DEREK HYND and the F-F-F-F-FOUNTAIN of YOUTH by Jamie Brisick
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DEREK HYND AND THE F-F-F-F-FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH By Jamie Brisick About three years ago a video was posted on YouTube that not only captivated the surf world, but got it scratching its collective chin with what ifs? In it, Australian Derek Hynd takes off on a series of double-, sometimes triple-overhead waves. All appears to be normal at first. He rides in a low crouch, rear hand tickling the wave face. But there’s a subtle drift in effect. The usual traction between surfboard and wave is non-existent. As the clip kicks on we see Derek slip, slide, drift, careen, ride backwards, and spin a fit of dizzying 360s. “About fifteen years ago I watched the Daytona 500 live, and wanted that feeling on the high line,” says Derek. “I got to wonder in less than a second what it’d be like to deliberately lose friction going as fast as I could, but increase the speed. That’s what I got a glimpse into when the leading car lost it with the field up its backside, and for a tiny moment put a gap on the chasers until it flipped multiple times. It lost traction thus friction and went faster for a flash. With the pack less than a yard behind at 200mph high on the speed bank, I saw the shift.” Derek has had a long and colorful ride in surfing. He’s been a pro, a coach, a journalist, a marketing genius, a critic, a test pilot, a historian, an impresario, and now, at age 55, a finless surfer. It’s key to understand just how important fins are to surfboards. They provide the bite, the hold, the traction. They are what keep the board pointing forward. Without fins (or a fin), there is very little to cling to the wave face. Finless, a surfer is not unlike a child sliding down a snow hill on an inner tube. In some ways it makes perfect sense that Derek would find finless surfing. While his contemporaries have gotten fat and taken on middle-age responsibility, Derek is lithe and carefree and continues to live the surfing dream as if he were still 21. He travels far and wide on the hunt for waves, rarely missing a swell. He has been an outspoken critic of the cookie-cutter surfing that takes place on the ASP (Association of Surfing Professionals) tour—as well as its cookie-cutter equipment. He reads Dostoyevsky and Proust and Nabokov, and will describe a particular wave he rode ten years ago, or even a particular turn he did on that wave, the way Humbert Humbert describes Lolita. 1 “When the wave is going super fast, and a board that shouldn’t be matching it is matching it,” he says, right hand driving an imaginary board across his face, “it leaves you breathless about the potential of where surfing may have gone fifty years ago had the fin never gained such static popularity. I got a wave this year at Jeffreys, a big wave, and I was on it and the sections were coming toward me and I wasn’t going to make it but I was making it, and I was aware of my mouth getting wider and wider open, and the wind getting in my mouth, and I was conscious of knowing that the board’s out of control, no, it’s in control! whoa, what’s happening to me? what’s happening to the board? It was at a point of maximum velocity. I’d passed through some sort of barrier.” * * * * * Pro surfing is a young man’s game, not only because contemporary high-performance wave riding is extremely gymnastic, requiring great reflexes, but also because the industry is built primarily on apparel, i.e., fashion. Like the fashion world, surf mags and websites are rife with tanned, muscled, wrinkle-less teens and twenty-somethings. This is how the surf dream gets sold. “How does the industry treat pro surfers once their careers are over?” a former world champ once told me, “They hand you a gun, they tell you to go outside, ‘round back, and into the shed. Stick the gun in your mouth like this (he brought a finger to his mouth) and pull the trigger. But do us a favor. Put a silencer on it. We don’t want our stocks taking a dive.” In short, ex-pros often end up marooned and bitter. The lessons learned from riding waves—improvise, duck and weave, be mercurial— rarely translate into terrestrial mid-life and beyond. One of the ways pro surfers stay sane in the wake of their competitive careers is by experimenting with boards. Three-time world champion Tom Curren did this in the ‘90s to great effect, inspiring a fascination with vintage and alternative wavecraft that has endured and is presently exploding (see Mollusk in San Francisco and LA, Pilgrim