Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.BZ

[man] Okay, go ahead and roll cam.

Here we go.

[projector rattling]

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ

[beeps]

[power dies]

-How's the speed? -[man 2] It's all good.

-[man 1] All good. -[man 2] Okay.

-Good? -[man 1] Yep.

You know, I'd like to take this opportunity

to apologize to all the people that I stole waves from,

because, you know, I know that

my surfing has been a subject

of admiration,

and the way my surfing got to that level

is stealing a lot of waves from other surfers.

You see, taking waves from other people

is really the same thing as stealing,

and if you do it enough, and I did it a lot,

you can become pretty good at it.

You also stop thinking about what a low thing it is.

[chuckles]

You know, everything that I read in my yoga studies

talked about full acceptance, no resistance,

yielding, allowing,

nourishing, understanding, love.

And I guess my disharmonious behavior

with a lot of other surfers I felt was, uh,

balanced out by my trying to be in total harmony

with the waves.

You know, I've come to realize that yoga and surfing

have been perhaps the most significant

yin-yang relationship,

yin-yang balancing act of my entire life.

[percussive jazz playing]

[distant waves lapping]

[subdued percussive music playing]

[dramatic music swelling]

I'd probably spent a good 30 years of my life

surfing this wave,

and I felt I'd kind of learned something,

learned how to ride it,

learned to be comfortable with it,

actually felt I had

a special relationship with this wave.

It really had a personality.

It was so intense all the way,

and you were dodging landslides and earthquakes,

and there was a big awakening at the end of the Pipeline.

Because that tube was so big,

when it compressed at the end,

the spit would come out

and, whoosh...

blow you right off your board.

You know, the funny thing is about the Pipeline

is that it all happened pretty quickly.

I mean, in high school, honestly,

I never had any dreams about surfing,

going anywhere than right where I was with it.

Surfing didn't really click for me till I was in college.

[rock guitar playing]

When I graduated high school,

out of 500 people, I was number 250,

so I was as average as you could be.

I ended up going to California to go to college in 1966.

It was actually my first time out of Hawaii.

I didn't really give it the time that I should have.

It was like I was just kind of going wherever life took me.

['60s music playing]

I met a guy that lived in Whittier.

He was a surfer, and we became friends.

♪ Ba ba bee ba ba ba boo buh buh ♪

♪ Whoo whoo whoo ♪

He had this great van.

He goes, "Let's go take a trip down to Mexico."

[singer shrieks]

You know, in those days you crossed the border with a driver's license.

We went down and ended up

at like K38.5 or so,

and looked out, man!

There are these glassy, cool-looking waves out there.

So we went out surfing.

[acoustic guitar playing]

It was cold. The water was freezing.

Eventually I got too cold. I went in.

The sun had been out for a while

so the rocks on the beach were big black rocks,

you know, and I knew that they were gonna be warm,

so I crawled on one.

I was laying on my back, I had my eyes closed,

and I was seeing, in my mind's eye,

images of surfing.

All of the sudden, I looked a little closer,

and it was the first time I saw an image

in my mind's eye of me surfing.

[guitar playing hard rock]

I was doing all these things that I'd never done before on a surf board.

Suddenly, I'm just going, "Wow!

Look at me, man, I'm ripping!"

I was born to be a surfer.

I didn't know it until that moment.

[cool jazz playing]

Ala Moana was the whole foundation

of my development as a surfer.

I mean, I surfed every other place,

but Ala Moana was the place

where it kind of all came together.

It had a tube

and was the first wave that I saw

legitimate tube riding going on back in the early '60s.

['60s guitar music playing]

There was a surfing milkman named Conrad Canha,

who for some reason was thinking ten years ahead in his approach.

[Gerry] When it came to tube riding,

I don't know if anybody else was doing that before him.

He was this short little guy with a cannonball stomach

that he would use to his advantage

and throw that stomach to accelerate.

He'd take off, and if you were paddling out from the side,

he would disappear.

And, pfft, come out the other end.

And I watched that and went,

"Man! I wanna learn how to do that."

[rock guitar playing]

[man] Early mid-'60s, Gerry, myself,

and the rest of us in the neighborhood

were all riding long boards.

Then in 1967 began

what was known

as the shortboard revolution,

and it basically took

from '67 to '69.

Board went from 10 foot to 7 foot.

And in that period,

it made a whole new generation of surfers.

[Gerry] My first surfboard was a big longboard,

and I didn't have enough money to buy a new one.

So a good friend of mine, Buddy Dunphy,

goes, "Well, let's make our own surfboards."

So we got our old longboards

and we stripped the fiberglass off them

and, in his father's garage on sawhorses.

You know, he went first and he made his surfboard,

and then he was done and it was my turn.

I made my surfboard,

and I went down to the Hare Krishna shop

and bought a poster and cut out the blue Ganesh elephant,

and I glass that on the board, that was my logo.

And then we had surfboards that we'd made.

"Okay, let's go down to the beach and surf them."

[rock music playing]

So we paddled out at Ala Moana on these new boards

and everybody's looking at them, you know,

'cause most of the guys are still on their longboards.

And we took off, and I remember thinking,

"Man, my board rides like the wind, man."

"This is the greatest board I've ever had," you know.

And I look at Dunphy and he's coming on the next wave.

He comes up next to me and I go,

"This is the best board I've ever had," and he goes, "Same here."

And we rode a few more waves

and, you know, I paddled in,

and there was another friend in the parking lot,

and he came up to me just as I'm climbing out of the water,

and he's got money in his hand, you know, and he says, "I got $80, I want that board."

And I looked at the money and I looked at the board,

and I thought back, "Okay,

$15 was all I paid for this board."

I grabbed the money and gave him the board,

and I was in the surfboard business just like that.

Pretty soon guys were ordering boards from me,

and the next thing I know,

Fred Swartz offers me a job, a real job

at Surf Line Hawaii,

shaping surfboards

under my own name.

It was kind of a big deal.

I had a job!

['60s rock music playing]

[Randy] Up through the late '60s,

Surf Line was the main shop in Hawaii.

It was the place to be.

It had the best shapers, designers.

It was kind of the epicenter where things were happening.

