This article originally ran in the December 1985 issue of Tracks magazine.

“What do you reckon about the hare and the tortoise?”

The question, coming as it does across a chilly farmyard at six in the morning just outside Margaret River township, is a complete doozy; but Mitch Thorson just looks over, halfway through loading boards into his beaten-up Commodore, and raises his eyebrows enquiringly.

Well, shit . . . he’s got me . . . but as I find out later, Mitch is always thinking about the old hare-and-tortoise number. You know, the one where the cheeky hare sprints away from his slow-moving chum, only to be dusted in the home straight thanks to an attack of the sleepies.

"I say it to myself all the time, you know. 'Hare and the tortoise, hare and the tortoise',” he tells me, eyes glinting with the buzz of a pro surfer who's finally found an act to hang his hat on—for Mitch likes the metaphor. He likes the idea of being the slow, steady, certain type who's always there at the end, while the fast flamboyant ones are busy going off the rails somewhere else.

And not only does he like it, but it seems to be working—on the pro tour anyway. Through the kind of grinding consistency that wears down the hares more often than ever nowadays, Mitch came into the Aussie spring circuit sitting in a comfortable 10th place on the world ratings. He is planning on longevity.

“Derek (Hynd) told me I’d never make the top five because I'm too lateral a surfer. Well, you know, Hans Hedemann's been in the top five for 25 years and there’s no way he's a vertical surfer. I think definitely I’ll end up doing better than a lot of guys who are more popular and in vogue at the moment.”

It is said very straight, very serious; but at 22 Mitch Thorson, top-pro-on-probation and possibly Western Australia's best known surfing export since the enormous Ian Cairns, is like that: straight, very serious and very much, very carefully, in control.

When you hear about Mitch’s shivery early family life, it’s hardly surprising he likes the idea of being slow and steady.

His parents went through a painful divorce when he was seven years old. His father had moved them all over the state, searching for a place to settle down after a big career in Australian football. Mother Margaret took the children, headed back to their Rottnest Island origins and remarried, this time to Frank Thorson, the island's baker.

Mitch hasn’t seen his natural father since he was 15.

"I think about him a lot because he was a really hot football player. And that's what I was doing up till I was about 15. I was on my way to that sort of career. I was playing with a club and everything, and I was just about to start training with the Colts at Claremont. [A famous West Oz footy team.] I’d done my apprenticeship, I'd played in the state rounds and got best-and-fairest, I was on my way.

"Then I won a state surfing title and thought no, this is better." He laughs. “Mum always tried to encourage me away from football.”

Mitch still goes to watch Claremont play sometimes, and sees his old team-mates out there on the field. “Every time I watch it, it sorta hits me. I wonder if I might have been able to—especially last year and the year before when I was about 30th on the ratings."

Footy or not, Mitch always felt like a sportsman. In his early teens, he spent the weeks in boarding school in Perth and the weekends and holidays back on the secluded beaches of Rottnest. The school, Scots College, was pretty strong on sports. “I used to play tennis, swim and row boats. Every morning in second and third forms I'd get up on dark, ride my bike down to the boatshed, get the boat out and row for a solid hour, put the boat back, ride back to school just in time to get changed and have breakfast, go to school, finish, bolt back, get changed, row till dark, come back just in time for dinner. That was the rowing season. Then in the footy season, I used to train on Monday and Wednesday and play for the school on Friday, and on Tuesday and Thursday I played for an outside club. I hardly had time to do anything else."

If you're a surfer, there can’t be many better places to grow up than Rottnest, blessed as it is with a natural environment and juicy, uncrowded surf. Mitch learned his moves in the solid reef waves at Strickland Bay on the weekends away from school. It’s been 18 months since the Thorsons moved to the Margaret River farm, and despite the River area's amazing surf Mitch still finds himself missing the island sometimes: "Strickland was my spot and I knew every hole in the reef, every sort of wave that would come through out there. I had it totally wired. I still get off on it every time I go there.”

With that surfing background, Mitch's choosing surfing over football as the sport to chase is pretty easy to understand.

