[ ROB PAGE ]
[ 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 ]
[ BEN AIPA ]
[ 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 ]
[ RIP CURL PRO PREVIEW ]
HEAVEN AND HELL
The absurd extremes of Robbie Page
By Tim Baker
Four months after being jailed in Japan for possession of LSD, pro surfer Rob Page found himself dining in the home of the then-French President Francois Mitterand, having recently deflowered the great leader’s 16-year-old granddaughter.
This is just one example of the wild ride of peaks and troughs Page has ridden, since he emerged from a housing commission home south of Sydney in the early ‘80s, as one of Australia’s most promising young goofyfooters.
“From jail in Japan to sitting in the President’s house, four months,” says Robbie emphatically, as if to establish the outlandish time frame beyond doubt. “That’s why I knew God was playing a joke ... My contrasts have been absurd.”
Indeed. Rob’s path as a professional surfer has taken him from dire poverty and a broken home to the top of his sport - a Pipe Masters title, a starring role in a Hollywood movie, and most recently a world masters title in Peru. Along the way he’s put in 22 Hawaiian winters, 12 years living and surfing in France, and 10 years on the pro tour rated in the top 30 in the world.
The Japanese drug bust at Tokyo airport in 1992 saw him suspended by the ASP for 18 months, effectively ending his pro competitive career. This despite the fact, he points out, that many of the people who voted for his suspension had been known to ingest the odd prohibited substance. His crime, it seems, was getting caught. He spent two months in a Japanese prison, half of it in solitary confinement.
“I once asked my mum when I came out of Japan, I asked her, how come I ended up in there? And she said, oh, it’s simple. You lost appreciation for the fundamental values of life,” says Rob. “And I asked her, fuck, mum, where have I been? And she said, oh son, you’ve been to heaven and hell and back many times.”
Upon his release, he flew straight to Hawaii on his original ticket from Japan, simply hoping US immigration wouldn’t notice the cancelled stamp on his Japanese visa. Miraculously, they didn’t. He dedicated himself to surfing big Pipe, suddenly on the new and uncertain path of the sponsored free surfer, then travelled on to France to see his sponsors, Oxbow. It was there that he met President Mitterand’s granddaughter, Pascale. “I met her and I actually thought God was playing a joke on me,” says Rob, “because here I am on the pro tour loving life, now here I am in jail crying and sitting in a fucking box alone, and now here I am in Hawaii dedicating my life to Pipe, so I can get my life back on track. Every time I fall down I go to the surf and I went to Pipe and surfed Pipe for those months. And then I went to France to see Oxbow and that’s where I met Pascale.”
The French President, one of the most powerful men in the world at the time, warmed immediately to his granddaughter’s new Australian surfer boyfriend, despite his colourful history and the fact that he was 12 years older than her.
“The first night I met him, we had dinner and he’d been a bit sick so he went in to the back room to put his feet up, and he called Pascale in and he said, is that your first real boyfriend? Is that your first lover? And she said, yes. And he said, you picked a good one. And I was really stoked with that, because we were in his house. There was a whole thing in Paris Match, the biggest magazine in France, and there was an interview with me about the whole Japan LSD thing and Pascale said, my dad read this thing and went, ‘Gee, they’ve done a good thing on Robbie .... Oh, that’s not so good, about the acid.’ And I was thinking, fuck this is heavy. I knew it was going to surface some time, but when it got to granddad he said, ‘It’s a nice interview, and he’s done nothing wrong.’ That’s from the President. That’s probably what kept me in Europe ... They didn’t focus on the kid that just got out of jail from acid. This is the great sportsman that’s won the major surfing event on the planet and now he’s taken my grand daughter’s virginity and he’s 12 years older than her. That’s what I admire, that they’re real, they don’t suppress their own people’s emotions and minds. I moved in with her and her mum, and stayed at her dad’s house or grand dad’s house.”
It was this accepting, cosmopolitan attitude that Robbie says kept him in France for so long. “People used to ask me why I’m in France and I used to say, three reasons: I had a beautiful girlfriend there, the waves were perfect and I had a great sponsor. Why wouldn’t I? I was taken care of that well, those 10 years were fucking epic, being cultured, learning to speak another language.”
