In surfing circles, Larry Blair is best known for his fabled win in the 1978 Coke Surfabout and his back-to-back victories in the 1978, ’79 Pipe Masters. However, beneath the thin veil of curling water Larry was so adept at hiding behind, he was concealing another life.
You see, Larry’s step dad Frank ‘Baldy’ Blair was one of Australia’s most notorious criminals in the 60s and 70s. Baldy and his crew infamously pulled off the world’s first-ever successful robbery of an armoured vehicle. This heist earned the gang a haul of more than half a million dollars – worth roughly double by today’s standards. The book goes into quite some detail about the machinations behind the robbery. Although Larry was just an 11-year-old boy, he vividly recalls the cast of dubious characters involved. Reading between the lines of the memoir Larry has written with Jeremy Goring, you sense Larry is still wary of his father’s past coming back to haunt him.
More often than not Baldy’s partner in crime was Larry’s beguiling mother, Patricia – a master thief whose specialty was jewellery. “There can’t have been any major underworld figure of the 1960s ’70s or ’80s who didn’t visit our back room at some point to chat, plan or wile away an evening with the girls,” explains Larry in one of the many references to the underworld figures who frequented his home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.” Perhaps the only thing Patricia loved more than a well-planned robbery was her blonde-haired son. Meanwhile, Larry’s enduring love for his kleptomaniac mum is one of the more complex themes explored in the book.
And so as you can see this compelling memoir is about much more than a few well-ridden barrels. Instead the murky and at times fascinating world of true crime collides with the escapism of 70s surf travel and the flamboyant, early years of professional surfing when sponsors and hangers-on often encouraged surfers to behave like unhinged rock stars.
The memoir begins with Larry growing up in Maroubra and Coogee, doing his best to claim a place in the competitive surfing hierarchy, while ducking and weaving around his parents’ network of career-criminal friends.
As a result of his parents’ nefarious activities, Larry’s childhood is unsurprisingly volatile. One minute he is being lavished with gifts, catching cabs to the surf and dressed in the latest designer clothes, the next he is jumping on planes on the run from the cops.
Trapped in this underworld milieu, Larry attempts to achieve some semblance of normality by hanging with his mates, Terry, Mick, and Fat Larry, and surfing the breaks between Coogee and Maroubra. Meanwhile, early 70s trips down the coast with the older Maroubra crew pull him more deeply under surfing’s spell. “I know for sure that it was on this lost piece of Australian shoreline that I discovered what surfing could be.”
However, despite Larry’s best efforts to go surfing and turn his back on the criminal world fate has landed him in, he invariably gets dragged into the family business. As a ‘Thief’s Apprentice’ (the title of a chapter) he plays the lookout while his mum’s light-fingers relieve shelves of their stock; then eventually Larry gets caught up in an elaborate social security scheme.
It’s this last scam that turns Larry from schoolboy truant to wanted young man and inspires his first trip to Hawaii –basically to get away from the law. He boards the plane at age 15, raids the alcohol trolley on the flight and wakes up in a land of swaying palms, shakas and perfect surf. All this while he is wanted for questioning back home. Taken in by a retired colonel, who is a respected North Shore local and friend of Larry’s shaper, Geoff McCoy, Larry flies under the radar on his first adventure.
The early trips to Hawaii and later Indonesia, hone Larry’s affinity for hollow, powerful waves. Then at age 18 he defeats Wayne Lynch in funnelling waves at Manly to win the 1978, 2SM Coke Surfabout. The unheralded success hurls him into the limelight – which seems like a strange place to be, given his mother is still engaged in her furtive pursuits.
Despite the nefarious nature of his family’s affairs, the archetypal blonde-haired surfer becomes a media darling and embraces his newfound stardom by indulging his penchant for fast cars and high fashion. Turbo-charged by all the attention, Larry appears in TV commercials and even takes on a role in a Shakespearean theatre production.
Writing with the benefit of hindsight, Blair confesses the confident strut and ostentatious behaviour was all a mask for deeper insecurities. “I drank, partied and crashed cars all over Sydney, and got more attention than I deserved. I was developing a sort of outrageous alter ego that was designed to hide the real duller me.” The book chronicles the meteoric rise of this surfing artful dodger. Noting that at the peak of his fame, Larry dated Debbie Tate, the sister of Hollywood star Sharon Tate, who was murdered by Charles Manson’s gang in one of the darkest chapters of American History.
Larry’s flamboyance makes him a target for the menacing Black Shorts, when he returns to the North Shore in 1978 in pursuit of Pipe Masters glory. And so the book’s climactic chapters focus on Larry’s quest to win surfing’s most coveted contest, amidst an environment of simmering violence and animosity towards flashy and ambitious Australian interlopers.
Despite the extra-attention from disgruntled locals Larry’s superior barrel-riding skills ensure he triumphs at Pipeline. However, in the book Blair morbidly reflects that perhaps his apprenticeship in the trades of theft, cunning and guile had perhaps served him well. “Waves are not given by one surfer to another, they are robbed. So what better preparation for this sport than being a robber’s son? I wonder if the mean and opportunistic edge that I acquired from my family is what made 1978 such a good year for me?”
‘The Outside’ is a compelling story, which artfully weaves together the seemingly incongruous, overlapping worlds of Larry’s Blair’s life. Given the general infamy of his family it has been written to accommodate an audience beyond surfers, but wave-riding diehards won’t be disappointed by a story that takes you on a journey from the depths of Australia’s underworld to the heights of Hollywood. In the end, ‘The Outside’ reveals much about the reality of criminal life but is careful not to romanticise it. It is certainly a tale of an outsider who triumphs in bizarre and confronting circumstances, but also offers a clear warning about the pitfalls of fame.
Memoirs are generally best written when someone has either achieved something exceptional or led an extraordinary life. ‘The Outside’ readily meets both criteria.
This unique, Australian story has been told well, and will keep readers enthralled.
