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

Before the IPS world tour, the top shortboard-era surfers—Nat Young, Midget Farrelly, Gerry Lopez, Reno Abellira, and Terry Fitzgerald among them—earned a living by shaping surfboards. Once the tour was established, aspiring pros had more incentive to focus entirely on wave-riding, and boardmaking fell by the wayside. Wayne Bartholomew, Shaun Tomson, Cheyne Horan, Dane Kealoha, and nearly all the other IPS pros had no interest in shaping.

Mark Richards bucked this trend partly because, unlike Bartholomew, he wasn’t convinced that pro surfing was going to evolve into a career-worthy occupation. But he also just loved designing and crafting boards. Sydney shaper Geoff McCoy gave Richards some informal training in 1974. Following the 1976-77 North Shore season, he stayed in Hawaii and hired master boardmaker Dick Brewer for an intensive two-month shaping workshop. For the rest of his time on tour, in-between events, Richards was often in the shaping bay, covered in foam dust.

At first, his contest results suffered. Richards finished third in 1976 final ratings, dropped to fifth the next year, then fell all the way to tenth in 1978. It wasn’t just that he was learning a trade. He was learning a trade while competing on the tour, so his time was divided. But that wasn't really it. Too many contests were held in small waves, and as one of the tour’s biggest surfers, Richards found himself bogging down more often than the smaller, lighter pros. (Richards was 6' 1", 180 pounds; Bartholomew was 5' 10", 150 pounds, which was closer to the average.) Apart from Hawaii, which required special equipment, the pros were all using some variation on the same single-fin double-ender design that had been popular since the early '70s. Most of the boards were 6' 6" by 20-inches wide, or thereabouts. Hoping to put a bit of snap and fizz into his small-wave act, Richards, alone among the top Aussie pros, made the switch in 1975 to the “stinger” design, introduced a year earlier by Ben Aipa of Hawaii.

It was a cagey move. Aipa weighed 250 pounds, and had the stone-faced look of a Honolulu hit man—he scared a lot of people. He was also known as the best high-performance boardmaker in Hawaii. Like Richards, Aipa had struggled to find a small-wave board that would get him over the flat spots. In 1972, he introduced a new version of split-backed design called the swallowtail, which allowed the board to pivot a bit more freely. But floatation was still a problem. With the stinger, Aipa essentially took the front two-thirds of a wider small-wave board and glued it to a narrower swallowtail rear section—there was actually a one-inch cut in the rail line. The added width in the center allowed the board to sit higher in the water than a conventional board, which increased the planing speed. The tapered back end gave it bite. Aipa further boosted the board’s maneuverability by moving the fin—and therefore the board’s pivot point—about six inches toward the nose. By late 1974, Hawaii’s best small-wave surfers, including Larry Bertlemann, Buttons Kaluhiokalani, Mark Liddell, and Aipa himself, were all zapping around the Waikiki reefs on their new stingers, most of them decorated with airbrushed hot-rod flames.

Tomson and Bartholomew and the rest of soon-to-be IPS pros thought Aipa’s design was a bit too skittery and held on to their conventional boards. Richards, with some extra cash after winning the 1975 Smirnoff Pro-Am, bought a half-dozen stingers from Aipa, as well as some knockoffs from Dick Brewer. For two years he used these boards exclusively in smaller waves. Other design wheels were in motion, and Richards paid attention to these as well. At the 1976 Coke event in Sydney, Reno Abellira showed up with a stumpy little round-nosed twin-fin, modeled after the “fish” design created a few years earlier by San Diego kneeboarder Steve Lis. Abellira’s board wasn’t especially maneuverable, but it had plenty of flat-bottomed surface area and absolutely skimmed over the water in tiny waves. Richards made himself a copy, and between contests he rode it for kicks at his home break in Newcastle.

In mid-'77, still looking for a magic bullet in smaller waves, Richards built himself a 6-foot 2-inch stinger-fish hybrid. The nose wasn’t round, like Abellira’s board, and he lost the stinger-style cuts in the rail. He kept the swallowtail, and put a lot of V in the back end—not like the old plastic machines, but more than anybody else at the time. Most significantly, Richards finished the board off with a pair of modified fish-style fins, both angled slightly toward the nose. As a finishing touch, he ordered a new oversized surfboard label, with the initials “MR” airbrushed inside the familiar diamond-shaped yellow-and-red Superman logo.

