Australian surfers love an out-of-control rebel. Particularly if they surf exceedingly well. We admire their free spirited, devil-may-care approach to life; both in the water and on the land.They do things in their own way, on their own time, and by their own rules, and are often motivated by a raging fire that burns deep within their damaged psyche. Initially, they’re driven to prove themselves, but ultimately, they’re driven to destroy themselves. It’s not pretty, but we can’t look away.
It’s a rare and fascinating flame that draws them in. Predictably, there’s a never-ending supply of sycophantic acolytes who willingly keep that fire well stoked. I should know, I’m their biggest fan. I’ve known only a few of them, but those few I’ve known well. It’s from these close friendships that I’ve formed the ‘Dark Lineage’ theory and provide first- hand accounts of what I witnessed. This is the final chapter in the Dark Lineage series, which also features Bobby Brown, Kevin Brennan, Keith Paull, Michael Peterson and Joe Engel.
Shane Herring
I spent more time with Shane Herring, during his rapid ascendance and descendance, than any other member of this brilliant, but cursed, club of surfers. In late ’91, my brother, Greg, asked me to video one of his new Insight team riders surfing at Dee Why. To say I was blown away by Shane’s surfing would be an understatement. He was the most intense, precise, and muscular Australian power surfer I’d seen since Tom Carroll or Occy. He was super fit, flexible, and focused. Every time he got to his feet on his surfboard he looked like he was shaping up in a UFC match. Every turn he did was a fierce slice or searing gouge. He surfed that day, and every day for the next 12 months, like he was in the final of a pro event. When he actually made it into the final of a pro event, the Coke Classic, he won it.
Shane Herring was born in 1971, in Manly, NSW. His dad was a lifeguard and his mum, a barmaid. His parents broke up when he was very young and he moved with his mother, Sandy, and brother, Brett, to Dee Why. It was there that they started surfing. By the time I began videoing Shane he was a fully formed and polished professional; despite the fact that he had almost no competitive experience.
Shane was also the most willing and helpful surfer I ever filmed; and I’ve filmed many. No other surfer ever asked me before a surf, where I would like them to surf, or after a surf, if there was anything else that they could do for me. “Have you got enough foot- age? Or would you like me to go back out there and get a few more?” In short, Shane was not only the best surfer I’d ever filmed, he was also the most considerate. But I saw something in him that concerned me. In my regular interactions with him and others, I noticed that Shane lacked the ability to say “No.” Whatever was asked of him he would give. Even when he knew he shouldn’t. I wondered how this might play out when he started collecting the accolades, and the acolytes that come with them.
After shooting Shane surfing for two months, another Greg, Greg Day, asked me to make a surfing movie for his company, O’Neill. It was to be a low-budget affair, but we were blessed by pumping swell on the Northern Beaches of Sydney for the next six months. Shane surfed for O’Neill, and I captured remarkable sessions of him surfing with his fellow Insight/O’Neill team riders, predominantly Richie Lovett and Michael Rommelse. They blew the backs out of waves from Whale Beach to Curl Curl, and everywhere in between. We would drive together to any one of the Northern Beaches, get out and set up, and locals would sometimes get out of the water to watch. I know this because these surfers would often stand alongside me and ask lots of questions about who I was filming.
All was well, until Shane won the Coke, at North Narrabeen. It was also Kelly Slater’s first pro event, and the two met in the final. It was a classic showdown between the two young surfers from the USA and Australia. Much was made of it in the media.
At the presentation night after Shane won the contest, I found him alone in the bathroom of the Dee Why Hotel looking at himself in the mirror. It wasn’t a quick glance to see if his hair was alright though, he was really looking at himself for a long time. I was at the urinal and called back to him: “What are you thinking about?” He answered instantly: “I don’t feel any different than yesterday.”
