"The Angel Inside," by Ben Marcus, ran in the December 1994 issue of SURFER. This version is been slightly shortened and edited.

. . . only 20 years old, and already the world is full of Shawn Briley stories. You're becoming the Flippy Hoffman of the '90s.

It seems like anyone who spends more than 24 hours with you comes away with some kind of near-death experience.

Todd Chesser talked about the time he nearly died in your Jeep as it skidded out of control at 60 mph into the opposite lane with a car coming at you, near the Waimea Bridge.

Another one of your friends described very vividly the sight of you sitting in the front seat of your car with a gun held to your head, calmly talking some Town gangster out of blowing your brains out

 had a shot of you taking off on a 6-foot wave In the Waimea shorebreak and going headfirst over the falls into two-feet of water.

Why were you surfing the shorebreak at Waimea Bay?

I didn’t want to surf 12- to 15-foot Pinballs with a bunch of dummies. It was winter. There wasn’t anything else happening on the North Shore that was good to surf. I'm radical, so I did something radical. It’s fun, charging the shorebreak.

Why do you do those things? Why do you take off on closeouts at Pipe? Why do you color your hair green? Why do you drive crazy? Why do you do things that could maim you for life?

Why do I do things like that? You should know. It was in SURFER Magazine a couple of issues ago.

The one with that epic photo of Shawn Briley on the cover. I have it right here in my hand. Look on page 70. It's a caption about me by none other than Kelly Slater. He says, “There are people you'll watch surf and you’ll say to yourself, ‘God, that guy really loves the camera.’ Shawn, I feel, is one of those guys. But somewhere along the line he learned to enjoy it and get really good at it.” There it is. I do crazy things because I love the camera and I love attention. Kelly Slater said so.

You bet I do, man. If Kelly Slater is saying I only do things for the camera, he obviously doesn't know me. One thing I know, a lot of times the way we perceive people is the way we judge ourselves. Kelly comes to Hawaii once a year for three weeks with the circus, and I'm here 24/7 all year long. The reason I do these things—whether it's going left at Waimea or sliding Sunset beach shorebreak with all the groms or shooting guns or getting crazy four-wheeling—I do those things because they're me. They're inside me. I enjoy them. God created me to be radical. Do you understand the vibe I'm trying to get across?

Yes, I do. You're not doing it for money or out of some deep-seated psycho need for love and attention. You’re doing it because you get off on it.

Bingo. It's just inside me. I say it’s a gift. Some people say it’s a curse.

Then I guess the question is: How did all that get in there?

Ask me the right questions and you’ll know.

Okay, then. Let's begin at the beginning.

I was born in Oceanside. My parents lived in Fallbrook. They had a farm out there or something. Eventually my mom couldn't handle my dad because of his, uh, problems.

My dad’s name is Mike Briley. He’s from Huntington Beach. He was a surfer when he was young. Just in the last few months we’ve begun a relationship. I’ve never met him face to face but I have photos of him. He has body tattoos and he's in prison. He’s been in prison most of my life.

My mom left my dad when I was eight or nine months old and took me to Montana to live with her parents. When I was 2 we moved to Oahu because my mom wanted to raise me in Hawaii and she had family there. My mom’s brother is Owl Chapman.

Is that the same Owl Chapman who did hood ornament stances backside on 12-foot waves at Second Reef Pipe on Big Monday and who's been charging Sunset Beach and Waimea for a couple of decades?

Bernie Baker remembers you as a chubby kid growing up next door to him on Sunset Point.

When I was seven we moved to a home on Sunset Point and that’s where I was raised. It’s the little house you use to line up at Val’s Reef. It’s the oldest remaining house on the point, I think. I lived there for 12 years.

How old were you when you started surfing?

I was 4 or 5 when I first started surfing at Rocky Rights. I rode the whitewash with Mike Taylor and his son, Orion. Mike Taylor was the closest thing I’ve had to a father. The Taylors were like my second family. When heavy shit went down at my house my mom would send me there.

What kind of heavy shit went down at your house?

