Originally published as "Gavin Rudolf: A New Face From the Crowd," in the May, 1972, issue of SURFER. Rudolf was 18 at the time of this interview with surfer-writer-filmmaker Rod Sumpter, which took place in late 1971, in Hawaii, just after Rudolf won the Smirnoff Pro-Am at Sunset Beach. His first time surfing the break took place the day before the contest.

What was it like riding Sunset for the first time?

It was spacey. A different trip to what I usually handle, because at home we don’t get such big waves. Sunset that day was pushing 8- to 10-foot, some 15-foot closeouts. For sure some of the biggest waves I’ve surfed. That was the day before the Smirnoff.

How did you feel, with all the names and the heroes out there? Were they giving you a hard time?

No, they weren’t giving me a hard time. I thought I’d be given a hard time, and thought I’d have a hard time taking off because the drop is really radical. It's like an elevator drop, and the wind was blowing pretty hard. But I seem to have handled it pretty well. I thought I’d really spin out, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to handle it, and I was glad I could. I caught many waves. I was quite stoked.

You only got out of the Navy [the South African Defense Force; mandatory nine-month service] a couple of months ago, right?

I only got out—well, let’s see, a month and four days ago. So the whole of this year I’ve been in the Navy doing national service like the kids have to do here in America (chuckle).

So arriving here straight into two or three big swells was . . .

. . . was strange, man! Woke up the very first morning and thought to myself, “I just have to get it on!" I had a new board, which was a day old, and it was 7' 10". I haven’t surfed board that size for two-and-a-half years. The last board I was riding was 6'6".

It depends on the surf. If the wave is hollow, I won’t try to rip it up because I know it’ll rip me up. I’ll try to play as tight to the curl as possible and play with the tubes and try to get inside. Whereas if the wave has a nice long wall and looks playful, then I’ll get right into ripping it apart and doing as much as I can.

What do you think of the Hawaiian way of surfing?

I see it as long, smooth, flowing movements. There are other things going on. You can see some East Coast and West Coast influences there too, and of course you get Australians coming here and their styles gets intermingled as well. But in general, the main style here smooth, with long turns. The way you ride big waves, you know? 'Cause that’s where Hawaii’s at—big waves.

Is there any other way of riding Hawaiian waves?

I reckon they’ve got it pretty jacked up [figured out]. For instance, Kanaiaupuni, Tiger, Clyde Aikau, Ben—they're sort of the fathers. Jeff Hakman, too. They know the Islands, they know the most about surfing here, and most people try to follow them. That’s why the common style you see here is based around their style. Get as close to the tube as possible, play it as cool as possible, which is really groovy. You don’t get that in other countries. Everywhere else, you have guys surfing about 20-feet in front of the curl. Here, the good surfers stand mostly in the tube and close to the lip.

Well, guys like Barry K., and especially Billy Hamilton. He turns and cuts back so gracefully. I’m really stoked on Boobie Jones' surfing. Jeff Hakman, for sure. All the top guys that everyone knows about, and there’s so many kids that I didn’t even know who really blew my mind at the local breaks.

Haleiwa, mainly, where I stayed for five weeks, and Chun’s Reef, which is a really playful wave, and the local breaks around Sunset. I reckon Hawaii's got the best surfers in the world.

And the best surf, yeah. For sure. I reckon I’ve never seen such good surfing in my life as I have in this past month in the Islands

How many countries have you visited so far?

In 1968, I went to Puerto Rico for the World Contest. I was only 15 years old then.

I got to the quarterfinals and was eliminated.

What's it like to surf an event like that, then return to South Africa?

You learn a lot at a World Contest. Then you go back home, and South Africa is about three years behind on average. And you forget mostly about what you learned because you go back to surfing with guys who don't know much about surfing. You just surf for pleasure. That's what happened to me, anyway. There's no rat races in the water back home, no fighting for waves and things like that. Whereas here in Hawaii it's a really different sort of atmosphere. On land, the vibes are beautiful, but in the water, it changes to war (laughter).

