[ BEN AIPA ]
[ Tim Winton Interview ][ Strong Current ]
[ Nat Young's Dream ]
[ The Tao of Mick Fanning ]
[ Tackling Gorillas in Peru ]
[ NORTH SHORE TRADE SHOW/ SHARE HOUSE/REALITY TV WEBCAST ]
[ HIGH SURF INTRODUCTION ]
[ GORDON MERCHANT INTERVIEW ]
[ THE SCIENCE OF THE SUPERBANK ]
[ HAPPY ACCIDENT ]
[ FLOATING ]
[ ALBE FALZON INTERVIEW ]
[ FULL MOON IN THE MENTAWAIS ]
[ JAMIIE MITCHELL ]
[ THE HUMAN BONFIRE ]
[ MENTAWAI LAND GRAB ]
[ GEOFF McCOY PROFILE ]
[ WHERE TO FROM HERE? ]
[ AUSTRALIA DAY WITH HERRO ]
[ THE WEBBER BROTHERS ]
[ ROBBIE PAGE ]
[ RIP CURL PRO PREVIEW ]
He’s surfed alongside every great Hawaiian surfer from Eddie Aikau to Andy Irons. He shaped boards for the freakish ‘70s Hawaiian hotdoggers, Buttons Kaluhiokalani, Larry Bertleman, Dane Kealoha and Mark Liddel, ushering in the high performance sting swallow tail era. He helped teach MR to shape and put boards under his feet that sparked his success. He’s coached many of the great modern pro’s - Brad Gerlach, Sunny Garcia, Taylor Knox, Conan Hayes, Kalani Robb, Bruce and Andy. He reinvented and popularised the modern longboard. And, at 62, he’s still charging and shaping up a storm. In Hawaiian surfing’s epic journey from proud watermen on enormous longboards to modern pro’s ripping on high performance shortboards, Ben Aipa is ...
The Missing Link
“He’s the most surf stoked person on the planet.” Mark Richards
By Tim Baker
Who’s the greatest living surfer on earth?
Well, if you judge the question on a surfer’s life work - his sustained level of performance over four decades or more, his range of influences on other top surfers over several generations, his command of the full range of surfing disciplines - big and small waves, free surfing, competing, shaping, coaching - his timing in being in the right place at the right time at key moments in surfing’s evolution; if these things are our guide, I would like to nominate Ben Aipa.
Consider his Curriculum Vitae:
The first Hawaiian, along with Eddie Aikau, to be invited to the first pro events of the late ‘60s, a fixture at nearly every world contest from ‘68 through to the ‘90s, shaper of Fred Hemmings’ world title winning board in ‘68, creative dynamo behind the Hawaiian hotdogging super crew of Bertleman, Buttons, Dane Kealoha and Mark Liddel, creator of the revolutionary sting/swallow tail, the creative spark behind MR’s rise to greatness, coach and tactician for every Hawaiian team of the modern era, and personal mentor to a stellar lineage of top pro’s - from Brad Gerlach to Sunny Garcia to Taylor Knox, Conan Hayes to Kalani Robb to Andy and Bruce Irons. And teacher to his own accomplished surfer/shaper son, Akila.
Not a bad track record for a guy who didn’t start surfing until he ws 23, yet made the Hawaiian team for the world titles just two years later.
He even takes the rap for the rise of the modern longboard - something he knows not everyone will thank him for. “I started the whole mess,” he confesses, because of a longboard event he kicked off in Waikiki in the mid-’80s, that brought all the old-timers out of the woodwork. At 62, he was recently named one of the top 10 shapers of all time, by US Surfing Magazine.
I went to Hawaii this year with a bit of mission - to uncover the largely overlooked contribution of the great Hawaiian hotdogging generation of the mid ‘70s. To my mind, and based on a viewing of the old surf movies and magazines, the revolutionary shortboard surfing of Buttons Kaluhiokalani, Larry Bertleman, Mark Liddel, Dane Kealoha and Michael Ho, was so far ahead of the times it was ridiculous. And the boards that allowed them to do this were almost all shaped by Ben Aipa - with his short, swallowtail, step bottom Stings that opened a new door to small wave ripping, when the world was still infatuated with pintail guns.
One piece of old super 8 home movie footage I stumbled upon recently blew my mind, the sort of thing that would still drop jaws if Slater did it today. Buttons, back in ‘74, comes hard off the bottom at overhead Backdoor, hits the lip, pulls a spinning 360, comes out of it and straight into a switchfoot roundhouse cutback, belting the foam and landing it, all smooth and clean as a whistle. I was stunned. As ‘76 world champion Peter Townend recently put it: “You can compare them to the most innovative aerialists of today. They were so radical, but it was almost like they were too radical. No one really got it.”
