit suicide.”

Grigg: "We were surfing a solid 25-foot day at Waimea one late afternoon, perfect conditions, sun going down, when we see this guy Jim Caldwell out there—bodysurfing! He was a collegiate swimmer at USC, and I guess he figured he’d get the feel of some big waves. A little before dark this huge set came in, so big that Jim couldn’t get around it on the shoulder. He was in 60 feet of water and he still hit bottom. He ended up mid-bay, screaming for help. Pat and I got over there, but the current was taking him so fast toward the rocks, there was no way he could make it. Now it’s just about dark. Pat and I talked him into swimming back out, full rotation, then coming in through the break. The three of us. It was terrifying. We were very lucky to get him in. He was so weak when we got him to the beach, he just collapsed there, unable to move. Every now and then I see Jim I Caldwell, and he always says the same thing: ‘It’s been a great life. Thanks to you and Pat Curren.’”

Brown: “In the early days, when Waimea was first being ridden, guys were real leery of the place. They felt a little better if Curren was around. One day it was just huge, and Pat was due in from the Mainland that afternoon, so everybody’s going, ‘We’ll be on it. Pat’s coming in. Wait until he gets here.’ So Curren pulls up and they’re all ready, waiting for the signal to just charge out there. Pat takes a look and says, ‘Shit. Sure looks big when you haven’t seen it for a while.’ Walked off and left everybody standing there.”

Noll: "Pat was really known for his diving. He'd free-dive down 60, 70 feet and wrestle huge turtles back to the surface, so guys loved to go out there with him. Neal Tobin told me he went on a diving trip with Curren, and Pat’s totally quiet. Three days go by, and the guy’s said maybe two words. Tobin finally grabbed him by the neck and screamed, ‘I can't take this any longer! For God's sake, say something!”’

Mickey Munoz: “When the surf was flat, a bunch of us would hike up to Waimea Falls and dive off into the water. The normal jump is about 35, 40 feet, but if you go around the falls and up, there's a ledge people claimed was about 80 feet. Just getting up there was kind of dangerous, but Del Cannon and I climbed up and sat there, trying to psyche ourselves into diving. So we’re there about 45 minutes, hemming and hawing, finding all sorts of excuses not to go when Pat Curren comes climbing up. This was around 1957, and I barely knew the guy. He takes kind of a nervous look over the edge and says, ‘You guys are nuts. I would never do that.’ And he kind of backs off the ledge and goes down below, where the rest of the guys are taking the regular dive. So Del and I go back to our psyche job, and about 15 minutes later, Pat comes back up. Without saying a word, he crawls right between us and jumps. Everybody was just in shock. Couldn’t believe what we had seen. That told me a lot about Pat: really a ballsy person, but understated. I just went, ‘This guy’s my hero'.”

Brown: “I heard Pat got bit by a moray eel one time, so I went over to Meade Hall to check it out. This is the conversation . . . .

“Pat, I heard you got bit out there.’

“All the while, Pat’s holding his hand in his pocket," said Brown. “I asked if I could see it, and he begrudgingly pulls it out, just a piece of hamburger, covered with old tobacco and pocket lint, unbelievably bad. Diffenderfer and those guys tried to get him to a doctor, but Pat just sat and rocked in a chair for a couple of days. Finally he just fell out of the chair with blood poisoning. We had to drag him to the hospital.”

Van Dyke: “I'm not sure anyone really knew Pat. I don't think anyone ever penetrated his depth. And that was sort of his charm. He was quiet, strong and silent, sort of a John Wayne type. He had an incredible effect on women; they’d be so impressed and nervous, they could hardly speak to him. They'd just fall apart. The image I'll always have is from Waimea one day in 25-foot surf. We’re all standing around, waxing our boards, and there’s Pat with a cigarette and a beer. He walks down to the shore, flips the beer over his head, kicks the cigarette into the ocean, paddles out and catches the wave of the day."

Countless surfers ride Waimea Bay. Only a few can truly claim it as their spot, their niche in the surfing world, at the kind of size that identifies the truly courageous. In a way, Pat Curren was the Darrick Doerner of his era: quietly going about his business, rarely mentioned with the really hot surfers, going virtually unnoticed in routine surf, then appearing on the biggest, nastiest, most hideous wave at Waimea— and making it.