And Jack Shipley was working as the head sales guy there.

Jack was managing Surf Line for the owner, Fred Swartz.

It was during that period, we became pretty good friends.

[Jack] I sold the boards

and Gerry worked in the shaping department in the back

and we became sort of fans of each other.

He appreciated what I did, and vice versa.

[Gerry] We surfed together, we did a lot together,

and, you know, I realized that if you want to be a surfer,

this is the best job you can have.

So at the same time all this stuff was happening,

yoga came into my life.

One day I saw a group of girls

looking at this announcement for a yoga class,

and I went to that yoga class

expecting to see them again.

And this was like an outdoor class,

and the instructor was this young gal.

And I remember just watching her move,

going, "Wow!

Look at how smooth and fluid that is."

By the end of the class,

I was convinced that yoga

was gonna make my surfing better.

Right from the start, I dove into it.

I embraced it in a bear hug.

But I went to the Honolulu bookstore

and I said, "Let me see all your books on yoga."

The one that I still have

and really made an impression on me

was "The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga"

by Swami Vishnudevananda.

From the beginning, there was this relationship

that I was striving for between surfing and yoga.

It wasn't something that I had to bond with.

I was already bonded with it.

I remember thinking that

if I could be as smooth doing the poses

on my surfboard, then I could be a good surfer.

[intense surf music playing]

I was 20 years old.

I felt like my surfing was improving.

I was doing my yoga.

I was competing in events.

I had gone to the U.S. championships

in Huntington Beach.

[Sam] I saw an article in "Surfer" magazine about the U.S. championships

in 1969, and there was this kid from Hawaii,

Gerry Lopez, sitting in his contest jersey,

in the full lotus position,

meditating before going out on his heat.

The next thing you know, he's on the cover of "Surfer" magazine, 1970,

ripping at Ala Moana.

If you were on the cover of "Surfer,"

that meant that you are a real up-and-comer.

You know, there he is on the mainland, one of the best surfers in the United States,

and there was sort of some foreshadowing that he was really something special.

[Gerry] In that time period,

I was still working at Surf Line,

my boards were just becoming popular.

Working for Fred was tough.

You know, he wanted it his way.

[Jack] You know, the owner had a little bit different vision with things,

and he was really into sales and numbers and all that kind of stuff.

[Gerry] And Jack had the idea,

"Well, maybe we could start our own shop."

There was this shop that was up for sale.

It was the old Hobie shop,

which was the original surf shop in Hawaii.

So we got into the shop, it was the summer of 1970,

and then we had to come up with a name for the shop,

and a couple months before,

a friend of mine was smoking a joint,

and he says, "Hey, guys, gotta try this.

I call it Lightning Bolt."

And Jack smoked it and went, "Wow, this is really great,"

and months later at the shop, we're going, "Okay,

well, what are we gonna call it?", you know.

And all of the sudden, Maryann was in the kitchen,

this is Jack's wife, and she goes,

"Why don't you call it 'Lightning Bolt'?"

And we went...

"Okay. Let's call it Lightning Bolt."

[thunder crashing]

[rock music playing]

It really escalated very quickly from there.

I mean, in a matter of months, it was really popular.

You know, and then we suffered a pretty big setback,

'cause we started in the summer

and it was the night before Thanksgiving

that all of the sudden we got a call

at like 2:00 in the morning,

they go, "Hey, your surf shop's on fire."

What?!

We went down there and the whole shop was burned.

The fire investigators came around, they go,

"Hey, this was arson.

Somebody squirted a flammable liquid

under your back door here."

They said, "This is exactly how the fire started,

and it spread to here."

[man] Who did it?

Somebody that was not happy with us.

[Randy] A year before that, I left Surf Line

and opened a Dewey Weber dealership down the road.

The owner of Surf Line, Fred Swartz,

I actually caught him looking in the window of my shop,

right before I opened it up, and then the next day,

all the windows in my shop got broken.

Well, a year later, Gerry and Jack Shipley

got their store up and running, and there was a big fire

that the whole shop got caught on fire,

and unfortunately it reflected back on Surf Line.

Everything was gone.

So we started again.

Right from the beginning,

it was clearly delineated.

Jack ran the shop,

I went and shaped and built boards.

You know, Gerry wanted to work as little as possible,

but he was really good to me and to the shop

when the surf was bad.

Luckily, the surf was not good all the time.

His talent was unbelievable.

His hands, he's got magic hands.

The boards that he made were really special.

None of them were ever hurried, 'cause he was pretty slow.

He was slow because he was a perfectionist.

His work was real easy to represent

for me as the salesperson

and real easy to sell and get out the door.

What was happening with surfboards

was happening and changing on a day-to-day basis.

Lightning Bolt was at the forefront of that.

Our shop was in town, which is the South Shore.

You know, the southern swells coming from the southern hemi.

In the wintertime, we were surfing the North Shore,

which was where all the winter swells came to,

and the North Shore was a whole different mindset.

There's a lot of great surfers

that surfed the Pipeline before me,

but they weren't having a lot of success

because their equipment was holding them back.

[man] The surfer had to overcome his board

as well as survive the power of the wave,

which was jacking on the reef

and the roundness of the tube

and the immense amount of water in the lip

and the shallowness of the bottom.

[Gerry] Because it was so intense,

not that many people surfed there.

So this was this spot

that was kind of empty.

I liked that space,

that space where I'm not having

to jockey so much with other surfers

to try and figure a wave out.

[intense music playing]

I spent a lot of time there,

and it took a lot of time to figure it out.

'Cause it was a tricky spot.

I mean, it was, you know, way more than Ala Moana.

I mean, Ala Moana was friendly.

It was soft, it was forgiving.

It really was welcoming.

But Pipeline was fierce, you know.

It wanted to bite you.

It could hurt you.

Early shots you see of Gerry trying to surf Pipeline,

he's trying to figure how to get those straight stiff boards

to fit into the wave.

[Gerry] That was a big obstacle that had to be overcome,

and I went through a lot of surfboards

in the process of doing that.

Eventually, we had tossed around this idea

of a 9-inch tail,

a foot up from the tail,

and that was what a Waimea gun had.

