“Goodbye Sunshine Superman” ran in the Winter 1994 issue of Surfer’s Journal. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.

There is great appeal, maybe even cosmic justice, in the idea that Jock Sutherland, master of critical positioning, rode deeper and cleaner than anybody during Our Holy Year of Gigantic Surf, 1969.

Sutherland stamped his name on ’69 as hard as any surfer ever stamped a name on any year. He was tops at Pipeline as a goofyfoot, among the best at Sunset and Honolua Bay as a regularfoot, and the near-unanimous word among the upper ranks was that Sutherland, in general, had simply left everyone else in the dust. He won the ’69 SURFER Poll. He starred in 

, the year’s definitive movie. He had a catchy name and a nice, big smile. “It's pretty simple,” says Jeff Hakman, oversimplifying just a little. “1969 begins and ends with Jock.”

So it's curious that Sutherland, today, has been nearly pushed out of the historic record. He was completely missing in 1990’s 

, and a close reading of John Grissim’s 

, combining for a total of 634 illustrated pages on surfing and surf history, turns up zero photos of Sutherland, and just a single, short descriptive sentence on Sutherland’s contribution to the sport. He was primarily remembered in a recent issue of 

 Magazine as the guy who night-surfed Waimea on acid—a compelling story, but awfully confining.

Why is Sutherland fading from view? One answer is simple incompetence and oversight on the part of the writers, editors, and film-makers. A more intriguing explanation is that he just doesn't fit in. Sutherland didn’t win an international contest after 1967. He’s never been considered part of a larger school of surfing. And by volunteering for the US Army at the height of his popularity—and the height of the Vietnam war—he committed an act that, to a lot of surfers at the time, seemed nearly treasonous.

There’s an irony to all of this that Sutherland must appreciate: the qualities that made him the stand-out figure of ’69 have made him impossible to categorize in ’94. The locus of his whole act was originality, and that can cut both ways. “He's on a different trip,” Barry Kanaiaupuni said 25 years ago. “Jocko, he’s good. He’s so different and he does things that normal people wouldn't do.” That Sutherland was something other than normal was already well-established. In fact, he was so far removed from the rest of the surf world in the late ’60s, that the running joke—spread, for the most part, in the most complimentary tones—was that he was from outer space.

So what to do with this uncategorical person today? Ignore him, apparently. Have the Australian shortboard revolutionaries (Young-McTavish-Lynch) meet up with the Hawaiian power-flow crew (Hakman-Kanaiaupuni-Lopez), and skip Sutherland altogether. He’s just one guy—and kind of weird. It was 1969 and he didn't grow his hair long. How do you explain 

It’s hard to say if Sutherland cares about any of this. Over the past quarter-century, he’s spent two years in the Army and another two years in prison. He was married and separated and raised kids. He made a career as a roofer. Two or three times a week, nearly every week, he’s gone surfing. In other words, he’s done virtually nothing to support his own legend.

Still, because Sutherland's brain seems to be quietly red-lining for most of his waking hours, it’s impossible to believe he doesn’t pause now and then and get righteously frustrated, trying to figure out how, when, and why his late-sixties reputation devolved from creative genius to psychedelic misfit.

Kiki Spangler and Jimmy Lucas first took Sutherland out at Pipeline sometime in the winter of ’64–’65. “It was extremely difficult,” Sutherland remembers, “to get the correct angle of attack as you dropped in. You had this 10' piece of machinery with insufficient rocker, and it just didn’t want to fit into that concave face.” Sutherland pearled up to his neck on his first wave, pinwheeled over the falls, and bounced off the bottom. But not long after, he got his first real Pipeline tube ride. “One of those sneak-through-the-backdoor things, totally unplanned, with a definite fear aspect. Sort of like, ‘Oh, man, if I straighten out here I’m gonna get 

.” So I tucked in and took my chances, then popped out the other end and thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute. That wasn't so difficult. Yeah, let's try it again.’”

It’s not much of a Pipe story on its own merit, but interesting in the way it affects Sutherland. The memory is pleasing, and loosens his voice up. Words connect almost without effort, and some even jump out for emphasis.

