For two people who clashed virtually from the moment they met, former world champion surfer Shaun Tomson and I have had an amazingly enduring friendship for almost half a century now.
I never thought that would happen when the South African born, 1977 IPS world champion took furious exception to the anti-apartheid articles I wrote for surfing magazines in Australia and the US.
“You’ve never even been to my country and you have no understanding of the issues,” he yelled at me during one of our early encounters.
He was right, of course, about my naïve idealism, and history proved me right on the morality of apartheid, but we both moved on, him to America for the sake of his career (but not before doing his mandatory military service for the country he so loved), me to a more tolerant position on the views of others.
And we became friends, as I also did with his late cousin Michael, another champion surfer and brilliant mind. Shaun will be on the Sunshine Coast only briefly next week, joining 1978 world champion Rabbit Bartholomew as keynote speakers at the at the 10th annual Board Meeting Surf Charity Legends of Surf Long Lunch which will be held at Novotel Twin Waters on 23 September.
I’m looking forward to seeing Shaun at the lunch but I wish he could have taken up my offer to spend some time in Noosa, as he did in 2008 as a special guest at the Noosa Festival of Surfing, a week of good surf and a lot of laughs, and a few tears as we shared memories. As he gets older, however, Shaun seems to get busier, and his schedule of speaking engagements is brutal.
Shaun always had the gift of the gab – at his surfing peak in the 1970s he pioneered a spectacular new approach to riding inside the wave, and declared, “Time is expanded when you’re in the tube,” and it made surfers around the world go deeper, which is more or less what he’s doing in an intellectual sense now.
“My new life is so rewarding,” he wrote to me recently.
“You write and I speak.”
Although he remained a potent force in world professional surfing right through the 1980s, Shaun also created and ran two successful surf brands, Instinct and Solitude, the latter with wife Carla, as well as adding an American master’s degree in leadership to his South African commerce degree, while he and Carla brought a son, Mathew, into the world in 1991.
I saw the Tomsons regularly during the years at the turn of the century when I ran the Quiksilver World Masters series, and saw how much they doted on their only child.
In 2006 Shaun turned his hand to film production with a documentary about the dramas and conflicts of the “Free Ride” years in Hawaii, for which he enlisted me to write a narration script for actor Edward Norton.
The genre seemed to suit Shaun admirably, and his intense pieces to camera were among the best parts of Bustin’ Down The Door, which went on to win several awards.
But before the film was finished, the Tomsons’ life came crashing down with the accidental death of 15-year-old Mathew at his school in Durban. Having also lost a son at a tender age, my wife and I understood only too well the devastation Shaun and Carla were feeling.
But instead of wallowing in grief, Shaun used elements of his surfing experience, his resilient humanism and his Jewish faith in his first book of homespun philosophy, Surfer’s Code: 12 Simple Lessons for Riding Through Life, which he dedicated to the memory of Mathew.
This later evolved into The Code: The Power of “I Will”, which was aimed at inspiring troubled teenagers. Meanwhile, he began mentoring for the charitable organisation Boys To Men, and his inspirational keynote addresses became famous around the world. And as the years rolled on, he and Carla adopted a boy, Luke, who has grown into a fine young man, much loved.
Now Shaun has joined forces with the best-selling poet-philosopher Noah benShea for The Surfer and the Sage, a book that is already a bestseller.
From the publisher’s blurb: “This timely guidebook alternates between Tomson’s inspiring experiential essays and benShea’s spiritual commentary that lift the soul… After losing his son, Tomson walked the bitter road of loss and crossed from darkness into the light. The Surfer and the Sage addresses the 18 relentless, breaking waves of life, from loss and aging to relationships and depression, and guides you to transformation.”
I remember being so proud of Shaun the night in 2008 when he graciously and tearfully accepted a standing ovation on stage at the stately old Arlington Theatre when Bustin’ Down The Door premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Nearly a decade later he used his influence to get my production, Men of Wood and Foam, accepted into the SBIFF and then organised a before-screening party for the entire local surf community at a bar around the corner. That’s Shaun: he da man!
According to Board Meeting Surf Charity chairman Mark Skinner, the annual lunch continues to get bigger each year, with ticket sales now closed and more than 600 people set to fill the room to hear from two of the world’s iconic surfers.
“Our goal is to continue to raise money to help support local kids and their families with disabilities. Over the last 12 months our charity has managed to raise over $200,000 to help over 60 local families and we want to continue to do this,” Mark said.