He spent several years as an amateur, heading up through the blossoming West Oz junior ranks, pushed by Dave MacAulay, Mike McAuliffe, Colin Earle, Damon Eastaugh and a guy called Peter Bengough. "Ever heard of him?" he asks. He was as good as anyone I saw in Sydney or Queenland. He was built like Potter but shorter, even thicker in the legs. He used to blaze! I reckon he was potentially the greatest thing that WA had ever seen. If he'd had the attitude.”

The attitude! This is most important to Mitch—the correct attitude to things, the right perspective on situations, the balanced view that keeps a tortoise cruising while the hare zooms off into Dreamsville, ignoring the scene altogether.

Attitude is the thing he keeps coming back to throughout our interview, stressing the difference it makes to performance in and out of the water. Mitch is a damn good surfer with many strong moves under his belt, especially in bigger waves; but he knows it’s his attitude that’ll separate him from the pack.

He chooses surfers to illustrate the point. Occy, Kong and Potter, he says, are all going a bit hard, hare-style. “There’s no way you can tell me that leads to stability in your career. I mean, it just doesn’t. No matter how outrageously good you are, it just doesn't matter. Like, I’ve seen Mike Parsons beat Kong seven times in a row. And Mike isn’t half the surfer, but he's got a head that allows him to go, ‘OK, Kong is heaps better me, but I can beat him by getting the right waves.' Now Kong and that, if they go out there and get the waves and go off, they’ll win. But those guys, Kong and the rest, I can tell you right now, will never win a world title."

On the other end of the scale, there’s Tom Curren. “He surfs . . . well, you know how he surfs. And he’s fuckin’ got his head together! He’s committed, more than anyone else except maybe Tom Carroll. And he’s got his boards together, which is a major advantage.”

So, Mitch — where are you? “I'm most definitely in the stable camp. I’ve been around the tour for a while now, and one thing I’ve really learned is the guys who seem to be stayers are the ones who are stable with their lives. I've decided that the way I’m gonna make my career is by being consistent, stable, and alert to what's going on.”

Slow and steady. But Mitch's entry to the pro tour, or rather his exit from the amateur ranks back in 1983, was uncharacteristically abrupt.

He’d had a couple of killer years in West Oz, winning every contest he entered and aiming for a jump-off into the pros from the National Titles, scheduled for his home state that year.

By January he’d won the first two contests of the four-event WA titles, and wondered if he had enough points to qualify for the Nationals as it stood. If so, he could take the time to go east for the Stubbies. He asked the organizers and they told him there was no problem.

Now, whether or not Mitch’s successful image—he was already careful to be seen as straight, 

 pro tour — was bugging what he describes as the “cool mould" in the WA hierarchy, who knows. But Mitch called his mother after the Stubbies to be told he wasn’t in the West Oz team anymore.

“I came back and said to the guys, ‘Look, you said it was OK. I’ve got to be in that team, I'm the best surfer in the state and I’m gonna win an Australian title for West Oz!’ And they just said, 'Nope, sorry," and I had to sit and watch Bill Sedunary win it. I was devastated. I just went, 'Fuck you guys'.”

So, boom! Mitch was out on the pro tour, in South Africa, fuming, “not even near ready," but helped out by a much-needed parental injection of cash—a fact that made him even less “cool."

In hindsight, he says, it was “pretty much a fucked-up year. I started doing the tour too early, 19 years old, before I was ready, and it's a mistake a few guys have made.” But the parental aid didn’t go astray, despite the hipsters' remarks—some of which are still flying. That annoys Mitch. “I think it sucks. If I was a parent with the money, and my kid said, ‘Look, I’m gonna kill it on the pro circuit, one day I’ll be a top surfer,' and they were sure of it, I’d say well, here's five grand, go for it!”

After that first year in 1983—he finished 49th, with his top result a 5th in a C-rated event in France—Mitch began putting his attitude to work.

