"Ten Years After: a Decade of Professional Surfing: the Continuing Education of Joey Buran," by Matt Warshaw, ran in the October 1987 issue of SURFER. Buran, age 27 and retired from the world tour, had just enrolled in junior college. This verision has been slightly edited.

You dropped out of high school right before senior year?

Sort of. I took the proficiency test, so I got my mail-order diploma. But to answer the question, yes, I did drop out. I was a problem child in school. I grew up in an era way before the NSSA—and guys my age can relate—where contests were uncool, drugs were cool, and cutting school for good surf any surf was the coolest. If you could cut school, get stoned, be a hardcore local and throw rocks at people at your break, you could rule the cafeteria at lunch time. You were cool.

You were winning everything in the WSA at the time.

I’d just won seven WSA 3A Invitationals in a row, which is sort of like winning seven NSSA Open Seasons in a row. This was 1977. All that year I was keeping an eye on the pro tour, which was in its second season, and it just seemed logical to toss my hat into the ring.

What do you think now about 17-year-olds dropping out of high school today to turn pro?

If a kid wants to go out there and try his luck, it’s his choice. If he turns into a blow-it, that stems from a decision he’s made, and he has to live with it. He has to accept a certain amount of responsibility in his life. I think the individual has to accept responsibilities for his actions, whether he’s 16 or 26 or 36.

So the magazines, sponsors and organizations can’t be blamed for enticing a kid with fame and fortune—that kind of thing?

No, I don’t think so. It’s up to the person making the decision. Let me add this, though: If I owned a company, I would 

 send a 17-year-old out on his own on the tour with a free ticket. Not without some kind of coach or guardian, or whatever. Look at tennis: The top players, when they come up real young, have coaches going everywhere with them. And look at Mark Occhilupo, when he had that one really big year, a couple years ago when he came out so strong and was leading the ratings for a few months—that was when Derek Hynd was the Billabong coach and, basically, his job was to take care of Mark, to keep him out of trouble. And it really made a difference.

What if a young amateur star came up to you and asked for advice?

My advice is always based on what I've learned firsthand, and one of the main things I’ve learned after all these years is that education is so important. Now, there’re different kinds of education. Traveling around the world can be an education. I learned a lot, going around the world for seven years. But now, going to college, I’m finding out how much I really missed out on by dropping out. Discipline, mostly. The best thing about school is that it creates discipline in a person's life. One of the main reasons I spun my wheels on the tour during the early years was just a complete lack of discipline. When you can sit there and do three or four hours of homework and not cut class, that kind of thing, it creates a notion in your mind that you cannot quit. So, with high school, not only are you bettering your mind, you’re learning to stay with something, and that’s something you have to have to be successful in life. I mean, look at Jeff Booth. He had a 4.0 GPA all through high school, and the guy is without a doubt one of the biggest threats in American surfing. And when you watch him surf a contest, he’s got so much discipline it’s reflected in his whole approach.

Does he come off looking sort of programmed, the way he surfs?

. I'm just saying that, as a competitor, what he’s done in school shows up in the direction his career is going. And I’m not going to name names, but you look at other guys who came up with Jeff, guys who took a different route—the dropouts who turned pro—and where are they? All those Great White Hopes. Top 16? Top 30? No, not most of ’em. A lot of those guys got lost.

You've also been on record talking about drug use. 

Besides education, the other thing I feel really strongly about is the whole drug thing. Smoking pot was the one thing that really hurt my career—being a stoner for six or seven years. I know it’s real “in" to be anti-drug these days, but at the same time there’s still a lot of it going on. Drugs do destroy lives, and I’m so glad I’ve been clean for six years now. In fact, I've been going to junior high schools and doing anti-drug assemblies. That brings me a lot of satisfaction.

But you’ll knock back a few beers now and then. Does that seem a little hypocritical to you, when alcohol is in fact a bigger problem than drugs?

Well, I don’t drink hard liquor anymore, but yeah, I'll still drink a few beers. I read a quote once from [football coach] Knute Rockne, it’s one of my favorites: “You drink the first one, you sip the second, you skip the third.” That’s pretty much the attitude I have now about drinking.

Couldn’t you apply that same logic to smoking reefer? The idea of moderation?

I don’t think so. From my experience with the two, pot has a much greater effect on a person. You get stoned, and everything’s kinda groovy and bitchin’, and then you’re still sort of out of it for the next two days, even if you don’t get stoned again. I think pot has a much more prolonged effect than beer. I’m not an expert on this stuff, I just know how I felt, after smoking pot and after drinking beer.