Four-time world champ Mark Richards is just as fulsome in his praise. “Those guys were fucking unbelievable. They were doing amazing stuff,” he says.
When the highly-acclaimed skate movie, “Dogtown and Z-boys,” came out a few years ago, and the giants of the Santa Monica skate scene all expressed their admiration for Larry Bertleman’s surfing, it seemed like final confirmation. If surfing had forgotten their influence, skateboarding certainly hadn’t, and Stacey Peralta, Tony Alva, Jay Adams and their crew all gave the Hawaiians heavy props for inspiring their own “Berts,” skating low with their hands dragging the cement like one of Larry’s cutbacks. The skaters sensed what was going on there, even if many surfers didn’t. “We didn’t want to ride the board, we wanted to surf it. No stand up tall and la dee da; get down low and kick it,” Ben Aipa explains today.
How would I find any of these great Hawaiian surfers, I wondered, none of whom have gone on to flash, lucrative surf industry jobs, or even high profile elder statesman roles, who have all but disappeared from the view of the modern surfing world? Ben Aipa, I was told, was the key, the shaper and mentor behind their ground breaking surfing, and the only one likely to know where they all were today. How I would find Ben in the first place, I wasn’t so sure.
I could hardly believe my luck then, on my second day in the Islands, when I spotted a familiar, stocky older Hawaiian out at Haleiwa absolutely blazing on an enormous longboard - charging the sets and belting the lip on solid eight foot waves. The trademark swallow tail and stings were still there, but now attached to a surfboard of such huge proportions, it was hard to credit it could be manoeuvred through such radical surfing. Ben had to be over 60 these days. I was in awe.
The man has a heavy rep, befitting his stature, and I wanted to approach him in a suitably low key kind of way. I came in from my surf and watched from the beach for a while, as he wielded the mighty red railed longboard sting through outrageous top turns and big swooping bottom turns. When he eventually headed in, I sat on the sand like an obedient dog awaiting his master. But I wasn’t the only one who had recognised him. A bald, negro man, who’d been trying to teach himself to surf on a battered old single fin in the shorebreak (without a great deal of success) was also an Aipa fan, apparently. With no fewer than 10 children in tow, they virtually mobbed Ben as he waded to shore, asked him for autographs and admired his board. A group of Japanese tourists, attracted by the commotion, moved in and started snapping photos. Kelly Slater could probably have come in from a surf with less fanfare. So much for my low key approach. I waited for the busy scrum around him to dissipate. Eventually, he trotted up the beach beaming, apparently buoyed by the high energy surf session and the unexpected recognition. Under the circumstances, it seemed entirely normal that an admiring surf journalist, more than 20 years his junior and from the other side of the world, should request an interview.
Ben was upbeat and gracious, suggesting I meet him in town at his shaping bay later in the week, and meet him for an early surf if the waves came up again. The old ‘70s Hawaiian hotdog crew, he reported a little sadly, were pretty dispersed and hard to track down these days. Dane was on Maui. Larry had gone underground. Buttons was as loose and wild as ever, popping up occasionally to blow minds on the North Shore. Time and fate had not been kind to all of them and they’d seen little in the way of lasting financial reward for their groundbreaking era of high performance surfing. But as Ben’s own tale began to unravel, I sensed a larger story - one that took in the hotdog crew and their mighty contribution, but placed it in a continuum of Hawaiian surfing history that I hoped might make us all pause and feel a little gratitude for the ongoing gifts of inspiration and innovation which emanate from surfing’s birthplace.
So, later that week, I headed into Honolulu and followed Ben’s directions to his tiny hole-in-the-wall shaping bay at the back of a medical supply factory in a nondescript industrial estate. And there tacked on the walls, in old photos, magazine cuttings and scrawled tributes from grateful surfers, and in vivid flashes of memory as he carved out his 40,000th slab of foam, virtually the entire modern history of Hawaiian surfing poured forth.
Ben still comes in here every weekday to mow foam, answers the phone with an excited, “How’s the waves?” before he even asks who’s calling, and can look over a wall-length collage of his career held together with thumbtacks and yellowing sticky tape - a makeshift mural that spans the entire story of elite Hawaiian surfing from Eddie Aikau to Andy Irons. “Thanks for getting me psyched,” Bruce Irons has scrawled on a poster of himself charging big Pipe.
