Da Bull: Life Over the Edge

"It was neither his surfing nor his shaping, it was his personality that drew me to Greg and his book captured a lot of that. Through a mutual friend, Gordon ‘ Clark Foam ‘ Clark, Greg and I became great friends and spent a lot of time together over the years. He, Clark, and their generation of surfers were the ones I looked up to from the time I started surfing and then over the years as I became friendly with many of them. I understood how much their contributions—just doing what they loved—doing laid the groundwork for surfing becoming what it is today. Greg paddled into his last wave in the winter of 1969 and rode that wave gloriously till the end of his life. Surfing, from the beginning, has had a tremendous influence outside of itself… making a big impression on people who have never done it—and in many cases, never will. By the same token, it has also prompted many to try it and find their lives changed forever, becoming surfers just like the ones that impressed them the first time and in the process discovering what a beautiful thing surfing is. This has caused surfing to continue growing at an exponential pace and the business of surfing to become a very large industry in a relatively short period of time… because, as the surfwear companies realised, many people still found a compulsion to look like surfers even if they weren’t. It was cool, and that sold a lot of shirts, pants, shorts, and jackets. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As for the surfboard part of the industry, and Lightning Bolt surfboards… surfboards have obviously always been the foundation of the industry of surfing, but after the Bolt Corporation used the image that the surfboards created as their promotional vehicle, that was the beginning of this other industry that wasn’t within but rather without the surfboard part—’without’ because, from a monetary standpoint, it grew so far beyond the surfboards that it was another whole thing altogether. When the Bolt Corp. went down, so did Lightning Bolt Surfboards—but in its place, first OP, then Quiksilver, then Billabong, RipCurl, O’Neill, Gotcha, Volcom, and others rose to prominence, creating a gigantic marketplace and successful business of surf stuff that was entirely different and in many ways, unconnected to the surfboards… what, in the beginning, used to be the only industry of surfing. “Surfing is so much more than simply riding waves” Of course, the demand for surfboards for the growing surfing population put a lot of pressure on the local surfboard builders of the areas and countries of surfers. This led to an emergence of overseas production: surfboards made in Asia and other places with less costly labor. Production continued to improve to where it began to rival the quality of local surfboard producers. Now it is an accepted and legitimate source of good surfboards."