"Paul Neilsen: Professional Surfer," by Drew Kampion, ran in the June 1973 issue of Surfing.

I just turned 21 during the World Contest on the 6th of October. Luckily, by the 6th, I’d already missed out in my heat, so I was quite capable of celebrating.

Southport, Queensland. That’s the hospital I was born in, it’s just north of Burleigh, where I surf the most.

When I first started it was Broadbeach, where I lived, just a beachbreak sort of place. On the coast, there are about 13 miles of straight beach, and no reefs, nothing, just sandbanks. And when it’s good, it gets really good, and Peter Drouyn and myself and Rick [Paul’s older brother], we all just started surfing around about the same time. Ricky and Peter possibly started a year or two before me, then together we sort of figured out how the Gold Coast was situated, all the good point breaks and everything, and started to travel down to Burleigh and Kirra, and beyond to Byron Bay, Angourie, and even further on. It’s all within about 150 miles, Angourie to Noosa Heads, and we’re smack-bang right in the middle of it.

How many years have you been surfing then?

About ten years; nine or ten, I’m not sure. It slips by really quick.

I spent a month here last year, and I’ve been here about two months now, and that’s it.

You adapted really quickly to the Hawaiian surf, and have even done really well in the contests here. How did you pull that off?

I really don’t know. I was here 18 months ago for a month and I didn’t come during the contest period, I just came for a holiday, just to sort of find out what the waves were like, and to see if I could handle it.

Just perfect. Every day was around 8 to 10 feet. The smallest waves I got were 6 feet. It was a really good time of year—January and February—really clean. It was the best trip I’ve ever had, y’know? Much better surf than I’ve had this year. Like, I’ve had Sunset big, and a lot of the other places I didn’t surf so much the last time I was here. But I enjoyed the last time more because it was so clean, light offshore winds; no stormy conditions.

I heard you got super-big Pipeline last year.

Yeah. Yeah, that was just a few days before I left. It was something we had to do before we took off, y’know?

I don’t know. It’s sort of hard to judge, especially when you’re surfing backhand and you’re sort of looking over your shoulder the whole time, so you don’t really see what’s behind you. Which is probably for the best! If I would’ve been a goofy foot and dropped down and started to turn and looked up and seen it all coming over, I don’t know what I would’ve done; I probably would have bailed out on a lot of waves, for sure.

It must have been heavy to surf big Pipeline with virtually no experience there.

Well, I’d actually surfed Pipeline a lot. I’d surfed it probably two weeks straight at 8- to 10-feet, and some 12-foot days—and crowded. And with a crowd you’ve gotta adapt fast ’cause you’ve gotta get your waves, you know? And if you’re gonna get your waves you gotta know you're just eating it a lot of time. You’ll drop in on a wave and three guys will drop in and there’s nothing you can do except just pull into it and hope you don’t get cut in half by somebody's board. I mean, you’ve really gotta go for some radical things when there are a lot of guys in the water. If I’d surfed it by myself, I may not have adapted so fast. Because when a wave comes and you can get it for yourself, there’s no way in the world you don’t paddle for it, even if the takeoff is vertical. It doesn’t matter because you’ll take the chance of getting one to yourself. That’s all that matters. It’s a funny situation.

A lot of people aren’t that aggressive, obviously.

There were only three or four surfers out on that big day. How did you manage to be one of them?

(Laughs) I was in Town that morning, as a matter of fact, and Rod Sumpter rang up and said “Get out here. The North Shore’s come up.” I was just buying a few things before I went home, and I wasn't sure about driving all the way back. “Just come have a look at it,” he said. “It’s pretty stormy, but it’s big and you have to just look at the size of some of those waves.” So off I went and got out here about 10 o’clock in the morning.

