Phil Jarratt's profile on Terry Fitzgerald ran in the Spring 2000 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

Coledale, 1960. A collection of miner’s cottages hung like a string of imitation pearls around the neck of a coal-rich cliff that falls away to the sea. Dominating the village on the south coast of New South Wales is the Coledale Hospital, a bungalow-style building at the cliff top with a large, closed-in verandah where hard-boiled men with dust in their lungs and death in their sights sit and watch the waves breaking on the shore.

Among them this winter morning is a frizzy-haired 10- year-old boy, a sickly child wrapped in a blanket and in his thoughts. They are not happy thoughts. The doctors have told his parents the boy may lose a leg, and while they haven’t passed the news on to him, the boy knows that his condition is serious. Terry Fitzgerald stares out the window at the surf below and focuses his thoughts on a positive future. He will get better, he will do all the things he’s dreamed of. And like the surfers he watches way below, he too will ride free and flowing through life.

Almost 37 years later, Terry Fitzgerald reclines on a sofa in a room looking over a cliff that falls away to the sea. From this position, Fitzgerald can look south along the cliff to Narrabeen, where so many seminal events in his surfing career went down.

But he doesn’t, of course. In his middle years, Fitzgerald is not much given to the remembrance of things past.

Or so he says, at least until the third bottle of wine is uncorked. Then, despite his previous protestations, he can be prevailed upon to recall the glory days and give of the Gospel according to Fitz. And it’s an interesting story. Over a decade of North Shore winters and more than 15 years in the front line of Australian surfing, Fitzgerald managed to amass a mere handful of contest victories, and yet the consummate surfer-shaper, claimed by Dick Brewer in 1971 as the best surfer in the world, was undoubtedly one of the most influential stylists of his era.

But, for all that, Fitzgerald, at 47, sometimes has the aura of a man to whom life has dealt a fairly average hand. It’s not a chip, not even an attitude. Just a little hint that Terry Fitzgerald never quite matched the exacting standards he set for himself.

I first met Terry toward the end of 1974, around the time he was taming the frizz and the angst and adopting the persona of the responsible provider and, at 24, the elder statesman of competitive surfing in Australia. But I didn’t really begin to understand him until the following year in South Australia when he won his only national title, in atrocious surf, worse weather, with a vibe that could only be described as lowkey.

Amateur competition at that point was in its death throes; everyone had gone pro, man. Only the wannabes and the coulda-beens were battling it out in the mushburgers at Middleton, aka Dribbleton. Only the hackers and the Fitz, out there cruising and power-gliding in the slop, underlining every move with the finesse that came from understanding the contours of every inch of the double-wing swallow under his feet.

To be fair, there were other good surfers in the event, but Terry was stylistically many light years ahead. At one point in the pub, I asked: “Terry, what the hell are you doing here?”

He fixed me with his serious here-comes-my-take-on-everything stare, took a pull on his whisky and explained: “The Nationals are very important. They’re part of the fabric of surfing’s development, always will be. Besides, I’m a team player. I’m from Narrabeen.”

Team player, ha! From Narrabeen? Fitzgerald wasn’t really from anywhere. And it was kind of hard to imagine him talking like this to Sam and Owl and ’da boys. Like a diamond twinkling in the sun, Terry had momentarily revealed another facet. The bastard was always doing that.

Terry Fitzgerald was born in April 1950, the first child of Madge and Bill, a balls-up, groundbreaking diver with the Royal Australian Navy. Being in the service, Bill Fitzgerald was shifted around a lot, from one undistinguished tract house to the next. Terry’s first home was at Helensburgh, a railhead town on the NSW south coast, not far from the sea cliffs that characterize the dramatic coastline south of Sydney. One of Terry’s earliest memories is of sitting on the fuel tank of his father’s motorcycle, screaming down the narrow, ledging road to the beach at Stanwell Park.