The next day he was different. I interviewed him on camera in the loungeroom of the flat he lived in with his mum and brother. It was a strange experience. He was not the same Shane that I had spent the last six months with. He was suddenly very self-conscious and kept pulling his long blonde fringe down in front of his eyes like he was modelling. His girlfriend at the time was standing behind me and kept asking him what he was doing. “Stop acting so weird, just answer the questions and stop posing.” But Shane had earned his moment in the limelight and wasn’t going to trade it in for anyone. The interview was unusable for my purposes at the time. But it did capture a fascinating transformation, from a freckle-faced keen to please grommet, into someone so self- conscious.
Over the next few months, Shane’s mates at Dee Why almost killed him with their demented love of him. Every night was like New Year’s Eve and Shane footed the bill. I saw him consume so much alcohol and smoke so much weed one night that I wondered what it was he was trying to prove. I couldn’t help but think he was trying to kill the monster he’d become. But I imagined it was more likely that he was trying to prove to his friends that he was one of them. He told me that he believed his friends were the most important thing in his life and that they would be there for him forever. I didn’t realise that he was going to test that theory to the breaking point.
Everywhere we went together people were giving him drugs. The story of him being a drug-addicted-alcoholic-pro-surfer had travelled like a bushfire and many wanted to bathe in the reflected glory by feeding the beast. When we were checking the surf at Mona Vale one afternoon a bloke handed him a half smoked joint. Not long after, we were parked in Dee Why carpark one morning and a guy he didn’t know handed him a bag of pot. Peter Crawford saw us stuck in traffic one morning in Collaroy and handed Shane two big white pills: “It’s a new designer drug called DMD.” We took them there and then and I spun out while shooting Shane surf big North Avalon. Inside one tube he started gyrating like he was playing Twister. When we met up again on shore, I asked him what he was doing in that barrel: “I thought I was inside a nightclub, so I started dancing.”
We went on surfing trips together to the Great Barrier Reef, Lord Howe Island and Hawaii. At the GBR, we shared a full bottle of Jack Daniels one night and he confided in me that he thought he might have a drinking problem. In LHI, I saw him sneaking swigs of a bottle of Jim Beam before a surf; a surf in which he schooled the other Hot Tuna team riders on how to perform a round-house-cutback. In Hawaii, we sniffed enough cocaine together to hamper our chances of doing what we were sent there and paid to do. We went to Indonesia twice together. On the first occasion, on June 4, ‘94, we, along with everyone else in G-Land at the time, were hit by a tsunami at 2.10am. No-one died at the surf camp, but over three- hundred villagers were killed in towns across the bay. An hour after half of us were washed into the jungle under a wave of rushing water, Shane tapped a keg of beer. It was 3am. The wounded were still being stitched up and bandaged. A few hours later we went surfing. A year later to the day, Shane, Rob Bain, Simon Law, and I, who were there for the first Quiksilver Pro, stayed up till 2.30 in the morning, celebrating the anniversary by drinking barrels of beer.
I realised that I was a part of Shane’s problem. I was not only making surfing videos that he starred in; I also wrote articles about him. One even started by me admitting: “I feel like I’m interview- ing Jim Morrison!” To which he replied: “You are man, you are!” There’s a terrible myth-making power journalists possess which they have to be careful with. It does no-one any good to immortalise them. But Shane didn’t need me to become a mythological figure in surfing. He did that all by himself, by surfing so well. I was just one of many who gave him a leg-up, or down, as the case may be. I was also one of his many drinking and drugging buddies. But while he was the only one I was drinking and smoking to excess with, there were dozens of others, just like me, he felt obliged to party with too. At the premiere of the film I made for O’Neill called Liquid Planet, Shane was surrounded by a mob of adoring fans, almost all of whom he shouted drinks. When I saw him giving them money to go to the bar, it occurred to me that he was celebrating their friendship, something he imagined might outlast his popularity.
Ten years after the G-Land tsunami, I worked on a short documentary about it. I organised to meet Shane, through his mother, Sandy, in the park at Dee Why. When I saw him meandering toward me, wearing a long trench coat, and swig- ging from a bottle in a brown paper bag, I thought he looked like Kevin Brennan, back in 1974. The image I had of Kevin Brennan in my memory bank, from 40 years earlier, had re-materialised right in front of me. By then, the fallen-hero- Herro, a legend in his hometown, spent his days wandering the streets of Dee Why like a drunken character from a Hollywood movie. It was like he was playing Matt Johnson, in Big Wednesday (1978), who famously said “I don’t wanna be a star.”