You just get accustomed to it like you get accustomed to the climate in a new city. So at this point I’ve sort of gotten used to the fact that there’s crowds in the water, and if you don’t catch waves, you just don’t surf, man. So I suppose I’ve become a hustler now.

What are you going to do with the money? [$2,500, the year's biggest pro surfing prize]

I’m going to use it to travel for the rest of next year.

I'll stay here another few weeks, then play it by ear. My return ticket stops off at San Francisco, and so I’ll stay there a while, cruise on down the coast towards San Diego, maybe get to the Ranch. A lot of my friends from Jeffrey’s Bay have told me about it.

The Ranch is good—it’s really good—it’s the best area in California.

Yeah, I’m stoked. I wanta get there when the winter’s still on.

What do you think about the way contests are run here in Hawaii, and about the whole contest trip in general? The Durban 500, to me, is run better than the contests here, but what do you think?

I reckon the 500 is run better than the contests here, ’cause we have younger judges and guys that are really participating in the sport, whereas over here it mostly old men running the show, and they don’t know too much—know what I mean?

They don't know too much about modern surfing?

Because most of the guys have been surfing thirty years?

Some of your takeoffs [during the Smirnoff] were as late as anybody’s, but what I think the most impressive thing was your cutbacks, they were really tight. How’d you do it?

As I was saying, the waves that day—it was a case where you could really rip if you wanted to surf that way, and use the whole face of the wave. The other guys were respecting it, and I wasn’t respecting it because I didn’t know Sunset. I just thought it was a normal wave to get into and rip. In other words, the other guys sort of played it cool and surfed Sunset like it should be surfed, and I sort of surfed Sunset like it shouldn’t be surfed but it 

You've won the biggest contest there is. How does that feel?

I didn’t know how big this contest was until I came here and got to surf in it. I thought it was going to be, well, just another contest. I didn't realize that I’d get that much money from it. I thought maybe I’d freak someone out by making it out of my first heat or something like that. Once I was in the semifinals, and I was doing it, I thought I could win it because I was using the whole face of the wave to do cutbacks and S-turns. And I did.

I learned to surf in Port Elizabeth, where I was born, and when I started to improve, I was able to get lifts out to other breaks—Jeffreys and Cape St. Francis, which are close to my home. Surfing in those perfect waves, learning about the rock situation, and how waves come into a point—all that really improved my surfing. I just traveled a lot, that’s how I learned to surf well.

I didn’t take water shots when I was down there because of the shark scene. How does that affect you?

The shark scene where I came from is cool. There’s not many sharks near where I live. But further down the coast, Victoria Bay and Mossel Bay, Plettenberg Bay, around that area, there are lots of sharks.

Yeah, those are the places that freaked me out.

I haven’t been up there, you see. I haven’t up been that far. I surf mainly from Cape Town to Durban, and north of Durban.

In Durban, they’ve got shark nets. But that's the only area. Down the East Cape, where I come from, there are no shark nets, ’cause the shark scare is off. One or two every ten years, you know? Except we’ve had three attacks in this past year.

One guy was sitting out in Mossel Bay and this shark came up and took half his board away, just one bite, a big one. And he freaked out and started swimming to shore, and the shark decided to take his leg off, and so it took his leg off. But he made it to shore anyway. He's a good friend of mine, and I was bummed out about that. Anyway, the guy got a few of his friends together and they went and hunted the shark down and shot it, ’cause they’re good at shark fighting there.

Over the years, which surfer had the most influence on your?

Nat Young. I followed him for a good three years—the way he surfed, his views on the sport.

Do you want to surf in more professional contests?

If a contest comes along, a professional contest, I’ll obviously enter it because I’d like to win some money. That’s the main thing that stokes me to entering the professional contest—not to break the next guy’s ego, or to sort of knock him down. You know, that's what I hear the big contests are like on the mainland. Pretty much all the contests I've done back home are these soulful little things, just some friends drinking a few pops and we just go surfing.

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Features

Videos

Contests