The Sports Factor

As the Bells Beach pro classic fires the imagination of the surfing community we hear about other waves of inspiration. Author Tim Baker has spoken to many of the world's most intrepid surfers and discovered the wide ranging appeal of board and beach.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Hello, and welcome to The Sports Factor here on ABC Radio National. I'm Mick O'Regan.

On this Good Friday public holiday, we're turning our backs on the city life and heading for the coast, shrugging off our shoes and pulling on a pair of board shorts to paddle out into the briny stew and go surfing.

Surfing. Now it started as a ripple, but these days it's a sporting tsunami, which impacts not only on the lives of millions as they chase that perfect wave, but also on almost every aspect of popular culture. For the young, and the young at heart, surfing leaves tracks across the way we dress, the music we listen to, even the way we speak. I mean where else could the term 'filthy barrels' refer to something to relish?

So this week, we're talking with one of the new breed of writers, who've specialised in documenting surfing, and the leading global exponents of a pastime that's become a planetary phenomenon.

Tim Baker lives on the Gold Coast, where his day begins with a walk to Currumbin Beach to check out the ocean and to reacquaint himself with the delights of catching a wave.

Tim Baker welcome again to The Sports Factor on ABC Radio National.

Tim Baker: Thanks Mick, great to be here.

Mick O'Regan: Now last time I had you in a studio on the Gold Coast, this time we're still at the Gold Coast, but we're actually sitting just on the dunes at Currumbin Beach. Now this is your local beach, and I know that for surfers a sense of locality is important. Just tell the listeners why this beach is important to you.

Tim Baker: I guess a spot like this, you know the beach that you go to every morning, you check the surf, I guess it's the closest we have to kind of like a village square in our kind of community, or our culture, that's somewhere where all the surfers gather in the morning to check the surf, and it's a really nice kind of community experience. I come down here with my young kids now in the mornings, and meet other surfers and discuss the waves, and there's a bunch of old boys who kind of hang out here under a sun shelter with their cups of coffee; they're called The Coffee Club, and they're there like 365 days a year, regardless of what the surf's like, and it's a really nice start to your day. You get out and you assess the elements, you know, you sniff the wind and look at what the swell and the tide and the sand's doing, and confer with your friends about it, and it just feels like a really nice kind of community gathering.

Mick O'Regan: Indeed, and in some ways through your book 'High Surf', you've become the chronicler of elements of that surfing community, obviously not just here at Currumbin on Queensland's Gold Coast, but really you know, throughout the surfing world. To begin with though, why do we need another book about surfing, because it seems to me they have proliferated in the last five years.

Tim Baker: Yes, there's a growing library, for sure. I guess I was trying to redefine surfing in a way. I think surfing always seems to get mis-characterised, you know even in the old days of the kind of hippie, druggie kind of dropout, through to the modern extreme sports, X-games kind of marketing sort of vehicle it's become. I just feel like any of the surfing stereotypes really miss the point, and I guess I'm more interested in how surfing fits into people's lifestyles, and what it gives them. And it just seemed to me it's a conversation surfing's been really ready to have, because when I started asking surfers 'What does surfing mean to you?' and the central question of the book is 'What have you learned from surfing', it was just like letting the genie out of the bottle, you just couldn't shut surfers up. It's like they'd all been thinking about this.

But Australian surfers in particular I think don't like to come across as too sort of esoteric or too New Age-y or whatever, but I feel like a lot of the characters I interviewed for the book, have just been waiting for an opportunity to talk about how much surfing meant to them, and what they got from it, and it was this really precious and cherished part of their lives and what emerged I think, which I wasn't really kind of aiming for at the beginning, was almost like a philosophy of surfing, that there's this holistic approach to living that you can get from spending lots of time in the ocean and on the waves.