The mechanics of Sutherland’s conversation are usually wound much tighter. Each word is distinct from its neighbors. Sentences are clipped. He talks in monotone, almost as if he were holding his breath. He’ll pause, searching for a phrase, and as the muscles of his jaw bunch up slightly, he almost radiates strain—the precision he wants is often just out of reach. “He’s always been like that, even when he was a kid,” says Roy Crump, who presided over the Long Beach Surf Club and the Harbour Surfboards team, both of which counted Sutherland as a member in the mid-’60s. “He’s extremely bright but awkward in the way he communicates; sort of hesitant, with that weird Jock-talk, where he’d always be using long, polysyllabic words—and often using them incorrectly.”

Sutherland is straightforward, occasionally funny, sometimes even sly. Now and then, to good effect, he’ll loosen up with a little pidgin. But as a rule, he deals in information and analysis, not emotion, and he’s rarely wistful, poetic or nostalgic. Sutherland’s recollections, for example, of a year spent at a Maui junior college, in ’67–’68, when he roomed with Jeff Hakman, go like this: “There was fairly consistent surf, I had good boards, classes were going well, and Jeff and I really had some great times together. We had a good surf-P.E. thing going at Honolua. Yeah, that was a really satisfying period.”

Here are Hakman's recollections of the same year: “Out

memories. Peaceful memories. We were 18 or 19 years old, both riding for Dick Brewer, Hendrix was on the record player, we could get from school to Honolua in one hour. Yeah, it was a 

It was incredible! Out at Honolua, 8–10', fuckin’ 

, nobody else around, from three in the afternoon till dark, each of us on a really nice tab of purple Owsley. I’d be sitting outside watching Jock’s silhouette go up and down this perfect wall, then I’m riding, and here comes Jock paddling back out, screaming something. . . .” Hakman pauses. “Wow, you know, I guess the best moments of my surfing career have been with Jock.”

An interesting embodiment of the Sutherland paradox is that Sutherland himself, as the spark for a million evocative moments, is virtually unable to bring any of those moments back to life.

Which, of course, doesn't really matter, as people have always been happy to testify on his behalf. Sutherland stories are legion. Corky Carroll recalls a sunny afternoon at Waimea Bay when he and Sutherland tried, unsuccessfully, to jump on each other’s boards mid-ride. “Three times we went for it, and three times, man, we just ate it like rats.”

Dan Calohan, owner of Plastic Fantastic surfboards, remembers a surf check at Waimea one evening, just past 9:00 pm, in late ’69. “We pulled up and there was this beautiful full moon, and no wind. I was with a few guys. Hakman was probably there. We’d just finished dinner in Haleiwa, I think at the Seaview, and everyone wanted to see what was happening with the surf, because it had been coming on all day, but was sloppy right up until twilight. So we were standing on the point, and it was solid 20', and I remember this feeling like electricity going through me, because all of a sudden we heard this hooting. The first thing we all thought was, ‘God, somebody's out there!’ And not even a second went by before we all realized it was Jock. Not just because he had a distinctive hoot, but because it couldn't have been anybody else.”

Calohan considers for a moment. “The only guy, I think, who did stuff that radical,” he says, “was Butch Van Artsdalen. But that’s not really true. Nobody did stuff as radical as Jock.”

Contest results also bring up the lights on Sutherland, but the best way to get a feel for his surfing is through late-period photographs. All the precision he could ever hope for was there in his surfing by 1969, counterbalanced by great spasms of creativity, and the photos put it all on display beautifully. A two-page SURFER spread by Art Brewer in the March 1970 issue shows Sutherland, as a goofyfoot, bottom turning around a giant ball of whitewater at Pipeline, with the fingertips on his back hand brush-kissing the water. In the previous issue, in another two-page spread, this one by Ron Stoner, Sutherland strikes in a similar position at Sunset—as a regularfoot. A few more definitive Sutherland images from ’69: trimming through the bowl section at Honolua; a reverse-shoulder-rotation cutback at Oceanside; side-slipping at Pupukea, Sunset, and Velzyland; a super deep-fade turn off the bottom at Haleiwa; and hidden behind the curl at Pipeline.

Another great media moment comes near the end of John Severson’s psilocybin-tinged 

 With Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses” on the soundtrack, Sutherland is shown in the lower-right corner of the frame, paddling out as a big, glassy Pipe cylinder stands up and unloads. He sits up on his board, looks into the spinning eye, makes a motion of greeting with his left hand, and, it seems, begins to talk to the wave. “He’s so much more comfortable in the water,” says Audrey Sutherland, Jock’s mother. “John Severson once said that Jock sheds his skin when he goes into the ocean, and I think that's true.”

