A Long Surfing Life
I really enjoyed this profile by William Finnegan of 75-year-old Jock Sutherland, who was one of the best surfers in the world in the late 60s and who still cherishes a good wave.
A surfer as famous as he was could have made enough money for an easy retirement, I thought, but Sutherland hadn’t cashed in. Surfing was never, to his mind, a job. Even when he was at the apex of the surfing world, he was unimpressed, stubborn. There was no pro tour in those days. “You could work for a board manufacturer, maybe have your own signature-model board,” he told me. “But that meant sell, sell, sell. That was…crass. I mean, the banality. It was antithetical to being able to enjoy being out in the water.”
Sutherland’s mom, Audrey, sounds like an amazing person:
Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:
- Clean a fish and dress a chicken
- Write a business letter
- Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord
- Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes
- Handle a boat safely and competently
- Save someone drowning using available equipment
- Read at a tenth grade level
- Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy
- Dance with any age
This list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.
Finnegan wrote Barbarian Days, a memoir of his life as a surfer — I loved it.
Comments 4
Barbarian Days is wonderful.
His mother's books about her solo adventures, Paddling My Own Canoe and Paddling North, are fantastic reads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/670010.Audrey_Sutherland
Well that's a purchase on "Paddling My Own Canoe," then.
Probably one of my favorite books I've read this year, just amazing writing all the way through. One thing I was struck by reading it is how recollections of a particular surf will stretch on for pages in great detail, but then major sections of his life story will just sort of quickly glossed over.
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