Nobody had a board for any of the other spots

that had a tail that narrow,

and I went, "Well, I'm gonna try that."

And I made this board, and I looked at it,

and I went, "Wow, no one's got a board like this,

but, well, I'll give it a try," and I went ahead and shaped it.

Went out and, I mean, right from the very first wave,

I went, "Ooh.

I think I got something here."

You've got to remember,

there was no history behind him.

He is making it himself.

[man] It's not that hard to paddle into a wave at Pipeline.

You can force yourself to do that.

It's the really, really, really rare surfer

who can then get to their feet

and keep their heart rate down and stay more or less relaxed.

[sitar playing]

[Gerry] Studying yoga,

that's what allowed everything to happen

at the Pipeline for me.

♪ Tangerine ♪

♪ Come back to me ♪

[Sam] There's a real fascinating advertisement in "Surfer" magazine

in 1972 for a guru named Yogananda.

[Gerry] I started reading

Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi."

It really revealed to me, obviously,

the concept of yin and yang,

which is more of a Chinese philosophy,

but also a very big part of yoga philosophy,

especially the part where it said

that health and harmony is created

when yin and yang are in balance.

[man] Can I read something he said...

-Yeah. -[man] ...in "Surfer" magazine,

that you also appear in.

He says, "A person with a calm mind is a happy person.

Instead of becoming uptight,

one should be able to swing into intense activity

and like the pendulum,

return to the center of calmness.

Yoga produces that calmness."

Isn't that amazing?

And that was in "Surfer" magazine.

[Sam] What Yogananda is preaching, so to speak,

was this balance, a pendulum swing,

between dynamic action and stillness and calm,

and that it's that pendulum swing,

not living in one space, not living in the other,

but the balance of the two,

and you can really see, Gerry took that

and he applied it to the incredibly dynamic sport

of surfing.

['60s guitar music playing]

[Gerry] I understand that that balance isn't static.

You know, it's constant, you know, readjusting.

All of that requires tremendous discipline.

You know, you gotta practice,

you gotta do it over and over again.

But that's what surfing was too.

And that's why both of them

were things that I embraced

more than anything else in life,

because to me they were going the same way.

They were side by side.

I needed that same stillness and calmness

at the Pipeline.

You have to be at peace with this wave.

You had to have that type of concentration

where your mind was steady.

For your mind to be still, your breath has to be still.

And to calm the breath, your body must be still.

So, you know, a lot of times

you'd see pictures of me standing really still.

Well, I'm not standing really still, I'm going like a bat outta hell

because the surfboard's going really fast,

but my body is still

because I'm trying to still my mind.

And that was really the only way

to really connect with that wave at the Pipeline.

In a western sense, the concept is,

you're riding this wave and you're concentrating on it,

but you're concentrating by thinking all these thoughts

about this wave.

And yogic concentration is much different.

It's one-pointed focus on the object of concentration.

By focusing your mind steadily on this object,

you actually absorb the essence

of your object of concentration of this wave,

and this is what developed for me at the Pipeline.

[contemplative music playing]

To be a great surfer you have to have some kind of physical advantage.

You have to have great balance,

great awareness about your body.

Every great surfer has to be blessed with some kind

of special, and he's one of them.

When you see Gerry Lopez,

there's this connectivity of tissue

with the connectivity of water.

[Matt] You don't get to be that relaxed and that calm

and that serene

without having put in the 10,000 hours,

without having taken so many wipeouts

and knowing that you can come up and also getting hurt

and knowing that you're going to heal.

And also looking at so many waves

until you know just which one you want.

There's a hard side to Gerry

that I don't think has ever been part of his public version.

Without a doubt, he's incredibly competitive.

Man, it was head to head with Gerry at Pipeline.

Gerry wanted that best wave, that best barrel.

[Gerry] I was a terrible person.

I had no qualms whatsoever about taking waves

from people that were already trying to ride them.

Gerry was actually one of the most aggressive surfers

on the North Shore.

He's out there to get waves and surf well,

and he's very serious about it.

[Steve] Because he was so Zen and elegant and smooth,

it didn't mean he was passive.

He went after what he wanted and took it.

He'll command respect because he's Gerry Lopez,

and people will part ways for a little bit.

[Gerry] In the early '70s,

surfing was going through this growth period

where all of the sudden, there were too many surfers,

too many good surfers,

and the whole traditional social order of the lineup

was being altered.

In this new world,

you absolutely had to be aggressive.

[Tom] Tempers flare, it gets very aggressive out there.

The air can get thick,

and there can be physical interaction

between the surfers.

It's primeval, you know.

It is pretty much law of the jungle at that point.

[Matt] To own a spot like Pipeline

the way Gerry owned Pipeline,

you don't do that by, you know, Zen and mellow.

You do it up by being hard ass.

[Sam] Most of the people at Pipeline

have got their hearts in their throat,

that he would drop down

on a big Pipeline widowmaker

and tweak his nose a little bit

before he pulled into the barrel.

Think of how that subtle intimidation

worked for the rest of that crowd.

If you take it from a western perspective, there's kind of an enigma there.

You're thinking, "Well, Gerry's just this mellow guy on shore

and then this tiger shark out in the water."

You know, he can't be both,

but from an eastern viewpoint,

from Taoism, from the yin and the yang,

you can be both at the same time.

The true sage, the true bodhi,

he goes down the middle, and that's what Gerry does.

What people don't say about Gerry is,

apart from getting the most beautiful tube rides in that period,

I think he took the most vicious wipeouts of that period, too,

so the magic didn't always work,

the sleight of hand didn't always work.

I mean, he just got punished out there.

I remember one time I had this kind of unusual wipeout, and I landed on my fin.

And stabbed me pretty good, you know,

and I remember, as I was being tumbled,

reaching back and feeling the tear in my shorts

and feeling my hand go into the wound,

and all four fingers went in all the way.

I went, "Ah, shit."

And all of the sudden, he comes walking up the beach

and he's holding his butt, you know, he comes up, he goes,

"My board flipped over and I landed on my fin."

[Gerry] Came in the yard, you know,

Fat Paul looked at me,

looked at the cut and goes,

"Oh, you gotta go to the hospital."

