A couple of weeks back on the island of Oahu a 71-year-old homeless man was rushed to hospital after being savagely beaten in Ala Moana Beach Park, just a few hundred metres from the Waikiki glitter strip.
Nothing particularly unusual about that. These days Ala Mo is a known hangout for people sleeping rough and they are a target for lowlifes who roll them for sport. But this attack was unusual for its severity. The man was unconscious when discovered and lapsed into a coma in the ambulance. He remained on life support until surgeons operated to ease pressure on his brain. He was extremely lucky to survive.
News of the attack came as a shock for me and for many surfers around the world who knew Reno Abellira but did not know how bad his situation had become. Reno, one of the finest surfer-shapers of his generation, has been my close friend for almost 50 years. In fact a signed photo – one of many of himself he’s given me over the years – sits by my desk as I write. It shows the young Reno and Brewer team-mate Gerry Lopez in a yoga meditation with their shaping mentor Dick Brewer in Hawaii in the early ‘70s. Reno’s inscription reads: “To me ol’ china Phil”, which was always his little joke about Aussie slang.
I first met him in Sydney in 1974 when he flew out for the first Coca Cola Surfabout and the small, superbly fit and yoga-flexible Hawaiian impressed me with his quiet intensity and his powerful, crouching turns off the bottom of any wave with power. Later that year he won the Smirnoff Pro at Waimea Bay in the biggest surf ever contested (30-feet plus) to that point.
The following year I chose to focus on Reno as he travelled around the three Australian pro events on offer that season, and got to know him and then-wife Joanne very well as I put together a long profile. Over the next few Hawaiian seasons our friendship grew and in 1979 I wrote a long article for America’s Surfer Magazine called Still Reno After All These Years:
“You hear Reno described as arrogant, aloof and intense. He’s all of that, but he’s also a warm and genuine human being with a positively wicked sense of humour. He is sometimes misunderstood. There are surfers who have associated with him for years but confess they don’t really know or understand him. By his own admission he is ‘a complex person’. He wondered whether this interviewer knew enough about him to present the big picture. The answer is yes and no. Reno revels in his own complexity, and this much is for sure: any interview that laid him bare, that left no questions unanswered, he would regard as a misrepresentation.”
There was a lot I didn’t know, like that his father, a middleweight boxer, was gunned down while working a security shift at a dodgy club in Honolulu’s Chinatown just as Reno was getting his start in surfing. As a young teenager he began winning Hawaiian junior events and flew to San Diego in 1966, hoping to pick up a reserve spot on the Hawaiian team for the world titles. He didn’t, but got his chance in Puerto Rico in 1968 where he finished sixth and turned heads with his unique, low-centre-of-gravity style.
A decade later he was ranked number four in the world and made up one-half of the O’Neill Wetsuits A-team, alongside South Africa’s Shaun Tomson. He was still a force well into the ‘80s, but somewhere along the way the wheels began to fall off. His marriage broke down and he did some jail time over a cocaine importation charge, although he was later exonerated. His beautiful surfboard designs were much in demand, but Reno would disappear from the shaping bay for months at a time, showing up at some unlikely and exotic location.
I possibly didn’t see Reno for a decade, although we occasionally communicated by snail mail, but he came back into my life when I ran the Quiksilver Masters from 1999 to 2003. Once a dapper dresser, Reno in his 50s favoured Waikiki gigolo chic. At the Makaha Masters in 2003 he won heats in monster surf by day and crooned at our hotel’s open mic by night.
Around that time we flew him to Noosa for the surf festival where he blew minds with his longboard style and agreed to shave his long black locks for charity. In 2010, Reno claimed honorary Noosan status to join our Noosa Malibu Club team at the Malibu Surfing Association Teams Classic in California. The surf was small and some of the competitors resorted to questionable tactics, but Reno got us back in the game with the best “snake” I’ve ever seen, paddling around three hustling opponents to claim right of way.
I last saw my old friend nearly four years ago, when he drove up from San Clemente to Santa Barbara, his two chihuahuas on his lap, for the American premiere of our film, Men Of Wood and Foam, at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Reno was in fine form that night, trading quips with Shaun Tomson and shaping legends Rennie Yater and Steve Walden.
I’ll keep that memory alive, rather than the haunted images of him at Ala Mo, and hope that this great surfer can rebuild his life.