It wasn’t a particularly unusual childhood until the beginning of 1960, when this rather determined, curly-headed kid was struck by a degenerative bone disease called osteomyelitis. The family knew the condition was serious, but it is difficult to imagine the trauma they must have gone through when the doctors flagged the possible amputation of Terry’s left leg below the knee.

Fortunately, a team of bone surgeons at nearby Bulli Hospital had been experimenting with a drug therapy, and when the little boy began to respond, they decided to attempt a series of bone grafts. So Terry was settled in on the clifftop at Coledale to endure the long haul to recovery with the old miners, many of whom were navigating a quite different road.

Terry recalls: “I spent more than nine months in that hospital, off and on, and I remember watching a lot of waves go unridden at Coledale Point. I guess I took notice of the surf for the first time, but if you want to know what I really got out of that experience, it was learning to accept people for what they are. There was no children’s ward. It was just a country hospital, and I was dumped in with everyone else. I played draughts, poker, and blackjack with the old miners, built model ships and planes with them, and watched them get ready to die. I’ll never forget the first time I saw someone die in the ward. It was nothing like I expected, just a gradual, peaceful expiration. I guess the window to the surf was my escape from those realities.”

Terry's leg healed, and he returned to his family, who by now had moved to the Sydney beachside suburb of Maroubra. The new home was a government cottage at Little Bay, between the Long Bay prison and the Aboriginal community at La Perouse, which was where Terry was enrolled at school.

La Perouse was a weird cultural mix. The school was predominantly black, but since the town was so named because it was the landing point for French explorer La Perouse (just days after Cook claimed Australia for the British), each Bastille Day the entire student body—including the original inhabitants—would march through town to the La Perouse monument and sing the Marseillaise in honor of the would-be invader.

Still on crutches during those first months back at school, Terry was an outsider. He was the wrong color and he couldn’t play football. Desperate to gain peer acceptance, he hobbled along on a carrot raid on a Chinese market garden. When the old gardener discovered the daring band of thieves, they took off like hares in all directions. Except for the boy on crutches, who was carted off to Kingsford Police Station.

Eventually, young Fitzgerald got the strength back in his leg, played football (“hidden on the wing”), and became more or less a regular guy. He was also academically gifted, and in 1962, not yet 12, he was one of the three La Perouse children to win entry into the selective Sydney Boys High.

Although it was a government-funded school, Sydney High’s concentration of elite students had gained it acceptance into the GPS (Great Public Schools) family of academic institutes. This was a world of rowing, rugby, and the old school tie; a world where Terry’s schoolmates were the sons of stockbrokers, physicians, and company directors. The boys were expected to study hard, play harder, sow plenty of wild oats with a girl of good stock, and follow in their father’s footsteps. For those who conformed, no doors would be closed. The Fitzgerald family was neither wealthy nor conformist, but Terry’s early years had taught him the tricks of seemingly fitting in.

Terry’s earliest memory of actually surfing is a moment of combined terror and joy as he plunged down the face of a Bondi dumper on his father’s back. The Fitzgeralds lived not far from Maroubra Beach on Sydney’s south side, but most family outings were to the north side beaches where Madge's family and Bill’s brother lived. Here, at Dee Why and Curl Curl, Terry and his younger brother Stephen would often watch Sydney’s pioneer Malibu surfers in action. But it wasn’t until May 1964, when the debut World Contest was held at Manly, that the desire to go surfing finally kicked in.

Terry recalls: “I was at home one weekend and the contest came on our little black-and-white TV. Like a lot of my generation, I was blown out by what I saw. Guys like Wayne Cowper and L.J. Richards just ripping. It was bigger than the Beatles! For me, Richards was the standout, and as soon as I could, I was down at Maroubra giving it a go on a hire board. For Christmas that year, my brother and I were both given surfboards. My parents drove over to Brookvale and just picked them off the rack. Stephen got a Keyo and mine was a 9'9" Scott Dillon.”

