This weekend’s Single Fin Uluwatu Classic will see a number of the world’s best contest surfers, tube lords, style masters and everything in between put down their usual quiver and duke it out on a number of retro single fins. The specialty event has become a staple in Bali’s surfing calendar and usually sees hundreds line the cliffs at Uluwatu partying across the weekend. While competition will be fierce at times, the day is also about fun and celebrating a wave that acts as the epicentre of Bali surfing.
The man behind it all is Tai ‘Buddha’ Graham. As well as being a tube lord himself, Tai is the co-owner of lifestyle hospitality group, Project Black, in Bali. Writer Tom De Souza caught up with Tai to discuss his winding path to success and surfing freedom for Issue 601 of our mag. However, you can now read the feature for free below.
Responsibilities are a bit like toothpaste. Once it’s out of the tube, it’s damn near impossible to get it back in. Mortgages, kids, a partner – all of these things a pull towards middle-class and away from the blissful dereliction of a life dedicated to surfing.
Outside of a professional surfing career, there aren’t many who can manage to ‘grow up’ and still maintain the freedom necessary to chase swells. Tai ‘Buddha’ Graham is someone who has managed to do both, and with a remarkable amount of success.
He’s the co-owner of lifestyle hospitality group, Project Black, in Bali – in charge of 1500 staff and 12 venues, including Single Fin at Uluwatu, The Lawn beach club at Canggu, Times Warung, Numero Quattro at Echo Beach and Skool Kitchen, which was recently awarded Asia’s Best 100 Restaurants.
He’s the go-to guy for celebrities visiting the island and has taken Kelly Slater to a few secret waves he’s got stashed up his sleeve, hosted others like Lewis Hamilton, and even introduced surfing to rapper, Anderson Paak.
It’s a dream life that Tai has built, and sometimes those peering in through the windows of that dream comment on how ‘lucky’ he is. But Tai doesn’t believe in luck. At the end of the day, our lives are basically just a pile of decisions that we are left standing on, and only through some heart-wrenching choices and sacrifice has Tai been able to commit himself to his own happiness.
Back in the early 2000s, Tai had that same dream of a life completely dedicated to surfing. He was chasing it down the most obvious route – qualifying for the professional tour. But after a few unsuccessful attempts, he found himself working as a lifeguard down at Main Beach on the Gold Coast.
“I had to get a job. I wanted to do something around surfing and fell into lifeguarding, which I thought was awesome at the time. I got to spend heaps of time down the beach but I actually didn’t get to surf as much as I thought. Some days it was great, we would rescue 50 people. But other times I was sitting there watching seagulls flying around. I knew I had more to give,” he says.
Like all young men, Tai was lost. He wasn’t really sure where he wanted to go or what he was really doing, but that all changed one night when he came onto the radar of North End Boardriders Club committee member and local businessman, Dave Hardman.
The boardriders were planning their next fundraiser and all the usual ideas were thrown into the mix: car washes at 10 bucks a pop, maybe a meat tray raffle. It was guaranteed to bring in a good $500, maybe $1000 if they were lucky. But the club had recently won a national competition, and they knew they had to put some real money back into the club if they wanted to remain the best for years to come.
There was an upcoming training program on the NSW Central Coast with Martin Dunn, regarded as the number one surf coach in Australia at the time. But it was $500 a kid. There was no way a few raffle tickets would be enough to send five or six of their best junior surfers down there.
“Dave encouraged me to think outside of the box and apply a bit of a champion mindset to business. I’d always played high-level football and had been a sponsored surfer, but I was struggling to figure how I could apply that same mindset to life,” says Tai.
“I approached the committee and suggested getting a bunch of jerseys from mates who played in the NRL, and boards from surfing mates like Mick Fanning, and auctioning them off. We ended up raising $11,000. It was the most money the club had ever seen. Everyone was like, whoa. After that night, Dave pulled me aside and asked if I wanted to grab a beer.”
After that conversation, Dave invited Tai around for dinner at his home in Main Beach. He saw this young man, like all young men, was lost, but he recognised Tai’s great potential if he could find his way, and perhaps the catastrophe if he couldn’t.
“We were having a beer, and he goes, are you happy? This is back in 2003. Men didn’t talk to each other like that. I was like, fuck, that’s a pretty deep question, bro. He goes, why, are you? I went, nah. I’m not,” says Tai.
“He asked me what my dream was. I had no idea. He goes, well what’s the dream? I wouldn’t have a clue. Well, what would the dream day look like? Well, I’d love to wake up and surf pumping waves every day. I want to be surrounded by fun people, good looking girls, great food, a beautiful environment. It’s nice and warm.”
“He goes, you want to live that dream? Go do it. And I went, how do you do that? He told me: you know you have to start a business, become the captain of your own ship, right?” says Tai.
“He asked me what I was going to do. I didn’t know. I loved hosting people. I thought, maybe a surf camp. We started looking at all these places: Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Samoa, Mexico, Bali. We put all these dots over the map. He goes, what about the lay of the land? Where do you know the language? Culture?”