Mick O'Regan: Now I know from talking to various people that surfing's quite tribal and even if we stayed in this locality here on the southern end of the Gold Coast, you've got places like Kirra Point, but then you've got the Tallebudgera Bridge and people will say that north of Tully Bridge is one area of surfing, south of Tully Bridge is another. So there is this - as we said earlier - this sense of locality. Is there in the Australian surfers that you've interviewed and spoken to and written about, a sense of Australian surfing being distinct from say the West Coast of the US or Hawaii or even Brazil?

Tim Baker: Oh yes, I think so. I think there's definitely sort of different flavours to the surfing experience in different locations. Australian surfers have been notoriously competitive animals. I think maybe that comes from the surf club tradition. You know, surfing grew out of the surf club sort of culture here, which was competitive in nature, and I think the nature of the surf here too, it's sort of short wave periods close together and Australian surfers seem to attack waves in a really kind of physical way, and when the first Australian surfers, aspiring professional surfers went to Hawaii, they were seen as these kind of wild, marauding, competitive animals who perhaps didn't have some of the kind of classic grace and style of the proud Hawaiian water man, but they wanted to take that kind of Aussie aggressive beach-break, ripping to this huge canvas of the Hawaiian surf. And I guess it was a kind of clash of cultures in a way, because the Hawaiians felt pretty put out by this, you know, 'Rabbit' Bartholomew and Mark Richards and their contemporaries went over there and attacked the waves with what I guess you could call a characteristic kind of Australian animal approach.

Mick O'Regan: So the West Coast surfers and people form the North Shore of Hawaii where there are significantly big waves, is the Hawaiian idea more that you sort of become one with the wave, rather than trying to dominate the way in the way that, say 'Rabbit' Bartholomew or Mark Richards might have tried to do?

Tim Baker: Yes, I think so, and surfing's just one small part of the whole ocean-going culture in Hawaii. You know like in Australia it's quite unique that you have what became a sort of separation between the surf clubs and the board riders, you know, you had this whole kind of clubby, surfy, kind of war you know, where the clubbys would confiscate your board if you've surfed between the flags, and that separation doesn't really exist anywhere else in the surfing world, and in Hawaii it's all about being a water man, you know, that there's no distinction between someone who paddles a paddle-board, or paddles a surf ski, or paddles a canoe, and they're all things that you do to increase your all-round ocean skills; you free-dive and you fish and you body surf.

And part of my research for the book was to go to Makaha, go to an event called Buffalos Big Board Surfing Classic, and Buffalo Keaulana's this great patriarch of a beach called Makaha on the West side which is like a lot of places, the West side's the wrong side of the tracks, but surfing is there, I guess it's like the salvation, you know, Buffalo runs this big event every year to bring the community together and he'll say quite openly 'Get the big old fat boys back in the surf', and try and get the kids to stop them from smoking ice or stealing cars, or whatever, you know. It's this really almost kind of pragmatic kind of survival thing, 'Get everyone to the beach and get them surfing, and that'll keep them healthy and keep them fit and keep our community intact.'

Mick O'Regan: Because it's interesting - just on that: where we are now, and for people listening in Sydney and the beach areas of Melbourne and Victoria and stuff, there is a proximity to the surf that can actually just insinuate itself into your life, and people will know that Australia - we're clustered around our coast. There's a sort of fringe of population - I think 85% live within 15k of the water. And yet it seems to me that surfing has gone from that niche sport of people who live really close, can easily get down to the water, to now being this mass sport, and people will be familiar with kids, grommets, with surfboards on buses and trains coming from Penrith to the beaches of Sydney and stuff like that. Can I ask you about that change, about how it's gone from being the province of people who lived closer enough to the sea to be part of it, to that thing where it's just a sport of mass culture that people make that effort, and even though they're not connected to the ocean, they're connected to surfing?