Terry’s cousin, Gary McKenzie-Smith, had already paid his dues as a member of the Dee Why surfing fraternity, which eased the path for the Fitzgerald kooks over the summer holidays, and when they returned to the south side at the end of January, they had learned enough of the basics to teach themselves at Malabar Beach near their home.

The Sydney surf scene in the mid-1960s was not exactly one big happy family. The great weekend class battles between the rockers of the inland suburbs and the surfies of the affluent beach suburbs had only just been held to an uneasy truce, and the memory of these recent and often violent clashes made both cults unacceptable to parents, police, and other figures of authority. Surfboard riders were also at war with the local councils over the issue of board registration and with the Surf Life Saving Association because they were shameless hedonists who refused to do surf patrol duty on weekends.

On top of all this, there was an intense regional rivalry between such clubs as North Shore, Maroubra, and the Bondi-based Windansea. This wasn’t just a matter of team spirit. In a city of fewer than two million people, surfers living a few kilometers apart had developed different cultures, with different heroes, different mores, different surfboards. At North Shore, Nat Young, Russell Hughes, Butch Cooney, and Lester Brien reigned; at Windansea, Max Bowman was the main man; at Maroubra, Muscles Hammond was the surfer to beat, but Ted Wilson was the boss.

At 15, Terry Fitzgerald was too old and too distanced from the culture to be accepted at Maroubra, but he got in through the back door, for which some people never forgave him, no matter how good he got. Rugby mates from school introduced him to Jim Small, a surfer who lived in a place behind the Maroubra Seals Club. It had a garage big enough for the groms to stash their boards. Terry was on the scene.

“Jim Small’s dad’s garage was like club-a-go-go for us,” he says. “I’d run from home past the jail and across the rifle range at dawn, grab my board, surf for an hour, then run all the way back in time to catch the school bus at 8:15. And through Jim, I met Muscles and Ted, and gradually got involved.”

In 1966, the first NSW Schoolboys contest was held at Maroubra, and a rapidly-improving Fitzgerald finished second, but at the end of the year the family moved to Collaroy, on the north side, and Terry’s life was shattered. He recalls: “It should have been my big breakthrough, I got a little bit of recognition from the Schoolboys win and I was invited to come and surf for North Shore as a junior. First meet was a three-way club contest at Curl Curl and I came in last in my heat. Total embarrassment. Couldn’t show my face at the beach. Then, when school began in 1967, my surfing life just stopped. I caught the school bus at 6:30 in the morning and got home at six at night. This went on for months until the headmaster, Mr. Callaghan, took pity on my situation. He accepted the fact that I’d shown some promise as a surfer, and that it was a legitimate sporting activity, so he let me miss school sport and go home at 12:30 every Wednesday. I’d go straight to Long Reef or Butterbox and just surf all afternoon, no matter what it was like.

“Then later that year, I got my driver’s license and the whole universe changed again. My dad had left the navy and was managing a little cleaning company, so on Wednesdays I’d borrow one of the company cars and surf up and down the coast.”

When Terry graduated from high school at the end of 1967, he found himself being drawn, somewhat uneasily, back into club competition. He had started to surf Narrabeen on a regular basis, and the club president, Russ King, asked him to join. Says Terry: “Narrabeen was really starting to become the force. The club was run by three patriarchs—Doc Spence, John Payne, and Russ—and they helped nurture the young guys: Dappa Oliver, Tony Hardwick, Mark Warren, and Col Smith. At Narrabeen, I started to see that what you read in the magazines wasn’t necessarily the way it was. Midget was my real hero at the time, but then I’d see guys like Ted Spencer, Dick Harvey, and Russell Hughes, who were like footnotes in the surf media, and they’d come out at Narrabeen and rewrite the book! Harvey would appear with a 5'6" chamfered tail and just change your perceptions about everything.”

Terry had found his spiritual home at Narrabeen, but even from his earliest days there, he couldn’t wait to venture further afield. Fortunately, the entire club had the travel bug. Every other weekend a convoy of beaten-up vans would leave the Antler car park at closing time, bound for Old Bar up north or the Golf Course Reef down south.