There was one dot on that map in particular that jumped out at Tai. After his parents split up when he was nine years old, his mum moved to Bali and developed her own fashion label. Tai stayed in Australia with his dad, Miha Kereama, (Tai is proud of his Maori ancestry) but every school holidays would visit his Mum. He spent a lot of his time down at Legian Beach, hanging with local surfers.
“I started learning the language, learning the ways, learning the culture. Once I understood the language and the culture, I started to understand the people,” he says.
“But I didn’t really understand the value of that when I was so young. Bali was just a place where my mum lived, and I went and surfed and partied. I didn’t take it seriously.”
Dave encouraged Tai to fly over there and look at Bali with a different set of eyes. Whatever idea he came up with, he promised to bolster it with an initial investment to help get things off the ground.
“I jumped on a plane and flew over and went, this is it. I went back and broke up with my girlfriend; we had been together for six years, quit my job and sold my car,” he says.
“Two weeks before I was getting on the plane to leave, Dave calls me and goes, ‘hey, I’m out’. I can’t invest. I was like, fuck. The dreams over. It’s not happening. He told me to try. But what was I going to try with? I had $3000 in my back pocket from selling the car, that was it.
“I flew over, I was kind of lost and a bit heartbroken. Straight off the plane, I went surfing at Desert Point and broke my back. I spent the next 38 days in hospital. I was just thinking, this is not happening.”
But even laying there in the hospital bed, Tai knew deep down that he was heading in the right path. He felt it in his gut, and he trusted in that intuition. Because while the head can spin you in circles and the heart can blind you, the stomach never lies. This was where he had to go, broken back and heart and empty pockets be damned.
“I just sat there and went; I’m not going back. No matter what, I’m going to make this work,” he says.
“I realised I really had to get my shit together. And when I got out from the hospital, I took a year lease out on a bungalow for 25 million rupiah ($2500AUD), which was almost all my money. I had just a couple hundred bucks left in my back pocket. I went out and partied and met some surfers, and they were looking for a place to stay. I pulled them into my place, and that was it. Everything sort of snowballed from there.”
Perhaps the most valuable business lesson that Dave had taught Tai was not to do things for the money. It was to do things for fun. To follow his dreams and his passions and do what felt good. If he did that, the money would come, he promised.
In the early 2000s, Bali was a popular holiday destination for Australians but not yet the global hotspot it is today. Tai was one of the first guys with connections in the surf industry to base himself there full-time and established himself as a facilitator for visiting professionals, photographers, and magazine editors.
“They would come over and bring all the boys, and ask me, where should we go surf? I was kind of like the villa-guide/surf-guide/party-guide/take-me-to-the-police-because-I-lost-my-wallet kinda guy.”
“I started with one villa then saved up and got a second one. Because I was taking people everywhere all the time, I got to know all the guys who had bars and restaurants. This one nightclub offered me a night. You bring people here, and we’ll give you a slice of the bar. From there, I realised I wanted to have my own bar.”
In 2007, Tai began Black Dog, the first music and arts bar in Bali, with his friend, Tipi Jabrik. They found an old warehouse down a Canggu alleyway, and every Friday night hosted a party with live bands and DJs playing only original music; prints from photographers and artists hanging on the walls.
“We brought this really alternative arts crowd together, and the place just pumped. Man, you couldn’t even get in,” he says.
But Tipi and Tai had the unique problem of becoming too successful. Eventually the landlady who leased the warehouse shut it down; it was right next to her house, and she was tired of the late drunken nights. Tipi began working with a Chinese businessman from Jakarta, while Tai struggled to figure out his next move.
“2010. That was the most broke I’ve ever been in my life. My girlfriend and I were staying in a bungalow that was 1.5million rupiah ($150AUD) a month. I could just afford it. I was playing in a band; we would get $300 a show, split between three of us. We would maybe play once every two weeks, once a week if we were lucky. I was just scraping by,” he says.
“I was selling all my stuff just so I could pay the rent. I couldn’t even afford renting a motorbike. I was riding around on a pushbike. And I just kind of sat there and went, I guess this is what rock bottom feels like. I still had a roof over my head, but it was a bamboo hut, and we could just afford eating.”
“And it was probably the most humbling experience that I’ve ever had in my life. Actually, I think it was the best experience. Because I was like, if this is what rock bottom feels like, it’s actually not that bad. I made a promise to myself that I was never coming back here ever again, but I also wasn’t scared of anything anymore.”
Tai had learned one of the greatest keys to success: to use fear as a driver of ambition rather than an impediment. It bolstered him as he began planning his next venture. He started meeting with businessmen, local politicians, even gangsters – but it was an old friend from Legian Beach who caught his attention.
Made Kasim, one of Bali’s first professional surfers, brought Tai down to Uluwatu. Back then, it was mostly dusty farmland with a few small warungs built into the clifftop. He showed him an empty dirt lot attached to an old hotel, looking out over that same view from Albe Falzon’s ‘Morning of the Earth’ that first put Bali on the map in the 1970s. In 2011, they opened Single Fin, the first surfers bar in Uluwatu. It quickly became an institution in what is now one of Bali’s fastest growing areas.
