Road to Santosha

The Kevin and Craig Show

Hippie Trail Gold

At Play in the Fields of Allah

Career Move

Grand Prix Dream

Follow the Money

Big in Japan

Rabbit's Big Adventure

Shaun Tomson's Tunnel Vision

South Africa in Black and White

Mark Richards, Gentleman Killer

Two Fins, More Wins

The Divine Miss M

The Fortune Seekers

Shaun Tomson was the pro surfer of IPS founder Fred Hemmings’ dreams. To use a marketing phrase that was just beginning to catch on, Tomson was “the complete package”: bright and earnest, polite and dependable, a deadly competitor who was never anything less than a perfect sportsman. All that, plus he had an aristocratic blow-dried handsomeness that earned him modeling assignments from Calvin Klein and 

. Everything about Tomson was above-average, and over the course of a long career he sometimes overplayed his hand—wearing a Tony Manero three-piece disco suit to pro contest banquets, or letting it be known that he had never fixed his own dings, held a job, or been on a grubby camp-out surf trip. A vocal anti-drug crusader, he offended a lot of Aussie surfers by saying in print that Michael Peterson, a Queensland legend and hardcore stoner, had “put the sport in disrepute.” As one surf journalist wrote, with a lightly sarcastic voice, Tomson was the “Prince Valiant of the pro circuit.”

None of that mattered. Shaun Tomson was a wave-riding supernova, and in the winter of 1975-76 he lit up the sport like nobody else.

There had been plenty of advance notice. Still three months shy of his 15th birthday, “Sean Thompson”—as misspelled by the Australian surf press—was touted as a longshot contender for the 1970 World Surfing Championships title. The Tomson style had already gelled, even at that early date, and everything about it ran counter to the sport’s prevailing early-'70s approach: instead of riding out of a closed, vertical, 

 stance, Tomson spread himself low and wide across the board, rounded his back, and kept his arms out like balancing poles—the classic “stinkbug,” except nobody used that description on Tomson. Even at 14, his body and board worked in full synchronization, and he had the positioning instincts, in the lineup and while riding, of surfers twice his age.

Tomson also had the full backing of his family, which was a great advantage. Ernie Tomson, Shaun’s father, was the prosperous owner of one of South Africa’s biggest car dealerships, and still loved the ocean despite having the better part of his right biceps ripped from his arm by a Zambezi shark while swimming along Durban’s South Beach as a young man. New boards and wetsuits, transportation up and down the coast, contest entry fees, coaching and encouragement—Ernie backed his son’s interest in surfing to a degree that was unheard of at the time. On top of that, Shaun had an excellent sparring partner in his older cousin Michael, who was fractionally less talented but just as determined.

In 1973, surfing in front of a hometown crowd in Durban, Tomson won the first of six consecutive Gunston 500 titles. Two years later, in early 1975—not long after finishing his conscripted 18-month national service with the South African Defense Force—he won the Hang Ten American Pro in perfect triple-overhead waves at Sunset Beach, after a finals performance in which he out-pointed Jeff Hakman, Gerry Lopez, Reno Abellira, and Larry Bertlemann—Hawaii’s entire starting lineup. With that, Tomson was anointed the leader among what 

 described as an “increasingly powerful group of Australian and South African performers.”

Shaun Tomson flew back to Hawaii for the '75-'76 winter season with a new set of boards and some radically new ideas about how to ride the powerful North Shore waves. Michael Tomson was there, too. Wayne Bartholomew, Mark Richards, Ian Cairns, Peter Townend, and another dozen or so young and fired-up Aussie pros soon arrived, just in time for a incredible run of North Pacific groundswell and clear, windless weather. Bill Delaney flew in with a couple hundred pounds of camera gear—the 

This was the final North Shore season without a world tour. It was the last time a surfer’s reputation was measured primarily in heavy Hawaiian waves rather than contest results. “For Shaun and myself, and for everybody else," Bartholomew later recalled, "the North Shore was everything. There was no tour, no world title, the contest money was peanuts, and nobody outside of the sport was paying any attention to us. What mattered, the 

 thing that mattered, was who ripped on the North Shore.”

 surfers all ripped, including the top Hawaiians. But the 20-year-old Tomson surfed on a different, higher plane. At Rocky Point and Off-the-Wall—a temperamental break located just west of Pipeline—he did slashing 270-degree cutbacks. At Pipeline, along with cousin Michael and Wayne Bartholomew, he led what the surf press immediately called the “Backside Attack,” taking off further up the reef and riding deeper inside the tube than any of the regularfooters before them. Nobody batted an eye when Tomson beat Gerry Lopez and Rory Russell to win the 1975 Pipeline Masters.