“Pat was the original,” says Noll. “He was in a class of his own back then, the first guy to ride Waimea well and really examine the place. He was with us that day in ’57 when it was surfed for the first time, and we all went on our ass. From that point on, he concentrated on making the right boards for Waimea, being patient, sitting outside, and really tackling those big waves. And he rode the hell out of ’em. He does remind me of Doerner, come to think of it. And I’ll tell you, to be honest, I tried to emulate Curren’s better qualities as the years went by.”

Van Dyke remembers feeling a sense of uneasiness when he saw Curren on big days. “I enjoyed surfing with him, but I didn’t use him as a lineup. Wherever Pat was sitting, I didn’t want to be. Because he’d be over on the other side of the peak, and Pat was probably the only guy who could make it from that position. He and Peter Cole used to push each other so far over, there was no place to go but left (laughs). He knew that lineup like nobody else. Even better than Greg.”

His peers remember him as a quiet, brooding presence in the water, sitting by himself and waiting hours, if necessary, for the day’s biggest wave. “But that’s the essence of his reputation,” says Cole. “To me, quantity means nothing at Waimea. If you get the biggest wave out there, you’ve won the day. And Pat had that over all of us. He never advertised it, either. Never had a media following. The rest of us were running around, you know, ‘Did you get the picture?’ while he’s just sitting way outside, and all of a sudden the set of the day comes, and he’s on the damn thing. Used to drive me insane. My first couple of winters out there, Pat gave me an inferiority complex."

Meanwhile, Curren had met the one woman who could steer his energy away from the North Shore. Pat and Jeanine Curren were married in 1961 and Tom, the first of their three children, was born three years later. As the Currens’ family life began, Pat gave up Hawaii for good. “Knowing Pat, he just said the hell with it,” says Van Dyke. "He had done what he wanted, he was the No. 1 Waimea rider, and he had nothing else to prove. It’s funny, I saw him in Hawaii about 15 years later. I was driving down to Laniakea and Waimea was pretty big, maybe 18 feet plus, and when I drove up to the lookout spot, I saw Pat Curren standing there. I knew he hadn’t been out there for years, and he was just reliving the whole scene. He looked so pensive, engrossed, you could almost see the memories come through his head. I didn’t even disturb him. It was a really impressive and touching sight.”

A look into the Curren family wouldn’t be complete without the perspective of Sam George. He first met the Currens in 1977, when Tom was 13 and really starting to draw attention, and he lived in Santa Barbara for the next eight years. George was around in 1980, when Pat left the family and fled to Costa Rica, never to return. He has traveled the world with Tom in the dual role of journalist and friend. Now 38, George has a flood of memories and holds all of the Currens in the highest regard. In a recent conversation, these were some of Sam’s thoughts:

“By the time I came around, Pat wasn’t surfing much anymore. It was too crowded for him. But he’d show up on big days at Rincon and he still had that really clean, trimming style. I remember being outraged when people dropped in on him. I just wanted to scream, ‘Get out of his way! Don’t you know who he is?’

“Pat had a detached way about him. Jeanine was totally involved with Tom, a real driving force in his career, but Pat was always off in the back, playing with his black lab. He’s always been really kind to animals, and if he went surfing, he’d make a little bowl out of foil, get some water, make sure the dog was okay. People rarely talked about Pat being the parent of this incredible surfer. It was always Jeanine.

"She has a photograph of their wedding day, at Maile Point on the West Side. The surf was pumping, and there's Pat standing behind an old woody, big guns sticking out the back of the car and he’s leaning up against it, wearing Sammy Lee's tuxedo jacket—way too big for him—and smoking a cigar. The look on his face is so classic. It was like a treasure trove to me, just studying this portrait of self-assuredness. He's getting married, the surf's big, and he's leaning up against a board that he made. Jeanine told me that after they got married, they rushed back to the beach because the surf was big. She says, ‘I spent my wedding day wondering if my husband was going to come back alive.'

“I was down at the office of a bodyboarding magazine one time, working on an article, when I came upon some old archival photos in a box. And I saw a picture so profound, I had to go home. It was an old black-and-white of Pat Curren, and it looked like it had been framed from a Douglas Fairbanks film. Pat had decided he was gonna sail home from Hawaii on a schooner one year, and there's Pat at the helm, with a beard, wearing a turban. You felt like you were looking at Sir Richard Burton, or Sinbad, and I thought to myself, ‘My God, that's a surfer.' He wasn't flying back on Hawaiian Air, he was sailing home. The pride I saw in that photo, the sheer exuberance! said, ‘Look, guys, I’d love to help you out with Keith Sasaki drop-kneeing T-Street but forget bodyboarding. I’ve got to go home now.’

