What Do You Think of Bobby Martinez Now?

It’s exactly nine o’clock on a hot, bright, breathless Monday morning in Santa Barbara, California, and Bobby Martinez gets right down to it. 

“My life probably looks so boring, huh?” He’s not thinking out loud. He’s asking, straight up.

I can speak only to what I see, and what I see is Bobby, dressed in a white T-shirt, chinos, and a pair of faded black house slippers with the heels pushed flat, sitting in the backyard of the gray-shingled single-family home he shares with his wife, Cleo, and their three children at the far end of a small street in a quiet neighborhood called the Mesa. He’s leaning forward in his chair, hands on his knees, feet bouncing just a touch, the whole of him in the shade of the garage. A 6-month-old chocolate Lab named Bonnie, a plush toy and her entire tongue hanging from the side of her mouth, rips around at his legs. 

The house, built in the 1950s, is recently remodeled. The paint is fresh. The concrete is without crack or blemish. The grass is cut tight, the edges lined, the hedges trimmed straight and square. There’s a fire pit behind us and a grill on the deck. A new half-ton truck, bone stock except for a set of all-terrain tires, is parked in the driveway behind a late-model Sprinter van that’s seen many of the major waypoints of America’s Western interior over the past few years. A white picket fence bounds it all in. Inside? I can’t say. I haven’t stepped foot in there, and I won’t ever. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it boring. I’d say it’s suburban. I’d say it’s maintained and organized and comfortable, cared for and thoughtful, everything in its place. I’d say it could belong to just about anybody, just about anywhere. But that’s only a surface-level survey, and looks can, of course, deceive—and it’s not my life anyway. 

“Are you bored?” I ask. 

“Oh, I’m so bored at this point in my life,” he says while reaching for Bonnie’s toy, then giving it a toss. “I mean, I’m not bored, because I have my kids and wife—my family. Everything else is secondary. But for me, personally? Besides trying to be the best parent I can, I feel like I don’t have my own purpose in my life right now. So yeah, life is boring for me in that aspect.” 

“So where does surfing fit for you?” I ask. 

Surfing’s the reason I’m back here with him, after all. It’s why I’ve been bugging him for his time for months, Bobby scheduling and canceling and rescheduling, interested and polite and even apologetic, just busy with his kids’ birthdays, the start of the school year, family vacations, and the like. It’s why I’m fine with having only today and tomorrow, maybe, between when he makes the school runs, so long as nothing else pops up. Because Bobby is one of the most supreme talents and most mercurial personalities ever to slide one. He was, once, a bona fide surf star in surf stardom’s golden age—at least until he told its powers that be to go fuck themselves on a live webcast. 

That’s what he means by “boring,” I think—compared to back then. To be honest, I can’t help but see that Bobby too. While it’s been more than a decade since, he looks much the same as he always has. He’s unmistakable, really, head shaved and eyes absolutely unflinching. And he’s still a pro surfer by trade, the logos of Monster Energy and Channel Islands Surfboards front and center on his sleds. Surfing is the only job he’s ever known, and it’s in large part responsible for everything I’m looking at. 

What I want to know is where he’s at with it all. It’s hard to tell. Other than a few boards in the garage and a wetsuit drying on a rack behind it—items found anywhere coastal these days—there’s nothing visible to give him away. 

“I’m surfing,” he says, “but I have no direction. If the waves get good, I’ll surf. But if it’s not good, I don’t. I won’t ride a wave for three, four, five months sometimes. My sponsors, they’re not asking me to do anything. They’ve never judged me or tried to pull up on me. I don’t have anyone telling me what to do or where to go. To be honest, those days are over in my life. I’ve been thinking about the next chapter for years. I just haven’t had to go there because I’m still being supported. I’m in this weird situation.

Bobby leans back in his chair and puts his feet up on the table, cool as you please. 

“I know it sounds like, ‘Oh, he’s a spoiled little brat,’” he continues. “But I know I’m very lucky, and I don’t ever take that for granted. I mean, look at what we’re doing right now, where we are. We’re two blocks from the ocean in Santa Barbara. I’m aware of things.” 

“Back when you were in the thick of it,” I say, “could you have ever imagined that this is how it would shake out?” 

“No way,” he says. “When I was a kid, people would ask me all the time, like, ‘What are you going to do after surfing? What if surfing doesn’t work out?’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m going to make it work.’ I didn’t think about anything else. I should have been like, ‘Actually, you’re right.’ Because really, you have a tiny window and then your whole life ahead. Now that I’m here, I’m like, ‘Maybe I didn’t prepare enough.’ But you know what?” 