Alright. Back to the story. So there you were at 17, smoking pot, not much discipline, and surfing around the globe on the World Tour.

How is the Tour different now, here in 1987, compared to 1978?

Oh, it was so much different. I mean, we had long hair. No stickers on our boards—or way less, at least. We rode single-fins. Jeez, beaver-tails had just been chucked not too long before. A blue and black wetsuit was getting pretty bold, as far as colors go. But I'll tell you one thing that hasn't changed: how hard it is to break in. A lot of people think it’s harder to break in now, but people forget what Peter Townend was like in his prime. Or how good Ian Cairns was. Or how good Michael Tomson was. It’s always been tough to break in.

Were you the first Californian to go fulltime on the Tour?

A few guys before me had done bits and pieces. Rocky Sabo and Randy Laine were two. But nobody had gone all the way around. I was the first to do that.

Who were you hanging out with at the time?

I did a lot of cruising by myself that first year. Those first couple years, actually. Buzzy Kerbox was always real cool to me. He helped me out. Rabbit was pretty cool, too. But for the most part, here I was, this young guy from California, and I was the total oddball, I really was. I was pretty much alone. Joey Buran took care of Joey Buran.

What was your biggest moment that first year?

Making the finals of the Pipe Masters. That was big. I was the youngest surfer ever invited to the contest up to that point and Randy Rarick told me that a lot of the veteran guys were bummed about me getting in. A lot of guys were waiting for me to take a fall.

Do you remember how the day went, heat by heat?

Yeah, I got through a couple heats on lucky breaks, actually, and suddenly there I was in the semifinals. So I show up for my semi and I’m putting my jersey on, looking over at Rory Russell putting his jersey on—Rory’s already won the thing twice—and I’m going, “Whoa, this is the big time!” Sort of wondering what the hell I was doing there next to Rory Russell. Then I look outside, and it was so good that day, and I thought to myself, “Man, this is perfect Pipe. It’s a big left tube and I’ve got a good board. Why not just go for it?” And I won the heat. I got the barrel of my life, and I won the heat and made the final. Rory was spewing—he got second—and later he was telling me, “You’re going to die out there, you’re going down in the final." And he was right! I choked the final. 

But, there was this moment, it’s one of my favorites: coming out of that tube in the semis, just the longest, deepest tube, hearing the beach erupt in cheers. That was the first time I’d heard anyone cheer for me. It was too good to be true. A Pipe Masters’ heat with Rory Russell, and I’m getting spit out of an unreal tube, and everyone on the beach is going nuts.

What were some other big moments in your career? 

Winning the Waimea 5000 in Brazil in '80. That was a big one. Then winning the Pipe Masters in '84, and the Katin a few months before that—those were the other two really big ones. The Pipe win, of course, was just a dream come true. Oh, and winning the California Stubbies in ’81 meant a lot to me. That was right after Chris O'Rourke died. 

He was sort of the guy before you, in terms of a name surfer from California.

Chris was so good. I mean, he was just grace on water, like Tom Curren. I’d always looked up to Chris, and it really affected me to see someone that young die of cancer. He would have been the guy getting all the headlines, not me. If Chris hadn't gotten sick, I would have been the number two guy from California, my whole career. It's hypothetical, but I really think that would have been the case.

What went into your decision to drop out of the world tour? 

[In 1984, after seven years on tour, Buran unexpectedly quit in order to form the Professional Surfing Association of American, or PSAA.]

I was pretty upset with the world tour at the time, and the pro surfers themselves. A lot of it went back to an emergency meeting of the Top 16  in 1983 that we called to discuss the restructuring of the tour. The administration wanted the season to finish in Australia rather than Hawaii, and I was dead set against that. So I sat in a room with all those guys, and right then, everyone completely agreed—everyone in the Top 16—that the tour should end in Hawaii. Thirty minutes later, we’re in a meeting with Ian Cairns and they all vote for ending it in Australia. I couldn’t believe it.

Why does a tumbleweed blow in the wind? Who knows? I honestly don’t know what happened. We had a meeting, just the surfers. Then we had another meeting with Ian, and almost all of them changed their minds. Michael Ho was in my corner, that was about it. It left such a bad taste in my mouth. I was so turned off by my peers for a while, I really was. So that was one factor for why I left, my distaste for what was happening with the tour at the time, and my distaste for the Top 16.