"One thing I’ve always savored was a day at El Capitan when I saw Pat loading up his old gray pickup, and he had this board that looked like a replica of his old Waimea guns. I’m looking at the fin, and it seemed so inadequate—almost like a keel fin, not very high, with a real long base. So I summoned my courage and said, ‘Pat’—I dared to call him that: Mr. Curren seemed stupid—‘you know, you didn't have a lot of fin on those boards.’ And he sat there for a second, and all of a sudden he stopped tying his trucker’s knot, because of course he wouldn’t use surf racks. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, God, I said a real stupid thing.’ And he sort of looked off to the side and said, ‘Back then you didn’t need a lot of fin. All you needed was a lot of rail and a lot of guts.’

“A lot of people say Tommy's going to be like his dad. There are some parallels. Obviously they’re both kind of quiet and speak mainly through their actions. They have the same walk. They look quite a bit alike. Pat had a major family breakup, and now Tommy’s divorced, too, with kids of his own. Will he be a nomad like Pat? Hey, nobody can really say that. But I definitely think Tommy’s a lot more driven than his dad. You can’t become a five-time world champion—that includes two as an amateur—without loving the limelight. You might win one world title just on pure skill and verve, but you can't win five unless you really enjoy being a surf star and a champion. And Pat turned his back on all that kind of stuff.

“Tommy told me one time that his dad disapproved of what he does, being a pro and a competitive surfer. It hadn’t been spoken in words, but Tommy got the feeling his dad wasn’t real stoked about the direction he went in surfing. Now that's a pretty tough thing to live with. You become the greatest surfer ever, and your dad, who was also a great surfer, doesn’t approve of it? The last time Tom saw him, I think they reached some kind of resolution.”

A Curren story was relayed to George: Apparently, a year or two ago, someone sent Pat a surf video that showed Tommy in full glory, ripping waves all over the world. Pat was reportedly so overwhelmed by the scope of his son’s work, his eyes teared up.

“I don’t know if that really happened," Sam George said. "But I hope it did."

The little Jack Russell terrier curled up and fell asleep as Pat Curren relaxed in his chair. They are incredibly sturdy dogs, tiny in stature but of a mind that they are large and can enforce. “He got into it with a couple of ranch dogs the other; day,” said Pat. “They beat him up pretty good."

Curren's place looked totally disorganized, almost abandoned. His layout consisted of a dirt floor, a five-board quiver, some tired and loose lumber, a propane refrigerator, well-worn coolers, some workbenches, assorted tools, and a handsome dune buggy for four-wheel travel. A simple palapa covered the trailer, and there were no screens on the windows. A mid-summer rain had drenched southern Mexico the previous night, bringing great hordes of insects into everyone’s life.

"Too hot with the screen,” he said. "I sleep outside.”

“That's hardcore,” said my friend Jim Hart. "What about the bugs?"

The interview progressed in that tone. Curren taking long pauses before answering, usually thinking it over with a long hit off his beer. He didn’t say much, but his comments were direct, to the point, and spiced with the inevitable Curren humor. We couldn’t help but be impressed by the man's honesty, humility, and light-hearted nature.

Looks like you’ve been glassing some boards.

“Well, it’s a real good way to ruin glassy conditions if the surf’s good. Soon as you lay out a side, the wind comes up. I don't know how it knows.”

"Small. I don't have the range. An 8- to 10-foot wave is startin' to look pretty big to me these days.”

Peter Cole said he was amazed at how many Windansea guys did well in Hawaii. He figured it's such an open-ocean type of wave, it was good preparation.

Peter also said he wanted to catch every wave in sight when he was younger, and that he got his patience in big surf from you.

“Peter's the greatest. He didn’t learn anything from me. I never saw anybody enjoy surfing so much. He’s my hero.”

The old guys say you made a science of Waimea, that you were the ultimate craftsman and the first to really study the place.

“I don’t remember being that serious."

"FATHER, SON, HOLY SPIRIT," PAT CURREN PROFILE BY BRUCE JENKINS (1995)

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