It’s not quite history repeating itself and it is impossible to compare eras due to pretty much everything evolving in every which way, however the challenges facing many aspiring young dreamers has a semblance of similarity to the impoverished 70s.

People find a great deal of hilarity when I regale stories of how we got around, firstly around this massive island continent and then the world. It was a bare boned, bare knuckled roller coaster ride where the difference between eating saimin noodles and a breakfast buffet was getting through a heat or somehow making a fast buck.

People were equally appalled at some of the antics, driven by desperation, that we deployed to make ends meet, or better still, put some food in one’s belly. There are literally thousands of stories because not many surfers were born into wealth in the 1950s & 60s and if you were your parents, you were not going to encourage or fund a journey into the surfing lifestyle. 

I can only share stories of my own journey but be assured there were plenty of unnamed mates that were just as guilty. Let’s begin with the 1973 Australian Titles at Margaret River, a 6-week road trip that entailed driving to the Bells Easter Carnival, the first Rip Curl Pro, then across the Nullarbor to Margs.

The great thing was being scooped up from my mums by Richard Harvey and his wife Jan in a brand-new station wagon then picking up Peter Townend. The sketchy part was mum sending me off with $15 and a fruit cake, and somehow, I came back overweight, now that’s street smarts. 

The journey itself was mind blowing, but I will touch on a few moments of desperation. There was the eating contest I won in Torquay, not for the prize but like a squirrel gathering kernels for the winter. I even stuffed spinach pies in my only jumper. Then we pulled up at Cactus and surfed with Reno Abellera, who was making the movie Rolling Home with Paul Witzig.

We surfed Caves early one morning, no leashes of course, I ate it on the steep drop and my board went around the corner and out to sea in a sharky moat, heading to Impossibles. I had the heaviest choice to make. Michael Peterson had made me a 6’8” gun for Margaret’s, which was woefully short for 12’ Margs but that’s another story because it was my only gun and desperation sent me on the scariest swim of my life. I had some hairy swims in Hawaii but this was next level terrifying.

Another carload of Queensland hooligans had done a runner at the next petrol station. The owner saw our plates and told us to give them the message that unless they were going home via Darwin, he looked forward to seeing them on the return journey because he was the only thing between perishing in the desert or paying up. After the comp at Margs, which Richard Harvey won on an 8’1” proper gun, we stopped some guys at the airport. Me and a mate noticed that the rich people didn’t eat all their food, so we hoed into three quarter eaten burgers and scrappy chips, a brilliant feast before facing the 5000 km drive home. 

Richard and Doris and I went to Bali, a wondrous trip where one could live like a king on way less than a dollar a day. I somehow cottoned on to these bogus Qantas round the world tickets for $300, complete with a satchel of bogus revaluation stickers. The trick was to make a reservation, whip out a reval’ sticker, pen in the flight deets with a little airline official squiggle as a signature. 

This worked a treat for many years. There was obviously no online, it was all paper tickets and a heck of a lot of double talk and bluff at the airline counter. I always maintained you could never stop a desperate surfer and so it came to be. Several years down the track I was on my last world leg, having been to South Africa, England, California, back to France, California, Hawaii, Japan, back to Hawaii.

I would leave for Bali at the end of the Queensland surf season in late June and return home mid to late January. I presented a completely dilapidated piece of paper that barely resembled an airline ticket at the Qantas counter in Honolulu and horror of horror he lifted up all the revalidation stickers to the very bottom one which said Denpasar. I was cooked, he looked down the barrel at me and said, “go on, get out of here buddy” and I was safely on WF3 heading home, phew.

Where the parallels collide is my generation and the current crop of hotties seem to have unwittingly bookended the Surf Industry sponsorship pie. Well, it’s actually more like a cup cake once again. In the mid 70s a sponsorship was a pair of board shorts and a wetsuit and hand me back surfboards, or what was left of them.

I was recently speaking with Mick Cain, a highly accomplished surfer/coach/manager. He mentioned that even with a sticker on the board a kid with all the right moves is lucky to get a steamer, and then he rattled off big name surfers who had just been dropped.

Wow, mind blowing when you consider how surfing has exploded around the world, which means the market and a massive number of consumers of surf product has gone through the stratosphere, yet the sponsorship pie has shrunk firstly to a cup cake and now, unless you are in the world’s top 10, crumbs.

It’s like there was a secret Zoom meeting between all the Surf Industry CEO’s, the Big Kahunas, where they all agreed at once to not pay surfers or sponsor surf events. I suspected that when guys like Gordon Merchant, Alan Green and Doug Warbrick threw the keys on the table and actually left the building that the well-honed pathway from hot grom to pro, which they played a huge part in creating, would be eroded, especially when the suits eventually took over the reins. 

It begs the question, how do richly talented, impoverished kids make it to the hunting grounds. I did a press conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2000 and the Brazilian media, hungry for signs, asked me how and when Brazil would have its first World Champion. I rattled off a hypothetical story about a kid wandering down from a favela, finding a broken board on the beach, and with the natural ability of Pele, becoming a champion. As it transpired my projection mirrored the story of Adriano de Souza, who spear-headed the Brazilian Storm and eventually became a world champion in 2015.

There was also story about a surf school that was so poor it did not have surfboards and the coach would make the kids perform manoeuvre sequences on the beach, simulating the body language of forehand and backhand turns. Maybe that’s it, where there is a will there is a way, and once again history repeats whereby nothing can stop a desperate surfer, not an airline steward and not a Surf Industry embargo.

The dreamer is always searching for that lucky break, maybe a cheap ticket in the back streets of Kuat…I know a guy who knows a guy.