After finishing at Sydney Boys High, Terry was rarely at home, and when he was, he was at loggerheads with his parents. He worked briefly at his father’s cleaning company, then after taking a shared flat in Manly, he went to work at his uncle’s glue factory. He recalls: “It wasn’t that great a job, gluing veneer, but I only had to do it four hours a day, and the rest of the time I could surf, play pool and darts, and chase chicks, so life wasn’t so bad.”

But Terry was still something of a square peg in a round hole. He lived on the north side but rode south-side boards. Although his second board—his first true custom—came from Barry Bennett’s factory at Brookvale, as soon as he began to pull a salary he went back to Maroubra and got Richard Futcher to shape him another full concave, this time a 7'2”. Futcher, who was into some pretty weird shit and was arrested some years later while trying to teach himself to fly a 707 at Sydney Airport, made Fitz’s new board vivid orange. The Narrabeen boys scratched their heads at first until they saw the thing turn into a speed blur on the Alley rights.

Jumping in the car and heading off on loony surf trips was one way of becoming a regular guy, so when Wally Wipeout announced he was heading down to Bells for Easter ’68, Terry Fitz was the first one to tie his board on the roof. He recalls: “None of the guys knew where Bells was, but I had this little act going that I knew where it was, which I didn’t. I knew it was past Geelong, but that was about all. So we drove on through the night, past Torquay, past Lome, and we woke up next morning parked under the pine trees at Apollo Bay. There was a bit of dissent in the camp, and I was relieved as navigator. So we worked our way back up the coast, not knowing where we were going. Shit, I didn’t even have a wetsuit!”

At Bells that year, Terry made it through the prelims and into the junior final, but his Narrabeen buds had had enough and left without him. “That may have been an indication of my general obnoxiousness, but there was no way I was going to miss the final.”

Local surfer John Pawson was also in the final, and he took pity on Fitzgerald and took him home to stay at the family pub, where Pawson Sr. loaned him 50 bucks for the trip home. In the final, at high-tide Rincon, Terry lost his board and snapped off the nose. Brace Channon won, Wayne Lynch took second, Terry got dead last. And since he had scraped into the final with a tie for third, last meant seventh, and there were only six trophies.

Empty-handed apart from two-thirds of a board, Terry cadged a ride home with Cronulla surfer Frank Latta. After the 12-hour all-nighter, Latta was too tired to take his young passenger across the Harbour, so Terry hitchhiked the last leg. As dawn broke he was picked up by a motorcyclist who seemed hell-bent on creating a new land speed record. Coming through inner-city Newtown, the driver failed to see the empty tray of a semi-trailer as it turned in front of him.

Says Terry: “I can remember it all quite clearly. I can remember looking at our reflection in a shop window. Suddenly the truck was looming and we were on it. My instinct was that he was going to try to ride under the trailer, but I think he realized too late that there was no way, so he dropped the bike and tried to slide under. It worked for me, but not for him. He lost the top of his head and was disabled for the rest of his life.

"I blacked out, and when I came to, they were backing the truck up to pry my head out from between the dual wheels. I was okay apart from gravel rash all over my face. I couldn’t grow a proper beard until I was about 22, but they did a pretty good job of patching me up.”

“You know I’ve never really talked about this before, I guess because I still feel a certain amount of guilt about that guy.”

I'm not sure what Terry’s reflections on this episode reveal about him, but it is a trait I recognize from the period in our lives when we were close. He will be in full flight one minute, and just when you think you can’t take much more of his bullshit he will change tack completely and suddenly expose his own raw nerves, reveal a depth of feeling you’d forgotten he had.

Once his face had healed, Terry, 18, decided to submit to the forces that had molded him. He recalls: “In 1968 there was nothing in surfing but glory. You had to have a job, and I’d spent six years in a GPS high school where it was fully ingrained in me that I should be a doctor or a pilot. So I decided to pursue a career. It was college or bust!”

