By Phil Jarratt
Now that the frivolity of the various elections and the Melbourne Cup has been and gone, let’s turn our attention to the serious business of the Christmas party season.
The one event I will not be missing for anything is the Noosa World Surfing Reserve’s Surfers Christmas Ball at the amazing Sunshine Beach Surf Club function room on Saturday, December 12. Not only will the fabulous SandFlys be playing their surf tunes and (hopefully by then) dance beats, but special guest for the night will be the legendary Gary “Kong” Elkerton.
If you’ve lived under a rock all your life, and not one around which surf breaks, and have somehow missed the life and times of the Mighty Kong, here’s a bit of background.
Like Simon Anderson, another of those “best surfer never to have won a world title” cases, the man they call “Kong” bounced back a few years after his retirement from the world tour and won three back-to-back World Masters titles, competing against those same peers who had thwarted his ambitions for more than a decade. While it wasn’t quite the same, it was a gong nonetheless, and the flamboyant Kong grabbed it with both hands. I was there at Lafitenia in France that autumn day in 1999 when he ran up the beach and kissed the sand, and I’ll never forget it.
I was also there at the last Masters world titles two years ago in the Azores, when Gary didn’t do so well, but now long past his competitive days, he just congratulated his old mates and we sat down on the cliff and enjoyed a few beers and a few laughs. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing when Kong comes to the Surfers Ball next month.
Gary spent his early years on his father’s prawn trawler working the central Queensland coast, and didn’t get much school or surf time until he was 13 and the family settled on the Sunshine Coast. The Elkertons were salt of the earth Australians who instilled in Gary the virtues of hard work and responsible behaviour. Unfortunately, it went in one ear and out the other, and by the time the chunky, powerful natural-footer came to the attention of the surfing media, he was a wild boy who crossed the line repeatedly, in and out of the water.
When he won the 1982 Pro Junior at 17, he had already entered the folklore. Quiksilver hurriedly signed him to its team, but the early focus of its marketing of Kong was his dynamic free-surfing. He was the guy who was capable of anything—all they had to do was follow him around with a camera and capture the moments. It was no coincidence that Elko was front and centre in an infamous poster campaign under the slogan, “If you can’t rock and roll, don’t f … … come.” But Quiksilver and film-maker Jack McCoy really captured the essence of Kong with the 1983 short video Kong’s Island. Sublimely silly, it documents Gary’s no-holds-barred approach to everything from eating a pie to charging a wave.
There was, of course, more to Gary Elkerton than the Kong persona, and when he joined the pro tour in 1984 he started to prove it. He was a natural at Sunset Beach, taking off late on the biggest set waves and drawing long, powerful lines across the face. By 1986 he had become very serious about his pro career and his public image. When I referred to him in an article as “Kong” (as everyone did) I received a verbal thrashing down the phone line. “Kong was yesterday”, he yelled at me. “Today I’m Gary and tomorrow I’m the next world champion.”
And he so nearly was. He won two of three Hawaiian events to take the Triple Crown but narrowly lost the 1987 world title to Damien Hardman. It bit hard because Elkerton’s wins were explosive, and achieved in big, powerful waves, while Hardman was a grafter who quietly compiled the points.
In 1989 he again took out the prestigious Triple Crown, and the following year was in contention for the world title but again finished a close second, this time to Tom Curren. The frustration was beginning to take its toll, and Gary became a vocal and boisterous critic of the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) and the surfing establishment. But in 1993 he found himself near the top of the rankings again coming into his favoured Hawaiian events. This, surely had to be his year, but he lost by the slimmest of margins to the late Derek Ho. “This was my title”, he told Surfer magazine. “They just put a knife in my chest and opened it up.”
Gary quit the tour two years later, although he accepted wildcard invitations and continued to delight his many fans with gutsy performances at big-wave haunts around the world. He became an enthusiastic tow-surfer and, after his trifecta of World Masters titles, actually relaxed a little about his place in history. It’s okay to call the gentle giant Kong now.
Tickets for this awesome fundraising dinner and party are available now at the noosaworldsurfingreserve.com.au online store or follow the hyperlink www.noosaworldsurfingreserve.com.au/product/the-surfers-christmas-ball-2020/