Another thing was that I felt I’d had as good a year as I could ever hope to have in 1983. I was voted Most Improved, I’d won the Katin, I’d won the Tropix series, and I’d stayed ahead of Tom Curren when everyone said he was going to blow by me. 

[Note: Buran finished the year at #7; Curren, in his full season, finshed #8.] 

Plus, you know, I was a little burned out by that point. There’d been a lot of pressure on me the previous two years with the arrival of Curren, and I’d just been doing it a long time. That was my seventh year on the Tour. And the last reason, to be totally honest, there was just a lot of pride and ego involved. I didn’t want to stick around long enough for Curren to pass me up, which was inevitable. I'd just had my best year ever and finished 7th. Tommy had just started, pretty much, and he was just one slot behind me—and some people were saying he’d had an off year. So I knew he was going to pass me. 

You were the California Kid for a long time. 

All that time on the World Tour, from '78 to ’84—except for one season when Mike Benavidez was ahead of me—I was the top-rated Californian. So even when I'd finish 13th or 14th in the world, I could still jump on Interstate 5 and go from San Diego to Eureka and never pass anyone rated higher than me. California felt like my turf. So while I wasn’t saying it out loud at the time, I really had a tremendous fear of having to live with being #2. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around and watch it happen from the competitors’ area. 

Looking back, do you think you ever had a real shot at the world title?

That’s a good question. I think I did. Maybe. I’d say at one point in time—in '81 or '82— believe I had a chance at being world champion, yeah. Shaun and MR and Cheyne and all the guys who'd been dominating the top spots were just a little bit vulnerable at that moment. And today’s crew—Occy and Curren and Winton and Lynch—those guys hadn’t arrived yet. Tom Carroll and Hans and myself, we all came on the Tour the same year, in '78. We had a year or two to learn the ropes then it was time to make a move. Carroll, obviously, made his move—he made things happen. Hans, too, except he wasn't Tom Carroll. I didn’t make my move. Unfortunately, I was still smoking pot. I just kind of floated around at 13th or 14th for those three years. It wasn’t until I quit smoking and got the other parts of my life together and realized nobody was going to hand me anything. In fact, I was going to have to give it everything I had just to make the Top 10. But yeah, there was a crack there, just for a short while. If I’d been really on top of my game, I might have been able to challenge in '81. On the other hand, I’m really happy I was able to pull it all together and finish in the Top 10 in '83, then win Pipe there at the end. 

[Note: at the end of 1984, during his first year of retirement, Buran won the Pipeline Masters.]

If you could do it again, would you’ve quit the tour when you did?

I don’t know. That’s a tough question. (Pause) No, I think my departure from the tour was premature, definitely. But to what extent, I don’t know. 

Was an easy decision for you to bail out of the PSAA earlier this year? 

[Note: In January 1987, Buran walked away from the oranization he had founded two-and-a-half years earlier.]

Not at all. As hard as it was for me to drop the Top 16, that’s how easy it was to drop the PSAA. Real easy.

I don't think I really ever knew why I was doing it. I for sure didn't know how much work it was going to be! But here it is a few months later, and I look back at that—at starting the PSAA—and I think, “What was my goal?” And, hell, I don’t know. What was my goal? I guess at the time it just seemed like the right thing to do, like I was filling a need for pro surfing in California. 

It did, yeah. I announced the formation of the PSAA in September of '84, went out and won the Pipe Masters in December, came home and went right into Executive Director mode. I ran the first PSAA contest in January '85. And all this energy I’d built up—coming off that great year in '83, and then winning the Masters—that just seemed to push me through the first six months of the PSAA. Just raw enthusiasm. Then toward the end of summer, into autumn, my energy started to fade. By the end of fall, I just didn’t want to do it any more. It felt like I’d aged five years.

Dealing with all the event sponsors, getting permits for the cities, putting up with 50 California wannabee surfers who didn’t want to pay their entry fees and then complained about everything once they got in the contest. I don’t know. I’m just a dreamer, I guess. I had these visions of PSAA wavepool events across the country, and PSAA events in Florida, South Carolina, New Jersey, Texas, Hawaii, everywhere. And when I got into the world of business and all the limitations imposed by other people, I was kind of—stunned.