He had tested the waters on the straight side of life before, when straight out of school he signed on as a junior trainee officer at the Sydney Electricity Commission. The commission had a program whereby promising young employees would, after six months, be sent to university and have their fees paid. For Terry, this had double appeal. Not only would he be making a career for himself, but he would also be ineligible for national military service, which, in the late 1960s, was a major consideration.

Terry combed his frizz and put on a tie and went to the office in Castlereagh Street, Sydney. He was moved from department to department, getting a feel for the entire bureaucratic operation. Then he was moved to a department called Sick and Accidents.

In 1969, he gave the serious world another shot, enrolling at the University of NSW to do an arts degree. “My three courses of choice were coastal geomorphology, psychology, and economics, so you can see how mixed up I was!”

College didn’t last long either. Terry was a good student but he had reached his most tempestuous stage, in and out of the water.

He was in love with a girl from Collaroy Plateau, but the relationship was part of the eternal triangle, and the third corner was Rod McQueen, later to become the coach of the rugby union Wallabies. Says Terry: “We duked it out on the Cromer football field. I lost the girl and split for Queensland.”

During the winter of ’68, Terry had taken to hanging out at Denny Keyo’s boardmaking factory in Brookvale. On the north side, the mantle of cool among surfboard shapers moved often, and in ’69 it belonged Keyo. Denny had Nat, Baddy Treloar, Ted Spencer, all the hot guys, and he took on Terry, too. “By 1969 I had very succinct ideas about what I wanted in a surfboard. I wanted a 6'8" with a bullet-pointed nose, parallel rails in the middle third, and a big, round tail. Denny tolerated me, let me do whatever I wanted, so I adzed out this thing with a lime green tail, yellow nose, and four Keyo stickers in a star, which Denny just hated.”

That summer saw Terry down on the Gold Coast looking for surf, girls, and work, in approximately that order. He bluffed his way into Laurie Hohensee’s shaping bay and started to mutilate a blank. He recalls: “Ricky Neilsen showed me how to use a sanding block. The whole deal was totally embarrassing because no one knew I’d shaped about three boards in my life. I owe a lot to Ricky because he embarrassed me so badly I walked out the door and went to Joe Larkin’s, where things started to fall into place. Joe gave me a deal where I had three boards on the rack, and as soon as I sold one, I could shape another. I was getting something like ten bucks per board, so if I sold four or five a week, I could live. Every morning after I’d surfed. I’d go to the shop and drag customers off the street to look at my boards. My shaping had to improve or I’d starve, so I worked really hard at it. Joe’s head shaper, Brian Austen, taught me the tools and the rules. I learned to shape scientifically, using ten variables, and the boards got better.”

His surfing got better too. Terry was now part of the Kirra crew, surfing every day with Dick Van Straalen, Johnny Charlton, Mick Stafford, and the Deane brothers. Some hot young surfers were emerging too—notably Michael Peterson and Peter Townend, and a wild little shorebreak grom called Rabbit.

Says Terry: “It was an amazing time, all of us pushing each other to surf better. In February 1970 we drove down to Sydney for the Bobby Brown Memorial at Cronulla. It was a full Queensland invasion. Andrew MacKinnon won and I made the final. I’d only been living in Queensland a few months, but I felt very much part of that scene. Peter Drouyn was the main force at the time. He beat me in the Queensland titles at Greenmount that year. I didn’t surf well at all, but when the Australian team for the World Titles was announced, Mark Warren and I squeaked in.”

The world contest at Bells in May 1970 was a milestone in surfing, not so much because it was won by a sweet-faced rich kid from California, but more because it was lost by stupid surfboards. Most of the members of Australia’s surfing elite were so busy writing free-form poetry about how individual they were, they failed to notice they were all writing and riding the same crap.