But while the relationship with Pascale didn’t last, his long association with Oxbow endured for many years. “It was the best sponsorship I ever had,” says Rob wistfully. “Such respectful caring people. That was such an education. They never played sponsor on you. They were family. You were at their homes sleeping. It wasn’t like, we’re going to sponsor you and give you some money. It was, let’s hang out and have a great time, and in so doing they showed me the way to take care of your sponsored athletes ... The way they treated me was insane. Pottz was world champ and he used to come and eat with me at Oxbow and go, ‘Hey, Sweaty (Rob’s nickname), you’re on such a good thing here.’”
Oxbow founder Frabrice Valeri once told me, “Robbie is my wizard. He will be with Oxbow for life.” Robbie even dreamed up the concept of the Masters surfing events which Oxbow initially sponsored, bringing all the pioneers of pro surfing together again. However, when Oxbow was eventually sold, the new owners felt no such loyalty and Rob found himself abruptly unemployed, living in France and about to become a father. Even so, Fabrice and Oxbow cofounder Isabelle Cachot have remained dear friends. “Isabelle helped me buy my house in France. They’ve been fantastic for me. I see Isabelle and Fabrice as absolute family.”
Rob and his Morrocan girlfriend at the time, Nanu, had two young boys in quick succession and Rob had to do whatever he could to support them. Even when he was virtually broke, he was still surfing perfect A-frame French beachbreaks, or draining Mundaka barrels, or towing 50 foot Belhara, keeping the simple yet elusive dream of a surfing life alive. Eventually, he wound up running a beachfront bar in Hossegor, called Cream, that became hugely popular with local and visiting surfers alike. It was a business success. Rob was able to buy an acreage property in the French countryside and invest in some apartments on the beach. But the lifestyle was incompatible with family life, and the relationship fell apart. Rob returned to Australia, very nearly broken, to lick his wounds. He picked up a few acres and a rundown farm house in Kempsey, west of Crescent Head, halfway between Sydney and the Gold Coast, and settled into the familiar Australian bush to heal. In his solitude, he dreamt up unlikely plans for his own wax and surfboard company and to revive his amateur competitive career.
“I came from a divorce in France, two beautiful kids and a lovely wife and an awesome house and a bar on the beach and four apartments on the beach,” he says, “and when you go through break-ups it seems like you lose pretty much everything. And I came back as a pretty crushed soul and just lay down to rest my soul. I was digging deep asking all sorts of life questions, because I’ve already been to heaven and hell and back, like my mum said, and now apparently I’ve fucked up again. It doesn’t matter who’s fault, I’ll take responsibility ... And so down in the depths again, down in the black depths, you ask yourself many questions as a man and as a human, and as an athlete that you once were. Is there anybody in there? Can you hear me?”
Rob had spent much of his time in France helping to develop a new surfboard technology, Hydroflex, with a group of German surfer/shapers. And he felt he’d stumbled on the perfect formula for his new wax. At his lowest ebb, and almost penniless, he embarked on a far-fetched mission to launch a business, taking the name of the bar in France, Cream. And, just as implausibly, he set out to prove his products at the highest level available to him and began competing in the masters division of local amateur events. “I thought I should go back and compete. It will get me healthy and fit. It will help me dig up whoever’s still inside me, and I’ll be able to test these products at the highest level you can at my age,” he says. “It was basically to go talk to the people on the beaches again and test the products, and in doing so I realised I was there testing myself. I always believed I was an artist as a surfer, and I was fine with that, but I wanted to see if there was some athleticism left inside there with the artist. The artist is always going to be there.”
Remarkably, after not competing for almost 10 years, he won regional, state and two Australian masters titles, before heading to Peru for the world masters titles in 2008. Rob and I had traveled through Peru 14 years earlier as part of a magazine/video shoot - in his new freesurfing role a couple of years after the Japan bust. Rob had been in great form - stepping off the plane and being almost immediately recruited to star in a well-paid beer commercial, then hooking up with a drop-dead gorgeous TV presenter who had come to interview us about our travels. One day we surfed at Punta Rocas, south of Lima, as this dark Latino beauty, Vanessa, watched from the clifftops of Peru’s dry desert coast. There were a couple of other travelers and local surfers in the water clearly intent on impressing her too. It felt like some sort of primal surfing contest ... and to the victor went the spoils. Of course, Rob won the day and the girl was his.