I had this Delta, Oldsmobile Delta 88, man,

the thing drank more than I did back then.

I could lay rubber from Chun's Reef to Waimea.

[engine revving]

We go to Kahuku Hospital,

then the nurse comes and she cleans it all up

and says, "Doctor will be in here in a minute."

And Gerry's looking at me and he goes,

"I got to fart."

And I go, "Go ahead," you know, "Why not?"

And he farts, and blood comes out of the wound.

He looked at me and he goes, "What's wrong?"

And I said, "Blood came out of your wound,"

which meant he had punctured his intestines.

So the doctor walks in, I tell the doc,

and he goes, "Well, okay,

we'll call up, you know, the next hospital in Honolulu

and, you know, wait for the ambulance."

I go, "Forget the ambulance, I got the Delta 88!"

[engine revving]

[Gerry] The next thing I knew,

it was the next morning, and I woke up,

and then the doctor walked in, and he goes,

"Yeah, you're gonna have to wear a colostomy bag."

Surfing came really hard to me.

I put in a lot of time

and a lot of agony and pain and suffering, you know.

For me it was very difficult.

[peaceful guitar music playing]

Growing up, we lived every weekend at the beach.

That's what you did.

My parents were both really good swimmers,

And when we had lessons, it was all three of us.

[man] It was a magic childhood,

growing up in Waikiki.

We'd pack a lunch, they'd just drop us off.

We'd bury our towel and our $2 for the day,

go surf, come in, buy a hotdog.

We spent a lot of family time down at the beach.

The surfers were right out there riding the waves,

and we looked at that and we'd go up on the wall there

and watch the guys body-surfing, paipo boarding.

We went down one day.

I was 10, Victor was 8.

We got to pick a board out of the rack.

My mom swam out,

and I just remember the first time

she shoved me into a wave.

I was still on my belly,

but I just distinctly remember

that feeling of gliding.

It was just like magic.

I got back to my mom,

she goes, "You wanna do that again?"

I go, "Yeah."

She goes, "Okay, this time try to stand up."

When you were standing, the feeling was amplified,

that gliding sensation,

that feeling like you were flying like a bird.

[gulls crying]

Both those first two waves

have stayed with me my whole life.

[man] Did you ever expect that you were going to become a famous surfer?

No, that was just...

There were photographers filming and, you know,

there were surf movies,

and, you know, I was in some of them, and...

[man] Well, you were in all of them.

Well... [laughs]

Where I come from in South Africa,

that was a long way away from the center of surfing.

Our only conduit into surfing was the surf magazines,

and then when the surf films would come to town.

[Gerry] In 1972, Greg MacGillivray,

him and Jim Freeman came out with a move

called "Five Summer Stories."

[rock music playing]

"Five Summer Stories" is the first major quality documentation.

There was other surf movies that were nowhere near as good a quality.

[Shaun] When that surf film came to town,

every single surfer would gather.

The electricity in those small auditoriums...

We used to sit there and we used to wait

for that first wave to come on the screen.

Wait and wait and wait.

And the screen would happen and we went, "Wow!"

[rock music playing]

And those moments, man, that I saw up on the screen there,

they just burned into my consciousness, burned.

When I say "burned," talk about not imprinted,

burned into my consciousness.

[Matt] You had the two best

filmmakers working in concert.

They're covering it from multiple angles.

Because it was Gerry and super slow,

you would be sort of hypnotized.

[Sam] Filmed for the first time

at 200 frames per second in super slow motion,

Gerry's surfing in "Five Summer Stories"

was like nothing we'd ever seen before.

[Steve] That film was big in the evolution of the sport of surfing,

and Gerry had a starring role in it,

which made him hugely important.

[Randy] Gerry, all of the sudden, "Five Summer Stories" came out,

and boom, everybody wanted to ride a Lightning Bolt.

[thunder crashes]

[Jack] We started this program of loaning surfboards

to pro surfers.

[Shaun] Us young guys coming over from South Africa,

we just didn't have much money, we couldn't afford boards.

Lightning Bolt gave us as many boards as we needed.

[Matt] All of the sudden, almost everybody in Hawaii

is riding Lightning Bolt surfboards,

and it was a glorious time, visually,

'cause the boards looked so beautiful.

Everyone's on Bolts.

Every poster, every magazine cover

was basically a Lightning Bolt ad.

And there's not even any letters.

It's just the bolt.

[Jack] That's really what launched our program

outside of the Gerry Lopez thing.

We got coverage bigtime from so many different pro surfers,

and just massive sales.

[Randy] Every kid across America

wanted to be Gerry Lopez in a tube,

and if you're gonna do that, what do you need?

You need a Lightning Bolt.

Guys were drawing lightning bolts on their own boards.

[Michael] Having the bolt on your board

was the ultimate badge of authenticity.

[Sam] They had status like no other company had ever had.

They had the whole surfing world behind them.

"Give it to us! Give it to us, Lightning Bolt!

We want that energy, we want the pure source!"

And that was even their motto, "the pure source."

And the irony of this, they're selling a lot of boards,

but they're not really making any money.

[music slows, stops]

Nobody makes a lot of money on surfboards.

The margin is tiny.

I got paid, I think, like $1,500 a month.

In the '70s, that was making a fine living in Hawaii.

We lived in a house right on the beach

and it was 425 bucks a month.

And Gerry got paid well for his work.

Gerry's never been a fancy guy.

He always wanted a truck that worked well

and a place to fix his food.

[Gerry] We paid for our lifestyle.

Paid the rent, we paid for our health insurance,

which was only $18 a month back then.

That was all we expected out of this.

[Sam] You have to realize that at the time

that Lightning Bolt was really becoming

the most recognizable brand in surfing,

they were just coming out of a short but very potent period of anti-commercialism.

And the thing that Lightning Bolt had more than any other company,

they had Gerry Lopez.

They had the ultimate in authenticity.

We had a friend, his name was Duke Boyd.

He had started a company called Hang Ten.

[Steve] Hang Ten clothing was the first commercially mass-produced brand

that actually were accepted by the surfing community.

Duke started coming around the shop,

looking around, and he said,

"You know, you have a really great brand here."