Terry Fitzgerald was no exception. In an article imaginatively titled “Do Your Own Thing, Man,” he wrote, “I wasn’t going to preach or prophesise (sic),” but he did anyway. “I believe every person has a right to be an individual in everything he does—to be himself, to do his own thing. A guy says to you, the sun goes up, the moon goes down, take this pill, man, blow your brain, go insane. Then you have the right to try it out at your own risk. Man, get into righteous waves and get in on righteous life, good and clean, as an individual, as yourself.”

But the individuals all turned up at Bells with the same 5'6" paddle pop sticks. Dramatically under-gunned, they floundered while Rolf Aurness and the Hawaiians drew long lines on the face. Terry missed out on the final after losing to Rodney Sumpter on a countback, but he was not disgraced, despite his equipment. And Terry was quick to learn from his mistakes. He recalls: “I got a whole new perspective from that contest, and I connected with the network that was to become the foundation of my surfing life. What happened was that most of the Australians couldn’t stand a bar of me, so when they were assigning rooms at the Lome Hotel, I was put in with Ben Aipa and Paul Strauch, and my mind was opened to the whole Hawaiian deal.”

Terry went back to Queensland, but not for long. He had fallen in love with Pauline Parkinson. Head over heels, the full enchilada. Appropriately, they met at The Patch in Coolangatta, the surfer’s hang of that and many other eras. Pauline was holidaying at Kirra with some girlfriends from her home town hear Newcastle, NSW. She saw Terry and told her friends: “That guy is absolutely gorgeous. I’m gonna get him!”

She remembers now: “I just marched across and asked him to dance. He said no and walked away. I couldn’t believe it!”

But Terry found her later and walked her home, and they’ve been together ever since. They made plans to go to Hawaii, but first Terry had to move back to Sydney to save money, which turned out to be fortunate timing because it resulted in him being on hand for the shooting of Albert Falzon’s groundbreaking film, 

Terry and Pauline moved to Sydney's north side. He first worked for Nipper Williams, then Shane Stedman. By the time Nipper’s ads featuring Terry appeared, the star had moved on, but the words tell a story. “All out speed and flow, super tight against the wave, is the formula.” The Sultan of Speed had arrived.

After the 1970 world contest, Corky Carroll had begun negotiations with Shane Stedman to produce an Australian twin-fin model. Terry and sander Greg Hodges picked up on some of Carroll’s design elements and decided to develop their own twins. They built two 5'6"s and experimented with them at dawn at Butterbox. Says Terry: “They were the first twin fins ridden in Australia, and they worked. After the bagging our boards had gotten at Bells, it seemed like some kind of vindication.”

Terry and Pauline were married in March of 1971. This hadn’t been their immediate intention, but Pauline’s dad offered to pay for her airline ticket to Hawaii if they tied the knot. The day after the wedding they flew to Oahu and moved into James Jones’ parents home in Honolulu until they got set up on the North Shore. The spring surf was clean and relatively empty. Terry got his Hawaiian act together, surfing with Sam Hawk, Owl Chapman, Reno Abellira, and Gerry Lopez. One day at Rocky rights a white-haired man watched Terry surf and his jaw dropped. Twenty years later Dick Brewer recalled the moment: “He was different and he still had to prove himself, but I recognized him as the best surfer in the world. The best I’d ever seen in fact, because of his speed lines.” Jeff Hakman also remembered his initial impression. “He just exploded onto the scene. He was loud, colorful, and flamboyant. His whole act was like, 

 But he surfed beautifully, just beautifully.”

Brewer offered the Fitzgeralds accommodation on Kauai for the summer. Grateful, they flew over and moved into the RB madhouse. Terry recalls: “Brewer had a house guest named Chuck Mundell, a refugee from California. This guy used to take me bass fishing in the sugarcane field dams, talking all the while. Suddenly I found myself subjected to this acid-based psychobabble! Brewer had already been through all that and come out the other side, but I was new blood and Chuck just worked me.”

