This text-only article turned up recently in the EOS files, with the header "Remembering Rodney." It was written by Corky Carroll, who thinks it ran in the Orange County Register around 2000, but my newspaperarchive.com search came up empty, so it may have been a different paper. I will update this post if new information comes in. The version below has been slightly edited.

The other day I heard a name that I haven't heard in many, many years—Rodney Sumpter, aka "the Gopher." He got the nickname because he actually sort of looks like a gopher, same kinda buck teeth and stuff. Rodney is best known as the Father of English Surfing. But that really doesn't tell who he really is or how that whole part of his life came about. This is what really happened.

Rodney was born in England but grew up in Australia. He became an excellent surfer as a teenager and was high up in the younger surfing echelon over there in the mid-sixties. Along with being a good surfer, Rodney also had learned the fine art of working a situation. Some would call him an all-time con artist. Others would credit him with being extremely gifted at recognizing and manipulating an angle. The dude was either really slick or really greasy. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Here are a few examples of what I am talking about.

In 1966 they held the World Surfing Championships in San Diego. Rodney didn't qualify for the Australian Team so, realizing that being born in England might have some sort of value, he contacted somebody in the British government and got them to recognize him as a British surfer. He then rushed over to England and threw together a surfing contest with himself and the three or four other dudes that surfed in England at the time. This became the "National Championship." Naturally, Rodney won and was therefore the British Champion. This not only got him into the World Championships but got his way paid and all expenses covered as the "champion" of his country. Nine of the ten Aussies, meanwhile, had to pay their own way to America. And, being a very competitive dude, Rodney wound up in the finals, getting 5th. He placed higher than all the Aussies except Nat Young, who won the event. It was a great coup.

A few years later Rodney was traveling around the world making a surf movie. He got good at working his way into free places to stay and getting taken to dinner a lot. His best effort came during a trip to Maui. The day he arrived he was hitchhiking from the airport out to Lahaina and got picked up by a dude who surfed and was also a member of a group of flying saucer fanatics that called themselves the Xians. They believed that the Haleakala volcano was actually hollow with catacombs, and that flying saucers lived inside it. Rodney, never one not to recognize the big smiling face of opportunity winking at him, seized the moment and made up this incredible bald-faced lie about how he had actually seen a real flying saucer. And he said it in the fully believable way that only a master at this sort of thing can do.

Now, the thing about the Xians was that even though they fully believed all that stuff about aliens and flying saucers, the truth was none of them had actually ever seen one. And here was a dude, right there in the front seat of this guy's car, who had. So Rodney was invited to stay at his house and was asked to come to their big meeting a few nights later. Of course, the story Rodney told them got even better by the time the meeting took place, and the result was Rodney got a free place to stay for three months, all meals included, and even somebody's car to drive, 

 had a serious romance with one of the Xian's daughters.

Never spent a penny that whole trip. Classic Rodney.

Not much was sacred to the dude and even his friends had to be careful not to get caught in one of his schemes. I found out the hard way while in Australia for the 1970 World Championships. By then Rodney had fully dialed in his British angle. He had a girlfriend in Cornwall and had of course endeared himself to her family. This resulted in him having a place to stay and an official British address. But most of the time he was still living in Australia. Surfing was growing in England and the local surfing community had put together a small team for the 1970 World Contest. This included Rodney and a few young kids from Newquay. I was there representing the United States.

At that time the very first portable play-and-record cassette players had just come on the market here in America and I had brought one over to Australia. One day Rodney came to me and told me that one of the kids on the British team really wanted to buy the cassette recorder from me—but the kid was really poor and had barely enough money to be there and something about his mother at home being terminal and the bad life that the poor dude was leading and on and on with this really sad story. So I went ahead and told Rodney to give the dude the recorder and all my tapes and I'd get another one when I got home. Seemed like the right thing to do for a fellow surfer not as well off as me at the time.

A few days later I saw the kid over at the house where they were all staying. He told me how stoked he was on the recorder and thanked me for giving him such a good deal on it—only a hundred dollars. He saw the look on my face, and reality hit us both at the same time. Our heads snapped in unison toward Rodney, just as he was sneaking out of the front door. He'd worked us both. The next time I saw Rodney he had that irresistible "Okay, but ya still love me don't ya?" look on his face. He claimed he had needed the money for medicine for some sort of ailment. He looked healthy to me. Maybe a little richer, is all.

Rodney went on to live in England full time and, no fooling, really is very much responsible for the emergence of surfing in that country. From what I hear he has worked in and out of the film industry and still surfs quite a bit. The dude is a classic.

"THE DUDE WAS EITHER REALLY SLICK OR REALLY GREASY" - CORKY CARROLL REMEMBERS RODNEY SUMPTER

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