Some people are too sensitive for this world. It only takes a couple of really bad things to happen in a row and they become discouraged. Injury, expectations, bad luck. They visualise, all too clearly, the dreaded pattern ahead, and follow it obediently, in a downward spiral. Sometimes they become melancholic, other times they become addicts. Nick Wood became both.
Nick was born in 1970 and raised in Newcastle. He was a child prodigy, born into surfing royalty. His Godfather and personal shaper was four time World Champ, Mark Richards. His uncle was Peter Cornish. Nat Young was a family friend. He started surfing at the age of six. A year later he was surfing Snapper with Michael Peterson.
Nick told Tracks; “That whole trip, Snapper was better than I’ve ever seen it. It was six o’clock one morning and there was this beautiful sunrise. I was in boardshorts, and the water was really warm. For an hour there was only one other guy out. It was low tide, dredging, just like Kirra. This guy was way behind the rock, taking off really fast, then fading into a double- up every time, with a super long section already folding. I was trying to catch those waves, but every time there’d be this high- pitched whistle that’d go on forever, and it’d be this guy, so deep in the tube…it just kept going till he was way past me. I paddled for those waves, four or five times, and he whistled every time. He never fell off. My Uncle Peter Cornish was on the beach and when I came in he told me that I’d been surfing with Michael Peterson… I’ll never forget that whistle.”
For a while Nick won almost everything he went in. Too many club contests to mention. He was two times winner of the Cadets in the Australian National Titles. He dropped out of school at 15 and was runner up in the Australian Professional Surfing Association. That year, 1987, he also won the first pro event he ever went in, Bells. He remains the youngest male to ever to win a world circuit event, and the only one to win in his debut effort.
Not long after his Bells win, I filmed a session of Nick surfing at Bondi Beach. It was the ’87 Surf League Club Challenge. The surf was pretty good for Bondi, about four feet, with some nice glassy walls and floater sections. Even though the surf was crowded with some of the best boardriders in Australia, it was obvious at that time that Nick was the best surfer there. The footage I got of Nick drew hoots from the audience when I showed it at the local RSL a few weeks later.
Nick’s super-sensitivity became obvious to me early, when I read how badly affected he was by the confrontational nature of life in an article by Derek Hynd. Nick was at the McCoy factory and talking to Cheyne Horan: “I was there getting a board shaped, and I was talking to Cheyne. He asked me how MR was going, and I said, ‘Oh, he just bombed out in a Merewether club contest.’ I went back and told my old man what I said, and he got so angry at me, he made me ring MR and tell him what I’d done and tell him I was sorry.” I wondered if Nick’s father might be his Henry IV.
Derek went on to explain: “If the seed was already sown and dormant in Wood’s mind the lessons of fame soon followed. ‘I went to see Free Ride when I was 11, with Mark and it was just about the biggest thing that ever happened to me. We went in with the lights on and every- one was there. The film started, and MR came on the screen in a barrel at Off the Wall. A few smart-arses started booing. It was so heavy. The heaviest thing I can remember. Mark got up and left.’ Wood still had trouble talking about it.” Derek continued: “It was as if Nicki Wood was preordained to draw experience from the best, and his lessons came with great synchronicity. The next occurred when he was 12, and the teacher was that most Hawaiian of them all. The subject: etiquette. ‘I was staying at the Burleigh Towers watching the Stubbies. Me and Scotty Bell were throwing water bombs off the balcony and watching them land outside the lobby. Then Dane Kealoha and Martin Potter walked outside and got splashed. We ducked inside the room, but Dane saw us and made us come down- stairs. When we got there he made us kneel before him and apologise.”
Wood joined the ASP World Tour full time. In Niijima, Japan, he was burnt in the quarterfinals by his nemesis, Damian Hardman. “That destroyed my confidence. I went straight up to Fatty Al, [Hunt – Tour boss], and told him I felt like quitting already. Then I lost eight straight trials. The only reason I finished 38th that year was because of a third in October, back in Japan, in the AA, the biggest event. Hardman beat me there as well. The guy’s hard to beat.”
Then came the most ironic twist to the downward swirling whirlpool. Little Nick, who prayed he would grow bigger, had his prayers answered. He grew seven inches in a year. “I grew too fast…I first felt my knees go when I was 15 – they’d start to crackle. Then when I was 17, after I came home from Japan, I was surfing in Ballina. I was doing lots of pig-dogs [backhand tube riding], and when I came in my leg was all puffed up. I went straight to Sydney for arthroscopic surgery. The next day I tried to walk but collapsed.”
Derek concluded: “Despite his crippling handicap, Wood was rated 13th before Hawaii…Wood’s effort, from 38th the 13th – while suffering semi-debilitating knee problems – was the most awe-inspiring rise in the history of pro-surfing; an incredible athletic achievement. Wood subsequently plummeted to 25th after missing three events in Hawaii, and spent the following two months, bouncing between training endeavours – packing muscle around his knee by day, and packing muscle on his pisser’s arm by night at The Crazy Horse Tavern.”
There were lots of visits to muscle therapists. Then Nick got himself a girlfriend, Natalie Ayoub, and bounced back, coming 5th in the O’Neill Coldwater Classic and 3rd at Bells. He had some other good results and even better performances all over the world. But the condition of his knees depressed him: “I know whenever I have a couple of surfs they’re going to be sore that night. It’s upsetting to know that the other guys can surf all they want.”
A story by Nick Carroll in Tracks reported: “As a person though, Wood was a mystery. Quiet. Detached. Cool, for sure, but a little strange. I think it was Derek Hynd that named him “The Phantom”, and us World Tour punters, of the 80s and early 90s, in a pre-social-media-age, were left to wonder, is Nicky shy? Simple? Mute? The next Michael Peterson?…Along with the creaky knees – maybe in part because of the creaky knees – Wood drank a river of beer and smoked a crippling amount of weed. ‘Pot makes you do nothin’,” as Wood put it in ’95, just after missing the WTC cut – forcibly retired at the age of 25. “It becomes one big fucken’ headspin.”
Carroll surmised: “…the growth spurt – when it came was just this side of a medieval torture act. The knees went: the expectations remained. Wood, not surprisingly faltered. Career wise, Bells became not a starting point, but the high point. He never made the top 10. He went from a happy kid to a vaguely morose young adult – not all the time, but often. Mostly, even while still on tour, Wood just wasn’t around. Shy, prideful, penitent, who knows? My guess is that in part, Wood didn’t want anything to do with the low- level vibe of pity or sympathy or compassion we aimed his way any time he was in the public eye. Nicky Wood became The Phantom as an act of self-preservation, is my guess.”
Nick Wood’s decline over the past 20 years into drug addiction and alcoholism only got worse. His story unraveled like a Greek tragedy; incomprehensibly sad, considering his potential. He made a rare public appearance in 2010, when he was inducted into the Merewether Surfer’s Hall of Fame. Never before in Australian surfing history had so much been expected and so little delivered; other than perhaps, the next casualty of the dark lineage.