Sutherland, in other words, can’t be counted on to emblaze his own history. He needs witnesses, film clips, photographs, and other secondary sources. Sutherland’s not reticent, and he’s good with details, but he's no dramatist. He’s the story, not the storyteller.

One version of the Jock-is-from-outer-space story is that he came alone. Another version is that his whole family is alien. Jock smiles when I bring this up. “Well, my mother’s always done things her own way. She’s very unique. And for us kids, I think it’s just because our parents encouraged us to read and to learn. And, maybe in my case, because of the drugs.”

John Carson (Jock) Sutherland Jr., the 2nd of four children born to native Californians John and Audrey Sutherland, was born September 27, 1948, in Long Beach, California—a busy port city in those postwar years, a bit raw and uncultured, maybe a little strange in places, but hardly extraterrestrial. John Sr, 29 years old, a dedicated man of the sea, was advancing through young adulthood at a smart pace. He’d learned to surf during a two-year visit to Waikiki in the late ’30s, and carried on as a first-generation Long Beach surfer up until his entry into the war. He served in the Coast Guard for six years, starting in 1941, primarily on a sub-chaser in the Caribbean, and in the space of 12 months, in ’42 and ’43, became a husband, father, and officer. For three years after the war, while the family lived in a beach house at Surfside, John fished commercially, surfed, and fathered a second child.

The changes continued: John served for five years in Korea, then moved the family to Oahu in 1952; worked one year for Fish and Wildlife, and two years as a military marine engineer; had two more children; then made a unilateral decision, in 1957, to move back to California. Audrey and the four children, ages 4 to 14, chose to say in Hawaii. The divorce was finalized that year.

John paid no child support, and for 20 years made virtually no contact with the family. He worked up to a Master’s Unlimited captain’s license. While in charge of a tanker in the North Pacific in 1976, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, at which point he contacted Audrey and flew to Hawaii, not telling anybody he was sick. There was a reconciliation of sorts at the Sutherland home. Six months later John died.

Audrey says that Jock has always tended to idealize his father, even though John’s hands-on influence on his son’s development was minimal. Disproportionately, her own influence—which Audrey doesn’t comment on directly—was immense. Audrey, 73, says that “Jock sometimes knows what I’m thinking even before I do.” Even that doesn‘t really convey how deeply connected the two are—they’re more like close siblings than mother and son. They look and speak alike (Audrey with a more comfortable delivery), both are competitive, both welcome intellectual challenge (Audrey has a BA in International Relations from UCLA, and a Masters in Education from University of Hawaii), both crave solitary adventure, and both prefer ocean to land. Audrey’s self-reliance is legendary. “I remember surfing Chun’s in the mid-’60s,” says Roy Crump, “and all of a sudden Jock’s mom would pop up with a spear and a fish, getting dinner."

Audrey first swam along the near-vertical north coast cliffs of Molokai in 1962, by herself, towing a waterproof bag of supplies. She returned a few years later, again by herself, but this time with a kayak, and subsequently wrote a book about her experiences. 

, first published in 1978, is now in its fourth printing. All told, between ’62 and ’81, Audrey made 18 trips to Molokai, 11 of which were solo. As she wrote in 1978, perhaps confirming the family’s otherworldly origins, “Water became my element. I delight in its color, its texture, the three-dimensional freedom of movement, where buoyancy balances bodyweight. I stagger in an alien world of gravity’s pull when first I stand upright again on shore after an hour or two [in the] water.” Her expeditions over the past 12 years have taken her through the inner and outer coastal passages of Alaska.

Audrey worked constantly after John left, mostly as an education administrator for the army, so the Sutherland kids often took care of themselves. By the time Jock began elementary school, he was spending almost all of his non-class time either reading or swimming. “We didn't have TV until I was 10,” he recalls. “And even then, the reception was poor. So I was reading quite a bit, even when I was young.”

In 1956, the year before John left for California, Audrey took Jock out to Barber’s Point and let him ride one of John’s old 11' balsa boards. He surfed alone. Nothing much happened. Baseball was Sutherland’s real interest, and certainly a better outlet for his competitive drive, and his Little League team, the Cardinals, with Jock as an all-star pitcher, were league champs in ’58.