The Backside Attack was a huge shot of adrenaline, but it wasn’t conjured out of thin air: Sam Hawk and Owl Chapman fearlessly attacked Pipeline earlier in the decade, and they in turn were inspired by longboard-era surfer John Peck. What caused the surf world to stop and gape in amazement was Shaun Tomson’s complete redesign of 

 tuberiding. It was his signature achievement, engineered mostly at Backdoor and Off-the-Wall, and it was wave-riding like no one had seen before.

Up to that point, Gerry Lopez was the last word in tuberiding. His board flew straight as a spear through the hollows, while Lopez stood in perfect motionless repose. Nothing in the sport was as beautiful, and Tomson himself did it beautifully. But the Lopez method worked best in big, wide-open, well-shaped tubes. To ride deep inside a less-than-perfect tube—or to ride even deeper inside a perfect one, for that matter—meant the surfer had to be more active.

Nobody but Tomson could have invented the “pump” style of riding the tube, for the simple reason that he had the widest stance in the business. Straight-line tuberiding, for all its aesthetic merit, had developed out of necessity: the rider turned while standing over the back half of his board and then, while setting a trim line, moved up a foot or so to the board’s sweet spot—where it was almost impossible to change course. Tomson didn’t have to toggle back and forth; his turning stance wasn’t much different from his tuberiding stance. With this advantage, he worked out a number of ways to extend his time inside the barrel. He could afford to delay his bottom turn because he didn’t have to take a moment once the turn was complete to adjust his stance. Exiting a tube with his eye on the next hollow section, he could quickly go to his heels for a speed-checking fade to the trough, then lean to the right and climb back into trim position just as the curl again pitched out overhead. Again, without moving his feet. Or if the wave was going to shut down completely, he was often able to jam a quick left turn and evacuate just ahead of the whitewater. Best of all, when heading into an especially long, fast tube, Tomson was able to weave his board a few degrees up and down the wave face—that was the “pumping” part—which gave him access to gears that weren’t available to a straight-line tuberider.

Tomson had a monopoly on all of these new moves during the winter of 1975-76. Advanced equipment had a lot to do with Tomson's sudden advantage over other pros. His new boards had added lift in the nose and tail—one was nicknamed “the banana,” and Tomson was heckled when he first walked down the beach holding it—which made them extra maneuverable. The low-rocker boards everybody else had, by contrast, could not be finessed from inside the tube. More than equipment, though, it was Tomson’s imagination, audacity, and prodigious talent. It was good luck, too—being in that time and place, before the world tour and with a seemingly endless run of fine winter surf.

 single best clip, Tomson glides out of a long Backdoor tube in slow motion and aims for shore with a wide and slightly disbelieving smile. What everybody saw onscreen wasn't just new to them—it was still new to Tomson as well, and he looks radiant with discovery. “You remember the long ones,” he said not long afterward. “When you’re actually breathing inside the tube, turning and carving, and these sections are exploding over in front of you—you’re perceiving so many things so fast that reality actually seems to slow down. It’s perfect control of mind and body. These are the moments that I see as my reason for surfing.”

When the IPS pro circuit was launched the following year, Tomson finished in 6th place—mostly because he’d missed a lot of the events that the 1976 tour organizers decided, after the fact, to count. Competing full-time in 1977, he won the title. It wasn’t a walk in the park, exactly; Wayne Bartholomew led the ratings up until Hawaii. But Tomson was the world’s best surfer, and everybody knew it. A championship trophy only rubber-stamped this fact.

How good was Shaun Tomson? At 19 he won the Hang Ten American Pro in perfect triple-overhead Sunset Beach, after a finals performance in which he out-pointed Jeff Hakman, Gerry Lopez, Reno Abellira, and Larry Bertlemann—Hawaii's entire starting lineup.

Chapter: 6

The Fortune Seekers

Shaun Tomson's Tunnel Vision

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