By PHIL JARRATT
SPRING is meant to be the season of renewal, so I really wish I believed in an afterlife. It would help me cope with the sense of loss I’m feeling as dear friends leave the beach or prepare to do so.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the memorial paddle out for John Stokes last Sunday, so when I got home from Byron Bay on Sunday evening I checked into Facebook and saw Libby Troy’s photos of Stokesy’s farewell, which came just days after the most amazing and beautiful memorial service, orchestrated by Stokesy himself, of course.
Not far away from Libby’s post I found a photo of one of my true surfing heroes, Barry “Magoo” McGuigan. I knew immediately that all was not well. It was written in Magoo’s faraway eyes, normally clear and piercing, but now cloudy and fixed on a space beyond our reckoning. I contacted his wife Debbie who confirmed that our old mate was failing. Magoo, who has stood on his head for 10 minutes a day for most of his 85 years, never drunk nor smoked, and surfed competitively until last year, was diagnosed with Non-Hodgson’s lymphoma in 2011 and told to put his affairs in order. Rip Curl co-founder Doug Warbrick and I pitched in to fly Barry and Deb to Noosa for the surf festival, because we didn’t think he’d be around for the next one. He came, he had a ball and even paddled out and caught a wave or two with the other legends.
But cancer didn’t know what it was getting itself into when it picked a fight with a tough old bugger like Barry McGuigan, who started surfing at Bondi in the 1940s, travelled the world with Scotty Dillon in the ’50s, and joined the fire brigade in the early 1960s because shift work offered the opportunity to surf four days a week. Between emergencies, Magoo practised yoga and read. He became the firey zen surfing master.
Magoo fought back, and in early March this year, Deb called me and said, “Barry wants to come up and surf in the over seventies division.” I can’t tell you how happy that made me. He came to the Noosa Festival of Surfing, he had a ball again, and he sparkled. As people who have experienced remission will know, normality is intensified by not knowing how long it will last.
Barry always rises early and watches the sun rise over the ocean below their lovely clifftop home at Norah Head on the NSW Central Coast. Since he got sick Debbie has documented most of these golden moments, and it gives me great pleasure to flip open my Mac in the early hours, see her post and know that all is well in their world. She hasn’t posted a sunrise for a while.
Magoo is a fighter, but it’s been a long battle and his friends are taking the opportunity now to visit or phone for a chat. This humble man has been an inspiration to so many for so long, that I continue to believe that he’ll live to ride another wave. And if I was a praying kind of guy, I’d pray for that right now.
Return of the Duct Tape Invitational
In 2013 the Noosa Festival of Surfing hosted Joel Tudor’s Duct Tape Invitational for the first time, with 16 of the very best traditional longboarders in the world strutting their stuff on perfect waves at First Point. After months of negotiation with sponsors Vans, this week we finally secured the return of the Duct Tape for the 2015 Noosa Festival of Surfing, presented by Cricks Noosa.
Former world longboard champ Joel Tudor will be bringing his posse of logger kings into town to do battle with the best of our local traditionalists, including 2013 Duct Tape Noosa champ Harrison Roach. The Vans/Duct Tape crew are also expected to bring a contemporary art show with them. The seven heats of the Duct Tape will be held in the best conditions available over the full week of the festival. Sure to be one of the highlights.