Ben tells me to roll the tape and start asking questions while he runs a sheet of gauze over a freshly shaped longboard blank. On the tape, his conversation is thus punctuated with the long, swooshing sound effects of his timeworn movements along the rails of another hand-crafted surfboard.
There’s an irony here that Ben, like Bob MacTavish in Australia, helped banish the longboard era, yet he also helped resurrect it in the modern age by developing high performance longboards. “I came from the ‘60s, longboards, but what I was riding wasn’t working,” he says. “I didn’t want to ride my surfboard, I wanted to surf my board. That was the difference. In longboard times it was riding the board, but because I was trying to surf my board, the bottom was wrong, which I didn’t know, the fin was wrong, which I didn’t know. I swam a lot. I swam a lot. I swam a lot. Man, I swam a lot,” he repeats, for emphasis. “So finally I worked out how to make a board that worked.”
Ben shaped the oversized gun that Fred Hemmings won the world contest on in Puerto Rico in 1968, holding off the mounting charge of the shortboarders and Hawaiian mini-guns briefly. But he was impressed with the super short equipment the Australians rode at the world contest in 1970, even though they mainly floundered in the powerful Johanna beachbreaks, while Californian Rolf Aurness rode a seven foot, gunny pintail to victory.
Even when shortboards took over surfing, Ben was still out of step with the crowd, his short stocky build suiting a shorter, chunkier board than the drawn-out pintails favoured in Hawaii. “Here it was the Lopez kind of board, the single fin, Parrish kind of board, stuff like that, and I was the odd guy. I was the guy with the swallow and the sting.” But Ben soon found an eager protege in a young Larry Bertleman who shared his vision to get down low and carve. “Because Bertleman was riding further up, you know, and his fin was moving up, the tail I was putting on his board wasn’t really working right. He needed the lift, the quickness, all that. We just split the tail .... We thought, what’s the quickest turning bird? The swallow, so it was the swallow tail. So we did it and the board was quicker, snapped quicker and flowing and all that.”
The Sting - “Not stinger, STING!” Ben corrects me more than once - the abrupt break in the rail line in front of the back foot, came about by a happy accident after another surf session with Larry. “We went and surfed Lighthouse, by Diamond Head. I had to go do some work so I lined up somebody to take him home. He was only about 12 at the time. Everything was fine, the guy came down who was going to take him home. I left and as I was walking up the trail, I looked back and saw Larry doing his long roundhouse, low, putting his hand in the water turns, and trying to hit the whitewater ... I looked at that turn and something was missing. I went to the shop, got a blank. All I did was I drew the outline of his board with the swallowtail. This is what happened, man.” Ben demonstrates on the blank in front of him, as keenly as if it were yesterday. “I drew the nose. I drew the tail. I looked at it. Because Larry’s turn was so different, the curve back here I had to make it straighter so he could get more draw ... I had the template and I dropped it and I looked at it.” Ben drops a template on the tail of the blank to demonstrate, effectively cutting off one side of the rail line through the tail. “And I went okay, Larry’s crotch, where he stands is so far up on the board. At that time he had a 5’9” so his crotch was like 18” up, 19” up. So I did that.” Ben traces out the fallen template on the tail, pulling in the tail by an inch or more and placing the break in the rail line neatly halfway between where Larry’s feet would be. “You know those hydrofoil boats? .... That day was a Saturday so I kind of left it like that because the Sunday on Ke’ehi Lagoon they had hydrofoil boat races. So I went down that morning, they had all those boats. I walked around and I looked at them. They had about 12 or 15 different designs, and I got the sting concept off the cutaway thing. I was talking to some of the guys - “‘What’s the idea?’
“‘Hydro-lift - water leaves, after that it’s air ... there’s no vacuum.’
“‘Oh yeah?’
“The trip was trying to shape it. How do I do this now? So I shaped the board first before I turned the rails ... glassed one side, glassed the other side. I called Larry up, told him I was going to come pick him up. Took him to Diamond Head Lighthouse, the surf was almost the same. I broke out the board. Larry was going, Wow, all stoked out. So I let him paddle out first. I told him, ‘You know, Larry, don’t go pushing it. Take it easy.’ So, he went out and he caught this left ... his first wave, he did this thing, he cranked it and the board just shot out of the lip.”