[Steve] So he got Jack and Gerry to agree

to allow him to license the brand.

[Gerry] I didn't really have any specific dreams.

I liked to go surfing

and I didn't like to work that much,

so I thought, why not?

Well, I had the secret thought, maybe it could be another Nike.

[Gerry] Jack had a dream.

He wanted to have a house in Hawaii Kai

on the cliff there.

We were thinking, well, hey,

maybe you're gonna get that house now.

[Shaun] I think Lightning Bolt, for that time,

was one of the greatest brands.

Just the representation of...

power, tube-riding, soul,

and Gerry just riding that hurricane.

[rock music playing]

♪ Every time I'm drivin' down the road ♪

♪ Feels like I'm flyin' through the sky... ♪

Gerry was the embodiment of Lightning Bolt.

Gerry Lopez was the brand. Gerry Lopez was Lightning Bolt.

There was a period from like 1972 up until the late '70s

where Gerry Lopez was easily

the most famous surfer in the world.

[Randy] He's all over the place in all these movies,

all the magazines are featuring him.

He didn't realize the impact that he was making

as he was making it.

[Jack] He had a very good, strong advertising program,

emphasizing Gerry,

and we really got off to a good start,

licensees all over the world,

and we were prepared for greatness.

Sales got up to quite a high figure.

It got to about 12 million bucks a year, pretty quick.

[Sam] Somehow, from the humble little shop on Kapiolani Boulevard,

Gerry Lopez and Jack Shipley were on the cusp

of the biggest brand in surfing.

They were right on the edge

of that explosion of the surfwear market.

They were perfectly positioned on the takeoff.

[Gerry] Suddenly it wasn't just a sportswear company,

he announced that, "Well, what we have is a licensing company,"

and, you know, I didn't know what that was, and I went,

"That's bigger, right?"

And he goes, "Yeah, it's huge."

[jazz orchestra playing]

[Matt] They put "Bolt" on a lot of stuff,

and most of it wasn't very good.

The Lightning Bolt necklace and the bracelet and the surf wax

and the backpacks and the skateboards and the beach towels.

[Gerry] I don't think anyone had ever sold

that much surf shit before.

[Sam] They'd marketed it and licensed it

to anything they could put it on,

but ironically, it was the least pure.

[Matt] Bolt went from being untouchably cool

to kind of not cool

in the space of just two or three years.

They really overcooked it.

Surfers realized, "Hey, they've left us.

They've almost betrayed us."

And Gerry Lopez went from that pure source

to being the most commercialized,

marketed surfer in the world.

I think that, though, that is a measure

of his approach to the sport,

that he could survive that

with his reputation intact.

[Matt] I've never understood how he pulled that off,

except to say that he had so much cool in the bank

that he was able to flog some really awful stuff,

but it doesn't stick to Gerry.

[Gerry] I don't know why I did all that stuff,

but I just, I did it because I felt

that that was one of my obligations

to being a part of Lightning Bolt.

He'd poured everything into the Lightning Bolt brand.

It was his first business of his life.

It was a very, very successful thing.

And he was very young and a surfer,

and all of the sudden,

all these things started happening.

[Gerry] The two principals in Lightning Bolt

was the company called Keepers in California

and Duke Boyd,

and the money started coming in

and they started fighting over how to spend the money.

The whole relationship unraveled from that point forward

and turned into a big legal battle,

and Jack and I, of course, got sucked into that.

Gerry and I picked different sides in the argument.

I was trying to get him to go the way that I went,

and he had to choose between me and Duke,

and he chose Duke, you know,

and I went, "I respect that," you know.

"I love you, but I've got to go this other way."

[Steve] Everyone in that lost.

It was a juggling act that was very delicate and easy to fumble,

and they did, they just did.

The Bolt shop finally closed.

It just sort of dried up

and had its day.

Gerry and I were in a little restaurant,

a health food restaurant called the Summerhouse,

and in the kitchen was a picture

my partner, Dick Hoole, had taken of Wayne Lynch.

[Gerry] A picture of Wayne Lynch,

who, to me, was one of the greatest Australian surfers.

You know, he was a big hero of mine.

And he's surfing this bitching wave,

I mean, this barreling, you know, really nice wave,

and I went, "Where is this?"

And I go, "It's that place I wanna take you to,

called Uluwatu in Bali."

And I said, "Man, we're going."

The plane lands there, the door opens.

First it's just a rush of things.

It's the heat and the smell.

[Jack M.] It smells like perfume.

And it's actually these clove cigarettes

that all the Balinese people smoke.

Everyone was so happy and uplifting and joyful.

[Gerry] Somehow it was all familiar.

It was like, "Wow, I'm home."

We get taken to this incredible little fishing village,

this little place in Kuta.

There's no tourists, coconut trees everywhere.

It felt familiar. It was comfortable.

[Jack M.] The next day we get up and go to Uluwatu,

and we all knew that it was the end of the Bukit.

It was a peninsula that sticks down

at the bottom of the island of Bali.

So going to Uluwatu was about an hour drive.

[Gerry] Got out there,

and it's just jungle on both sides.

"Is this it?"

And there was like a little trail.

So we grab our boards and we start going.

The farmers stick cactus in the ground,

which grows, so it's actually like a maze.

And, "now let's go this way."

And the next thing you know, we've been walking for half an hour

and I go, "Jack, where's this going?"

We're an hour on the trail, we don't know where we are.

We don't even know how to get back to where we're going.

[Jack M.] We wander off for another 15 minutes or so,

and, ah, like manna from heaven,

these two surfers come walking down the track.

And it turns out to be Mike Boyum and his brother Bill.

They look at us and go, "What are you guys doing?"

"We're lost, what does it look like?"

They go, "Well, follow us."

So we got right down to Uluwatu.

[Jack M.] To get into the surf, you had to walk down the hill

into this ravine

that had a little drop-off

and a little bamboo ladder,

about three big bamboo poles together,

that you have to tightrope your way down with your board

and get into this cave and paddle out.

[Gerry] This is dreamy as surf could be.

And there'd just be lines to the horizon.

There's nobody in the water.

[guitar strumming]

It was the most consistent, perfect, clean,

uncrowded waves that I'd ever seen.

