Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  I knew enough to be selective, to wait. I knew I only needed to post three good scores. Only needed to impress five judges, three times, in thirty minutes. That’s how I broke it down in my head; that’s how I made it manageable.

  For the moment, I counted myself lucky to be riding Herbie’s board. It felt to me like there was some good karma in it. Herbie was a bit of an innovator on the longboarding circuit; he helped to move the sport away from the slow, heavy boards they used to ride when my father was younger to a lighter, more modern design. And it wasn’t just the weight of the board; it was what he did with it. Herbie’s board even had a square nose; that was like his trademark; he could control his board and spin it around in a helicopter-type move, like what you’d expect to see on a shortboard. In this way, and in a bunch of other ways, Herbie was really revolutionary in his approach. He was one of those Huntington Beach guys we used to hear so much about as kids, and growing up, we all looked up to him, tried to copy him.

  First couple heats, I tore it up on Herbie’s nine-footer. I was really feeling it. My thing was to ride without a leash, which I thought was a great way to psyche out the competition. Wasn’t just me, a lot of guys didn’t like to use a leash, but I liked how it put it out there that you know you’re not falling. You ride without a leash, it’s another way to get an edge. It’s not about showing off so much as showing confidence.

  I started off so strong the event organizers actually pulled me over in one of the first heats to measure my board. They’d seen some of the moves I was pulling, some of the turns I was making, they figured it had to be less than nine feet, so the other surfers picked up on this and it gave me a whole other kind of edge. It set me apart. Already these guys knew who I was, but not because of my surfing; they knew who I was because of Doc, because of how we lived. I’d had some decent showings as a shortboarder, but I don’t think that was relevant here. I guess I had a certain credibility, but not the sort that would have earned me any respect in a longboard event. It was more like, Oh, you’re a Paskowitz? Well, then, I won’t kick your ass for spilling that drink on me. Or, Your dad’s got class. He’s a cool dude. He’s surfed with legends, so maybe I won’t drop in on you.

  Anyway, I was in my element, and I surfed my way into the final heat against big names like Corky Carroll, David Nuuhiwa (a Hawaiian surfer who’d won the 1971 U.S. Surfing Championship on a tri-fin shortboard), Dale Dobson (a virtuoso on the longboard, from Oceanside) … and Herbie Fletcher. Herbie took one look at the field and probably decided there was no way he’d let me beat him on his own board, so he came over and told me I’d have to find another ride. Struck me just then (and still!) like a dick move—and a perfect example of an anti-surfing move. It’s not like he wanted to ride the nine-footer; he just wanted it to sit on the beach, so I couldn’t use it against him in the finals.

  Can’t say I was surprised. Disappointed, maybe, but not really surprised. Herbie had taken a bunch of us younger surfers under his wing. We all used this product of his called Astrodeck, a rubberized traction system he’d developed that had yet to catch on, meant to replace the wax we were all used to. Also, he’d put us in these famous surf movies he used to make, but we’d always be in the background, while he was front and center. He was a selfish, self-centered guy—nice enough, but only when it suited him, and here I guess it didn’t suit him.

  And so I had to scramble. Wound up borrowing an eleven-foot board from my friend Vaughan Moran—a nothing-special, banana piece of shit that was much harder to maneuver than Herbie’s board, than anything else these other guys in the final heat were riding. Still, I wasn’t complaining. I was happy to have something to ride, happy to just be in the finals, and it turned out I maneuvered the crap out of Vaughan’s board, despite the long odds against me. Ripped my way through the finals like you wouldn’t believe.

  You have to realize, back then I was a lot tinier than I am now. I think I weighed about 160, 165, compared to the 220 or so pounds I carry today. Since I was so light, I could ride the nose of my board and hold a Hang Ten for a lot longer than anyone else. I could turn my big board in a modern-type cut—a much more abrupt, almost violent turn, more like you’d see from a shortboarder, as opposed to the more graceful, more subtle turns you expect from a longboarder. I could hit the lip of the wave with that clunky eleven-footer, and instead of just cruising along in a traditional way I could make all these surprising, aggressive, radical turns. I could even do my own helicopter-type, 360-degree turn, and steal a page from Herbie’s playbook, but I’d do it cleaner, tighter, faster, and I’d do it at a critical point in the competition.