Ben had arranged a ride home for his young protege again and as he walked back up the track, he spontaneously came up with the name for the new design. “I looked back again. I go, frick, man, this guy’s stinging the wave. He was stinging the wave ...” It was the ‘72 world contest in San Diego when the wider surfing world first got to glimpse what these freethinking Hawaiians were up to. In the team, along with Ben and elders like Jimmy Blears and David Nuuhiwa, were two young kids - Michael Ho and Larry Bertleman. Ben recalls taking the groms to Oceanside one day for a freesurf, while the US mainland team were having their final surf off for team places on the next bank. At a time when pintail guns and Lopez Zen-grace at Pipe were the benchmark, the Hawaiian groms were going crazy on their little, Ben Aipa swallowtails.
“These two kids went out and every heat that was going on, they were beating everyone in the heat, “ Ben chuckles. “We came back the next day and we saw the boards of these guys and what they did, they cut the tails, because these two kids were riding swallow tails, so they went home and cut the tails,” he laughs.
“As the contest went on in San Diego, they both made the finals ... If Larry and Michael never horsed around in the final, like taking off and doing go behinds, you know, they would have been first and second. Their surfing, as they went through the rounds, they were ahead of their time.”
Soon after, another crop of young Hawaiians emerged under Ho and Bertleman, inspired by their new style. “With Mark and Buttons and Dane Kealoha they came just a year after, a year and a half after, and those guys came off of Larry Bertleman’s surfing, where Buttons was the quick flashy Bertleman, and Mark Liddel was the smooth carving Larry Bertleman, and Dane Kealoha was the power.”
Ben took the young crew under his wing, shaping their boards and ferrying them to contests and surf sessions. “Every time I used to take these guys surfing I’d say, where ever we go, make friends, don’t make enemies. Don’t go out and pig out, you know, but those guys, they just wanted to surf strong and hard and all that.”
He recalls taking Larry to California and running into Mike Purpus, at a time when Purpus was considered to have the best cutback in the business. “So there was an unofficial cutback contest between Larry Bertleman and Mike Purpus up at the Point and Larry just shut him down ... He was riding closer to the board, it was just different.” It’s just one example where Ben has managed to place himself at the evolutionary coalface of high performance surfing, an uncanny knack that he has resolutely worked on with successive generations of surfers. “I was lucky enough to be a part of a movement in surfing,” Ben says, expanding on this weighty theory, illustrating it with perpendicular lines drawn in foam dust on his shaping bay floor. “Okay, here comes the movement,” he explains, drawing one line in the foam, “and here’s the surfer.” He draws a second line approaching the first line from side-on. “I wanted to go BOOM,” he thunders, the two lines colliding right at their leading edges. “I wanted to meet it. I didn’t want surfing to go over there and then you come up behind it. Any time anything happened with a surfboard design, with the surfers, it’s always been BOOOOMMMM! Nothing planned. It just happens.” It seems a significant point. Surfing as a whole is advancing on one front. Individual surfers are progressing along their own path. When a talented surfer insects with this mass-movement head-on there’s a kind of spontaneous combustion, a wave of accelerated progression the surfer can ride to leap ahead of the movement.
It was like that with the great Mark Richards, Ben reckons. “I saw this guy in San Diego from Australia. The guy was walking real awkward. Then I was watching this guy in the water, going, wow, who is this guy? He was a junior at the time. We talked and we hooked up and he came here and ... unreal.” Ben summarises neatly.
MR and Ben instantly hit it off and Ben shaped MR a couple of stings that helped launch his era of competitive world dominance.
“He’s the most surf stoked person on the planet,” MR says today. “I always had this fascination with Hawaiian shapers ... I think I wrote to him and said I was really interested in getting a board from him in Hawaii. He made me one board, a stinger, 6’8” by 20”, flames on the bottom ... This one board from him became a magic board for the rest of the year. We had a really long association. I rode his boards in all the events around the world. I found him to be really inspirational - incredible shaper, great design ideas, and more surf stoked than anyone, and he could surf good. We really hit it off. He was a big cog in my early competitive success. And he was really helpful in my development as a shaper, very receptive to giving me a hand, let me watch him shape.” The Aipa stings were an important step towards the twin fins that MR would go on to shape and ride to four world titles. “They were a fairly futuristic design. He was really off on a tangent,” says MR of the Aipa Stings. “It was a real shift in the perception of board design. He was incredibly helpful and giving, always there for me. I couldn’t thank him enough. It was the seed and the spark that sent me on that journey. Ben lit the fire under me - keep your mind open, keep experimenting.”
