Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

Depth of talent has always been Australia’s greatest strength as a surfing nation, and this was certainly true during Tom Carroll’s long world-tour career. Barton Lynch and Damien Hardman were the era’s best tacticians, and each won a world championship during the 1980s, with Hardman picking up a second title in 1991. Then there was Glen Winton, a rubber-jointed goofyfooter; Richard Cram and his sledging forehand cutback; Nicky Wood, Mark Richards’ godson, who won the 1986 Bells event—his world tour debut—at age 16; and a friendly born-again Christian named Dave MacAulay, who took out world tour competitors like an assassin and posed for a two-page 

 portrait holding the same leather-bound New Testament he used on proselytizing missions between contests.

All of these surfers were first-rate, but none were in the same league as Tom Carroll. Gary Elkerton of Queensland was close. And Sydney’s Mark Occhilupo was closer still—maybe better.

Elkerton was better known as “Kong.” He was a pugnacious 20-year-old world tour rookie in 1984, and if he lacked Carroll’s finesse and polish, he threw turns with the same blunt-force power. Like Carroll, Elkerton was among the last group of world-class surfers to come of age when the idea of a surfing career still seemed a little farfetched. (Carroll spent 18 months pounding metal in an auto-body shop before turning pro; Elkerton dropped out of school to work on his father’s Sunshine Coast shrimp trawler). Elkerton, too, was a natural in heavy Hawaiian surf. 

 would later name him the best surfer ever at Sunset Beach, something Elkerton himself wouldn’t dispute. “I’m gifted with something,” he once said, in response to a question about his ease in big surf. “When I get the speed, no one can touch me.”

For three or four years, Elkerton seemed to be channeling the rock-till-you-die spirit of AC/DC frontman Bon Scott: he’d drop his trunks on a crowded beach, or crawl screaming from the passenger window of a moving car to crouch on the hood. Daybreak often found him moving blearily through the lineup in a nimbus of exhaled beer fumes. Psyching up for a heat in the 1984 Stubbies Pro, Elkerton gripped the railing of his 15th-floor hotel room balcony and pushed up into a handstand.

In 1986, at age 23, newly married and unhappy with his pro tour results up to that point, Elkerton sobered up, moved to France, sent out a press release demanding that he no longer be referred to as “Kong,” and began to compete with the same ferocity he’d heretofore applied to football-Sunday pub crawls. The next year he hit #2. He did it again in 1990, and once more in 1993. Finishing second, Elkerton said years later, “crushes you.” Giving up the “Kong” identity, he added, in what seemed to be an indictment of his career and of surfing competition in general, had been “a sad point in my life.”

Mark Occhilupo of Cronulla was Australia’s greatest natural talent since Wayne Lynch, although you wouldn’t know it from watching him walk down the beach—he was stocky and short-legged, with a wide ass, a mildly swayed back, and a barracuda underbite. He turned pro in 1983 at age 17. Like almost every Sydney-area goofyfooter of the time, he’d made a close study of Tom Carroll, who was five years his senior. Carroll held an edge on Occhilupo as a tuberider and big-wave charger, and was always more focused and determined. But Occhilupo was untouchable—not just by Carroll, but everybody of his generation, save Tom Curren—in terms of flow, balance, and spontaneity. Where Carroll came to greatness by learning to ride within himself, Occhilupo did the opposite: he loved to push a maneuver just beyond control, duck his head slightly, neutralize the edges of his board, spread his open-fingered hands out like balance sensors, and calmly feel his way back to center. His monumental talent wasn’t so much crafted as it was simply channeled. Even more than Carroll, Occhilupo was the Australian “It” surfer during the mid-1980s: fans gaped at his loose and inventive free-surfing (anything done outside of competition), cheered wildly at his world tour successes (#3 on the 1984 tour, five event wins in 1985), and were drawn to his odd but compelling man-child charisma. He picked up the nickname “Raging Bull” during his rookie season, but it was wholly unfitting to his character. Occhilupo was pro surfing’s gentlest, most vulnerable figure—he’d basked in the attention of his mother and sisters, and was damaged emotionally by a stern, demeaning Italian immigrant father—and people fell over themselves to help and protect him.

The defining events of Occhilupo’s life and career unfolded in spectacular fashion in the decade to come, as he had a series of mental breakdowns, retired, then charged back to finally win a world championship in 1999 at age 33. But his first appearance seemed miraculous, too. “He just appeared,” Wayne Bartholomew later said. “Tom Carroll—we’d seen him coming for years. But Occy was a bolt from the blue. No buzz, nothing. He just seemed to turn up one morning, and we all stood there watching, awestruck.”

"Occy was a bolt from the blue. No buzz beforehand, nothing. He just seemed to turn up one morning, and we all stood there watching, awestruck.”

Chapter: 7

Long Division

An Explosion of Talent

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