  And that’s just what happened. I ended up winning the whole thing. Earned myself a whopping six hundred bucks—big, big money for me at the time. But even more than the money, I’d earned myself a reputation. Some cred all my own. I’d chased down all these giants like Corky Carroll, Dale Dobson, and David Nuuhiwa, and at the other end I was a longboarder … a champion longboarder.

  Ended up changing just about everything.

  * * *

  In competitive surfing, as much as you think you’re an original and trying to bring something new, we’re all doing essentially the same thing: you have some idea what you want to do out there, but you also have to let the waves decide. You have to know where you are in the competition, what kind of scores you’re looking to pull, whether you should play it safe or go all out. You have to know what the judges are looking for and how to catch the biggest ride or make the most difficult maneuver at the most critical point of the wave. It also helps if you know who’s riding in the heat with you, if you have some sense of their scores to that point, if you know what they’re trying to accomplish, so you can set it alongside what you’re trying to accomplish and do what you can to come out ahead.

  The traditional Hang Ten move? That almost always landed you a big score, because there weren’t a whole lot of guys who could pull it off. Whenever you were able to get out onto the nose of the board and wrap your toes over the end, you were greatly rewarded. The degree of difficulty is way up there, but it’s also an absolutely gorgeous move. And pulling it off, it’s like you’re flying. It’s like you’re perched on the roof of a car, surfing down the freeway.

  The guys who can Hang Ten tend to be soulful surfers. It’s in them—hey, it has to be, because it’s not really something you can teach.

  One of my favorite things to do in competition was to catch a wave early on and get up on the nose right away, way outside. Some waves are so steep, so strong, it’s just about impossible, but whenever the wave gave me the move I’d take it. I’d actually be looking for it, waiting for it. If I could take off and get out in front and throw a nice little Hang Ten and then get back before the wave crashed … it was like jumping out to an early lead. I’d be ahead of the game and start to feel like I’d accomplished something, and I’d have the scores to show for it.

  Another move I always looked for was a 360, also a big crowd pleaser. A lot of guys, they have their own ways of pulling off a 360, but my thing was to catch that early Hang Ten and then step back into a Hang Five, where I’d just have five toes hanging over the nose. From there, I’d get my fin to come up, in such a way that the whole board began to sideslip down off the wave and whip around double-quick.

  Weren’t a whole lot of longboarders doing 360s when I started out, but that was another great lesson: push the edge one day and the edge pushes back the next. In surfing, as in anything else, you have to keep stretching yourself and challenging the notion of what’s possible, what’s expected.

  * * *

  That first tournament earned me my first serious sponsor—Gary Propper, who was looking to introduce his own line of surfboards. Gary invited me and Danielle to his beautiful penthouse apartment overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset Boulevard, to talk about it over dinner. I’d never been wined and dined before, so it was way cool to be on the receiving end of this kind of attention. One of Gary’s ideas was to sign a
bunch of up-and-coming longboarders to ride for him, and I guess now that I’d won this Budweiser event I was as up-and-coming as anyone.

  He offered to pay me a modest monthly salary, about one thousand dollars, and to provide me with gear and travel expenses for out-of-town tournaments. Danielle and I went home that night to talk about it—but, really, there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about. I called Gary the next day and accepted his offer. The one wrinkle to the deal was he wanted me to go to acting school. He said he saw me as a kind of Latin heartthrob who also happened to surf. Remember, he was also a movie producer and a talent manager, so he believed it made good sense to connect the world of surfing with the world of entertainment. He knew I’d done some modeling, off and on, and said that if I was going to represent his brand, he wanted me to be poised and polished, maybe start doing some commercials, going out on auditions. Any gigs or shoots I’d book as an actor or model, he said, would benefit his surfboard line. With Gary, it was all about marketing and synergy—two concepts that were pretty much lost on me.