Much has been made of the influence that Dick Brewer had over a generation of surfer-shapers, including Lopez, Abellira, and Fitzgerald. But for his part, Terry is adamant that Brewer’s input was in the form of refinement rather than creation. He says: “The boards I took to Hawaii in 1971 were very much Terry Fitzgerald creations. They were the boards that created my reputation, and they were made before I met Brewer. Basically, I’d taken the twin fin that Greg Hodges and I made, put a single fin on it, and refined it along the lines of the boards that Russell Hughes and Dana Nicely were doing at Byron Bay." Terry then Brewer his due: "Dick’s genius was that he could look at what a TF or a Sam Hawk was doing and integrate that into his own designs. He pulled together influences from a whole range of people in a way that worked. By the end of 1971, I was in California making a real statement in foam, and I know I couldn’t have done that without the Brewer experience."

Terry thinks it over and takes one more pass: "Here's what happened. Starstruck yokel lands in Hawaii and finds himself in the presence of God, then discovers that God needs him as much as he needs God. Brewer taught me how to put soul into my boards. That was his gift.”

Back on the North Shore for the end of 1971, Terry found he had amassed enough Hawaiian over the previous months to be invited to the Duke contest. This was a major coup, as the Duke was still dominated by the old guard, with very few places going to young outsiders. And ironically, it was the old guard that impressed Fitzgerald.

“I was particularly taken by Paul Strauch. What a beautiful, beautiful surfer! In fact, the whole Duke contest that year was very old-era-meets-new-era. An amazing experience.”

In the semifinals, the trades kicked in heavily, sending plumes of spray hundreds of meters behind the big Sunset peaks. Terry lost his board on his second wave, swam into Val’s Reef, stood up on the coral and looked for it in desperation. He held out his hands in query and the crowd on the beach pointed out to sea. There was no rescue boat, no jetski, so he dove back in and started swimming.

Terry recalls: “I finally got my board and I was paddling in the channel when the five-minute flag went up. By the time I got in the lineup, there was under a minute to go, but I lucked out, caught a good one and just kept going into the beach. I won the semi on only three waves, but it was the swim that won me the respect of people like the Aikaus.”

When Terry and Pauline returned to Sydney just before Christmas, they rented a weatherboard cottage in the heart of Brookvale’s surf industry, turned one of the bedrooms into a shaping bay and went into business. All the past winter Terry and Owl Chapman had been listening to an Isaac Hayes album called "Hot Buttered Soul," which Fitz loved—the music and the title both. But back in Australia when Terry tried to fit the words onto the rainbow logo he and Pauline had chosen, they wouldn’t fit. Hot Buttered Soul Surfboards became Hot Buttered Surfboards.

They had no money and no backers, but Pauline remembers those formative years as some of the best of their married life.

“I think you appreciate everything so much more when you have to struggle, and boy, did we struggle! We had two rooms and a tiny kitchen, first just Terry and me, and then Kye too, and finally Joel. Four of us in one bedroom. Terry had his acetone drum in the laundry and one day Kye put his mouth over the tap and drank some.

"Yeah, it was a different kind of family life, but fun. I had no car, so I’d walk to the shopping mall with the pram every day. And alongside all the foam dust I had this beautiful little vegetable garden.”

The boards were good from the start. Terry’s scientific approach (keep nine of the variables constant, play with the tenth) seemed to work, and his accent on quality was a refreshing change in Brookvale after a year in which cheap “popouts” had almost destroyed the custom surfboard market. He told 

 in January 1972: “I’ll be building boards like I was surfing in the Islands but scaled down. I’ll pull out the tails a couple of inches or so. I’ll be using a lot of Brewer’s trips that he taught me, but I’ll be using a lot of my own. My boards will be faster than what is around.”

And more flamboyant. The Hot Buttered trademark became the outrageous air-spray job, and underneath it a complex matrix of concaves and vees designed to hold a high, fast track. They weren’t for everyone, but as Terry’s visibility became greater, so the Fitzgerald clones began to emerge. Terry’s win in the ’72 Bells meet helped push the label and the style, and soon there were little sultans of speed at every beach break.