It’s worth remembering that Ben was an early pro competitor himself, when the first big money contests started up in the ‘70s, but that didn’t stop him passing on his design wisdom. “I was the oldest guy when professionalism started, the oldest guy with the new guys,” he laughs. Few of the Hawaiians really adapted well to the advent of a world tour, despite their obvious ability. “These guys were playing out there, whereas the other guys were kind of serious. These guys were just going off. If Buttons had his head together, and not been side-tracked by other things, he could have put a good mark in the world of surfing, more than what he’s done,” says Ben. “But those guys, they never had fear because they were having so much fun.”
Surf journalist Phil Jarratt once described Buttons’ pro fortunes more graphically: “He approached his career with all the steadiness and good timing of a chicken with its head cut off.”
“Dane and Larry went the furthest in pursuing professional surfing,” says Ben. “Mark and Buttons never really pursued it, because they weren’t that serious ... In Hawaii, a lot of guys take it too easy. In Australia, everybody’s hungry because there’s more guys.” You get the impression Ben is still a bit dirty that his old crew never made much financially out of surfing. One American surfwear giant is still using a silhouetted likeness of Larry Bertleman in their ads without paying him a cent. “The surfers get ripped off again,” he sighs.
He and some of the most legendary names in surfing history are currently involved in a court action against a major US department store chain, for using a photo of them from the Makaha contest in one of their catalogues. On his wall, there is a photo of Ben, Buffalo Keaulana, Paul Strauch, Joey Cabell and George Downing outside the US high court, uncharacteristically dressed up in suits and ties, preparing to do battle with the retail giant. “Win or lose, we’re doing something for surfing,” Ben says. “If this was a mega-sport, basketball or football, their agents would be all over these guys already making settlements, but we’re surfers.” He shrugs.
But you also get the impression Ben is someone who doesn’t measure life’s rewards in dollars and cents. He’s too busy looking for the next challenge, the next young surfer to help, the next movement to meet head-on. His coaching career kicked off in 1984 at the world contest in California. He stretched the rules to the limit by getting one of his Hawaiian team to tag Brad Gerlach in a heat and knock him out, so another Hawaiian could advance. “I did it legal and it worked, knocked him out,” says Ben. Gerr was devastated by the tactics - he was the only mainland American who hung out with the Hawaiians after all - but was so impressed by Ben’s tactical mind that he asked Ben to coach him. “He got a hold of me and he asked me if there was anyway I could train him. His dad was really pissed at me that I did that thing to him, so we talked and I apologised but it was a move that any coach would do. But we hit it off, his dad and I hit it off.” He introduced Brad to boxing cross-training and working out on the heavy bag. Their goal was to make Gerr a world title contender and, sure enough, in their final year together, Brad finished runner-up to Damien Hardman, and promptly retired from the tour. The first time Ben met Taylor Knox at a surf contest, Taylor was in a wheelchair with a serious spinal injury from a road accident. Miraculously, he rehabilitated himself through yoga and when he embarked on a pro career, he also approached Ben for coaching. Ben introduced him to the idea of “boxing” the wave, addressing the breaking wave with the same kind of hip and shoulder movements and dexterity a great boxer might use against an opponent. Years later, he saw Taylor at a contest with a scrap of paper in his bag. On it, Taylor had written, “Think boxer.”
His regular spot coaching the Hawaiian team at world contests saw him overseeing virtually every emerging talent in the islands and working closely with several as they turned pro, when a particular talent caught his eye - Conan Hayes, Kalani Robb, Sunny Garcia.
“When I got into coaching, I said, okay, the guys that I work with, especially the hard ones like Sunny, we’re going to beat the system but we’re not going to break the door down - we’re going to find an opening in the door, a crack somewhere that we can use, and that’s what I did. Everything I did never came from a book, it just came from watching,” he says.
A Surfer magazine profile on Sunny is stuck to his shaping bay wall, with the following quote circled: “Ben was heavy. I think I used to drive him nuts. Ben was a really good coach. He’d always be there early in the morning before events, watching the waves. He’d tell you exactly how many waves were in the set, which wave was good, where to sit. And everywhere he told me not to sit because there wasn’t enough waves, I’d always try and prove him wrong and I’d always go and sit where he told me not to sit, and I still managed to win a lot of events. It used to drive him nuts, but he was a good coach. And he’s coached practically every single kid that’s come out of Hawaii, so he’s gone a really good job.”
Ben laughs, reckons he was on to Sunny’s rebel streak and deliberately told him not to surf precisely where he really wanted him.