Well, the permit thing was always a hassle. No permit, no contest, right? So there was one time in Santa Cruz where the city jacked me around with the permit, and it wasn’t officially approved until Friday afternoon, the day before the contest. I mean, everyone’s already up there Friday morning, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, whether or not I can even have the contest. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I was just praying. Thursday night I'm laying in bed, thinking, “What if they don’t give me the permit?” and gray hairs were popping out of my sideburns. I didn’t sleep all night. That kind of thing that was happening pretty often. The stress was just amazing. 

Yeah, I did. I snapped. Emotional breakdown—whatever you want to call it.

I felt like a failure. I felt I’d let myself down, and that I’d let California surfers down. I’ve always expected so much from myself, and I get so depressed when I make mistakes, or don’t do exactly what I set out to do. So from July to February, this last February, no one really saw or heard much from me. It took me that long after stepping down from the PSAA to regroup. I remember the overriding thought a lot of times was, ‘Jeez, I quite the world tour Top 16 to do that?" Which is in no way a comment on the PSAA itself, just my involvement.

[Note: Body Glove took over the PSAA in 1987, ran it succesfully until 1993, then sold it to the world tour.]

Absolutely. I think the PSAA has the potential to really move forward. To the point where, in a couple of years, it could be the premier organization in surfing. I’m proud of the fact that I got the ball rolling.

But you wouldn’t want to go back and be involved.

Changing the subject: What brought on the notion of going back to school?

Well, like I said, I was struggling there for awhile. It’s a horrible feeling, not knowing what direction to head. From the time I stepped on a surfboard, my goal was to win at Pipeline. In the mid-'70s I also decided I wanted to win a world title. Well, I got one and gave the other a good try, then started my own pro tour to boot. And now all of that was over. So there I was with no goals—I was like a computer waiting to be programmed. So my wife and I had a really long talk on the plane back from Hawaii last January, and she said, “Why don't you go back to school?” And it was like someone threw the lights on.

You're a full-time student this semester.

Full-time. I have finals this week, and I’m passing everything. Algebra, even! (laughs) Algebra, man! I can’t believe it. I look back on algebra as being symbolic of all my failures in high school. This year, my first day in algebra, I walked out of the class, went straight to my counselor and said, “Put me back in basic math.” So I almost quit again. I started out bad, the numbers were just kicking my ass, then I made a big comeback halfway through the semester. I just got into it; I got into the challenge. Sometimes I’d go home and work on a problem for, like, 20 minutes, and I’d just shout with joy when I get it done. I got 100 on a test and an 87 on the next. I know I sound  like a kook, getting so excited about a math class, but it’s an unreal feeling of accomplishment.

To go along with that, this April you started getting results in the PSAA as a competitor.

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but right when I made the commitment not to drop that algebra class, I started popping in the PSAA. I took 5th in the Hermosa contest, then went to Florida and made the finals of the Wavemasters’ contest, then back here and got 9th in Ventura. I was starting to do all the old, familiar things in heats. I’d be out there thinking to myself, “Yeah, I remember what to do here, I know this situation.”

Before that, things weren’t going well at all in contests.

I was so cold. I was out of it, out of synch, out of rhythm. When I stepped down from the PSAA I didn’t want to surf in contests for six months. I wanted to disassociate myself from the administrative part of it. So the six months go be and I came on this season just ice-cold. Like, first heat, first contest, I got dead last. Then in the Katin I bombed out in the second round. Then I didn't qualify for the Main Event in the Palm Springs wavepool contest. My ego was pretty shattered. So to suddenly get three Top 10 finishes in a row, it was like, “Hey, I’ve still got it.” 

It’s so strong, I can’t tell you. All my life I've been a competitor, and that hasn’t faded a bit.

So you’ll continue to compete as a professional?

I’d like to continue making a living as a pro surfer through endorsements and contest earnings for at least another couple years.

School is more important than pro surfing. No exceptions. I just went through a whole semester of school without once cutting class to surf. I can’t. Cutting class at this point—it would be like a junkie going back to drugs.

I don't know yet. School’s it for now. Being a student is a great excuse not to have a job. Like, “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m a student." So I’ll stay in school for a while and think about things. I need time. I did the tour for all those years, then I blew through two years of incredible stress with the PSAA, now it’s time to hang back and plan the next move.

[Photos: Aaron Chang, Chuck Schmid, Sonny Miller, Steve Sakamoto, Lance Trout, Joe Mickey]

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