The quotes below are taken from "Back for the Future: Mimi Munro," by Paul Holmes, originally published in the June 2002 issue of Longboard; and from "Soul Survivor," by Elizabeth Glazner, originally published in the Summer 2000 issue of Wahine magazine. In 2002, Munro was 50.


I was in the ocean from as far back as I can remember. My earliest memory—I was about two, still in diapers—was dipping for crabs on a full moon. They'd come to shore to lay eggs, so you could only take the males. But we'd go down there and get a bucketful of crabs and boil 'em up—wonderful! I used to fish with my Dad, too. Get up before dawn, put my jeans on over my pajamas, head to the pier and fish. Then every Sunday we'd picnic at the beach, the whole family. If you had cuts or scratches, my mom would take us kids to the ocean, to clean them out. Or if you had a cold, go for a swim. My Mom believed in that—she'd always use the ocean that way.


I think that as a kid I'd been kind of lonely. I was one of six kids and stuck in the middle of older and younger brothers and sisters. I was very strong and independent and I even helped my Mom a lot with the little ones—feeding them, changing diapers, all of that. But I was also left on my own a lot and didn't feel I got the love and attention I needed. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't my parents' fault, and I don't hold them responsible. It was just the way things were, with the family being so big, and it may have been a generational thing too. I know my parents loved me. My Dad used to drive me everywhere for surf contests, and he'd carry surf magazines around in his car so he could show everybody pictures of me surfing. But I do think that the attention I later got from surfing fulfilled part of that need I still had.


I was an athletic kid, well coordinated. I was capable of doing pretty much anything I wanted. At 10 I was playing tennis competitively, all up and down Florida. I'd sweep the courts for my lessons, at a club that was just a short bike ride from my home. Anyway, I came to the courts one day to find out the tennis pro had shot himself the night before. It shocked me so much that I never went back. That's about the time I started surfing. I had some friends who'd gotten hold of a surfboard— about 10 feet long, and really heavy. We dragged it to the beach and tried it, and I stood up my first wave. Of course, the board was so big and I was so small I couldn't help but stand up on it. Then my brother got a board shortly after, and that was that. I got home earlier from school than he did, so I'd take his board, sneak it out the back of the house, and go surfing. Then he'd come down to the beach cussin' me out and I'd just push the board toward him and swim down the beach to get away. As it turned out, he lost interest pretty quick so I just kept using the board.


About a year after I started, I was on the beach watching the Florida State Surfing Championships, and all of a sudden they were asking for women to enter the contest, just to fill up the event. There weren't many women surfing back then. I think the entire division was just two heats. Anyway, my friends were all prodding me to enter and I was saying "I can't, I don't have a board," and someone said, "Go on, you can borrow mine." So I entered, and I won. I was state champion at age 11.


I'm not a big-wave rider at all. I was always afraid because I'd had a near-drowning experience one day when I was bodysurfing back home. A nor'easter had been blowing hard and the water was rough. I was caught in a rip, swept out, and held under by several waves. It scared me real bad, and I've been afraid of big waves ever since.


I surfed daily. I surfed in the ice cold with no wetsuit. My sister would sit in the car with the engine running, and I'd surf till I was numb, come in, thaw out in the car, and get back in the water.


I enjoyed the attention and the praise, but there was another side to it that wasn't so pleasant for me. In a sense, it was very alienating. I was just a kid doing what I loved to do, but I was also a very shy person and I think some people took that the wrong way—they thought I was stuck up or something. When you get that kind of attention people treat you differently. They put you on a pedestal, or think you're something more than they are, and they either resent it or they think you wouldn't want to talk to them. But that was so far from the truth. I just wanted to be part of the gang. I mean, when you're a teenager you just want to be accepted by your peers. So that was tough. I even remember one girl wanting to beat me up because of it—we faced off at one of the Friday night dances. I really had to work hard at being just one of the gang, among my peers, in my own environment. It was lonely.


Joyce Hoffman was my idol [in the mid-'60s]. She and Joey Hamasaki. And they surfed a real lot and they had muscles, bulk. Back then women who looked like that were talked about, and there was this comment I heard from one of my buddies, something about that they looked more like men than women. I was 14 when I heard that, and it shocked me, and planted a seed in my mind. I didn't want people talking about me like that. I was overwhelmed. I let that get to me. Later I read where Billie Jean King said she didn't know one female athlete who wasn't confused about being an athlete and female at the same time. I don't see it as an issue anymore. Now that I'm an adult, I'm very grateful to have physical strength. For its own sake, but also because it's given me inner strength, and those two things have carried me through a lot of things in life.


I left school at lunchtime to check the surf one day, got caught, and they gave me a three-day suspension. At first I was just so upset about it, crying and carrying on because I was a good student. Then after I was over being upset I just got really pissed because it seemed so unfair, and I said, "Right, I'm not going back." I'd also starting smoking pot, which was probably not a good thing for me. Anyway, I missed out on the best years of high school.


I began to discover other things in my soul I wanted to find out about. I don't remember waking up one day and deciding to leave surfing. I just gradually started doing other things.


I really wanted children. At one time my sister said she thought I'd have 12 kids. Well, I ended up having four. I had all my kids at home, the last one was a totally natural birth, delivered by just me and my husband 'cause the midwife never showed up. I introduced my kids to the ocean as babies, but I wasn't surfing and I don't really know why. I thought about it now and then. But when I was raising kids that's about all I could do.


I started dreaming about it; dreaming that I was watching surfing, or checking the waves. My daughter had started to express an interest and I'd bought her a board. Then I started dreaming that I was actually surfing, riding waves, and this happened a few times. Finally, on my 38th birthday, I called [boardmaker and former sponsor] Dick Catri. He picked up the phone and said, "Mimi, it's about time—where the hell have you been?" And I just said, "Dick, I need a surfboard." I paddled out that first time, and in like 20 minutes I was right back into it. The skill was still there. The stamina and all the paddling—that was harder, that took awhile. I'd been through a lot of changes over the years. But when I started surfing again—it does something to your soul. I was getting back to being Mimi again.

[Photos: Greg MacGillivray, LeRoy Grannis]

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