The key to his success in working with elite surfers, says Ben, is getting to know the surfer intimately. “I get to know the guys so well, at a distance I can pick them out. In a crowd I can pick them out walking. As the year’s went on I used that thought in my coaching. Every time I’m coaching and working with someone and we sit down and talk seriously about it, okay, first thing we’re going to do, we’re going to work on your walk. This is a thing I’ve used all the time, even with Andy and Bruce. It was funny.” Ben first spotted the Irons brothers at a contest at Haleiwa, and knew he’d seen something special. “I watched them surfing and they were free style surfing because they come from Kauai, no contests,” he recalls, reliving the moment in a vivid flash. “Wow, these kids are good man. I’ve got to see them again.”
He went on to coach both Andy and Bruce until they turned pro. These days, he’s coaching another bunch of blonde, haole brothers from Kauai - Koa, Travis and Alex Smith, aged from 8 to 15, and predicts big things for them. “I told their parents I don’t want to do anything for a year, I’ll just watch them, and then I made my decision. So I gave the parents a three year projection,” he says. That projection should see them dominating the Hawaiian and US titles before an entry into the pro ranks.
“People say, you’re coaching these blonde kids, why? And I say, you know why? Because they want it. You guys from Hawaii, you’re too lazy, “ he laughs.
Yet Ben defies his own stereotype here and continues to work tirelessly to develop his own surfing and competitive performance. “For me, it’s not just surfing. I get into this thing where I set goals. I always set goals, always set standards. Anything to improve what you’re doing, and you’re way of life. My whole thing is .... projecting a lot, trying to read what’s coming, be a part of it, not be behind it, be involved in it. Now as I’m getting older, it’s like, how long can I keep doing this? How long can I keep up?”
Based on his surfing at Haleiwa the other day, I suggest, he can keep going for plenty of years yet. “And you know what? That wasn’t even a good day,” Ben chuckles. “How do I do it? Because if you don’t love it, why do it? Two months ago I found out I had diabetes,” he reveals, suddenly serious. “I don’t want to stop. Shit, I don’t want to stop. So what I’ve got, I can change it, so that’s my challenge now. For me, that’s a personal challenge.”
And Ben’s never been one to shirk a challenge. When he injured his back a few years ago, he could be seen down at Ala Moana Beach Park endlessly wading through the shallows with a rubber inner tube round his waist to strengthen it. When he resurrected longboarding back in the ‘80s, it was specifically to get all his old contemporaries back in the water, but he stressed that the old equipment could be ridden in a progressive way. He rode a longboard at the ‘81 Malibu Pro, a shortboard event, and made the final, just to underscore the point.
“When I brought the longboard back in the ‘80s, I brought it back for progressive surfing, for the guys from the ‘70s, not the guys from the ‘60s, because they were guys with regular jobs, not getting in the water, and longboarding was maybe the thing to try. But I made ‘em the progressive kind of longboards.”
The purists criticised his modern longboards and his design innovations like four fins, so he did a piece for Surfer magazine to prove that you could still nose ride on one of his modern longboards. A clipping on the wall shows him casually planted on the nose of a four fin longboard to settle the argument.
He started the first modern pro longboard event at Waikiki in ‘83 on Kamehamaha Day, a statewide holiday honouring the former Hawaiian king. The event, sponsored by the Hyatt Regency Hotel and televised live, was a huge success and largely responsible for the resurgence in modern longboarding. “That’s what kicked it off. I started the whole mess,” he laughs.
He continues to dominate the Hawaiian grand masters division, putting himself through his own special cross training programme and setting lofty goals for the seven-event state series. “I made a projection - Okay, I’m going to make seven finals, and I’m going to win half of them. Hoo, man, I went through it, and I only lost one .... The next year I concentrated on free style, enjoying surfing, no competition. And then the next year I did it again, made projections again, did it again, then stopped the next year.” In his relentless quest to keep surfing fresh and evolving, he says it’s the ever-changing, shifting moods of the ocean itself that’s been his greatest ally. “All the kids I work with I tell them, you’ve got to listen to the ocean, you’ve just got to know how to listen. The ocean is not your battle, your battle is you. You’re the one who beats yourself,” he urges. “They only realise when they get older.”
His own son Akila is now an accomplished surfer/shaper, upholding the family name and in demand from top pro’s, and with the renewed interest in retro design Ben’s old Sting swallow tails are enjoying new currency among serious board connoisseurs.
“My thing is I’ve got a lot of depth to what I’ve been doing,” Ben observes, in a rare burst of immodesty, then chuckles at himself. “I’ve got to say that because I’ve been doing this for four decades.”