When I first met Larry Bertlemann 49 years ago he was still a teenager – only just – but he was already a phenomenon, cover boy (there were no cover girls, yet) on every major surf magazine around the world, star of Hal Jepsen’s soon-to-be-released ‘Super Session’, third in the 1972 World Titles at 17, US champ the following year, recognised as the originator of a new, low-centre-of-gravity style that would change the direction of both surfing and skateboarding.

As Drew Kampion would later write: “The Rubberman opened the door. Arriving amid a period of flux, he demonstrated that no limits exist beyond our imagination.”

So, I suppose he had every right to keep Tracks photographer, Frank Pithers, and me waiting in Ala Moana Park for an hour or more that afternoon in June 1975 while he ripped the bag out of a crowded, windswept AM Bowl, but jeez I made him pay for it! I don’t know why I was so mean to Larry, not so much in that first Tracks article but in what came later. There was no personal animosity that I can recall, I just felt that such early fame had turned him into a wanker and a whinger whose only redeeming attributes were extraordinary talent, a precocious vision of what might be, and a wicked sense of humour. On balance, I should have been nicer.

The only son (he had four sisters) of a military man turned auto mechanic, Bertlemann was born in Hilo on the Big Island in 1955 and spent his formative years fishing with a handline and hunting pigs. Surfing didn’t enter the picture until his mum split from the dad and fled to Oahu when Larry was 11, where he was soon riding Queens on hired longboards. As he told an ...