Now he travels with Occy mostly, Gary Green sometimes, companions he finds both tortuous and amusing: “I spend half my time looking after Occy, 'cos he’s left his passport somewhere and I’ve found it, helping him fill out forms and stuff like that.”

For a while, though, he became what he calls a “semi-American,” hanging out with surfers like Dave Parmenter and Mike Parsons, and some of the Aussies "vibed" him for a while because of it. But for Mitch, it was just a technical move. “I looked at the way pro surfing was, and it was quite obvious that it was designed to have an American world champion. The system—everyone from Australia had to learn it, while everyone from America was growing up with it. My immediate thought was, I’ll hang out with one of 'em and learn first-hand how they do it; all the little intricacies that I probably don't notice when I’m watching a heat.”

Perhaps partly because he's West Aussie, with fewer of the ties binding eastern Australian surfers together, Mitch relaxed and enjoyed being away from his fellow countrymen. “I’m Australian and I’m patriotic but I think a lot of Australians have a fucked attitude to life—not surfing, but life. They think they’re so unbelievably better than anyone else that they walk around like they’re God. And I found it was just a lot easier to hang out with these conservative Americans rather than a bunch of Aussies who’re egocentric, extroverted, always competing against themselves. All I wanted was a way to look at the system without having to cope with all the bullshit.”

The learning paid off, as did the attitude—it's no coincidence that the names Parsons, Parmenter, and Thorson are crunched together in the solid ninth and fifth placings boxes from so many tour events this year.

Billabong coach Derek Hynd has been a help, too: “If I do well, he just says 'yeah, yeah, yeah.' If I make mistakes, he points them out. He actually reckons I’m surfing too smooth.

In '84, Mitch finished 29th, last year 30th. But this year is different. This year is where the work, the attitude, is starting to pay off. He and his shaper, Colin Ladhams, have been putting in a lot of effort on the design front, and Mitch thinks he’s on the way to conquering one of his biggest worries—equipment. “What happens is I’ll go away and he'll do maybe four 6’3”s for me. Then when I come back I pick out the best one or two. I try to change ’em fairly regularly. It’s good to change so you don’t get stale.

“So I’m getting my boards sorted out, and I’ve sussed out the system and seen how guys win and all that. And I’ve seen the guys who are stayers. Now it’s just got to the stage where I’ve just gotta start working on 

It’s back down at the farm where Mitch Thorson gets to loosen up, breathe some fresh air, haul out a seven-foot-plus rocket and indulge a slightly different, edgier side of his persona with a bit of big-wave craziness out on the River reef. Or he might go for a hell-run in his old Commodore, sliding down the dirt roads of the south-west by himself and burning up some of that world tour tension by getting out there alone, in the wild.

In part because he intens to settle down in the Margaret River area after he’s finished with the pro tour, and in part just because of who he is as a person, Mitch remains a supreme diplomat around other people. For instance, if it’s a good day at the River and he’s outgunning most of the locals, he is careful not to take too many waves, to make sure everyone gets their share. “Like, this is the place where I’m gonna live, you know? I wanna have friends here. And a lot of my mates, they're not great surfers, but they can surf the place. And guys will come down from Perth and work ’em, and I’m a guy who can work ’em back, tell ’em to get outa here and that. A lot of the guys are mellow, and I don’t like seeing ’em get done up.”

A better illustration: we’d just finished a long surf session, walked into a Margaret River lunch place and, while making an order, I’d ended up out the back of the shop gibbering to owner and veteran surfer Robert Conneeley. Mitch had been sitting at a table out front; suddenly he appeared.

"Can I get you to do a favor?" he asked me.

"There’s a guy sitting with me out there at the table. He’s a really nice guy and that, I’ve seen him around for years, but I’m not sure what his name is! So I was wondering, can you introduce yourself to him when you come back out? Then he’ll tell you his name, and I won’t stuff up.”

But that’s Mitch! Careful, covering the bases, unwilling to blow it, always in control—and in his position, hare or tortoise, that may be the best insurance of all.

"OUT OF THE WILDERNESS," MITCH THORSON PROFILE BY NICK CARROLL (1985)

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