Tim Baker: Yes, for sure. I think in the old days, when it was this niche thing, surfers kind of thrived on this idea that they were misunderstood, you know, that they were these kind of mavericks or fringe-dwellers of society, and surfers were the absolutely scum of the social order, you know, cops loved pulling them over and busting them; if you drove into any country town with boards on the roof, there'd be some redneck copy ready to pull you over and rip your car apart trying to find drugs, and we were kind of absolutely the lowest of the low, and it's amazing to see this transformation, this journey that surfing's been on, where it's now so broadly embraced. But I think with that, I guess part of the point of the book is, I feel like we can't really afford to be misunderstood any more, there are so many people coming in to surfing that just to kind of get along in the water, we need to have some common beliefs that are kind of recognised and shared and passed on, and there are just these unwritten codes of etiquette and stuff in the surf that a lot of newcomers might not be aware of, and that can create conflict in the water.

Mick O'Regan: Well surf-rage, yes, I mean it's quite a big phenomenon, I mean there was all that stuff with Nat Young and Angourie on the North Coast of New South Wales; it's an issue, isn't it?

Tim Baker: Yes, absolutely, and I guess I kind of went looking for answers from some of the kind of wise elders, you know, I wanted to talk to a lot of long-time surfers about what do you think about this kind of journey that surfing's been on, and this influx of people, and how to kind of quote Rodney King, you know, like Can't we all get along?

Mick O'Regan: Because it is so different. As we walked onto the sand this morning, we both commented there was a classic scene of a group of largely middle-aged women, and to be fair I'm not the fittest person in the world, but they weren't svelte young things, but they were all going down with their learner boards, to have a surfing lesson. I mean surfing is no longer the province of a sort of fit 25-year-old guy with a goatee beard, is it?

Tim Baker: No, and I think people - I think surfing's just irresistible ultimately, and there's nowhere in the world that's been exposed to surfing that it hasn't taken off and thrived. There are no people, no culture in the world that's been exposed to surfing and gone 'Oh, no, it doesn't really do anything for me', you know, not really interested, like everywhere it's gone from Japan to Indonesia to South America, people have just gone crazy about it, and it's upset social orders there, you know, Japanese elders are concerned that their kids are dropping out and driving round Australia in old Holden station wagons now.

Mick O'Regan: There is a movie about that that came out in the last couple of years.

Tim Baker: Yes, 'Bondi Tsunami' I think it was. Yes, and I think it's just the irresistible, magnetic attraction of surfing. In a lot of ways people talk about life getting busier, and people being time-poor, and maybe even these environmental stresses on us that we're not even fully conscious of in terms of air quality and water quality, and people talk about the quality of the food we eat, and I think people need what they getting form the ocean, it's like water to a thirsty man. You throw someone in the surf, and all of a sudden they feel so amazing whether it's a stressed-out middle-aged businessman, to a young kid, to like the disabled people that the Disabled Surfers' Association takes surfing, or the autistic kids that a group called Surfers Healing take surfing.

But it's this universal thing that we get in the ocean and whether it's breathing the negative ions that the scientist in the book talks about, or whether it's not that experience of being free of land and floating. I've said to friends, non-surfing friends, who ask about surfing, so much of life feels like the heavy lifting, you know, you're paying the mortgage and you're paying bills and you're going to work, and you're looking after kids, and for a few moments you get this freedom and glide, and you ask a blind person who's been pushed into a wave, one foot of white water for 20 metres at these disabled surfers' hands-on days, you ask them what was that experience like? And they just go 'That was like flying, that felt like flying', and without the sense of vision, for them it's just this incredible release that I think we all get.

Mick O'Regan: Absolutely. Sometimes I've even experienced that with body surfing: you come as close as you can to a sense of weightlessness and forward movement. But just on the surfing and the disability issues. In the book there's a fascinating discussion of the surfer whose son has autism, and decided that surfing could have a therapeutic value. Could you just tell us that story?

