Pat Curren is useless at 90 years outdated. I’m undecided there was a extra mystique-drenched surfer on the planet. Or a extra impenetrable one. Most of us, even these with a critical nostril for surf historical past know simply the Cliff’s Notes model. A Mission Beach, San Diego, child, he was there on the day in 1957 when Oahu’s Waimea Bay was first surfed. Started shaping surfboards and found he was Michelangelo with a planer. Within a couple of years, Curren was the world’s greatest large wave surfboard builder. “Pat was the first guy to produce the ultimate gun,” large wave browsing legend Fred Van Dyke stated. “Others were making nice all-around boards, but Pat made the stiletto, specifically for Waimea, where all you want to do is make it alive from Point A to B.”
In the early ’60s Curren spent a couple of years as a mainstay in big Hawaiian surf. Then, in 1964, the factor he’s in all probability most well-known for: He fathered Tom Curren. Every surfer between the age of 55 and 30’s favourite surfer. Tom is, with out query, the best surfer in historical past. Quiet, demure, a Buddha with a shortboard, although one with an oddly darkish streak. He’s the embodiment of the sort of embattled, tortured genius that simply attracts hearts. He was additionally a chip off the outdated block.
Pat was the template. Surfing was every part, but it wasn’t sufficient. Two pictures of Pat Curren come to thoughts first. One is him dropping down the face of a late ’50s monster at Waimea, wide-legged, again straight, arms like an Egyptian heiroglyph. Absolute full and whole dedication to driving a radical wave as quick as attainable. Nothing else mattered. The different is of him shirtless, face down within the grime, sleeping subsequent to a automobile, empty bottle of liquor in his again pocket.
Hawaii within the Nineteen Fifties was the sort of place a younger surfer may exist dwelling on a 50-pound bag of rice and a case of ketchup, sleeping 8 to a hut, browsing all winter with no duties to something however their very own urges. There was an innocence then, rooted within the immense wave of aid that settled over the world in a postwar euphoria, that’s been all however vaporized by our tradition at present. Pat Curren was certainly one of that interval’s demigods. Sometimes it appeared that’s all we would have liked to find out about him.
His legend grew over the many years as the game grew to become extra tainted with commercialism, grew to become extra jock-ish, extra reined in. Pat Curren lived and thrived and shone in browsing’s absolute most golden of golden years, a interval of discovery and uncrowded waves and browsing nonetheless a comparatively tiny, distinctive subculture, and for that, he’ll all the time be a mythic determine. He both by no means gave a shit about that, or by no means knew find out how to dwell outdoors the second. Curren was by no means, ever one to attempt to money in on what may have been a critical gold mine of “weren’t those the days” nostalgia.
His later years are largely a blur. We know he had Tom, then a decade later, his second youngster, Joe Curren, additionally a phenomenally gifted surfer was born. He lived in Costa Rica, then Baja, possibly constructing boats, shaping surfboards for these within the know, and largely avoiding any sort of outdoors scrutiny. In current years, he’d been recognized to be dwelling in Southern California, however nonetheless remained nearly completely absent from surf media’s prying eyes. Certainly the best way he wished it.
Nevertheless, he goes down as one of many absolute greats. There had been shapers who made higher boards, and surfers who rode greater waves, however like Tom Blake earlier than him, Pat Curren confirmed us all what it really meant to place browsing first, confirmed us what that made attainable, and what it value. For that, he was a hero.
Top picture: Via Encyclopedia of Surfing. Credit: unknown