People getting beat up, drugs, certain situations and whatnot. Let me explain this to you. My mom is so big-hearted it's not funny. She’s one of the sweetest, most loving people anyone could meet. For instance, when some people see a guy drunk at Kammies they only look at him as a drunk. My mom was friends with these people. Her arms were always open and she was always ready to love someone, to help in any situation she could. If someone came by and said, "Cheryl, I need a place to stay.” She couldn't turn her back on them. Each month mom would run out of food stamps and Mike and Lola Taylor would take care of me.

I had a hard time growing up because I didn’t have a father and my mom didn't have any money and there was trouble around the house and the whole nine yards. I was pretty chubby. Kids used to call me “Hubba” and all that. It hurt.

The North Shore is a pretty tempting place to get into trouble. What were you into?

I was just a typical bratty kid. I did drugs a little and did some stealing. We’d steal candy bars from Sunset Store, or take the bus into Pearl Ridge Mall and shoplift. But when I did all that stuff it didn’t feel right. I knew it was wrong.

Growing up on the North Shore, living next door to Bernie, you were surrounded by great surfers. Whom did you look up to?

The number one person who helped me out, and a lot of other kids too, was Karen Gallagher. When Sunset Beach Surf Shop was doing really good she’d buy us boards, and Pat Rawson would shape us free boards. The guys I looked up to were Derek Ho, Tom Carroll, Owl, Darrick Doerner and Roger Erickson. But the guy I modeled myself after was Ronnie Burns. Ronnie was a super nice guy. He always took time out to say hello, never dropped in on anyone. He taught me how to do backside floaters at Ehukai.

Shoots. Some single-fin piece of crap. I don't even remember. I began surfing Rocky Point then moved up to Haleiwa menehune contests and stuff. I was lucky to live on Sunset Point because it's such a perfect place to grow up as a surfer. You start out sand-sliding and riding bodyboards right there in the shorebreak, then move up to Val's Reef, then surf the Point, and then the sky's the limit. I remember when we were 12 years old, Pancho Sullivan and Orion and I paddled out to the shoulder at Sunset. It was only eight-foot but we pretty much shit our pants.

Karen claims you were pretty obnoxious as a kid. Non-stop talking about how you were sponsored by Quiksilver and Billabong and Gotcha, all at the same time, and getting 11-second tubes at Val's.

That was me when I was a little kid. Full on. I believed in myself. When I was younger I talked about myself like that, but I really believed I was going to do it. I was going to do it like Ronnie. I believed in myself, but a lot of other people didn't and that made me feel bad. But I took those feelings and channeled them into surfing and it made me want to do it more.

You're more intelligent than some of your actions might suggest. Did you do well in school?

I enjoyed school up until the 10th grade, and then I started partying pretty hard. There were these friends I hung out with, we'd smoke pot and do mushrooms or fry on acid, go into Town, to go strip clubs, just get crazy. I never got into cocaine. I'd seen too many people go down because of that drug.

At that point, yeah. I thought it was fun. Numerous times I got drunk and raged all night. I'd go to bed at 5 in the morning, wake up still loaded, take big bong hits and go surf Pipe. One morning Marvin Foster and I dawn-patroled it. Really early, no hint of sun, I caught three or four waves in the dark. Marvin paddled out saying, "You're crazy."

Did all this partying affect how you surfed?

No. My surfing was insane during this period. I was surfing all the time, big waves, Pipe, Sunset. I surfed so much I lost all that weight and starting attracting attention and getting compliments. I hooked up with Quiksilver when I was 15, just a small-time deal, and they ran a two-page ad of me at Pipe in SURFER's August 1991 issue. I was stoked! That photo was taken during my destructo period.

Owl snapped on me a couple of times, my mom tried to set me straight, and Karen would worry about me, and a lot of other people told me to be careful, slow down. they cared about me, but I was at a stage where heard what they said, but wasn't ready to stop myself.

I went to school. I had to or I wouldn't graduate, and I wasn't so far gone that I would let that happen. I did the least I could do to pass. I knew I wanted to be a pro surfer and I could make it if I did it right. I had to go surfing, and the beauty of the North Shore is that you can surf all day, every day, if you really want to.

I had a couple that were on my case and a couple who understood what I wanted to do and were behind me. The Kahuku High principal, Mrs. Albert, she said she'd never seen anyone turn themselves around like I did.

