Jim Murray's article on Margo Oberg ran in the Los Angeles Times in early November 1978

In 1964, in a contest for 61 surfers 12 years old and under, Margo Godfrey of La Jolla, Calif., won easily. No big deal Except she was the only girl in it. And she was barely 11 at the time.

Margo didn't win a world championship till she was a ripe old 15. She's won six since, and it might have been more except she took three years out of the water after she got married, to Steve Oberg, in Hawaii, in 1972.

But Margo Godfrey Oberg off a wave is like a moose on Broadway, an offense against nature. She's not at home in anything less than four fathoms.

She made her comeback in a Smirnoff contest at Santa Cruz, Calif., in 1975 where they allowed one woman in each of the seven heats. When she beat the New Zealand national champ and chased the world champ, Jimmy Blears, right up the beach, the other surfers surreptitiously begged the committee not to put Margo in their heats.

You would think from the foregoing you would have a pretty good mental picture of Margo Oberg—right from the butch haircut down to the arm tattoos, the railroad cross-tie shoulders, baritone voice, and Tugboat Annie silhouette.

But Margo Oberg looks like something out of "Chorus Line." Barely 5'5", a model-sleek 115 pounds, she doesn't even have surfer bumps, those telltale egg-shaped mounds on the insteps or the knees that denotes the athlete who spends his life kneeling on fiberglassed polyurethane sticks. There are no stitches where skegs, those razer-thin keels on the boards, slice through calves or biceps in a wipeout. Margo Oberg does not look like someone who has been to sea most of her life, she does not have a pirate's vocabulary, she doesn't even drink rum.

Now 25, Margo is the best woman surfer in the world and maybe no worse than third overall if the truth were told. She has avoided the surfers' scars by paddling prone on her board, thus keeping her shoulders and arms at showgirl width. Her hair is blonde, but without that greenish seaweed cast to it because, when Margo is on her stick, so to speak, her stick being a six-foot board in moderate or even heavy surf, her hair does not even get wet. She could ride a good wave halfway down Kalakaua Avenue before kicking out.

She will be favored to win the women s division of the Cuervo Classic surfing competition which will take place sometime between Nov. 15 and Nov. 30 somewhere on the north shore of Oahu, depending on when the Pacific storms deliver the ridable conditions.

Surfing is a man-against-sea struggle in which the surfer strives to skim across the ocean propelled by the waves. He—or she—catches the swell at its crest and then rides down a mountain of water like a snow skier skiing the cornice. Sometimes it becomes like skiing on an avalanche. When the seas hit 20 feet, the sensation can be like going over Niagara Falls on a barrel stave.

Margo knows the sea like a shark. She studied oceanography and spent so much of her life sitting on a board off San Diego's Point Loma that the whales used to plot their course south by her. She has learned to judge an ocean's moods as carefully as a shipwrecked sailor. She is almost unbeatable in light maneuverable surf, and she outwits the big-wave surf. "I'm stronger than I look, but I never slug it out with the big ones. I treat them with respect." Like Muhammad All, she jabs them to death.

Besides, she considers big-wave riding, while the most spectacular for spectating, to be the easiest kind of surfing. "Catch it right, and the wave does the rest."

The nice part about the sea is it is usually predictable. Not always. Like the time Margo was surfing off her home at Kauai with a group of students she was instructing and a huge swell came in. In the swell was a huge shark chasing a fish. The fish was right behind Margo's board. If the fish ducked or veered, Margo might have become the entree for Mr. Jaws. For once, she lost her board, her head, got her hair wet. She panicked as she watched the shark's dorsal circle as it looked for its lost dinner. One of the young boy students came up, turned his board over to Margo, and swam ashore himself

Margo has surfed all over the world from South Africa to Australia. The only thing she can't beat into the shore is a hungry shark. If one or more of them is in the field, Margo will let them have the wave, also the tequila and the money. You see, the shark might just think she's just an open-face sandwich.

"MARGO: THE CLASS OF THE SPORT," JIM MURRAY, LOS ANGELES TIMES (1978)

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