Surf + Supply in Williamsburg). Few people realize that Derek Hynd had a large hand in this. In the early ‘90s he began to lose faith in competitive surfing. As the global economy tanked, and Kurt Cobain sang his anthemic “Oh well, whatever, nevermind,” Derek went searching for surfing’s roots. In South Africa he built a pyramid-shaped house overlooking Jeffreys Bay, one of the world’s longest and best waves. He decked the house out with a nearly 90° slide that connected his capsule-like bedroom to the living 2 room, where dozens of boards—some bought at garage sales and swap meets, others procured from top shapers and surfers globally—lined the walls. Every morning he woke at dawn, studied the waves, and picked his board accordingly. A sort of time traveling ensued. His 1973 Lightning Bolt pintail, for instance, conjured yoga, Timothy Leary, Santana’s Abraxas. His late-‘60s Malibu Chip summoned surf nihilist Miki Dora and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Derek drew unconventional lines across the wave, often riding high in the pocket, at breakneck speed, hair blown back, arms like wings. He’d always been an expressive surfer, but never like this. These seminal sessions would lead him to finless surfing. But Derek doesn’t like to call it ‘finless.’ “It’s ‘free friction,’ tagged ‘FFFF’ for ‘Far Field Free Friction’,” he says. “What I've been into is more than a solitary deadbeat word, because the feeling is right out there. It's so far out there that the ‘Far Field’ of it refers to [Osmo] Vänskä’s theoretical physics construct of the instant before infinity. When all is in chaos, 'the scattering' or mass turbulence in the Beltrami field comes together in an astonishing blur. That's the feeling in a nutshell. Getting right out on the edge and having it all fall into place.” * * * * * I knew of Derek Hynd long before I met him. Hailing from Sydney and ranked in pro surfing’s elite Top 16, his knock-kneed carves and zingy 360s featured prominently in surf magazines and movies. He rode with a low-slung style, his lithe, rubbery frame much like Mick Jagger’s. He had a reputation for being a merciless competitor. Then, in the 1980 Hang Ten International in Durban, he rode a wave to shore and hopped off on the sand, jogging to shave off the speed. When he turned around his taut urethane leash flung his board at him. It whacked him in the left eye. Derek was so determined to win the heat that he paddled back out and tried to use his injury (“the ooze running down my face was not blood”) to psyche out his opponent. Only after a water photographer screamed at him to go in did he do so. He was rushed to the emergency room and taken straight into surgery. He’d severed his optic nerve. Two days later he exited the hospital with a glass eye. He returned to the tour the following year and finished 7th—the first one-eyed surfer in ASP history. But Derek was more thinker than jock. He retired from 3 competition, but continued on tour, this time as a coach/journalist. As a coach he employed a heavily tactical approach, and took great pleasure in watching lesser surfers outsmart giants. As a journalist he wrote snappy, contentious pieces that often enraged the pros in question. His column in Surfing World was called “Hyndsight” and bylined with a Cyclops logo. Not only did we read it with great interest, but my surfer pals and I, all aspiring pros, celebrated “Aussie Nights,” on which we pored over Derek’s words, drank oil can-sized Foster’s Lagers, and listened to Midnight Oil, Men At Work, and INXS, often till we puked. I met Derek in person in 1986 when I traveled to Australia as a pro surfer. A shaggy fellow given to Blundstone boots, pink shorts, and tweed vests over T-shirts, he was nothing like the puffed-up surfers who huddled in competitor’s areas. His shoulders slumped and his aquiline face wore an expression of perpetual disbelief. He spoke slowly, cryptically. He clutched a grey exercise book, and wrote in it constantly. In 1987 my sponsor, Rip Curl, hired Derek to coach the team. His methods were peculiar. In his exercise book he transcribed every ride of every Rip Curl surfer’s heat, as well as their opponents. He wrote in tiny, curlicue script, with a race caller’s urgency, so that a typical entry would look like this: JB 2nd: foamy, late, B hook, A hit float, cuttie roundhouse G+ RM 2nd: wide, critical, A layback snap, B+ cuttie, A- reo VG FULL ATTACK HEAVY PRESSURE ON BOTH – JB NEEDS VG! Derek’s beachside manner was like Slugworth’s in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.