In 1961, Audrey moved the family to a converted army barrack just west of Chun’s reef, at which point Jock, 12, took up surfing again—this time with feeling. The following year he was known as the “Chun's Kid.” Jock already was capable of making an impression. “I have a super-clear picture in my mind,” says Randy Rarick, one year younger than Sutherland, “of him hanging ten at Haleiwa lefts on a 3' day, on this metal-flake gold board. It must have been an old rental board because it had a big number painted on it. But the thing just 

, and Jock, he was just a kid, but he was really, 

Early versions of the Sutherland paradox were sprouting up during his first years at Waialua High. His manner, for example, groomed by stories of medieval chivalry (King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Sutherland surmises) often took on a rare politeness and formality. At the same time, Sutherland, the Berkemeyer brothers, the Smith brothers, the Paty brothers and a few other local boys had loosely allied themselves as the decidedly unchivalrous Chun’s Reef Surf Society. “Basically,” says Sutherland, “we were Country rednecks. That is, we weren’t particularly friendly to outsiders. Guys would drive in from Wahiawa or Pearl City, and if there were more than a few people in the lineup, the Chun’s boys would make a tense situation out of it.”

Sutherland’s surfing, too, was already showing a two-track development: studied and precise on one hand, spontaneous on the other. “When he was 16,” says Audrey, “I said to him, ‘You haven't surfed Waimea yet, Jock.’ And he answered, ‘Well, I'm not ready yet. I’ll know when I'm good enough.’ And, of course, the next year he was out there, switching stance, going left, surfing past dark, all of that.”

Did she ever worry about him? “No, never.”

Sutherland claims not to have patterned his surfing after anybody in particular, but he must have had an eye on Butch Van Artsdalen. In 1965, Van Artsdalen was both the king of Pipeline and the world’s best switchfoot. Three years later, Sutherland was.

In 1966, right after high school graduation, Sutherland flew to California and spent the summer polishing fins at the Hobie factory in Dana Point and taking summer courses at Long Beach State. He had already had a top spot in Dick Brewer’s growing stable of surfers—Sutherland says the best board he ever owned was a 10'5" gun Brewer shaped him that year—and was one of Hawaii’s hot juniors, along with Jeff Hakman, Jimmy Lucas, and Jackie Eberle. The previous year, in December, Sutherland pulled off what might be the greatest come-from-behind contest performance ever, as he missed the first 40 minutes of a 55-minute final in the junior’s division of the ’65 Makaha contest, paddled out with his jersey clamped in his teeth, and in just 15 minutes managed to tie David Nuuhiwa for first—losing on a countback.

The Makaha contest helped draw the attention of SURFER Magazine: Sutherland made the cover of the May ’66 issue (“charging down the face of a Pipeline giant,” read the caption), and was the subject of a short interview in the July issue, serviceable as his introduction to the surf world. The 17-year-old, with his semi-formal, pre-psychedelic language, was naive in places, prescient in others.

SURFER: What is your attitude toward style, Jock?

Sutherland: I don't think I have any set style. I feel that style in surfing is really over-emphasized. I’m more interested in getting the job done, I just try to get as much as possible out of each wave.

Who impressed you on the North Shore this year?

Yes, but I always plan carefully before taking off. That way I reduce the chances of being wiped-out badly.

I want to keep surfing as much as possible, especially in contests. I will be going to college next fall, however, and don’t want surfing to interfere with my studies. School comes first, as far as I’m concerned.

Sutherland had a good run on the California contest circuit that summer, blew off college that fall, jumped from Hobie to Harbour, and qualified for the Hawaiian 1966 World Championships, to be held in San Diego. One week after his 18th birthday, Sutherland finished runner-up to Nat Young in the world titles. It was a mildly shocking result, obscured almost completely by the puffed-up Young vs Nuuhiwa, Australia vs California debate. Sutherland rode a lightweight 9'8" Harbour Cheater model—not as radical as Young’s thinned-out 9'4"—but more advanced than the rest of the field. “I thought at the time,” Sutherland says, “that I should have been able to beat Nat. In retrospect, I realize he had an edge.” Sutherland reflects for a moment then, perhaps automatically, comes up with a neat bit of verbal gamesmanship. “You know, I’m not even sure if I’d heard of Nat before that contest.”