It was just like that all day long.

[Jack M.] Couple of days later, Mike Boyum

invites us over to his house,

which is just across from where we're staying.

He has half a dozen house workers

cleaning the place, cooking food,

doing everything that he needs to make it comfortable.

[Gerry] Mike had been there for a while.

We're all kind of asking, "Who is this guy?"

My brother's name is Michael Boyum.

And he was basically a hoodlum.

[Jack M.] We'd heard he had done some sort of smuggling

and that he was on the run.

The story came out that Bill came out to Bali

and found him and kind of slapped some sense into him, went,

"Are you kidding? Look at how good these waves are."

[Bill] By the time I showed up,

Mike just wanted to drop solidly into surfing

and drop the debauchery, get into really good shape.

[Jack M.] Mike, man, to have Gerry Lopez at his dinner table,

first thing he said was,

"When you come back next time, bring me eight surfboards."

[Gerry] We were surfing, to me, a beautiful day at Uluwatu.

Bill looks at him and goes, "You know, this isn't even a surf spot."

And I look at him, I wanna throw him off the cliff.

You know, what are you talking about?

And he goes, "Right over there,

that's the southeastern tip of Java,

and there's a wave over there that I've been to

that's so much better than this.

If you see it, you're gonna say 'this isn't a surf spot.'"

And I'm looking at him like he's nuts.

[Jack M.] This place, which is just across the strait,

was called Grajagan.

But to have a little code word, they called it "G-Land."

[Gerry] It's 60 miles from Kuta Beach

to the southern tip of java.

Mike built a boat that would be a fast ride

from Bali to G-Land.

We put a bunch of food and surfboards in the boat,

blazed over there.

[Bill] Going there on the boat, that was problematic, you know.

Anchor lines would break, things would go wrong.

[Gerry] Campaigning G-Land from a boat

was not the way to do it,

because we had no frame of reference.

Coming from a boat, it alters your perception

of how you approach that wave and how you surf that wave.

You have to see the wall of the wave from the beach

to really get a feel for what that wave is doing.

So I said, "Mike, we gotta get on the beach, man."

Problem was you couldn't go on the beach at G-Land

unless you had a permit.

[Bill] It was a national park.

Up till then,

people had been going there,

European hunters,

to get big game.

[Gerry] Sumatran tigers were there, you know.

There was actually two of them

that lived in this jungle preserve.

[Jack M.] So Mike decided he's going to go

to Indonesia to get permits.

I remember hearing him say,

"Oh, yeah, I was in Jakarta and I had to go see the general,

and I got to get his kid a surfboard."

[Bill] He was really good at dealing

with Indonesian red tape.

It was a trick, you know,

so shake hands with the guy,

and he'd slide the Rolex right off his wrist,

and it was a beautiful move,

but he had this kind of air about him

without being too blatant.

And he got the permits for it,

permit to build all these bamboo structures

on the edge of a national park.

[Jack M.] There was nothing there.

Nothing.

And they had to bring everything.

I was one of the first people to film there.

In order to get out there,

you spend three hours

paddling across this big, beautiful bay,

and you come into this little crack

at the end of the reef.

[Gerry] As we got to where Mike had built the treehouse,

I looked out and went, "Oh, my God!"

[rock music playing]

[Jack M.] This wave didn't stop.

As a kid, we used to dream of this sort of thing,

and here it was in front of you.

I found the best waves of my life.

Life in the camp was great.

[Jack M.] There were only allowed

six to ten people in the camp at one time,

so it was very intimate.

[Gerry] There wasn't a lot to do,

but I don't think anybody ever got bored.

[Jack M.] Everything that you wanted,

Mike had prepared for.

He'd bring in these big Igloos full of food.

Half a dozen of these Igloos, and you'd open one up

and there'd be this giant tuna,

this fresh tuna that had been there sitting on ice.

[Gerry] Mike had the camp workers

that did all the cooking and kept the camp clean.

-[man] And they got paid for it? -[Gerry] Yeah. That was their job.

He has his food trip down.

[Gerry] He had a very strict diet

that was based off a Zen macrobiotic diet.

Because it was the food trip that was together

that allowed us to sustain our bodies

to keep us fit and healthy.

You know, malaria was a big fear.

[Bill] We tried the malaria pills,

but they reduced your ability to be in the sun.

We stopped doing that

and we just did prophylactic type things, you know,

covering up our ankles, wearing socks,

and then getting under our nets in the evening.

And being under the net also required

that you didn't bring anything soft

that the rats might like,

like wax, surf wax.

The rats would come in, eat a hole in your net,

and then at 2 a.m. the anopheles mosquito

would come in, bam, malaria.

[Gerry] You couldn't afford to get hurt.

The entire reason we were there was to surf that wave.

It was a surfing monastic existence.

It was like we were monks.

And this was our all-day meditation.

[intense music playing]

[Bill] There were nights when we'd sit on this bamboo

and the offshore breeze would just blow through,

keeping the mosquitoes off,

and just this thunderous cannonade coming down the coast

of really powerful waves

and we'd just soak it in.

I mean, it's just, it's like being

right in front of the pyramids or something.

[Gerry] There was one trip where we were coming to the end of it,

and Mike said, "All right, well, we're going back,"

and I said, "Mike, I don't wanna go back.

I wanna stay."

So everybody all left, and I stayed.

I remember waking up the first morning,

looking around,

all the other beds are empty, I'm going,

"Wow, I'm here all alone.

Oh, this is kind of cool.

I feel like Robinson Crusoe."

Being in there all alone,

especially after the whole Lightning Bolt thing,

really had a profound effect on me.

We live in a world where

there's constant, incessant distractions.

Losing focus is easy.

A large part of attention

is being able to be in the moment,

right here, right now.

The solitude of that place,

it was a real cosmic sanctuary or something.

It was like the temple. It was the temple of surf.

I was forming this very special,

very personal relationship with this surf spot,

with this wave.

Getting to it on a cliché-ish

but a spiritual level.

It was the beginning of me and G-Land

really...

becoming one.