Yeah, but it was still kind of stormy. It wasn’t that good. So we waited till about noon. The trades were blowing all day, but it was sort of sideshore, then it kind of twisted around a bit offshore. We were looking down the beach at Pipeline, and you could see these big, open tubes; you could drive trucks through ’em and stuff. Keith Paull and I were sitting there talking and Rodney was there spurring us on, saying, “C’mon, boys! Go out! Go out and I’ll get some shots. You can’t go home without surfing this!” That’s really all you need, is someone spurring you on. So Keith and I walked down the beach and had a look at it for about half-hour. Maybe one in three waves was so good, and that particular wave would be just perfect. But the other two—if you took the wrong one, it was all over. So we ran back down the beach, got our boards, and just went out. Gerry Lopez came down about an hour after we went out and caught 6 or 7 waves, one after the other, these insiders that were really hollow. I didn’t see them; I was sitting outside with Keith, we were playing it really safe, feeling the place out a bit, picking off the bigger waves so we didn’t get caught inside. That seemed like the best idea, to not to sit inside and risk get picked off by the sets. Of course, the small ones were a lot hollower, but the big ones at least you know you could probably get through them and make it to the end.

Was that the biggest surf you’ve ridden?

It wasn’t really the biggest vertical drop, but definitely the hairiest.

Yeah, like taking off on the peak at Sunset would be much bigger but as soon as you turn you come out onto a big flat shoulder, so it dies straight away. Pipeline was a whole different deal.

At certain times, yeah. It’s not really fear, exactly. It’s hard to explain. You get a little bit scared and you say “Well, I hope not too many more don’t break on me like that.” But you sort of feel pretty safe cause you also know you’re likely not going to get hurt unless you start doing ridiculous things. Like going left at Sunset onto that reef when it's bombing out at low tide, or something like that.

In the past, you Australians have had a reputation for being “animal.” Was this true, is it true, and if so, what are you doing to keep it going?

To keep it going? Well, it all depends on what sort of animal thing you’re talking about. Animal, as in people or as surfers.

As surfers, I think that surfers from Australia are still pretty aggressive. As people, I don’t think they are. The surfers that I know, the ones I mix with, are really nice people. Y’know, like Mark Warren; especially Mark. He’d have to be one of the best surfers I know. He’s an easy-going guy and a good surfer.

Do you think the new group of surfers from Australia are more conservative than they were a couple of years ago, in the days of Wayne, Nat, and Ted?

Yeah, yeah. Everybody’s sort of woken up and said there’s no value in being like that. If you want to get something out of surfing, you can’t do it that way. You’ve gotta have a different approach. Everybody’s sort of taken a look at the world. Like Hakman and what he’s doing for his sponsors. Jeff's always in there being the perfect image for surfing. Hawaii couldn’t have a better ambassador to send to South Africa or Peru and he won both of those contests. [The Durban 500 and the Peru International]

Do you think surfers are behaving like that these days because they’re idealistic or because they think they can make more money this way?

I mean, are surfers underneath maybe not so clean-cut, but maintaining a clean-cut surface image to get sponsors?

What do you mean “surfers underneath?” Underneath what?

I’m wondering if any of what we're talking about goes along with a decline in drug popularity.

I don’t know what the drug scene is in surfing. I’ve never had anything to do with it. I know at one stage surfing was really mixed up with drugs, and every surfer, apparently to the public, took drugs and that’s all there was to it. And if you had a surfboard under one arm, you had a bag of pot under your other arm. That's what people thought, anyway. But now they’re starting to see surfers, like as the guys I’ve mentioned, Mark Warren and Ian Cairns, out there doing good things and being respectable citizens, you know? So people are saying, “Let’s get behind this surfing thing, it’s good.” People are trying to understand it now, whereas before they didn’t. They're coming out to the contests, and that's how you get sponsors for the events. And we need that. You gotta buy things to run a contest, you know? It takes money.

So you feel strongly that competition is a good element in surfing?

As far as I’m concerned it is. It keeps your surfing right up there, makes you improve all the time; having to compete against really good surfers makes you try more things and to do more things. Whereas just surfing every day, you turn it into just an enjoyment thing, whether you’re surfing well or not. And usually you enjoy it more when you’re surfing better. I find if I surf a wave really well, go all over it, carve everywhere, I enjoy it much more than just cruising.