It all kind of hit me in the same week. This was in February of 1992. There were a bunch of circumstances I won't get into, but at that point I thought, “Why am I doing this? This is all meaningless. I’m hurting myself and I’m hurting people." I started to realize what I was doing and why I was doing it.

Sin is like candy. It tastes good, but it’s not good for you.

I walked into the North Shore Christian Fellowship and let God into my heart. People in there were tripping because they knew all about Shawn Briley the wildman, and the next thing they knew I was next to them in church. Some of my friends thought I’d taken bad acid and had seen God and was spun out, but I was just doing what I felt was right in my heart.

Yeah. All my life I had believed in God and knew He existed and had been watching out for me, but that February it came time to let God into my heart.

God took the desire away from me slowly. I quit partying and gradually quit smoking pot and finally put it all down. I graduated from Kahuku High that June.

Have you been on the straight and narrow ever since?

No, I've slipped a little. I was clean for a year, and then in Puerto Escondido in 1993 I started drinking and partying again. No drugs, but I slid a little.

I improved. One of the reasons I quit partying and doing drugs is because there are a lot of screw-ups on the North Shore, and I didn’t want to be one of them. It's simple to do here—to not to deal with life. I didn’t want to be another guy selling dope or drinking beers on the side of the road. I wanted to make a living as a professional surfer. I wanted to have money so I could take my mom to Foodland and buy toilet paper. So many times when I was a kid we didn't even have toilet paper in the house.

I had been with Quiksilver since I was 15 but only on a small scale. In September 1992 I had a good day at Pipeline. I walked into Sunset Beach Surf Shop dripping wet and called Danny Kwock on the phone in California. I told him I'd just spent the morning charging Pipe and that I intended to keep doing it in the future. I wanted a better deal. Kwock said that was maybe the strangest phone call he's ever gotten from a teamrider. But Danny believed me and believed in me, and I’ve delivered.

I talked to a lot of people before I interviewed you—Gerry Lopez, Ken Bradshaw. Chris Malloy, Todd Chesser—and they all hold you in high admiration. Brock Little speaks well of you and says that he expects Shawn Briley will be around the North Shore for a long time to come. Brock thinks that your life will be what Ronnie Burns' life would have been, if Ronnie hadn’t died.

That was nice of Brock to say that. I miss Ronnie Burns. I’d like to surf Pipe with him, I’d like to play golf with him, I’d like to drink beers with him. I’d like to think that I'll be around for a while. I’m only 20, so I'm pretty happy with where I am. I make a good salary from Quiksilver, and I think I produce for them without having to put up with all the contest bullshit. Last year I put down my credit card and paid for a ticket to the Mainland for my mom and my little brother. She hadn't been off the island in 18 years, and I made it possible for her to sneak up on her parents at a family reunion. That felt good.

It's admirable what you’ve accomplished, but there's still this nagging feeling that you’re going to follow in the tradition of guys like Tim Fretz: radical Pipeline surfers who died young. Ken Bradshaw has known you since you were a pup, and he thinks you have an Islamic view toward death: If you die charging big waves, you go straight to heaven.

This is what the Bible says, okay: “Do not be foolish and die before your time.” I’m not afraid to die, but I'm not going to let it happen foolishly. I've come close to it a few times—in cars, out surfing—but God pulled me out of it every time. Life’s not easy. I’ve survived some heavy shit on land and in the water. But I have survived, and I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do and I’m living it. Thank God. Thank God.

One last thing. SURFER Magazine doesn't want to start a blood feud between you and Kelly Slater, so it’s only fair we read the rest of what he said about you in that caption: “You should see some of the positions he gets into. To paraphrase Tom Curren. ‘Sometimes you actually have to go for it to keep from getting hurt.' Shawn lives by that rule." See, Kelly isn’t dissing you entirely. He’s giving you credit for going balls out.

Yeah, I suppose so. I guess it's okay if Kelly comes to the North Shore next winter. I like the guy. Maybe we can go four-wheeling.

[Photos: Erik Aeder, Hank, Rob Gilly, Tom Servais, Russell Hoover, Rick Doyle]

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