So after that trip to the camp, I went back to Bali,

and one day I saw a guy fishing with a throw net,

and I asked him if I could try it,

'cause my dad was an expert throw-net fisherman in Hawaii.

My dad came from New York.

His dad Cuban, his mom German.

Think it was the late '30s,

my dad joined the army and on the GI Bill

decided he was going to go to school

at the University of Hawaii.

Caught a boat out of New York, through the Panama Canal,

then over to Hawaii.

My mother is local Japanese,

Hawaiian Japanese.

Her grandparents came from Japan

to work in the plantation.

They all worked on the plantation, her mom and dad.

[Lola] Japanese woman did not go on past...

I mean, the high school was a big deal.

And my mother was going to college.

[Gerry] My dad met my mom at the U-H.

They fell in love, they got married.

She was traditional Japanese family.

It was expected that she was gonna marry a Japanese man.

[Lola] My mother was very strong and very smart,

and my father was a Haole man, if you will.

A lot of the GIs that were there

would promise these women things

and produce children and then they left.

And my grandpa thought that's what would happen to my mother.

But my father got to Hawaii and he said,

"I'm never leaving."

[Victor] You know, our dad was such a special person.

He came to Hawaii,

and he didn't try to change his environment,

he assimilated into the Hawaiian culture.

The way he did it was so cool,

'cause he met our mom, got married,

he learned how to throw a net from our uncle.

He gravitated towards this throw-net fishing,

with my Uncle Kodama, and got really good at it.

He was just like this ninja in the water.

And I remember watching him, you know,

and he'd just be still there,

and I knew he saw some fish,

and he was waiting for them

to come within range of his throw net.

Whoo, whoosh!

And he'd spread that thing in a perfect circle every time.

I distinctly remember that movement

of him throwing the net.

Other throw-net fishermen, local guys, they go,

"Yeah, your father's considered to be

one of the top throw-net fishermen in Hawaii."

You know, here's my dad, he's a Haole,

he's from New York.

It was really an art.

I mean, it was beautiful to watch.

[telephone rings]

[Gerry] I got a phone call in Maui one day,

and I got up, you know, and went over and, "Hello,"

and said, "Will you please hold for John Milius?"

Who's John Milius?

John comes on the phone.

[gruff voice] "Hello, Gerry, this is John.

You don't know me but I know all about you,

and I'm doing a film project

and I want you to be a part of it."

And, oh, shit, this is Hollywood calling, man.

[energetic music playing]

[Sam] John Milius is part of that new breed of filmmakers

that included Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola

and George Lucas.

He wrote "Apocalypse Now."

He wrote "Jeremiah Johnson."

The difference was that John Milius was a surfer.

He had some renown by the mid-'70s,

and he realized, "you know what, I've got a few chips here, I better play 'em.

I wanna make a movie about my youth as a surfer."

[director] Marker. Let's get that one shot.

Get on his feet, get on his feet.

Beautiful! On his feet.

"Big Wednesday" is the biggest surf

that comes in 20 years, and...

Greg, this isn't gonna make it.

-[Greg] Sure, it will. -No.

Got all this water moving out there

and it's trying to hurt you.

You could very easily drown.

You could drown.

[clears throat]

This is dumb, Greg.

[Greg, laughing] Just relax.

Hey, hey, that's Lopez.

Yeah, let's go.

[bluesy music playing]

[Gerry] So during the making of "Big Wednesday,"

I got to hang out in Hollywood,

experiencing that lifestyle

which I thought was great at first

but eventually I realized wasn't so great.

Nighttime came around, there was drugs,

there was a lot of drinking.

I guess I was 28, 29 years old.

Old enough to know better, but still dumb enough to do it.

I remember waking up one afternoon,

and I looked down and there was just this beautiful south swell.

You could see the lines out to the horizon,

but by then the south wind had already come in

and blown it out, and I went,

"That's it, man, I'm never gonna drink again.

I don't wanna ever miss a morning

because I'm too hungover to get up."

And I never drank

or, you know, took those kind of drugs ever again.

"Big Wednesday" was the beginning

of actually a very long and great friendship with John.

He was working on this project in 1980,

and John wrote in a part for me.

I got the script and I read it, I'm like,

"Holy crap, are you kidding? This is like a big role.

I don't know how to act."

He goes, "Don't worry about it. You'll be fine."

Who are you?

I am Subotai,

thief and archer.

I am Hyrkanian.

So, what are you doing here?

[chains rattle]

Dinner for wolves.

[Schwarzenegger chuckles]

[Gerry] To have a second lead in a movie like that,

you really get pampered.

When John said, "I have a new project,

it's called 'Farewell to the King,'"

I had already read the book.

I said, "I'm in. What do you want me to do?"

He goes, "I got this great character called Gwai."

The mountain people, we come in peace.

I have this haircut and all these tattoos and stuff.

So that was really fun doing that role.

I got back to Hollywood

and got a call from this agent,

and she goes, "Well, you're an actor now.

I can represent you," and I go, "Well, I live in Maui."

She goes, "Yeah, that's not gonna work. You have to be here.

There's readings you have to go to, casting calls, stuff like that.

You have to be here."

And I went, "You know what, I like Maui.

I don't wanna be an actor."

[Hawaiian guitar music playing]

It was right after the release of the Conan movie

that I met Toni,

when she became interested in wind surfing,

about the same time that I did.

Toni and I, we fit together.

You know, we just complemented each other.

We were the yin and yang,

and together we found the Tao, that harmony that exists

in the center of everything in life.

[Toni] I had dated a surfer before that,

and I thought, "Oh, I don't ever want to date a surfer again.

With a surfer, you're never the number-one love."

Here is Gerry, the ultimate surfer.

[Gerry] I remember when Toni and I

were heading to Hana to get married,

the waves were good.

She knew what I was thinking.

She's got a good eye for waves.

We were driving there and she's going,

"Well, which one are you choosing?"

"All right.

I guess I'm gonna have to let the waves go today."

Surrender is a huge part of life.

When I surrendered to Toni,

which has been a long process, by the way,

when I surrendered to the fact

that her judgment is better than mine,

her eyesight's better than mine,

her hearing is much better than mine,

and her smell, everything,

life really got better.

I never thought that

I wanted to be a father.