Two months later, in December 1966, Sutherland made the finals of the Duke contest. In ’67, he beat an international field to win the small wave event of the Peru International, won the first of three consecutive Hawaiian state titles, and finished the year by winning the Duke. By ’68, Sutherland was the top competitor for the powerful Kui-O-Hawaii club, which included Gerry Lopez, Reno Abellira, and Tomi Winkler. He also found his greatest audience, as a distinctly hideous wipeout from his ’68 Duke outing became the “agony of defeat” clip during the opening titles of ABC’s 

Sutherland's style wasn't artistic. His stance, whether riding regular or goofyfoot, was nearly symmetrical, the left side of his body mirroring the right, almost like a paper doll cutout. While Hakman, by ’67, had already developed the prototype low-profile bottom turn, Sutherland preferred to remain upright as much as possible—“like he had a broomstick up his ass,” as Corky Carroll would put it 20 years later. Sutherland’s early reputation was for doing spinners in big surf, and for switching stance at Sunset and Waimea. “Not a pretty surfer,” says Dan Calohan, “but he was already doing things nobody else was doing.”

In addition, Sutherland’s personality was more and more often finding an outlet through surfing. Gerry Lopez describes a longboard-era afternoon at Pipeline, probably in early 1967, when a frustrated group of Pipe regulars were unable to push through the shorebreak, getting pounded back to the beach again and again. “Then Jock walks down with this palm-frond hat on,” Lopez recalls, “throws his board in, and paddles out—without even getting touched.” The crowning moment came when Sutherland, having just crested the shorebreak, still wearing the hat, with nothing but calm water between him and the lineup, sat up, put his feet on the rails and casually finger-paddled the rest of the way. He threw a single, smiling glance back over his shoulder. “Very subtle,” says Lopez, laughing. “Very effective.”

Magazine readers dug Sutherland’s act, too, as he finished 5th in the ’66 SURFER Poll, 3rd in ’67, and 10th in ’68.

Meanwhile, Sutherland was breathing deeply the winds of change, as he transferred from Long Beach State to a community college on Maui (where he made Dean’s list), enjoyed his first LSD trips, and positioned himself in the vanguard of the shortboard movement with Dick Brewer. In ’67 and ’68, Hakman and Young, in general, were doing better turns than Sutherland and were certainly more polished, while Jackie Eberle was Sutherland’s match at Pipeline. Plenty of California hot-doggers could out-perform him in tiny surf. But nobody could surf as well in as many different kinds of waves. “At that point,” Randy Rarick says, “Jock was the most versatile surfer in the world.”

Gerry Lopez agrees. “Right when the boards went short, Jock was light years ahead of anyone—particularly at Waimea and Pipeline.”

And Sutherland's best phase was still ahead of him. The ’66–’68 years, taken on their own, were solid enough. To Sutherland’s credit, they end up looking like nothing more than a 36-month warm-up for 1969.

, viewed one after the other, make an excellent two-and-a-half-hour diptych of surfing in 1969. Yes, Wayne Lynch and Nat Young are almost completely ignored, along with the rest of Australia—and the rest of the world, for that matter, except for the West Coast and Hawaii. But once the deficiencies are accounted for, a good portion of 1969, micro to macro, with all its possibilities, excesses and detours, hits the screen pretty well intact: organic food, glazed eyes, beaver-tail wetsuits, sticker-free boards; bootlegged Rolling Stones and Hendrix on the 

 soundtrack; J Riddle on an 8' x 18" finger-fin downrailer, Nat Young (in a one-wave appearance at Malibu) on a 5'11" x 23" stub, David Nuuhiwa on a diamond-tail single-fin with a W.A.V.E box, Mickey Dora on a midlength, Lance Carson on a noserider; Rick Griffin’s surfing eyeballs; straight-across-the-hips bikinis; Jeff Hakman doing his Charles Atlas-meets-Nureyev number on a beautiful afternoon at Haleiwa, followed directly by Barry Kanaiaupuni’s abstract-expressionism; soon-to-be world champ Rolf Aurness winning at Malibu, in the middle of his complete domination of the WSA 4A season; gutted houses on the North Shore from December’s mega-swell; and new film-processing tricks, allowing surfer and surfboard to be etched in bright bands of color against a black background, leaving acid trails across the screen—art imitating hallucination.