  Another thing I liked about Gary was he wanted to go out surfing with me. I thought that was cool. A guy like that, he didn’t have to prove anything to a kid like me, but I appreciated that he wanted me to know he still had some chops, that he understood what it meant to live for this type of thing. So we spent a day on the beach up at Malibu and I came away inclined to follow his lead. If the guy wanted to pay me to go to acting school, I’d go to acting school.

  And so it was agreed. Gary set the whole thing up, arranged for me to attend classes with Stella Adler, the famous Hollywood acting coach. She had a studio on Hollywood Boulevard, and I started making the drive up there a couple times a week. Danielle was working at the time at Surfer magazine, so I’d drop her off on the mornings I had class and drive up to Los Angeles. My surf buddies would have given me a ton of shit—acting classes?—but I didn’t tell anybody. Don’t know why, exactly … I just didn’t. I’d simply disappear for the day, and do my thing in class, and then head back home, hopefully in time to pick up Danielle at the end of her day.

  It was a nightmare. For one thing, the traffic just about killed me. I wasn’t wired to sit still like that, for so long. Plus, the city freaked me out. I’d get all weird and anxious and tense. I felt like a fish out of water. Literally. I’d get to the studio and race to the bathroom, just to splash some water on my face, to wet my gills. And then, all day long, I’d drink buckets and buckets of water, which meant that by the drive home I’d have to really, really pee. Like all the time. So I ended up keeping all these piss bottles in the car, just so I wouldn’t have to get out and go. It was an old habit. Back when we were kids, my father would never pull over when one of us had to go. We always had to make good time, and so I felt the same way here; the drive was so draining and wearying, I couldn’t see stretching it out any longer, even for the couple minutes it would have taken for me to stretch my legs and pee.

  Then I’d pull up to collect Danielle in our Ford Escort, and she’d take one look at the back of the car, filled with all these golden piss-filled bottles, and scrunch up her face in disgust.

  I kept up this routine for a couple months, but only in a random way, because Gary also had me entering a bunch of surf contests. The one kept pulling me from the other. After a couple months, I learned not to mind the commute or the hassle of the city, but it took a while to get used to some of the silliness of acting class. A lot of what they had us doing was just bullshit, and it used to bug me big-time that nobody else in that whole place would admit that it was just bullshit. Like I’d have to crawl around onstage and pretend I was a dog. The idea was to teach us not to just act like a dog but to actually be a dog, so I’d bark and crawl around and roll over on my back. I tried, but I don’t think I ever got it, not in the way the great Stella Adler intended. I mean, I could bark like a dog, and crawl around on all fours like a dog, but I couldn’t lose myself in barking and crawling like a dog and start to think it was real.

  During class, Stella Adler would stop by to monitor our progress, but I don’t think she ever had anything positive to say about my performances. She was pretty old by this point—in her late eighties—so she wasn’t there every day, but when she was she made her presence known. Once, she interrupted me in the middle of a reading and said, “What are you trying to say, young man?”

  I thought about this long and hard before responding. This was one of the most respected acting coaches in Hollywood. She’d taught Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro … all these greats. What was I trying to say? Well, whatever it told me to say in the script, for starters. I thought about telling the great Stella Adler just that, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself any more than I already had, so instead I just shrugged and said nothing.

  The other students in the class, they seemed to get it. Or, at least, they knew to pretend to get it. The room was filled with a lot of Midwest farm boys and fresh-off-the-bus wannabe starlets; they knew how the game was played, and there was a whole lot of sucking up and acting like what we were doing really, really mattered, when we all knew it really, really didn’t.

  At some point, I started going out on auditions. Gary’s wife, Ruth Anne, would set them up for me. Somehow, I landed a jeans commercial, where I got to pose with this superhot model, but mostly I’d go out on these big cattle calls that never went anywhere but around and around. Usually, it came down to whether or not I could dance and the answer was always the same: no.

  However, I did get one callback—for the movie Say Anything, directed by Cameron Crowe. Don’t know how I slipped past the casting people to make it to the next round on this one, but they must have liked something about my look and figured they could work around the fact that I couldn’t act.