I haven’t so much as a guess. 

“I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” he says. “I’ve got my family, obviously. But even surfing. Like I said, if it’s good, I want to surf. I’m a surfer. What surfer doesn’t want to surf when it’s good? When it’s not, I’m happy doing my other things. It doesn’t have to be 24/7 surf for me. And I’m good with that being it.” 

I suddenly feel all sorts of silly. Here I am wanting to dig back through his career, his surfing—the theater—while Bobby, it seems, has moved on. And while we’ll get into all that eventually, for now I change tack. 

“Is there anything you want to do today?” I ask. 

He tilts his head back and to the left, chin up. 

“What do you mean?” 

I explain that it would help if we could go do something—anything—to add some scenery to his portrait, manufactured though it might be. 

“We could go down to Rincon,” I offer, “maybe get in the water.” 

“I think it’s pretty bad today,” he says. 

“We could check out where you spar. Or head to the CI factory. We could drive over to where you grew up. They have a mural of you over there, right? Or we could just cruise around town…” 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I feel like that’s what I do every time I do one of these.” 

The backyard goes still. Bobby shrugs. 

“But you’re here,” he says. “Let’s get whatever you need. Let’s go check the waves, I guess.”

*

To make sense of how Bobby found himself bored and about it requires going back to the beginning. And before we head down for the beach, that’s where Bobby takes me. He wants to make sure I understand that it’s complicated. 

Born and raised in Santa Barbara, Bobby first stood up on a wave at 6, on the family boogie board—no help at all, just replicating what he saw other people doing farther out in the water. That same Christmas, he got his very own surfboard, a Channel Islands, in some act of fate, the result of his grandfather having worked with the board label’s founding shaper, Al Merrick, in the local boatyards back in the 1970s. 

He got heavy into it at 8 after two things happened in quick succession: One day after school, he walked into the Boys Club down the street from his house, where he spent most of his afternoons, to find its director, Earl Pointer, waiting for him with a gray-and-yellow Piping Hot wetsuit. Then, a short while later, still in the process of figuring things out on his own, he literally bumped into a kid named Andy Vogel at Leadbetter Beach while coming up from a duck dive

“His brother surfed too,” Bobby says. “They started taking me surfing. I started meeting more people who surfed, getting rides to the beach. It was crazy how many people would take me around. My parents never said no. I was just roaming. It was amazing.” 

It was right about then, in the early 1990s, that Bobby tore into surfing’s wider consciousness as a skinny, big-smiling kid with preternatural gifts. He was so good that by middle school he was making more money than he knew what to do with. By the ninth grade, school was an afterthought, Bobby already whisked up and down California, then around the globe, to go surfing. In competition, he won pretty much everything in his age division. When the millennium clicked over, he was the most decorated American amateur surfer ever, the winner of seven national titles. He was pulling in six figures a year. The plan was clear: Make quick work of the World Qualifying Series and step to the World Championship Tour. 

Injuries and the type of distractions that tend to arise from a teenager carrying around a large bankroll caused delays. But transcendence is inevitable, and by 2006, Bobby was on the big show. He was named Rookie of the Year after winning two events, at Teahupoo and Mundaka, and finishing fifth overall. Over the next few seasons, he remained a contender, never falling out of the top 10 and winning two more events, again in the Basque Country and again in Tahiti, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. 

He closed out the aughts as a high-profile, big-ticket pro surfer, riding the best waves in theworld as well as they could be ridden, featured in magazines and in movies, including his own signature film. His surfing was no longer a matter of potential. It was fully formed, a mixture of grace, power, and radicality that didn’t just reflect the standard of possibility but set it. In the water—in ability and accomplishment—Bobby belonged to a group of few. 

On land, however, he’s always walked it and talked it a little outside surfing’s norms. That has often been the focus of media depictions, especially during his pro-surfing peak—stories that focused on things like his outspokenness, his interest in boxing, his tattoos, his baggy clothes and his socks pulled up above the hemline of his shorts. How he fit in surfing, and especially how he didn’t, wasn’t lost on him. 

“To be honest,” he says, “my common ground with most of those people, like the industry, was surfing—which was cool. Beyond that, I felt, I don’t know, just little things—different lives, different backgrounds. I felt like I couldn’t really… I felt like I had a different outlook than a lot of people.” 

“Did you feel like an outsider?” I ask. 

“I’m still an outsider.” 

While Santa Barbara is indeed a surf town, as well as one of the most expensive places to live in the US, not all blocks fit those definitions. 