14 years later, he found himself back at Punta Rocas, up against our host from that first trip, local legend Magoo de la Rosa, in the final of the world masters titles. Magoo was harbouring a friendly grudge from a split decision loss back in their tour days and claimed he’d been waiting 20 years for the rematch. Despite massive local support for Magoo, Rob emerged victorious this time too.
“Going down there to South America, it’s a really spiritual beautiful place,” says Rob. “Peru has been so good to me. Getting off the plane, signing the beer commercial, meeting the movie star, doing the whole deal. This time I go back to represent Australia and they haven’t had a world title there since ‘64 when Nat Young was representing Australia to go up against Felipe Pomar.”
Ten days before the event started, Rob didn’t even have a plane ticket but, at the encouragement of his business partners, he pulled the funds out of the start-up money for his new company, Cream, to get himself there.
“I really felt in a way that I wasn’t allowed not to come back with a first. I couldn’t justify going away unless I brought back the gold,” he says. He took a couple of his new Hydroflex small waves boards but lacked a gun. “So I went and got my board I won the Pipe Masters on, 20 years old, 1988, and I said, fuck this is a 7’3” thick board, I can ride eight to 10 feet with, so I took that board. And I think I took it like someone in a church takes their cross. That’s the last time I was talking to god as far as competitive surfing goes, at the height of my career.”
Sure enough, the surf came up to a solid 10 feet one day and Rob rode the Pipe gun, knocking out the Brasilian champ and going on to make the final. Anyone who thinks a surf contest can’t be a soulful experience ought to talk to Rob about this event and the impact it had on him. In the opening ceremony, he loudly cheered on the one-man team from Mexico, a well-to-do lawyer who later thanked him with tears in his eyes. The rest of the team hadn’t come, he explained, because they wouldn’t have passed the strict drug testing.
“They open up the ceremony for the contest in such a beautiful manner. Everybody who’s there are 35 to 50 years of age, there’s about 15% or 30% who went on the tour, and the rest are just good amateur surfers, healthy people who have been healthy all their lives, and they were loving having the opportunity to surf against the guys who did the pro thing,” he says. “One of the guys from Trinidad was so cool, full rasta type cat. At the end of the contest he hands me this book. He’s one of Trinidad’s greatest artists, amazing painter. He’s a rasta Van Gogh. And so I found so much depth and seniority in these people ... They were there for this gathering that I never knew existed.”
It was also special for Rob because it was the first time he competed under the Aboriginal flag. Despite his pale skin and long blonde hair, Rob recently received his official papers establishing his Aboriginal ancestry. “I felt really honoured. I was saying prayers to the ancestry, I hope this is okay I just carry this flag for you for the moment,” he says. “People say, you don’t look like you’ve got any Aboriginal. I’m as white as a ghost. My dad’s Irish/Scottish. But you know what I tell them? You can’t see the pepper in that food but you can taste it. So I feel there’s some spice there.”
Since returning to Australia and settling in Kempsey, with its large Indigenous population, Rob’s Aboriginality has become important to him. “It was shocking coming from modern France to Australia and getting in with Aboriginal culture and seeing how thick the cultural tension is and how separate it really is. You can go to Kempsey down the whole main street and you won’t see an Aboriginal girl hired in any shop,” he says. “If you look at the world, the Aboriginal people who have been here so long didn’t destroy anything. We have to follow something from their culture. Man, we’ve taken this thing so bad that the world’s on fire ... We’re talking about a melting world, a world that’s spinning on climate change, and they know that the modern human did that in the last couple of hundred years. And we know how old Aboriginal culture is. Imagine if we would respect that, and have a blend of that with our modern life, but definitely put Aboriginal culture up where it belongs. Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone learnt an Aboriginal language at school and learnt true Aboriginal culture?”
In a sense, Rob’s journey, like so many quests for self-knowledge, has come full circle. Competing back in the amateurs has allowed him to apply what he’s learnt along the way, to help him succeed, certainly, but also to spread a bit of his infectious citizen-of-the-planet spirit.