By the advent of professional surfing in Australia in 1973, Terry had created a place for himself that was unique, and was to remain unique until Simon Anderson loped onto the scene. He was not just the only surfer-shaper in the front line, he was also the surfer’s surfer and the shaper’s shaper. Oh, he had plenty of critics in both areas—they said he was a loudmouth who fell off a lot, and that his boards went fast but you couldn’t turn them—but on a good day at Winkipop or Sunset or Honolua, the man and his platform became one entity, and it was sublime.

“He was the full package,” says Derek Hynd, who Fitzgerald pulled out of the pack at Narrabeen one day in 1975. “He was what surfing should be.”

Hynd, a hot young Newport local who had just started college, was one of the early recruits to the Hot Buttered “family,” a surf team that was closer to Hitler Youth than the Shane Gang. Hynd later recalled in 

 “Fitz is more of a god than any surfer I’ve met. You can probably see (the Fitzgerald influence) in every surfer that he ever sponsored—it’s this thing coming through your feet. Though you might not end up surfing like Fitz, you think you’re the sultan of speed. You can’t help yourself."

A few years on, Hynd, now a guru himself at Rip Curl, reclines in the spring sunshine on a grassy knoll at the edge of the Warriewood industrial park on Sydney’s northern beaches. Behind him, on either side of the central avenue, the Rip Curl and Hot Buttered buildings face each other like bookends on an empty shelf. The buildings are almost identical, but that is where the likeness ends. One is a corporate monolith, the other a true battler, once saved by bodyboards, still clinging to an uncompromising philosophy that was, is, and always will be Terry Fitzgerald.

Hynd gets a little misty-eyed when reflecting on Fitz, perhaps because the passage of time has now enabled us to judge the man more fairly than his persona allowed us when he was “spinning wheels in the car park,” to use one of his self-deprecatory expressions. And there are elements in Terry that resemble the hero in a Roman tragedy—fearless, magnificent, courageous, and flawed.

Says Hynd: “Terry was an established surfer and surfboard builder when he decided to build an empire, whereas almost all of his rivals had nothing to lose. He fought a lot on the way up, with the business people around him. Fitzy was a perfectionist in everything, and he just thrived on pressure. He was never scared to stick his neck out.

Great as it has been at times, the Hot Buttered family over the past 25 years has failed to produce a pro surfer of Fitzgerald’s own caliber (although Hynd came close, as did Vetea "Poto" David). But it has, however, given us some of the sport's most enigmatic figures:—people like Hynd, Nick Carroll, and of course Terry's own kids, Joel and Kye. Hynd and Carroll had their flings in the contest jersey, then went on to become two of the most respected writers in surfing. Rod Kirsop went on to become a doctor. In 1998, Kyle Fitzgerald is studying management. Get the picture? Hot Buttered was never a factory popping out surf-contest clones. Its stock and trade were custom-made individuals.

By 1980, when he enjoyed a rare contest victory in the Om Bali Pro, Terry Fitzgerald’s life had adopted a pattern that set him to one side of the pro tour, yet not fully in the soul camp of surfers like Peter McCabe and Jim Banks. After a decade of Hawaiian winters, he'd had enough. The North Shore fixation, in fact, had begun to wane as early as 1975, when he went to Jeffreys Bay for the first time. He recalls:

“I got three waves from Boneyards through to Albatross. That’s about a three-minute ride. Bunker Spreckels had a stopwatch on it. I started to realize that some places have their use-by dates. Then, in '78, Patrick Juventin invited me to go down to Tahiti with him. I went and that opened up another great place for me. In 1979, I went back to the North Shore but turned down my Duke invite to go back to Tahiti. I’ve never been back to Hawaii during the contest season.”

"ACCELERATOR: THE TERRY FITZGERALD STORY," BY PHIL JARRATT (2000)

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