Movie distributors send actors and directors on publicity tours, but the tour for “Riding Giants” was different. To drum up interest in this surfing documentary, which opened the Sundance Film Festival to a rapturous response, two legendary surfers came out: Greg Noll, a pioneer during the great era of surfing in Hawaii and California in the ’50s and ’60s, and Jeff Clark, who stumbled across an unknown wave break south of San Francisco in the mid-’70s and later popularized it as Maverick’s, a now-celebrated big-wave mecca.
I met the two in a Seattle hotel room; Noll, a beefy and garrulous guy, wore a Hawaiian shirt, while Clark favored shorts and T-shirt. They looked like they were ready for the beach, which they probably always are. Their friendly, unpretentious demeanor (they were awed at their limousine and hotel room) made this interview a highly enjoyable break from the usual Hollywood-oriented session.
Greg Noll: I was 7 years old and I had a job on the Manhattan Beach pier, dishing bait. And when I’d go to work in the morning, there were a half a dozen guys surfing on old heavy redwood and balsa planks. … I got my first board, and I spent the whole summer on an old hunk-a-junk board that they were gonna sacrifice to the surf gods. They took my 15 bucks, sold me the board, and from the very first wave that I caught and stood up, I knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life
Jeff Clark: My family moved right to the beach at Half Moon Bay in ‘66, and these Volkswagon buses would pull up every weekend. … Finally one of the surfers took pity on me, and gave me this old beater he’d shaped himself. It was somethin’ else, but I had a board, and I wore that thing out.
Noll: I think most guys probably do, truth is. But I’ll tell you one thing that’s funny. You ask a guy who’s been surfing most of his life about what the dimensions of that (first) board were, what it was like, and he can tell you more about that board than he can about his first serious experience with a woman. That’s the truth! Guys go, ‘What was her name?’ But the board – 10 foot long, 22 inches wide, had a 16-inch tail.”
Question: Having a wipeout on a big wave looks pretty serious.
Clark:
Noll: It’s not like a tap. It’s like a real live spankin’ sometimes.
Clark: It can be a very memorable experience.
Noll: You deal with lack of oxygen on some of these wipeouts. For me, there were stages I would go through. First, you have to relax. The next thing for me was experiencing kind of a red color and stars. And then, I thought that was it, but on a few occasions I experienced the next level, which was things going blue. I never found out what was beyond blue. … But if you take care of your oxygen in a relaxed manner, you learn to live with that stage of lack of oxygen. For me it was like experiencing another level of living out there.
Question: In many surfing movies, there’s an association between the feeling of freedom on the waves and a lifestyle of freedom.
Noll:
Clark: You’re out in the ocean. There’s nobody setting any parameters on you, except the ocean. You’ll get a really good wave, and you think you’re hot, and you spin around and think you’re gonna dominate the next one, and it just holds you down and makes you pay. Your value system is a little different. But you have one.
Noll: Plus, when I grew up, guys were coming back from the war fairly recently, and up till that time, you were force-fed this theory that you had to go out and get the 8-to-4 job and the education and the little white house and the three kids … and when I started surfing, all that went to (expletive). Guys came back realizing they were lucky they weren’t killed fighting a war, and I think the whole thing just rebelled completely, and my friends and I were the next generation. … For years, man, we were on the outside. I’d go surfing places and the cops would either want to put you in jail or run you out of town. Now I go down to Huntington Beach and they’ve got a shop down there like Hollywood where they want to put your hands in the concrete.
Noll: We get in there, and Robert Redford’s introducing the film, and the next thing you know here’s some fat guy with dribble coming out of his mouth on screen talking about surfing, and I turn around and look back and Robert Redford’s watching Greg Noll b.s. about surf stuff, and I poke my wife and say, “Is this really happening, or am I in a dream?” And since then, it’s just been this really nice ride.
Clark: You sit down watching this film, and you get a feeling of what the surfers are feeling. You’ve really got a handle on what we do, and the freedom that we felt. And the spiritual aspect of what we do. When the film ended – I mean, chills from the roar of the audience. Just overwhelming. It brought tears to my eyes – just the feeling of, wow, they got it.
Noll: The Hollywood movies have portrayed surfing as something that it wasn’t. … I think (director) Stacy Peralta’s the first guy to capture that magic, to come across with a film that really tells the story like it is, as opposed to some (expletive) deal with chicks in bikinis wringing their hands on the point while their boyfriends commit suicide or “challenge the big surf.” I mean it’s so much puke, you know.
Clark: He did it right. He put you in our heads, why we’re paddling out into these places, and the commitment and passion we really have. It’s not about anything else, it’s about us goin’ out and ridin’ a wave.
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