Forty-something years ago, after dinner, sitting around waiting for 

 and puberty to begin, I paged through a back issue of SURFER and landed on Drew Kampion's gimlet-eyed coverage of the 1968 World Surfing Championships. I didn't know it was gimlet-eyed at the moment, of course. I was nine. I looked at the pictures, mostly. And after I looked at Midget and Reno and Fred and Wayne and Corky, I looked at a tiny black-and-white shot of a guy crouched and trimming, with a very serious expression, as the occasion demanded—while wearing a pair of tennis shoes. "India's hope," the caption read. "Jerry Bujakowski, no urchin problems." 

I rendered judgment with a squeaky little fourth-grade chortle. Tennis shoes while surfing! What a kook!

On the other hand, having spent all my beach days up to that point in the reef-free environs of Santa Monica Bay, and being by nature a fearful child, I was concerned about sea urchins, poisonous and otherwise, and a not-chortling part of me admired Jerry Bujakowski for coming up with such a simple and obvious solution to the problem. (Much later I realized that he could have just worn a pair of booties instead of ruining a pair of perfectly good Keds—but the optics wouldn't have been the same.)

While piecing together the print version of 

, I tried to make room for anyone who was a "first" from their country, which led me back to Bujakowski. Technically, he was not in fact the first person to surf in India. Bujakowski was born in Lithuania to a Polish oil-industry father who held an Indian passport (I can find no mention of his mother), and while Jerry was indeed raised in India, he shipped off to America at age 17 and never looked back. Went sports-mad, in fact. He began skiing in Idaho, and got so good, so fast, that he earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Denver.

In 1963, Bujakowski realized that by flourishing the right passport to the right people he could ski in the Olympics and thus stamp his name on the historical record—nobody from India had ever competed in the Winter Games. The following year he flew off to Innsbrook, Austria, and found himself in a gondola next to 

 cover boy Egon Zimmerman and a young Jean-Claude Killy, staring down at a two-mile alpine chute of white downhill gnarliness known as the "Course of Fear." Slalom and giant slalom? Not for Jerry Bujakowski. The man was a downhiller all the way. 

The starting bell rings out, he blasts out of the gate, tucks, holds position, long carve left, long carve right, tucks again—and comes undone like a derailed train. Broken back. Concussion. Four operations over the next 18 months. (It could have been worse. The Australian downhiller at Innsbrook hit a tree during a practice run and died.)

I haven't found much biographical intel on Jerry Bujakowski, but at some point, maybe a year or two before Innsbrook, he began surfing. He even met his wife-to-be on the beach. Not surprisingly, Bujakowski took to wave-riding with the same drive and determination he brought to skiing, and again cleverly worked the ID game to get a spot as the representative from India at the 1966 World Surfing Championships, in San Diego. Went down in the prelims. On the plus side, unlike Innsbruck three years earlier, he left the contest site under his own power.

Bujakowski kept plugging away, and in 1968 he pulled off the same amazing double: skied in the Olympics (Grenoble, France), and surfed in the World Championships (Puerto Rico). No results to speak of in either event, but come on. The Olympics and the World Championships in the same year? Kelly Slater dreams of such a feat!

Looking at that old photo of Bujakowski this morning, I was again struck by the footwear. Ten months earlier, at Grenoble, the man was prepared to auger into a French Alp at 70 MPH wearing nothing but Spandex and Jockey Y-fronts, while here in Puerto Rico, in waist-high waves of San Onofre-like gentleness, he's strapping on waffle-soled sneakers to guard against a low-impact brush with an urchin? We'll never know why. Bujakowski died in 2010 and took his secret to the grave.

JERRY BUJAKOWSKI OF INDIA: TENDER FEET, LION'S HEART

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