“The guys at the Aussie titles, you can go to their beaches and you can guarantee that they’re out there every single day. They’re the consistency in the water - seven days a week, that’s their gym, and I respect that. I’ve had breaks and had time out and made money from surfing, and these guys are frothing still and surfing fucking great. They’re like the small surfboard manufacturers, they’re like the quiet, silent majority, you with me? They’re in the trenches ...
“I’ve seen a lot of guys win their trophies and be very humble because we’re standing at the back of someone’s pub handing out the trophies and they’re little pieces of perspex or wood that aren’t worth two bob, so I’d like to see that change. Because when they get given these things they stand there humble like it’s no big deal, so I try and let ‘em know it is a big deal. You’re fucking great athletes. That’s the first thing. You’ve paid all your own money, you’ve come by your own sweat and tears to put your name on the line and have a charge at it and you’ve come through a lot of rounds. But the other side is, I try to get ‘em where they’re all talking and cruising a bit more, not walking around doing that movie star thing. Because I seen them do that on the tour and it didn’t seem to help anyone and that’s why today everyone is so fucking aggressive and egoed out and pumped up, because that’s how for the past 15 years surfing was portrayed by the pros. Everyone thinks that’s what you’re meant to do.”
If there’s a core message that emerges from Rob’s remarkable journey, and his meandering, wide-ranging, philosophical raves, it is this - that surfers need to rediscover the fundamental joy of what they do. “Who’s going to turn this round? How are we going to turn it around? ... I’m had this 14-year-old kid telling me I’m a fucking kook and get out of the fucking water, you’re a fucking idiot, this and that ... Stop all that aggro shit. Surfing’s got to be a happy enjoyable dojo ... Those who’ve got 30 years plus in surfing, they know what it was and they know how it is now, and they know how it should be and I guess all we can quote is Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream.’ It’s got to be more friendly. If we can’t be happy and friendly in the water, where can we? If surfers aren’t going to lead the happy charge, who is? It should be whoever’s a nasty piece of work in the water should get expelled for a week, not praised for punching heads. Everyone has their best surfs when they’re happy.”
It’s an impressive, impassioned oratory that leaves me feeling like Rob deserves some sort of leadership role within surfing, as he grows into the unfamiliar position of elder. He’s already doing it in a sense, nurturing some of the young indigenous surfers in his area, encouraging some of the older guys to get back in the water, spruiking his boards and wax up and down the coast.
Whether the company will fly or not is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to argue with the lengths he’s gone to, to prove his products. Rob has ambitious plans to raise investment capital and go big, but the current economic climate might make that difficult. Regardless, he’s doing the old-fashioned sales run up and down the east cost in his old van, loaded up with boards, guitar and boxes of wax, visiting what he considers genuine surf shops, working his network of good old boys.
He asks me, “Do you know what always kept selling during the Great Depression?” He pauses, as if for dramatic effect. “Tobacco. Because the worse things got, the more people needed a smoke. Wax is the tobacco of the surf industry. We could all be broke and out of work but we’re still going to go for a surf.” He has a point.
Rob remains torn between Australia and France, flying his two young boys over for lengthy visits, or going there to be with them, squeezing in some extended stays at the Macaronis Surf Resort, in the Mentawais, enroute for a bit of field research. “They’re going to be little Morrocan French Aussie surfers,” he says proudly, of his boys, Ismael and Bruman. “They were surfing here and catching octopus and fish. The Aussie in them is so solid.”
They make an incongruous sight - the lilly white, blonde-haired dad and his two dark-skinned, dark-eyed boys, but all with those deep knowing eyes. In a sense, perhaps it’s to be expected, simply the latest chapter in a life that’s been anything but ordinary, bringing together disparate elements with always unexpected results.
“I’ve walked the red carpet of Hollywood, I’ve had a whole feature film made of my life, Rolling Thunder ... I lived with the President of France, been to fucking jail, won Pipe, two Aussie titles and a world title and carried the Aboriginal flag for the first time out of anybody in surfing history,” Rob neatly summarises, with an odd mix of pride and wonder. “To the day I die I’m the first guy to take the Aboriginal flag to the top of my sport.”