Tim Baker: Yes, a guy called Israel Paskowitz who's a former champion professional longboarder, and the son of one of the main characters in the book, Doc Paskowitz, who is a great patriarch of this great surfing family, and Israel's son developed autism and I'm not that familiar with the condition but they just found him so difficult to manage, and were looking for solutions and trying different approaches. And he just found taking him to the ocean and pushing him into waves just completely calmed him down and took off a lot of those rough edges, and they were so amazed by this transformation that they just wanted to share it, and so they started a charity and started just travelling around the California coastline, putting on free clinics and inviting parents to bring their autistic children to the beach.

And you can go to their website - I'm not exactly sure of the address, but I'm sure you could Google it. And you read these testimonies from parents who are just so profoundly grateful that their lives and their children's' lives have been transformed. And it's a similar thing at the Disabled Surfers' Hands-on Days; I've gone down to a couple of those and, there's people whose bodies really don't work, whether it's cerebral palsy, or quadriplegia, all kinds of incredible ailments, and there'll be a dozen volunteers around them, holding them on a board and ferrying them out through the whitewater to push them onto a wave for those few moments of - as I say - flight and freedom. And these people are just astounded, and the carers and parents are on the beach, almost in tears, that's seen someone who's just confined to a wheelchair or institutionalised, for even a few seconds, to be just floating and flying.

And these people sit in wheelchairs all day on the beach for hours, waiting for their turn, and they might get three or four goes in the course of a day, and one of the volunteers was telling me, you know, it's so hard at the end of the day, to say to them, Sorry, we're packing up now, you can't have another turn, and you've got to wait three or four months for your next surf. And he was saying to me, as a surfie, 'Imagine being told you had to wait 3 or 4 months for your next surf!'

Mick O'Regan: Tim Baker, author of 'High Surf - The World's Most Inspiring Surfers', talking to me at Currumbin Beach on Queensland's Gold Coast.

"Good Vibrations" - Beach Boys

Mick O'Regan: When Tim Baker set out to write his book, one of his goals was to locate and to tap the knowledge and experience of older members of the surfing community. So to resume our conversation, I asked him about who he had in mind.

Tim Baker: There was a long wish-list of surfers I wanted to get to, and it was really a matter of kind of serendipity and circumstance, how many kind of people on the list I got to in the end, and then there were others that were just sort of thrown up along the way that I wasn't expecting, and I guess maybe one of the biggest surprises was some of the real long-time surfers, the real elders, people who'd been surfing for 50 or 60, or in some cases, 70 years. And I felt like it was almost a religious impulse on my part, that I was looking for some kind of spiritualism associated with surfing, and what I got from some of the elders was almost this perfect pragmatism, that there wasn't anything New Age-y about it, but I guess it was philosophy in a really beautiful, simple way.

You know, Doc Paskowitz says - and he's 85 years old, he's had 14 children and travelled the world; none of his kids went to school, they lived in a campervan roaming the coastline from surf spot to surf spot, and he just says, 'I keep surfing, because surfing keeps me.' And Buffalo Keaulana from Makaha Beach, you know, this great patriarchal figure of his community, he says 'You can't just go surfing all day and expect to eat. First you go fish, and then you've got some food, and you put it away, and then you can go surf.' And I was surprised by things like that, because it was very pragmatic; it was like surfing fits in to a way of life because it aids your survival in a very real way. And for the Hawaiians, surfing wasn't just this idle play, it was just another way to know the ocean better, because that in turn would increase your chances of survival in a real hunter-gatherer society that it would have evolved in.

Mick O'Regan: For you, what are the real high-end skills that greater surfers - I mean we know that Mick Fanning has just won the WCT Tour, but when you think about what the greats do, what is it that sets them apart?