“I grew up on the Westside,” he says, referring to the next neighborhood over from where he lives today. “You’ll see surfboards in that area now, but back then it wasn’t like that. It doesn’t even feel like the same place, it’s changed so much. I know it’s like, ‘Oh, you live in Santa Barbara,’ but who do you think cleans these rich people’s homes and cuts their grass? Back then, it was very separate. No one in my family surfed. None of my friends that I hung out with from the Westside surfed. It was mostly Latino and Black, and their life just didn’t consist of surfing. I was the only one surfing, so I was different.” 

For Bobby, the Westside often wasn’t an easy place to grow up—on either side of his front door. Here, his tone and cadence become measured and careful, though he speaks without any hesitation or gloss. 

“Things happened that scared me,” he says. “My cousin got killed around the corner from my house. Another one of my little cousins, his dad got shot and killed [while] using the pay phone. My friend who inspired me wanting to box, he got shot when we were young. I would see people getting beat up and shit—stabbings. I had friends get in trouble real young, who went to juvenile hall, camp, YA, and ended up in prison. Growing up, I’d visit family in prison.” 

Bobby pauses for a beat and glances at the tape recorder, its red light glowing and timer ticking onward. 

“I had stuff at home,” he says. “My parents were really bad alcoholics. My mom is bipolar. We had domestic violence in my household. So yeah, naturally I was scared. I wasn’t the type who was confident, where I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to just be cliqued up with a bunch of people. I don’t give a fuck.’ I was steered away from that, to surfing. Surfing just made me forget about everything.” 

That’s where Bobby leaves it—we’re off to Rincon. And that’s fine. Because what happened next, at least as it pertains to his surf career, is easy to fill in. It was all very public. 

Starting in the 2010 WCT season, Bobby could hardly make a heat, and he finished 20th. The following year, he pretty much stopped showing up. During this period, Bobby had several fallouts with sponsors, including walking away from a deal that, with incentives, was worth upward of a million bucks. Internally, something was off. 

Externally, by 2011, the Association of Surfing Professionals, competitive surfing’s governing body, was a year away from being rebranded as the World Surf League. They’d already started on their grand plans, including introducing a One World Ranking, which combined results from both the WCT and WQS as well as implemented a mid-season cut on the WCT to drop the bottom-ranked surfers in favor of those at the top of the WQS. They also began scheduling events in metropolitan areas, sacrificing wave quality in the hope for extra eyeballs. The moves were part of a larger effort to bring surfing to the non-surfing masses. Dream Tour, no more.

Jump to September of that year, to the Quiksilver Pro New York, and cut to scene. It’s the biggest ASP event of the year, at least in terms of marketing hype, in one of the biggest cities in the world. Along with the actual surf contest—which featured the largest overall prize purse in pro-surfing history, at a million dollars—is an itinerary consisting of concerts, meet-and-greets, a surfing festival. Hurricane Irene would cause the extracurriculars to be canceled, though it would allow for decent waves to close the competition. 

Bobby’s Round Two heat, however, is held in rainy 2-foot junk. He wins. Afterward, he steps up for his post-heat interview, stares into the camera, and lets it fly: “I don’t wanna be a part of this dumb, wannabe fuckin’ tennis tour. All these pro surfers wanna be tennis players, wanna do a halfway cutoff. How the fuck is somebody who’s not even competing against our caliber of surfers ahead of 100 of us on the One World ratings? They’ve never been here. They’ve never fuckin’ made the right to surf against us. But now we’re ranked up on them? C’mon, now. It’s bullshit. That’s why I’m not going to these stupid contests no more. This is the last one.… I at least tell it like it is, and this is my last one, and I don’t like tennis. I don’t like the tour.” 

It was a spectacular, controversial, defining end dot. Bobby was 29.

*

Monday still, near noon, and I find Bobby in the parking lot at Rincon, standing at the front of his truck. We’ve driven down separately, just in case he has to split. 

He’s not in the Cove lot, which, even in the middle of a weekday, is packed with people bustling around: surfers, nearly all, pulling brand-new longboards out of vans and sliding beat-up shortboards into the backs of pickups and tossing foam boards onto the pavement, peeling into and out of wetsuits, running down the trail to the water and slow-stepping back up over the dirt and gravel, chattering and yelling and hooting, the mass of them. It’s a scene, and it’s not Bobby’s. 

He’s at the farthest end of the backside lot, where the locals and lifers tend to hang. It’s mostly empty this way. A couple of hikers are headed down the cliff. An event is being set up—a wedding, I think—by a half-dozen or so uninterested workers dragging chairs and rolling tables through the dirt toward the edge of the bluff. 

