The quotes below are excerpted from "Conversations: J Riddle," by Sam George, which ran in the June 1987 issue of Surfing; and from "Profile: J Riddle," by Marc Rubel, which ran in the June 1981 issue of Surfing. Riddle was born in 1950.


I was eight years old when I first saw somebody surf, and I instantly got the itch. But my mother took me up to Lake Arrowhead that summer. We rented these huge paddleboards, and I used to make like I was surfing. I'd paddle toward shore as fast as I could, then stand up and beach the thing. I spent a whole summer doing that and couldn't wait to get back to Santa Monica so I could try it in the ocean.

My first board was a used 9' 6" balsa. It had five layers of pigment and weighed 85 pounds. I was nine, and there was no way I could carry it 14 blocks from our house to the beach by myself. So every weekend I would round up three or four friends and make them carry it if they wanted to ride it. But they'd get frustrated trying to surf that monster and give up, so the next weekend I'd have to find new friends. My mother finally decided to get me a new board and bought one on credit from Dave Sweet. She even paid one of the older kids in the neighborhood to drive me to the beach on weekends and after school.


My first day at Malibu, I took off on a wave at the Cove and from out of nowhere this board comes flying at me, knocking me about 15-feet in the air. I turned around, and it was the famous Mickey Dora—he’d just done a flying kickout on a ten-year-old kid!


Maybe because of my upbringing, from watching Dora, there's a certain way of riding Malibu that has been embedded in my mind for years. It's a style wave. I'd rather see someone who just stands in one spot and lets the wave flow than someone who tries to tear it apart. When I paddle out at Malibu, I have an entirely different feeling than I do anywhere else in the world. Like something extra is expected of me. Maybe no one else in the water or on the beach expects it of me, but it's locked into my mind anyway. I don't think about the 400 other people in the water. I sit furthest outside with the blinders on to any conversation, confrontation, or anything else that's happening in the pack. When I take off on a Malibu wave, the rush never ceases to amaze me.


My first trip to the Islands was in '65. I had 50 bucks spending money, and Roy Crump was renting us floor space for 50-cents a night. I thought I could make the money last a month. Then I walked into Kammies and found out that a head of lettuce and a quart of milk just about wiped out my funds. The first day I surfed for hours and hours and got out of the water with a second-degree sunburn. That night I was back on the plane for the mainland.


I was still young and aggressive enough to make the transition from longboards to short. A lot of guys held back from making that change, but I was still progressing, still accelerating.


The contest scene here in California sort of fell apart in the late '60s. I had access to the Hollister Ranch then, and the waves were so perfect—they inspired that whole “Underground” era. Davey Hilton and I would go surf with George Greenough and the Hazard brothers, and get perfect waves to ourselves. It just so happened that in 1970 a few people got into the area with cameras, and at one point I was on the cover of SURFER and 


I was into designing boards, and I wanted to change the shapes so we could get more radical. I was trying all sorts of things. I was going to Hawaii every winter, surfing with guys like BK and Hakman. We were all riding real narrow boards that didn’t turn that well, and I remember Gerry Lopez came up with the side-slip maneuver. He taught it to me, and when I returned to California I sanded my fin down so I could sideslip. I was out at Rincon one afternoon, just sliding sideways into the tube and it blew people’s minds—nobody had ever seen that done. Then I taught Davey Hilton how to do it and we were up surfing the Ranch one afternoon and I said, “What if I extended this around and did a complete 360?" I figured that’d be pretty dynamic. So I started doing them, and that got me in the magazine. Then everyone was doing them. I remember going to Florida with Hal Jepson when he was showing 

. Every kid on the East Coast was trying do three-sixties.


I was shaping at the time, and like I said we were into really narrow boards. I had a 7' 10" toothpick, 15-inches wide, with a seven-inch tail. That board went down the line so fast I couldn’t even turn it. So what I wanted was a board that was a little wider, but had a narrow tail to hold in. I was shaping a board one day and thought, “What if I cut into the rail of the tail?” I called it the Fang Tail, and when I brought it out of the shaping room people laughed. But it actually worked. And it’s pretty neat to see that design used in a majority of surfboards today; that the old Fang Tail might have helped the winger design along.


It had its pluses and minuses. Having that SAG card [Screen Actors Guild] card makes a big difference; since 

 I've been able to do commercials. I just wish the movie hadn't turned out to be such a pie in the face to surfing.


Nothing has hurt surfing as much as localism, and nowhere in the world is the problem been as bad as in California. It's totally absurd—15-year-old kids pulling this shit, turning surfing into a punk-destroy scene. We used to have contests at Hollywood-By-The-Sea. Now you couldn't get a contest within 30 miles of the place without getting bombs thrown at you. Localism is definitely the ball and chain on surfing.

[Photos: Peter Smith, Harold Ward, Craig Fineman]

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