To go up another notch, then, how ’bout the professional movement that is becoming so strong? Do you think that’s a good direction?

Sure. It's a good direction for the people who are involved in it. Like, all the professional surfers think it’s definitely a good direction, cause they’re all in there trying to win some money. If you get a guy from the outside, he might say professional surfing’s no good, it’s spoiling the art and everything. But how does he know, he’s not in there doing it, right? He hasn’t played both sides of it, and you’ll find that professional surfers have been on the outside and on the inside.

Right. If you’re doing something you love and then can make money on top of it, then that’s better still.

When I first started there was Drouyn and Nat and Midget, the three heads of surfing in Australia. I followed Nat quite a bit for a couple of years, really liked his aggression in the surf. I think every Australian surfer, when they started, liked Nat’s aggression in the water. And after that, surfing Burleigh, I really started to like Hakman’s style of constantly carving everywhere. He never stops. And now, after watching him here in Hawaii over the last three contests, when he got two seconds and a first—I mean, he was never out of it, you know? Hakman is always gonna be in there because he never stops, and he never paddles for a wave and blows it, never does something stupid, almost never falls off, like all other surfers do. As far as he’s concerned, the only thing that'll change his point total is the wave size, cause whatever he catches, he’ll do everything on it. If it’s a five-foot wave he’ll get 10 points; if it’s a ten-foot wave he’ll get 15 points. But he’ll surf it the same either way. He's really consistent, and he’s really good.

Do you have any conditioning program to prepare you for the contests?

No, nothing really. Just surfing every day keeps you pretty well in shape. The only thing I do that’s possibly out of the ordinary is some running and some other exercises if I’m starting to get slack, just to get me back into gear.

No, I never change my food. I'm just a meat-eater, vegetables, stuff like that. McDonald’s, or whatever’s going during the day. You get into that health food thing and you find that if you go to another area and start eating someone else’s vegetables you get sick. You get into all sorts of weird trips with that. You start thinking, "Well, I can’t do this, and I can’t do that," because your diet won’t allow it. Or you’ve gotta fast once a week. You’ve gotta live for it, you know? I’d rather just live it how it’s coming.

I’ve been to Canada for a day. I’ve been to Mexico for a day or two. Then California, and here in Hawaii, and that's all. I'm going to Fiji on the way home.

No, but I hope I’ll be going this July for the Durban 500.

Are there a lot of American surfers in Australia now, or has that sort of eased off?

It certainly hasn’t eased off. Yeah, there’s a lot.

I’ve heard there’s a certain amount of uptightness.

Yeah, right. Australians are a lot like Hawaiians. I can get really friendly with Hawaiians, and they get real friendly with Australians. The Hawaiians who come to Australia are really liked. But you get Californians trying to pull their take-over trips, and not people don't appreciate it. They're gonna go to Lennox and live on a farm and eat health food and ride all the waves. It zonks people out. A lot of that has stopped, though, cause the Labor Government’s gone in and put a freeze on Americans buying land in Australia.

Tell me more about that, about Americans buying land.

Well, like Pat Boone’s got the biggest thing down there you ever saw, right between where I live and Byron Bay. It’s all vacant country, just a really nice drive along the coast to Byron, hills and sugar cane and little farms. But for two years now there’ve been these giant bulldozers just churning up the land he bought, and it’s finally starting to come out, and there are all these houses going up there and it’s just the biggest development, acres and acres and acres of land and they’ve put in roads and sewers. I mean, they've turned it into a little city [Ocean Shores, near the Queensland border]. That’s what it is, and Pat Boone just sells it. It’s a joke. And I think the government’s starting to wake up to things like that.

When I was there in 1970, Australians seemed really unaware of the environment and ecology. Maybe that’s changing?

Oh yeah, the new government has been voted in, so things are definitely changing. I’m not really right in with ecology either, because I cash in on certain things, too. Like, building surfboards definitely isn’t worrying about the environment, you know? Most surfers build their own boards, which means they put all the foam dust and resin fumes into the air. So I’m not full-on into it, but I’m slightly concerned. I’d hate to see it end up like Japan. I got a letter from Ian Cairns, who just went there, and he said Tokyo was like Los Angeles, except four times worse. It just makes Los Angeles look like the country. And I always thought Japan was really organized. I thought the Japanese would have the whole situation well in hand. But they sure haven’t taken care of the air.

