Legendary filmmaker Jack McCoy was well known for hitting the road with his amazing surf movies and popular talk-story shows.

What a lot of people don’t know though is how this travelling showman played a significant role in helping transform professional surfing. Thirty years ago, Jack McCoy, and Billabong founder, Gordon Merchant, produced a wonderful film about a unique surf comp ahead of its time. They invited eight of the world’s best surfers to a remote campsite on the rugged desert coastline in West Oz. This project was appropriately called ‘The Challenge’. Jack waited two weeks for the right sort of waves to run the comp in, six-foot, triple-suck barrels speeding across a super shallow reef. Tombstones is one of the heaviest waves Down Under, and pretty sharky too. The final was 90 minutes with four guys competing in exhilarating conditions. The whole thing was over in less than five hours. The Challenge was a wonderful Jack-driven vehicle. He left nothing to chance, hiring legendary surf filmmakers, Albe Falzon and Yuri Farrant to help him shoot everything from numerous angles, along with top-calibre cameramen, Peter Baker and John Gordon. Gravy Davey was there for artistic license, Ted Grambeau for stills and Ken Eichenberg for quality of sound. Rabbit Bartholomew as contest director made sure the event was run as fair as could be for the eight contestants. We resided in a mega campsite that provided everything we needed, and more. It was desert surf heaven. The Challenge instantly raised the bar for surf comps with its new methodology. I was lucky to be part of that event. 

In 1990 I was the sole reporter for the Northern Guardian in Carnarvon, a rural oasis some 900km north of Perth. It was a great job for a journo, especially from my goofy-footer’s ...