Tim Baker: Well maybe it's part of the issue I have with professional surfing in competition, as a kind of inadequate showcase for surfing, because I think ultimately surfing doesn't do anything but make you feel good, and to watch something that's beautiful, it's more like a dance, you know, I mean football or cricket can be just sort of practically effective in terms of scoring runs or tries, or goals, or whatever it might be, but for surfing, scoring points and doing the maximum number of manoeuvres on a wave, doesn't really seem the point. You can watch a surfer do these incredible manoeuvres top to bottom for hundreds of metres at incredible speed, but it could just be ugly. Whereas the only point to it really like a dancer if it's beautiful to behold.

Mick O'Regan: And I suppose as someone says in the book, it's one of the quotes, that it's completely non-depletive, that you get out there on a wave and there's that sense that you are in that moment, that as you're on a wave, you're actually seeing your future unfold in front of you, your past is crashing and disappearing behind you, literally, and that's the element; maybe that's the universal element that people share a moment; how they use it is their own skill and choice and opportunity, but the fact that they're in that moment is what links them.

Tim Baker: Yes, and you look at the great surfers, and they are so in the moment, and so in command that for myself as a fairly average recreational surfer who isn't at an elite level at all by any stretch of the imagination, you watch the great surfers, and it seems to defy physics and gravity, and it reminds me of the stunts in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' or something, that what they do, you just kind of stare, agog, and go, 'How did they possibly do that?' If they can do that beauty and grace, you know, it's just like one of those art forms that kind of makes you feel better about being human, that we're capable of beauty as well as all our kind of flaws and so on.

Mick O'Regan: Will it keep growing, surfing, inexorably?

Tim Baker: I kind of think it will, and I think most long-time surfers have kind of mixed feelings about that. I know the surf companies have this kind of great desire to waken the sleeping giants of Asia, you know, it's these markets emerging in China and India, and if people think that the surf's crowded now, if emerging middle-classes in India and China decide that they want to start surfing and can afford to travel, then we haven't really seen anything yet, in terms of crowds.

Mick O'Regan: I'm not familiar with the surfing in India; it's got a long coastline India, though, obviously on two oceans. Is it a place that surfers go? I know people go to Sri Lanka, I know people go to Indonesia. Is India also a surfing destination?

Tim Baker: It's not thought of as a quality destination. I've heard and seen photos and read stories of people surfing in India, in fairly average surf. You look at the coastline and you imagine there must be some reasonable surfing in some sections, but I'm not aware of any kind of great world-class surf that would make people travel long distances to go there. But I think it would be more a matter of if an emerging middle-class in India who started surfing in fairly kind of average waves could then afford to travel and discover the surf in Australia, and Indonesia and Hawaii. Like the Brazilians and the Japanese oftentimes don't have great surf in their home countries or parts of Europe, you know, there are Norwegian and Danish and German surfers, some don't even have an ocean but they've found their way to the nearest coastline and started surfing, and they come to places like this and just lose their minds.

They just go, 'Oh My God, look at this!' And some of them earn reputations for being hasslers in the surf and stuff, and I kind of sympathise, because they're just going out of their minds, they've never seen anything like it, and to see Burleigh Point or Snapper Rocks, or Currumbin three to four feet, and peeling for 500 metres, they just can't believe it, and they just want to get amongst it.

Mick O'Regan: Earlier this year we had a program where we did actually speak, a bit like you have done in your book 'High Surf', but we spoke to Bob McTavish and Rusty Miller and Lester Bryan, but Bob McTavish, who has been surfing for over half a century, I asked him how he characterised himself as a surfer, and he said he was a pirate, and he said that he was still out there, picking up waves, getting away from the crowd, but still wanting to find a little break that no-one else was on, or if they were on it, happily sharing it with them. And he said he sometimes went out with what he called a couple of cooks, you know, he'd pick a couple of young learners who weren't actually aware of where they should be to maximise their opportunity, and he'd actually pointed out to them. But what I took from it is that - and to bring us back to full circle I suppose - there is now within surfing, a sort of body of knowledge, of people like Doc Paskowitz, and Bob McTavish who've been surfing for half a century or more. How do you think the general surfing community accesses that knowledge? Or do they access that knowledge?