  I had a second callback, too, and this time I was supposed to read for Cameron Crowe, which everybody kept telling me was a great accomplishment, just to get that far in the process. Personally, I couldn’t think of it as an accomplishment unless I got something done, but pursuing an acting or modeling career was all about stages, I was learning. It wasn’t about getting it done; it was about getting to the next stage, and here the next stage was just a second callback. No big thing—no matter how many people told me otherwise. I was reading for one of the off-leads in the movie, one of John Cusack’s friends, but then when this second callback came around on the calendar it conflicted with a contest I was planning to attend in Australia called the Coke Classic. It was the biggest event on the tour that year, so I couldn’t really justify missing it, just for the shot at a nothing-special role in a small movie that may or may not have amounted to anything. The casting people couldn’t believe I’d pass up such an opportunity—although, like I said, it wasn’t much of an opportunity. I mean, it’s not like they were asking me to crawl around on all fours and bark like a dog, which at this point I could have done pretty well.

  * * *

  That first win at San Onofre kicked off a heady time for me on the longboarding circuit. Back then, there was no formal tour the way there is today, just a series of events that tended not to bump into each other. I’d go over my calendar with Gary, and we’d pick out the contests that made sense, and he’d make the arrangements. After a while, I started riding Hobie boards for Danielle’s father, too, so I had access to the best equipment, the best gear. Any surfer just starting out, his biggest concern is to cover his expenses, so here I was good to go. The high-end surfboards were so ridiculously expensive, I could have never afforded them on my own, but if I meant to compete at the highest level I needed to have a quiver of surfboards at the ready, at all times. I needed to have the right board for the right break, just like all these big-time guys.

  It was during this time, riding for Hobie, that I received the best compliment of my career—from no less an icon than Dale Velzy, probably the most influential, most creative shaper in surfing. I’d looked up to him from the time I realized who he was and what he did; he came up to me after an event and said, “Man, you�
�ve got great hands.”

  Just about blew me away. What Dale meant by that was that there was a kind of grace to the way I rode. It’s what you strive for on a longboard, to be like Baryshnikov, like an artist. You want what you’re doing to come across more like water ballet than break dancing, which is more of a shortboard ideal, and it starts with your hands. A lot of times, a guy might be technically proficient and do everything right, but there’ll be nothing artful about the way he rides. There’ll be no poetry it. So hearing a comment like that from a guy like Dale Velzy really had me flying.

  Jonathan, too, started having some decent success riding longboards. We traveled to a lot of the same events. For a while, he was riding for Herbie Fletcher, who was a very entrepreneurial guy. He could be a selfish dick, but from everything I heard he was good to Jonathan; he took care of his team, and Jonathan did well with him; we even went head-to-head with each other in the finals of another Budweiser event in California, one of the first national events on a tour that was just getting off the ground.

  I didn’t mind losing to Jonathan.

  Meanwhile, things were hot and heavy between me and Danielle. We were together all the time. We found a way for her to travel with me to most of my out-of-town events, so that was a great perk. She even came with me to that Coke Classic event in Manly, Australia—a suburb of Sydney. We worked it out so we took the per diem money that was meant to cover my hotel and crashed with friends instead; then we used the cash to take some of the bite out of Danielle’s airline ticket.

  We stayed with my good buddy Ian Reeder, a free-spirited New Zealander I met on the beach a couple years earlier. (We’ve been mates ever since.)

  One thing you need to know about surfing in Australia: it’s big. Like Super Bowl big. For the Coke Classic, the beach was packed with spectators—over one hundred thousand, by some estimates. There were helicopters hovering above the break, for aerial coverage of the event, and it was broadcast live, all across the country. Front-page news, and all that. Even high school surfing makes the news over there; it’s a completely different vibe, and you feel it the moment you step off the plane. Everywhere you turn for a world-class competition like the Coke Classic you’re bombarded with billboards and promotions and headlines announcing the event, and it’s easy to get caught up in the fuss. It’s easy to feel like a celebrity. It was great, actually, unlike anything I’d ever experienced.