Toni showed me the way,

and it's been probably the most

wonderful, complete thing

that life can give you.

When Alex was three years old,

Toni and I, with some other friends,

took a trip and spent a couple of days

up in Bend, Oregon.

[Toni] It was just like going back in time there.

It was such a quaint little town,

and it was nice

'cause nobody knew Gerry there.

[Gerry] We liked it, and we came back that winter

because we were all jazzed on snowboarding,

the early, beginning stages of it,

and we were there three days on that second trip

and we bought a house.

[Toni] I don't think we ever just sat down

and had a discussion, "and this is what we're gonna do."

We'd sort of fly by the seat of our pants a little bit.

"Oh, well, let's go try it and see what happens."

[Gerry] Just like that, Bend became

a really integral part of our lives.

The whole move to the mountain was part of my path of life.

The ocean's always moving.

The ocean is considered very yin in nature.

The mountains are the yang side.

But that's where the stillness is.

What I found at Mount Bachelor

was all these frozen waves

that the wind had created out of the snow.

A lot of people have asked me,

"Wasn't it difficult to leave Maui to move to Bend?"

And the honest answer is, "It wasn't."

Anyway, it wasn't like I had stopped surfing.

I was traveling to different parts of the world,

surfing, you know, surf contests mostly, at that point.

The first few years that we lived there,

Gerry went on a lot of different surf trips.

I remember him being gone a lot when I was young.

I mean, I would miss him 'cause he was going to places

that I'd never heard of.

[Toni] Still go back to Indonesia

and he'd always end up on the North Shore

at some point in the winter.

So he wasn't just a stay-at-home dad

or he wasn't just milling around the house all the time.

Being a surfer has got to be the most selfish thing

there is in the whole world.

What about the relationship?

What about the family?

What about the job? What about everything else?

Well, yeah, but the waves are good.

That's selfish, you know. That's thinking about yourself.

But unlike surfing,

in which my obsession with waves

wasn't really anything I could share with Toni or Alex,

snowboarding was something,

as Alex became adept at it,

we enjoyed as a family.

I never pressured Alex to surf.

I always felt it was something that had to happen on its own

and on his own terms.

[Toni] When Alex was growing up back in Maui,

all the comments when we're down at the beach is like,

"Oh, you gonna be a big wave surfer like your dad?"

And we'd just kind of cringe

every time somebody would say that and think,

"well, I want him to figure out what he wants to do."

He may not ever want to surf.

[Alex] Surfing is the hardest thing

I think you could learn how to do.

[Gerry] Eventually, Alex started to like surfing

and surfing did its thing on him.

And we got to enjoy it together.

I loved the days that I'd get to share with my dad

in the ocean.

The closest we ever get is when we're in the water.

You know, I've come to realize that...

my next wave isn't as important to me anymore

as Alex's next wave.

[Toni] We make surfboards here.

The Lopez business is really a mom-and-pop shop.

Alex has his own line of boards.

[Alex] I love building boards.

Just getting lost in doing something.

[Gerry] Alex's boards are different than mine,

and passing on what I can to Alex

has really given me a deeper appreciation

for this thing, the shaping thing

that I've been doing for the last 50 years.

[piano playing classical music]

I love shaping.

Shaping and building surfboards

really keeps me

in my surf consciousness.

Shaping has never, never lost its appeal for me.

I love it, maybe now more than ever.

[man] It's like a piece of art.

[Gerry] They're all pieces of art,

in my opinion.

[peaceful piano music playing]

It's funny, you know, we're four hours from the ocean,

but this is what we do.

[Gerry] I guess at this point in my life

I'm in my teacher phase.

As I grow older, I find that sharing what I've learned

has become more and more important to me.

And so I've traveled quite a bit to different parts of the world

to do yoga retreats.

[contemplative music playing]

I hadn't been back to Bali in about 30 years,

and I went back to teach some yoga

and to help raise some money

for the community there at Uluwatu.

I feel what my role is, is I'm just a conduit

for all this information

that's been there for a long, long time.

[man] Do you like teaching?

[Gerry] I'm a little nervous, you know,

because I don't feel as though I'm completely qualified to do it.

You know, I've been practicing yoga for over 50 years and...

[man] That doesn't sound like you're qualified.

Yeah.

When I teach yoga,

I'm not making anything up.

Everything I teach comes from a source

that I believe to be completely unimpeachable.

I've been studying this book since 1968.

I mean, this is the original one,

three dollars and 80 cents.

There's all these poses in here that,

I mean, I've tried everything a million times.

This pose is tremendously difficult.

I'd love to be able to do that one.

I can't even do that one.

I try almost once a week, still.

I mean, this is 50 years trying to do it.

[Alex] My dad's determination, his perseverance,

that's something that's inspirational

and motivational,

like, "Wow, how old is he, and he just started foiling?"

[Gerry] I want to keep learning new things.

I'm determined because I know it can be done.

One of the hardest things in life

is allowing yourself that freedom to fail

and be a kook.

[Toni] When he picks something up,

I've never seen anybody so driven.

[Alex] Anything that he wants to learn how to do,

he has this tunnel vision where nothing is gonna stop him.

[Gerry] Sometimes that frustration

will just kill you and stop you and go, "Screw it."

It's only when you're not trying,

when it just happens on its own and it's spontaneous,

that the light bulb goes on.

[Toni] As focused as he is on surfing,

he is on a lot of different things.

[Gerry] I was finding myself

having to find younger friends to do things with,

because the ones my age

are just not that interested anymore.

[Matt] Gerry's 70, and he's going to end up

sitting in full lotus position

while the rest of us are in senior living.

[Sam] Whether you're watching old movies

of him surfing Pipeline,

or watching him surf a river wave in Bend, Oregon,

you'll see him experiencing the very same sensation.

There's something about the energy

that is coming up through the board

into the soles of the feet and into his soul

that sustains him, that drives him,

and that satisfies him.

[Gerry] We're only here for a short time,

and you have to find some peace within you.

Then sharing that peace,

contributing to other people's happiness,

lets you find the true goal, the true meaning of life.

[peaceful guitar music playing]

My beach, my wave, go home.

[man] Yeah!