Versions of the twin-fin had knocked around ever since California boardmaker Bob Simmons made a series of what he called “duel-fin” boards in the late '40s and early '50s. Geoff McCoy, Richards’ first surfboard sponsor, made hundreds of square-backed twin-fins in Australia during the early '70s, when the design had a short but intense burst of popularity.

Richards’ take on the design, however, was the one that counted. It went into high gear effortlessly, and the speed didn’t seem to burn off during a turn. Because the board was smaller than what everybody else was riding, it had a tighter turning radius; because it was wide and fairly thick, it glided over flat spots. Richards was ecstatic with his new board. Everybody else was dumbstruck. “I remember sweating out adjectives,” journalist and pro surfer Michael Tomson wrote two years later, recalling the first time he’d seen Richards on a twin-fin, “looking for something powerful enough to give life to his surfing performance.” Richards hadn’t yet won a championship, but Tomson already felt confident enough to nominate him as the generation’s key surfer. “In the same way Nat Young steered us through the late ‘60s and into the early ‘70s, Mark Richards is laying down the lines for ‘80s.”

The twin-fin design had serious drawbacks. It couldn’t be elongated into a big-wave board, as Richards found out during the 1978-79 winter season when he made a few gunned-out twin-fins for the North Shore and they all bombed. (He rightly suspected that the problem had to do with the fins being angled toward the nose; this was the same trouble McTavish had at Sunset Beach with the plastic machine—the board wanted to be in turn mode at all times.) Also, the twin-fin by nature rode “flat” and was difficult to control during any kind of sustained maneuver; few surfers besides Richards, pros included, had the necessary combination of muscle and technique to push a twin-fin through a deep, gouging move. For everybody else, spinouts were common, as were slide-turns, half-turns, and wiggle-turns. The twin-fin was an international sensation by early '78, with tens of thousands of surfers rushing out to buy one, the vast majority of whom ended up looking less like Mark Richards and more like penguin chicks on a banked ice floe. Eventually, most of the world tour pros converted, but there were single-fin holdouts, including Wayne Bartholomew, Cheyne Horan, Michael Ho, and a powerful Aussie regularfooter named Simon Anderson.

The negatives barely registered with Richards. Beginning in 1979, having assembled two quivers of boards—twin-fins for smaller waves, single-fins for Hawaii—he was close to unbeatable. That year he won three of the opening four events, calmly let his huge lead vanish by skipping the South African and mainland America contests to stay home and shape a few boards—his way of recharging before the Hawaiian finale—then roared back in the season’s last event, passing three surfers at the wire to take both the contest and his first world championship.

It was a defining moment, not just for Richards and the still-germinal IPS tour, but for surfing as a whole. The new champion was living proof that the sport was a better place than it had been at the beginning of the decade. The mood, once heavy and brooding, had become lighter and brighter. Board design, thanks almost entirely to Richards’ twin-fin, was again in a fine, progressive state of flux. There was less concern about the “right” way to surf. Gerry Lopez could zen out in the tube at Pipeline, while Richards, a few yards down the beach at Off-the-Wall, set out to “rip, tear, and lacerate.” Surfers in general remained an unwelcoming and self-absorbed lot, as always. But Richards gave the sport a friendly, affable public face.

Cheyne Horan and Dane Kealoha kept Richards on his toes throughout his championship run. Horan was second to Bartholomew in 1978, then second to Richards in 1979, 1981, and 1982—and they became fairly bitter rivals in the process. (Kealoha, a power surfer for the ages who handled the twin-fin with more flair and agility than anybody save Richards himself) was runner-up in 1980. Richards graciously retired after winning his fourth title, at age 25, saying, “I have no desire to bust down any more doors,” and that he thought of himself as “an ordinary person who can stand on a surfboard very well.” Returning to his family home in Newcastle, he shaped boards for his father’s surf shop and married his longtime girlfriend.

Three years after retiring, Richards accepted a wildcard entry to the 1985 Billabong Pro, a pro tour event, the better part of which was held in 20-foot surf at Waimea Bay. He won. The following year, same place, same event, but the surf was nearly 30-foot—as big as the day he trembled his way into the lineup for the 1974 Smirnoff as a 17-year-old rookie. He won again.

By that point, Richards didn’t seem to be an ordinary person at all. He’d become a genuine surfing Superman.

Suddenly there was less concern about the “right” way to surf. Gerry Lopez could zen his way through the barrel at Pipeline, while Marks Richards, at Off-the-Wall, could rip “rip, tear, and lacerate” on his new twin-fin.

Chapter: 6

The Fortune Seekers

Two Fins, More Wins

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