Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 423 i Surfing World Magazine

Up until February 10, Pipeline was never for the girls. Molly Picklum has been surfing Pipe ever since she first went to Hawaii five years ago. At that stage there wasn’t even a women’s event at Pipe, but the Australian teenager was accustomed to reef surf at home on the Central Coast, where the local chargers had taken her under their wing on bigger days. At Pipe however she was on her own and wasn’t exactly ‘surfing’ as much as ‘surviving’ amongst the most contested and dangerous lineup in the world. “I don’t know if there’s any real strategy that works out there, purely because it’s just so hectic,” says Molly of her time in the Pipe lineup. “It’s very humbling. I like to have a good read on the…

Swampy, oily and damn near unlovable, Kurnell was the little town that Sydney forgot. Hidden inside the neck of Botany Bay and cut off from the outside world by sand dunes, mangroves, an oil refinery and a shitworks, it was an unlucky smear of suburbia in a Mad Max landscape. As a child in Kurnell, young Mark Occhilupo would have recurring dreams of burning oil refineries, people running, screaming, the world in chaos. These may have simply been premonitions of his win at Huntington Beach in 1986, but the reality of Occy’s childhood in Kurnell was somewhat less apocalyptic. There was the beach straight across the road from the Occhilupo family home at 41 Captain Cook Drive. There was a pool in the backyard, a fruit shop next door, and…

In March ’85, Luciano Occhilupo watched his son surf for the first time. “The first and only time he came down to watch,” qualifies Occ. “I’d made the finals of the Beaurepaires at Cronulla, and in between heats I’d come home to Kurnell and Mum was making me smoothies. Anyway, Dad looked at me and said, ‘I’m coming down.’ I couldn’t believe it, but thought it was great. Then I got down there and won the final and suddenly here’s Dad. I saw him in the crowd coming across in his green speedoes and I’m like, ‘Dad, can you put some pants on?’ But I ended up winning and I was so proud.” Occ took home $30,000 and a car, the biggest win of his career, and Luciano being there…

On the other side of the river at Teahupoo, the black-dirt path snakes through a grove of overhanging casuarinas, lazy palms and hibiscus. Tahitian kids kick a ball while the dogs do very little. The scene is a living, rioting Gaugin painting, a Tahitian cathedral, and late in the afternoon there’s a moment where the setting sun floods the fresco and turns it into a golden grotto. Missing only the harps and angels, it’s the kind of scene you might expect to encounter some kind of resurrected religious figure out for a stroll. On cue, here’s Occ. “After winning that contest and walking back along the point I had a flash this was going to be my year. It was a strong, overwhelming feeling, a spiritual feeling. The trees form…

The surf industry, as we knew it even a decade ago, is now decrepit, expired, bloodless. For better or for worse, we have entered a new age of surfing. The time of big contracts, endorsements deals, and fervent stickering for any able-bodied shred head with a serviceable face has turned to dust. The reason for this is simple. Surfing isn’t hot anymore. We’ve been to Nike and back, but rapid growth often equals rapid crash. We have witnessed the rise and fall of surf grandeur. Never again will the industry grow crops from such prosperous soil. For those who were lucky enough to tread the red velvet carpet of corporate glamour, accepting this as the fate of the industry must be akin to swallowing a shard of broken glass. Sometimes,…

“We’d heard he was in town,” recalls Occ. “It was the day before the Straight Talk Tyres contest started in Cronulla and the waves were pretty solid – six foot. I remember walking over the sand hills and looking up the beach and there was one guy out. It was him. He was on this deep six-channel thruster and ripping like nothing we’d ever seen. He blew us away. He stayed with Jim Banks that first year; Banksy had a house on the beach atWanda up top of the hill near my school, and that was where I met him. That’s where I met Tom Curren.” Occ knew of Curren, Curren knew of Occ, but neither knew how entangled their careers would soon become. Their first meeting, in Jim Banks’…

After three years of centrifugal travel, being spun from one corner of the globe to the next, Occ suddenly woke up one morning and found himself at home with the room still spinning. The world meanwhile stood still. “It was a weird feeling, far out… Huntington to Kurnell. The guys were going to Europe and here I was in sleepy Kurnell. I sat on the lounge and just thought of… well, nothing really.” Occ sold up his 11th storey penthouse apartment in Cronulla to pay off his credit card debt, sold all his furniture, took a deep breath and wondered what the hell just happened. In an interview he’d given three years earlier Occ had said, “I can’t sit down somewhere. I always want to be going somewhere and doing…

The first day of the new millennium and Mark Occhilupo was the world surfing champion. The world that day felt a little bizarre, but right. Occ’s win had been closure in a way for surfers everywhere, but at home in Australia his unlikely comeback story had made him a national hero. In the absence of great artistic and academic icons, Australians love people who win things, and Occ was mobbed wherever he went. Occ was bronzed, canonised… and he was everywhere. “I didn’t mind all the attention. I liked it actually. I’d always wanted to be the guy, and now I was the guy. Does that make me sound like a bit of a wanker? Maybe, huh?” After the three-week rolling party ran out of participants, Occ still hadn’t found…

“I often used to go to Sydney with my Dad to pick up boards for the shop. He had a panel van and in the early days he’d drive down to GordonWoods and Barry Bennett, fill the car and drive back. They were the first two board manufacturers he started stocking, and from there it was Geoff McCoy and Nipper Williams. At Nipper’s I used to collect foam offcuts, one-and-a-half to two-feet long, and I’d take them home and set up in the driveway and shape mini surfboards out of them with a Surform. I wasn’t very good academically at school, but I was good at anything to do with my hands, like woodwork, anything creative, so the whole idea of shaping surfboards appealed to me from an early age.”…

This was pro surfing Pangaea, a time when giants walked the earth, stalking an alien landscape – Neptune Beach, Fistral, Trigg, Wrightsville – and the tour was populated by characters so large they bordered on self-parody. They were guys who believed the whole point of pro surfing was to make the other guy disappear in your shadow. Ego and rating were tethered. They all could see pro surfing was set to boom and were all willing it into existence. They all wanted to be front and centre when it did. The class of ’84 was full of future legends. There were the old guard; Rabbit, Shaun and Cheyne, hanging on grimly into the geriatric twilight of their late twenties. There were the new generation; Carroll, Curren, Pottz, Hardman, Barton, Gerr…

Gordon called Jack, Jack spoke to George, George called Occy, and within the week Occ was on a plane to Perth. “I flew over thinking, oh shit, I don’t know if I can do this,” recalls Occ. “But sure enough I got on that plane and went to Quindilup. Jack McCoy was living on the farm with George and Tracy while he was building his house down the road, and I went there and got on the program for six weeks. Running, surfing. No beer, no TV, no pokies. Good food. George was a fisherman and Tracy cooked the healthiest food.” Occ slept in George’s garage amongst his boats and his fishing gear, “and if he caught me lying around doing nothing, he’d tell me to get off my arse…

Soon after this piece was published, two significant things happened in Mark Occhilupo’s life. In a way they were both related. First, he met Jess Crawford while surfing out the front one day in Rainbow Bay. The niece of photographer Peter Crawford – who Occ had travelled and shot with back in his teens – Jess was a vibrant soul, and landed in Occ’s life at a time when he needed one around. Jess was also a single mum. Occ was a single dad. The pair hit it off famously, then got busy. Jess fell pregnant, first with Jasper, then with Java. Added to Jay and Jonah – and Jess’s kids – Occ had his hands full. At an age most men are contemplating retirement, Occ was pushing kids into…