You have a surfboard business at home, don’t you?

No, I glass and my brother Ricky shapes. When we started off we started really small, the same as most people. I’d just finished an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and that was when I came to Hawaii that first time. When I returned I went back into carpentry, then I went to Bells Beach and won the '71 Australian Titles. So that seemed like a good time to start a surfboard business, cause we were thinking about that all along, but needed some publicity thing, some angle, to get it going. Ricky by that time had been shaping for six or eight years, for different boardmakers in the area. But we needed a glasser, so I figured, well, I'll give that a try. I’d never glassed before, but after the first few boards they started to come out all right. Just before Christmas this year we were doing 10 to 15 boards a week. We were stoked, cause we only figured on doing two or three a week. The whole operation at that point was still in a little shed! After that, we moved into a bigger factory. Then we thought, "We can do even better," so we opened up a retail shop and got a few clothes into it. Now the clothing side is a big part of our business.

Back to the contest thing. It must have been kind of weird in Australia after Nat, Wayne, Ted, Midget, and sundry others bailed out of the scene within a short period of time. What was the reaction, as you see it?

It was kind of shitty in a way, because we'd just gotten our chance to have a go against them, and they left. They’re all gone. And admittedly it left some positions open in the finals, but winning against surfers who were comparatively unknown didn’t feel as good as possibly winning it against Nat, Wayne, Drouyn or Midget. But maybe that was just some little ego thing that I got on, that I would have rather beaten all of them than the other guys. Anyway, I quickly realized that wasn’t the point at all. I wasn’t there to beat all the names. I was there to surf the best I can and hope that I win.

Still, those guys leaving must’ve helped a lot of kids.

It gave a lot of kids a break, yeah. It gave us all a break. Surfing in Australia was really getting monotonous. The movies were getting monotonous. Nat’s been surfing too good for too long. He’s been on top for 10 years. That whole time, he’s always been better than anyone else who came up. Maybe someone can beat him in a contest now and then, but that doesn’t make that guy better, you know? Like, in the latter contests that Nat went in, he was getting thirds and fourths. But no one cared, it didn't really matter, cause Nat was still the best. It was almost as if everyone had been brainwashed. I’d even been brainwashed! I still am! I still think Nat’s really good. He’s still surfing great. You know, I’d never sort of think of myself better than Nat or Peter or Midget. You just can’t imagine yourself out-surfing them. You might be able to one day, but on their good day and your good day, they’re just better. We're not equals.

How did you enjoy San Diego and the World Contest?

Now that it’s two months gone, I feel sort of good about it. It was okay. The guys that got in the event deserved to be in there. Everybody, I think, feels easier about it a couple of months later. You probably asked me at a good time.

I mean, everybody knows the contest was a joke. But I shouldn’t say that cause the guys who won worked hard to win, you know?

Yeah, it happened, and they got it done, and like Eduardo said [Eduardo Arena, ISF President], you can't help the fact that the surf didn’t show up.

That's right, you can’t help that. Still, I’d prepared a long time before that one, working and saving money, and it was a pretty big disappointment to arrive and have the waves be the way they were.

Many countries have good surfers now. Like the Japanese surfers are really good. And then the South African guys, too, plus they have a lot of depth.

South Africa has picked up a lot from last year.

And it’s not just a few guys on top. A lot of South Africans are good now. And Puerto Rico’s got some hot surfers. And Jeff Crawford from Florida.

He’s figured it out. He says it happens [getting beaten up] every three weeks, so three weeks from now he’s just gonna go hide for a while.

He was just up at Kammie’s, sitting there watching some little scene, doing nothing, and some local walked up to him and said, “What are you laughing at?” Jeff's just sitting there and says “I’m not laughing at anything,” and the local had a can of dog food and just smashed Jeff in the face with it and split his lip open again.

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