Tim Baker: Yes, I guess that was part of the point of the book, because I felt like those voices weren't being heard. I've said before, as someone who writes for surfing magazines, whose staple of the young pro surf stars, the pro surfing world sometimes look to me like a forest where all the mature trees got chopped town, and it's just as people were becoming interesting to me and developing enough life experience that I thought they had something worthwhile to share, they'd drop down the ratings and lose their sponsors and vanish, and have to go get a job, and you never hear of them again. And I really wanted to go and speak to some of the elders and I found this great desire amongst them to have a role to play and have a voice that's heard, and Bob and people like Doc are just fantastic characters, and I've just got this amazing great warmth and affection for them as people, who I think the greater surfing community needs to take note of.

Bob says some beautiful things about just being a good host at your local surf spot; he completely turned this localism thing on its head and said, 'You know, I discovered the joy of giving waves', and it was a great Hawaiian surfer, Eddie Aikau, who turned him on to it, and twice in Hawaii in the middle of crowded, feverish surf sessions, with all these heavy Hawaiian intimidating locals, Eddie would Bob and go, 'Hey, Bob, your wave', or to call a couple of heavy local guys off and go, 'Hey! Bob's wave', and he said 'I couldn't understand why he did it, and then I tried it at home, and it felt so great to be the host and be sharing my surf spot with someone and go Here, this is your wave', and maybe it's a naïve idea -

Mick O'Regan: It speaks of respect though, doesn't it?

Tim Baker: Yes, yes, and I just think it's what we need you know, if it's dog eat dog out there, it's going to get real ugly, and uglier as time goes on. And Peter Singer, who's another of the subjects in the book, the great ethicist and philosopher, talks about a theory called Preference Utilitarianism, which he'd never applied to surfing, but after interviewing him, I started reading some of his essays and papers, and his approach to most situations is what he calls 'preference utilitarianism' which is trying to create the best outcome for the greatest number of people, and I think that's what surfing needs, you know, that we approach a surf session kind of wanting everyone to have a nice time out there, and on any given day there's probably someone in the water for whom that wave could redeem their whole day, or they could get the ride of their lives, and on a day like today when it's tiny and windblown, that could be some stumbling beginner, or some middle-aged learner or some overwrought parents who's had a sleepless night and just needs to kind of wash off some fatigue and stress.

Mick O'Regan: The ocean actually delivers different scenarios for different quality surfers, I suppose, doesn't it? There are some days when you need to be of a certain calibre before you can realistically take the surf on.

Tim Baker: Yes, and I just think if we could kind of promote that attitude that then in return when it's 6-foot and perfect, and the surf's really challenging and the people who can make the most of those conditions, they'd be elite skilled surfers; but then the beginners or the less talented or even the kind of intermediate surfers could afford to just step back a bit and give the good surfers a bit of space and learn from them, and that in that way we could just try and kind of create this symbiotic kind of relationship where it's the best outcome for the greatest number.

Mick O'Regan: Sure sounds good to me. Tim Baker, congratulations on your book 'High Surf', and thank you very much for being on The Sports Factor here on ABC Radio National.

Tim Baker: Yes, my pleasure Mick, thanks for having us.

Mick O'Regan: Surfing enthusiast and sports writer, Tim Baker, speaking to me at Currumbin on the Gold Coast.

His book is called 'High Surf: The World's Most Inspiring Surfers' and it's published by HarperCollins.

And that's The Sports Factor for this week. My thanks to Andrew Davies for producing the program and to Costa Zouliou for technical production.

I'm Mick O'Regan, thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join me again at the same time next week for another edition of the program here on ABC Radio National.

Guests

Tim Baker
Author & Journalist.

Publications

Title: 'High Surf: The World's Most Inspiring Surfers'
Author: Tim Baker
Publisher: Harper Collins

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies