I had worked with John Price a little bit. I had re-shaped some of my boards, and I just got interested in making boards for myself. I started off and eventually borrowed dollars, bought [some] resin and a barrel of cloth, and made boards in my garage in Carpenteria. The rest is history. AM: [Laughs] Of course it was symmetrical.
I made a board I called The Shoe, which had extreme nose rocker and a squared off nose. BM: I probably spent hundred of hours at his shaping room door just watching. He never said anything, I never said anything. It kind of felt like holy ground. In my late teens, I picked up a planer and started trying. I learned by observation. Those images of his movements are just ingrained into me.
If someone out here wanted to shape a board, what could you tell them that would save them a lot of headaches? BM: Just go buy one. My dad would always say when he was making boards that, even with all his success, he was never satisfied.
He always felt like he could make a better board. He never felt like he finally got there. I think that mindset helped me. And then my dad always tried to teach me to be humble. I think that if you have ego in your shaping, things get kind of creepy. And it should be fun. I enjoy it. How much did being based in Santa Barbara affect the boards you were making?
AM: Yeah, undoubtedly. Rincon had a giant influence on me. My big shaping influence is Dick Brewer. I was fascinated when he was making the mini-guns.
I tried to make boards for Rincon along the vein of the mini gun. I got interested in watching what the kids around town were doing, and trying to make boards for them at Rincon.
I think all my boards and my fins outlines and rockers have been influenced tremendously by it. You guys have had some iconic team riders over the years. Who was the first surfer you made boards for who really pushed your shaping and brought it up another notch? AM: I think Shaun Tomson was a really big influence on me.
He really helped with my twin fin designs when he brought over a board from MR. I looked at that and we started making boards for Rincon.
He actually brought a board over from Simon [Anderson], and we looked at that, too. So Simon and MR also had a big influence on the work that I was doing.
I kind of developed the three-fin off of Shaun. Tommy [Curren] was a young lad then. I gave a smaller version of those boards over to him, and we went from there. When did you meet Tom Curren? And when you started making boards for him, was it pretty clear that he was going to be a special talent? It was a big deal. And I listened and got it together, graduated and went on a surf trip around the world. It happened that I met an American, the only American around who happened to be a Christian.
He didn't know whether I was or not, but he invited me to do a church service and though I hadn't been in church in several years, I went more or less because I was lonely and homesick and this felt a little bit like home.
But when I went I had this reconnection with my faith, that was really, really profound. It was the prodigal moment and I was like the prodigal son coming home.
And that happened on a surf trip. So at that point, for me, there was this real connection between these two lives; my surfing and my spirituality and how one had led me to the other. This pursuit of surf had led me back to Jesus and Christianity. And that's when I began to get involved in Christian ministry and got really serious about it.
It's clear to me now that in my own mind then, I perhaps bifurcated the two pretty profoundly because to me it felt like surfing for a while was a superfluous and fun activity but once I rediscovered my faith I felt like I needed to do some real work. That must have changed your life? My daughter Daisy was diagnosed with cancer, with a Wilms tumor sort of kidney cancer when she was five years old. She's five when this happened and she died when she was nine.
So we fought it for four and a half years. And we had incredible experiences through that, the faith community, the whole community was amazing to us, but especially our faith community in the way that they carried us and cared for us. We went through all the hard questions about God. What does it mean that my wife and I had given our lives to serving God, and now he's letting our daughter die of cancer? How does that impact our view of God? How do we look to God as all powerful and benevolent?
We had a website for Daisy, called it Prayor Daisy. What does that mean? We had to wrestle through all of that, she had to wrestle through as an eight and a nine year old, she had to wrestle through her own mortality. We'll never be the same from that. You're never the same after losing a child nor should you be, that would dishonor who they were in your life.
We asked those questions and I will not pretend to say that we have answers but by having asked those questions, we're better for it and our faith is better for it. So Jesus said to his followers, in this world, you're going to have trouble but take heart and somehow in the darkest places, in our deepest pain, in the most terrifying pain of losing a child, when we stepped into those spaces, we found Jesus to be there. And that was a big deal. Reflecting on that experience, what role did the ocean or surfing play?
Search Surfboards translation missing: en. Shortboards Open Menu Close Menu. Hybrid Open Menu Close Menu. Open Menu Close Menu. Shop translation missing: en. Surfboards Open Menu Close Menu. Threads Open Menu Close Menu.
0コメント