Tai also recognised the potential of retail in a rapidly developing tourism area, and approached Morris Wong, the owner of Rhythm clothing. He convinced him to give him the Indonesian distribution licence – even with no prior experience.
“I remember the guy asking me if I knew how to do it. And I pointed to my mates who were also surfers that founded the biz, and I was like, how hard can this be. If they can do it, I’ll figure it out. You can do anything with the right kind of attitude,” he says.
“I had an empty board bag and an empty suitcase, and I told him, let me fill it up with boardshorts. I promise, I’ll get your money back to you. I flew back with this board bag full of boardshorts, this big floppy board bag. Customs pulled me over, and I was like, one for you, one for you. I understood Indonesia, I knew how to play the game. That was key.”
His willingness to learn and take risks eventually caught the eye of O’Neill global CEO, Michael Heath. He offered him a position as brand manager and asked for his help to relaunch O’Neill in Indonesia. But for Tai, the greatest reward for his efforts was the ability to live life on his own terms, and he was unwilling to compromise that for anyone.
“I was like, you know what? No, I don’t. And he goes, why not? I went, well, my buddy’s the brand manager of Billabong, and all he does is sit on his laptop all day. I go, I live a great life, man. I’ve got so much freedom. I get to surf, but I still want to challenge my mind from a business perspective,” he says.
“So, we carved out this really cool deal where I still got to do what I like to do and help them launch the brand here. I think that was one of the pivotal points of my business career. Every Monday at 2:00 PM I did an hour zoom call with him, and he just taught me so many things, man. Over the couple of years we worked together, I felt like I did a business degree.”
As Tai’s success grew, so too did his understanding of it. As he achieved more, he found that success could, in a way, be its own form of failure. By setting himself goals and committing everything to achieving it, he found that beyond that there was sometimes a hollow, empty feeling. A sense of, what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-do-now?
“I definitely had this period of a couple years where I was making fantastic money and had venues full with thousands of people. And people would look from the outside like, oh my God, look at you. You’re living your dream. I was about to have a kid, and I had a beautiful house and a beautiful missus, but I just had this nagging feeling of like, what’s next? What’s my purpose?”
“There are so many businesses and so much money coming into Bali, not just Bali, but the whole world is saturated. I wanted to know; how do I stand out in the hospitality world? Is it the architecture? Is it the music? But I mean, money can buy that for anyone.
“After having a couple kids, I started going on surf trips, which gave me a lot of thinking time. And I realised it was sitting right there in front of me all this time. It’s surf. I’m a surfer. I can do surf better than any of the Beach Clubs or Hotel guys in Bali. I started to really accept and celebrate the fact that I was a surfer, first and foremost, and that was always going to dictate what I do.”
These days, Tai’s not just living the dream; he’s on the ground making it happen every day. As a current athlete / ambassador for Billabong, he’s turned into one of the go-to guys for some of the most coveted, uncrowded waves in the Indo archipelago. While the rest of the surfing world scrambles to get their piece of the action, Tai’s out there, often with just a handful of the world’s best riders, chasing waves that most only see in dreams. His deep connection to Indonesia’s waters and knack for tracking swells across the archipelago has made him a guru-figure, whose opinion is frequently sought when it comes to making a call. Tai is savvier with his time management now.; reluctant to let good swells pass by in the name of work and he is more committed than ever to being in the right place at the right time.
The QS drop-out who landed in Indo almost broke, now boasts a world-class freesurfing act, a healthy social media following and a highly successful business portfolio. More recently Tai has turned his attention to the surf industry, teaming up with JS Industries, signing a deal that sent a ripple through the surf industry. Together they worked on Tai’s signature board, the BIG HORSE, its design features a direct reflection of his years spent pursuing challenging barrels throughout Indo and beyond. Built for the kind of conditions Tai knows best, the board’s rapidly becoming a global favourite for those seeking hefty waves with hollow tendencies. Tai’s also secured the license for JS in the Asia region, taking the brand into new waters and cementing his place not just as a surfer, but as a key player in the surf scene across the Asian continent.
As he moves into the next phase of his business career, Tai also wants to inspire others to follow their dreams and live in a way that is true to who they really are. He has recently started a podcast, which he hopes will help pay forward the same lessons that Michael Heath and Dave Hardman instilled in him.
“Life is that simple. You don’t have to put up with shit. You don’t have to put up with a partner that’s killing your freedom or whatever it is. You don’t have to put up with that job you’re unhappy at. If you walk into the bakery and you get a meat pie and you start eating it and it doesn’t taste good, whatcha going to do? You’re going to throw that thing away and get another one!” he says.
“And I think for me, for anyone, that the true definition of success is to live with intent and in a way that remains true to your purpose. To get out there and really build a life you love, do things you love doing. And hopefully my stories and other people’s stories can be a source of inspiration for them to make that move too.”
