Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Kelly Slater hand-painted his own boards, told reporters that Noam Chomsky was his favorite writer, and occasionally pulled a world-tour no-show. In other words, he did just enough to be thought of as independent and mildly quirky. Yet Slater was never less than a model surfer-citizen: likable and well-mannered and always acting—in the hoary but still-popular phrase—for “the good of the sport.”

He was useless, in other words, to those who still needed surfing to be a conspicuous act of rebellion. It had been a generation or two since Miki Dora, surfing's great icon of disaffection, caused any real trouble, but Dora's basic message hadn’t lost its zing: the hardcore wave-rider engaged the sport not just for pleasure but as a running battle against crowds, kooks, nonlocals, bodyboarders, contest organizers, and various other offshoots of what was still called the Establishment.

Still, times had changed since the '50s and '60s—Dora’s era—when the Establishment had in fact given the sport something to be anti about. Surfing back then was odd to the point of being subversive, and all the 

-era handwringing over “surf bums” and “the bad surfer” practically invited rebellious behavior. By the '90s, however, wave-riding was no longer thought of as either peculiar or dangerous. Just the opposite. Everybody 

 surfing. Teachers, parents, your dentist—the Establishment was surfing too, and loving it.

So where did that leave the surfing malcontent? If your talent level was high enough, he (always boys, never girls) might again look to Dora for guidance. In the mid-'60s, the "angry young man of surfing" (as 

 magazine labeled him) channeled his disrupting reputation into his “Da Cat” signature model board and hit marketing gold. Dora's logic: if you can't beat 'em, at least get into their wallet. The "Da Cat" ad campaign was perfectly executed, the boards sold well, and the Dora method was established. Maybe too well. Twenty-five years later, anti-Establishment rebelliousness in surfing had no real value 

There were different ways to sell rebelliousness. The hard man was one, and best personified in the 1980s and '90s by a Makaha regularfooter named Johnny-Boy Gomes. Short, athletic, and well-muscled, Gomes had the same knockout talent as heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson—blinding speed, explosive power, awesome confidence. Gomes was a North Shore specialist. At one stage, over a 13-month period, he won three straight pro contests at Pipeline, and did so emphatically: blasting out of a long tube, he would turn shoreward and give the judging panel a deep-elbow Italian salute—

 them to post anything but a perfect 10. They didn’t need convincing. Gomes had a brutal surfing genius, and deserved every 10 he got.

He also, as Australian surf journalist Tim Baker put it, “soured more surf sessions, for more people, than anyone alive.” Gomes picked up an assault conviction for breaking a surfer’s nose, and was once fined by the ASP for punching a competitor while their heat was in progress—a world tour first. He tracked Baker down one afternoon, put him in a headlock, and laid a rusty screwdriver against his throat. Rarely did a week pass during the crowded North Shore winter season when Gomes didn’t get into at least a half-dozen confrontations, many of them physical.

Gomes wasn’t surfing’s first heavy. Tough guys have had a place in the sport since the beginning. What set Gomes apart was that he became surfing’s first 

 heavy. Starting in the late '80s, a beachwear manufacturer called Life’s a Beach/Bad Boy Club paid him not just to surf well in their gear but to look menacing as possible while doing it. Bad Boy ads showed Gomes snarling and raising a fist ran in all the surf magazines and had an effect.“By all accounts,” one magazine writer said, anticipating a 1990 meeting with Gomes, “I’m about to interview a walking time bomb.”

It made sense that this particular surfing archetype came out of Hawaii. The sport here was in closer-than-average proximity to high crime rates, heavy drug use, gang culture—the whole poverty-driven roster of urban pathologies, but in a tropical setting—and the menacing Hawaiian had been a familiar part of the surfing landscape for decades. When hip-hop began to filter into the sport during the late '80s, it was a ridiculous fit, image-wise—except in Hawaii, where it made a kind of sense. Gomes ate it up. By the mid-'90s, he’d taken on a more flamboyant thug persona, showing up at the Pipeline Masters with “GOMES” tattooed in gothic gang-style lettering across his abdomen, and telling 

 that he’d be just as hardcore while traveling overseas. “All you clowns in the surf? Stay the fuck out of my way. Just look at me, just give me a little vibe, and I’ll kick your ass in your own hometown.”

Surf-thug chic didn't catch on big. But it never went away, either. Some of Hawaii’s post-Gomes surfers ran even further with the gangster theme—none more so than Kala Alexander, a muscle-ripped regularfooter from Kauai with a long assault-filled rap sheet. Alexander was head of the Wolfpak, a loosely-organized vigilante squad who stayed in a house overlooking Pipeline. A referee whistle would sound from the porch when somebody in the lineup got in the way of a Wolfpak member, at which point the offending party would at the very least be ordered from the water, but more likely punched out, 

While Alexander wasn’t in Gomes’ league as a surfer, he was even tougher and more menacing—and therefore a hotter media personality. Surf magazines chased Alexander down for fawning interviews, and he played himself, to supremely malign effect, in 2002’s 

. He turned up in nearly as many beachwear ads as the world-title contenders, with the caption on one double-pager reminding readers that “Kala Alexander Runs the North Shore.”

All good for business, as Alexander knew. After pointing out to a 

 magazine interviewer in 2004 that the Pipeline was a “pretty heavy neighborhood,” and that his gang had it “locked down, [and] nobody fucks around here,” he shifted into marketing mode. “I’ve just registered the name Wolfpak,” he said proudly. “We’re going to be coming out around the world with products—hats, T-shirts, videos.”

Meanwhile, the Abberton brothers of Maroubra Beach, a working-class Sydney suburb hemmed in by government housing, a sewage plant, and a maximum-security prison, became the most-recognized hard men of Australian surfing. Partly as a way to create a kind of family—the Abberton's mother was a junkie, the various men in her life were crime- or drug-connected—they formed a gang in the early '90s called the Bra Boys. Similar gangs had long existed in Maroubra and nearby beaches. The violence that was either sought out or visited upon the Bra Boys was endless, and surfing was a welcome and in some cases literal escape. Sunny and Jai Abberton both surfed briefly as professionals. Koby Abberton did too, then went on to become one of Australia's most renowned big-wave surfers.

More so than any of their tough-surfer counterparts around the world, the Abbertons had the most far-reaching overlap with the non-surfing world. They fought with off-duty police officers and were said to be both instigators and peace-makers during the racially-charged 2005 Cronulla Beach Riots. Most famously, Jai Abberton was brought up on a 2003 murder charge (resulting in a self-defense acquittal), with Koby charged as an accessory (guilty; nine-month suspended jail sentence).

Not long after Jai's acquittal, Sunny Abberton began working on a feature-length documentary, released in 2007, titled 

Produced and narrated by Russell Crowe, the film became one of Australia's all-time top-grossing documentaries but was criticized for celebrating violence and providing an overly-redemptive view of its subjects. The following year, Koby was jailed for three days after assaulting a Honolulu police officer. Not long after that, Koby and Jai launched My Brother's Keeper, a clothing line.

Johnny-Boy Gomes, like heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, was a knockout talent, with blinding speed, explosive power, and awesome confidence. He was also a bully and a thug. As surf journalist Tim Baker put it, Gomes had "soured more surf sessions, for more people, than anyone alive.”

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Rebel for Hire

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