A friend paddled out in the water this morning and asked if I’d seen Searching for Tom Curren lately. I hadn’t, so as soon as I was near a screen I embraced the internet’s gift of instant gratification and dug up a ten minute excerpt from the original movie.
As I watched Tom lean on a rail with all the grace and purpose of an eagle banking off an updraft, I was immediately reminded why it is the sort of clip that should be watched at least once every few months. Irrespective of how far surfing has progressed, Curren remains the ultimate case study for timeless, on rail surfing. There is a reason why so many pro surfers list Searching for Tom Curren in their all-time favourites list and study every detail of his surfing in the movie. Who else can make junky, onshore Haleiwa look like a thing of rapture and wonder (see the clip) without employing the party-trick antics of modern progression?
No one disputes that Tom’s surfing has always had that hypnotic – can’t drag your eyes away quality – however, out of the water he has often been misportrayed as excessively aloof and distant. Perhaps it helps with preserving the mystery. Meanwhile, those who have met Tom are just as likely to talk up his his dry wit as his shyness.
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My favourite Tom Curren encounter transpired at Taylor Knox’s retirement party at the Haleiwa café back in 2013. Tom and I got talking in the buffet queue and as we happily scooped slow-cooked pork on to our plates he divulged his secret for surfing Off The Wall and Back Door, the setting for some of his most masterful barrel rides.
“I like to paddle out around the middle of the day and then say out loud amongst the crowd. ‘Mmm what’s that? Smells like someone is cooking something good for lunch.’ That usually sends a bunch of people in,” he mused. Despite being 48 at the time, Curren was a stand-out at Off The Wall that year, riding a rectangular, Dan Thomson board long-before everyone had jumped on the Tomo, Sci-Fi model.
Curren the surfer, the musician and the social companion who is always equipped with a quick wit and a quirky anecdote, is perhaps an entertainer at heart; just not the kind inclined to do his own self-promotion. Whether he is riding skim boards, strumming a guitar or surfing in a Legends heat he will continue to be mythologized and romanticised in surfing circles. However, at the core of the mystique is the surfing he did for most his career. The voice-over in the middle of the attached clip (almost certainly his Search co-conspirator, Derek Hynd) sums it up pretty well. “He’s just a clean, fast, smooth radical surfer. It’s just simple surfing in its classical essence. He’s just really laying down a good beat.”