This was the roiling landscape of 1969, and nobody walked it more freely, and with more confidence, than Jock Sutherland. His surfing, in a very short period of time, had evolved on several fronts. That summer he joined up with Plastic Fantastic, a new surfboard company based in Huntington Beach, and the narrow, flat-bottomed boards—mostly shaped by Bruce Jones, some by Danny Calohan, a few by Sutherland himself—suited him perfectly. His style, never fluid, was nonetheless better lubricated than it had been the year before, and moves that had once looked slightly wooden now came off as calm and controlled. But for the most part, Jock remained true to what he'd said as a 17-year-old, putting function above style. There wasn’t any particular Sutherland characteristic equal, say, to Hakman’s bow-legged trim stance, or Bill Hamilton’s religious-icon hand positioning. But Sutherland loved his little flourishes, manifest usually with by a quick bit of hand-jive at the end of a good ride—a kind of signature stroke, half comedy, half salute, that disappeared from the scene when Sutherland left for the army, then resurfaced five years later in the very capable form of Wayne Bartholomew.

Jeff Hakman was the only person to keep up with Sutherland in ’69. “But my trip,” Hakman says, “was totally different. My style was way more classical. You could pretty much tell what I was going to do. With Jock, you had no idea. He’d pull stuff out of the hat that would just shock you. Everybody else, you’d say, Oh, he surfs sort of like Lance. Or like Peck, or Strauch, or David, on and on. But Jock didn't do things like anybody else. And that wasn't just his surfing, it was the way he talked, the way he dressed, the way he wrote, everything. He was easily the most original person I've ever met.”

Sutherland hadn't necessarily expanded his range, but he’d further polished his act in big surf. Hakman continues. “Pretty much everybody, when the waves get 10' or bigger, they change the way they surf. They slow down, or move their arms different, or draw safer lines. Jock’s whole trip, fundamentally, was identical from 1' to 25'. Anything goes. It’s like he didn’t even realize the waves had gotten bigger.”

Meanwhile, Sutherland had gained a hugely important supporter in SURFER editor Drew Kampion, who, like Sutherland, was hitting his creative peak in 1969. Kampion, another less-than-typical surfer (raised near Buffalo, New York; English graduate from Cal State Northridge; utility man in the 

 West Coast production office in ’67), got a staff job at SURFER in mid-’68 when he was 24 years old, and single-handedly turned the magazine back from its premature middle-age into a hip, experimental, colorful, and intelligent bimonthly. Focusing on Jock Sutherland was a big part of that change. “He was the key figure of 1969,” Kampion says today. “I always say that Nat was the best surfer, but Jock, more than anyone else, defined the era. He was a little difficult to be around for too long because he had this kind of nervousness, which I think came from having all this energy that he was always trying to keep under control. In fact, control was a big part of what he was all about. But he was incredibly creative and bright, and his surfing was super hardcore while still having a playful quality, and at times he was wonderful to talk with. So I put a lot of effort into our relationship and did a lot to see that he was presented to the world. I wanted him to have a forum for his art and his views.”

This didn't always work in Sutherland's favor. His thoughts, as expressed in the pages of SURFER, often skipped from obtuse to nonsensical. In an article titled “What is Surfing?,” top surfers were asked a series of questions, one of which read: “What feeling do you get while riding in the tube?” Sutherland's response: “I do not receive a giant exudence of the senses, but rather a totality of their perceptive strivings, or a non-feeling, as it were, of some of the prismatic auras and shimmering spectrums of bright death.” (Fred Hemmings’ response to the same question: “A sense of personal accomplishment.” Margo Godfrey: “Relaxed and secure, for I am being hugged by the wave’s love center [like a] babe in the womb, with mother curl comforting and feeding me.” Jeff Hakman: “OWOOO!”)

Sutherland's “Finger English” article, and his “Pope’s Living Room” interview with Kampion, were nearly as convoluted. But a few mitigating factors should be considered. First, according to Sutherland, Kampion embellished upon, or created outright, a good portion of Sutherland’s words. At least half of his comments from the “Pope's Living Room” article were bogus, Sutherland says, and he briefly considered, in 1970, bringing suit against Kampion and SURFER. (Kampion's response: “Funny he never said anything to me and SURFER at the time. The interview was accurate; I didn’t embellish—I didn't 

Second, his comments were often made with tongue firmly in cheek—or, as shown in the opening photograph for his article “Finger English,” with tongue S-turning out of his mouth.