In 2013, I made a short documentary about Shane called Journey On. I used lots of the footage I’d shot 20 years earlier and interviewed Shane, Sandy, Brett, and my brother Greg. Sandy told me: “He wanted to be the best, he wanted to be a World Champ. He said that at 14, ‘I’m gonna be a World Champ one day”.” Brett continued: “He had the ability, I seen him do manoeuvres in ’89, guys still haven’t done now. But a few guys made fun of him when he first got sponsored, and he went within himself, which was a very weird thing to do.” Sandy: “The Coke win was good; it was what came after the Coke win that he didn’t handle. He didn’t have the psyche to handle it, he needed a Kelly Slater psyche. That’s what he needed to handle the media and everything after that.” Brett: “The first time I met Kelly Slater, he told me, ‘Your brother’s an alcoholic’.” Greg: “I think there’s a definite link between the eccentricity, slash, insanity, and the approach to the wave.” Brett: “What do they say? “The brightest flame burns the quickest…and that inten- sity, to get that good, that’s very hard to sustain.”
I asked Shane: “What were the main things that stopped you from continuing on the trajectory you were on?”
Shane answered: “Maybe lack of self- confidence, maybe drinking too much, partying too much, having too much fun. Just having too much fun and too much money. That’s all you can put it down too.”
Sandy: “Too much money and wanting to be nice to his friends. He would go out and spend money on his friends, and then it just became a vicious cycle.”
I asked Greg if he saw a change in Shane after he won the Coke. “[Eventually] it was like everyone became fuckwits and annoyances to him, another person wanting to take something. His sensitive foundation was a driving force and also his undoing.”
Shane: “It took three years, three years to get to the top, and three years to get to the bottom. (Laughs heartily).”
It was hard watching Shane crash and burn. It all happened so quickly. After his Coke win, almost everything was messing with his head. The media all wanted a piece of him and put him on too high a pedestal. Being compared to Michael Peterson on the cover of a magazine didn’t help. His friends wanted to party with him around the clock. He didn’t stop buying them beers until he ran out of money. The surf- board designs he was riding became ultra- experimental. He liked the Banana Boards, but they didn’t go well in all conditions. But perhaps worst of all, coming forth in the world and not feeling as good as he hoped he might, sucked the life out of him. He lost the drive to chase his dream.
He went from a fresh-faced, happy little kid to a jaded derelict in his own home, in a few short years. He clearly didn’t have the skill set to process all of the changes in his life when he became famous and became allergic to everyone around him. The way everyone acted toward him changed so dramatically that he lost respect for them; and then himself. As we watched him destroy himself, I felt like he was stuck in a modern Shakespearian tragedy. He had got what he wanted, and it ruined everything.
A few years ago, I asked him what his favourite memories were: “Competing in the Christian Boardriders Club Contests down at Dee Why when I was a kid.” I followed up by asking him what the worst time was: “Having to give up freesurfing because every time I was on a wave I could hear a judge who wasn’t there, describing the turns I was doing over a loudspeaker that wasn’t there, to an audience on the beach that also wasn’t there.”
I couldn’t help but think how much better things might have turned out had Shane had just stayed in the Christian Board- riders and never won the Coke contest in ’92. It was the kiss of death. But maybe his brother was right: “No matter what he was doing in life, I think he was going to head the way he headed…. Shane was gonna do what Shane was gonna do, to this day no-one can point him in a different direction.”
Kelly Slater told my brother Greg recently: “I was blown away by Herro’s low centre of gravity and ability to carve on the curve perfectly. I think what he gave up on … speed/drive (due to constant rocker) he more than made up for in creative lines. At the time he was intimidating to surf with ‘coz he really was that good. But he was burning bright and not for the long haul. It was a great time in our lives to be surfing together and pushing and challenging each other.”