Third, it was 1969, and Sutherland was doing a lot of drugs.

Those on the scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s remember Sutherland in three ways: for his surfing, for joining the Army, and as a near-mythical stoner. Sutherland doesn't react defensively to the accusation—but, at the same time, he may not have been as consistently high as people thought. Pot-smoking was certainly part of the daily program. But that’s hardly remarkable, even today. The acid trips, Sutherland maintains, took place just two or three times a month, not every other day, as some people claim. He and some friends would drive into the hills and dose themselves with whatever was going around. Sutherland knew people who were connected to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an LSD clearinghouse of sorts based in Laguna Beach, so the North Shore got its share of Windowpane, Orange Sunshine, and occasionally, some of Owsley Stanley’s top-rated product. Sutherland, like most people, preferred to start tripping outdoors: “You never, 

 wanted to start coming on inside a building, or in a car.” Eventually, after a morning hike, and maybe a swim in a nearby stream, everybody would go home, grab their boards and go surfing. Sutherland recalls going over the top on a few occasions, but his reputation for control, even while high, remained. “Jock’s whole thing,” says Randy Rarick, “was to do these massive amounts but still maintain. He’d never lose it and go berserk. He’d just get very, very weird.”

Amphetamines, mushrooms, and a variety of other hallucinogens and stimulants were mixed in. “We'd pretty much do anything we could get our hands on,” Sutherland says. “Not so much the downers, of course, because that slowed up your surfing—as did drinking. It all tied into how it affected your surfing. But, yeah, that was all a big part of my life for quite a few years.”

It's easy, with Sutherland, to overplay the drug angle, particularly the “acid casualty” label that he’s stuck with. The quantities he took were impressive, but it’s guesswork trying to estimate any lasting effects. Dan Calohan (admittedly a fellow traveler), plays it down. “Jock was pretty strange 

 he started dropping acid. I never noticed all that much difference afterwards.”

In a way, Sutherland’s drug use argues against his uniqueness. A majority of the top figures in surfing were dropping acid in 1969—Sutherland, on this score, is just one of the gang. Hakman agrees, then adds a qualification. “The drugs came with the territory, so in a sense, yeah, he was doing what we were all doing. But then again, Jock could smoke more than all of us, drop more than all of us, then go out and 

Sutherland’s surfing career shot forward for the last time during the last few weeks of 1969. The North Shore, of course, delivered its fabled motherlode of surf, and Sutherland, 21, simply matched energy with energy.

By this point, Sutherland had perfected his two-track method and could go from studied to bizarre in an instant. A 12' northwest swell at Sunset Beach, as Sutherland paddled out, seemed to be entering his mind as a field of data and power-vectors. He’d line up, almost dispassionately, then drop dead-center into a huge peak, in a goofyfoot stance, and draw a calculated line off the bottom and up through the saddle. Then the inside section would stack up, and a switch would go off in Sutherland's mind. Instead of angling back down for a race around the bowl, he’d switch his stance to regular, hold a high line, let the wave suck vertical, then pop the fin and try to drift through the maul sideways.

But the centerpiece of Sutherland’s act was tuberiding, and this is where his development, compared to the rest of the world, went right off the chart. In December of ’69, surfers were still uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the tube. Even the best would often outrun a hollow section or, once inside, not hold a high enough trim line, or bend at the waist instead of the knees, or assume an outdated, arms-out, no-look, chin-to-the-chest head-dip position. Sutherland, meanwhile, was consistently and methodically putting himself behind the curl line and staying there. He’d learned how to crouch. His ambidextrous feet and hands would turn into brake-accelerator pedals, controlling not just forward speed but, through practical application of the side-slip—a technique Sutherland had perfected in California that summer—lateral movement as well. As a tuberider, Sutherland was on his own level in ’69. Only Butch Van Artsdalen before him and Shaun Tomson after would be so far ahead of the pack. Dru Harrison, writing for 

 Magazine, put it this way: “Hey Jock, why don't you lay off for a year and let the rest of the world catch up?” Harrison reconsiders. “Hey Jock, make that two years.”

“GOODBYE SUNSHINE SUPERMAN,” JOCK SUTHERLAND PROFILE, BY MATT WARSHAW (1994)

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