We head over to the fence line to get a closer look at the surf. Beyond us, of course, is the famous cape, home to one of the most famous waves in the world, one of the best in California, the center of the area’s surf scene, provenance of George Greenough and Renny Yater and Al Merrick and Tom Curren. In that same lineage, Bobby too. From where we’re standing behind the headland, we can only see as waves hit its tip. But Bobby’s spent his whole life here, and he knows what each and every lump of swell will do, sight unseen, as it spills down the point. 

Unfortunately, as predicted, there’s not much on offer today. It’s waist- to chest-high, slow, broken up, and bumpy. I’m not going to see him in action. I don’t know how much time we have left. And I don’t know that tomorrow will even happen. So I have to ask: 

“Can we talk about the tour? About New York?” 

“Sure,” he says. “If you really want to. I don’t care.” 

“I know you’ve talked about it at length, many times. It’s just, you know, hard to ignore. So if you don’t mind, for the record, I guess, what happened?” 

“The simple answer is that I realized it wasn’t for me,” he says. 

“What’s the not-simple answer?” I ask. 

Bobby sighs, rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses, and chuckles down toward the dirt. He says the One World Rankings and the midway cut were just the final straw, that things small and large had been building up for years. Like the subjectivity and lack of clarity in the judging—where the difference between a 7.4 and a 7.5 could be, and often was, the difference between someone requalifying or not at year’s end. Or that those same judges walked around in an event sponsor’s clothing. Or that those sponsors in effect ran the tour, and that their riders seemed to benefit from favoritism. Or that other surfers seemed to share those same issues in private but wouldn’t say anything in public. Or that there was an increasing expectation and attitude, system-wide, that surfing should be bigger, should be growing, that the surfers deserved a place among soccer stars and football pros, that surfing had a chance to get there. 

“Go ask people I grew up with who any of those surfers are,” he says. “They have no fucking clue. They don’t care. It’s not their world. Surfing isn’t in their culture, so therefore it doesn’t exist to them. Surfing is just a little piece of this world. And that’s okay, but let’s not pretend that it’s something it’s not. I thought so much of it was just fake.” 

Which is where the long answer comes back to the short. 

“Sometimes you try something and you just realize it’s not for you,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to search for happiness in my life, I think because I wasn’t happy from some of those situations I had growing up. And I knew money wasn’t changing my problems, because I’d been making enough money since I was 13 to do whatever I wanted, and it wasn’t making me happy. Then I wasn’t happy on tour, chasing a fuckin’ 7-point-whatever. I wasn’t enjoying surfing, being a part of that whole scene. I realized, like, ‘When is enough enough? If I win another contest? Is that going to change it for me? No.’ I was sick of living my life in that structure. I was sick of doing what my sponsors were telling me.” 

“You don’t like being told what to do,” I say. 

“Does anyone like being told how to live their life?” 

The sun is climbing. Out in the midday light, Bobby certainly cuts a figure. He’s 5-foot-7 in shoes, but he’s lean, wiry, broad framed, posture perfect except for the way he keeps his shoulders, neck, and head always leaning forward, which makes every movement look intentional—a trait he carries with him when he’s standing up on a wave. If it’d been hot before, it’s cooking now, though a breeze has kicked up. Bobby takes his shirt off, and out come the tattoos. An incomplete index: a rosary around his neck and down his sternum. A rose in bloom on his chest. His kids’ names in whipped-out script on his arm. Portraits of Oso, a Rottweiler, and Rio, a black Lab, who’ve both passed away, on his waistline. Praying hands below his nape. A shotgun-wielding, bullet-vest-wearing kid stretched over his back, the design taken from a drawing a friend made in prison and sent to him. His last name outlined in Old English on the brim of the kid’s hat. “Santa Bruta,” a moniker for his hometown, sits just below, big and blocky. All of it in blue-black outlines and soft gray shading, worn and lived in, some meanings obvious, some only for himself. 

“Why’d you say it?” I ask. 

He confirms what he’s said previously, that his on-stage statement was “premeditated,” though the specific words were chosen on the fly, fueled by adrenaline. 

“I knew I was going to say it,” he says. “I’d been trying to say it. I had a Twitter and I’d said stuff there, but they would fine me. I had to write a letter of apology. But I wanted to say it where they couldn’t deny me. I knew I had to win my heat to be able to do that. So that’s what I did.” 

“But why’d you say it? You could’ve just walked away.” 

“Some people can just let certain things go,” he says. “They’ll just deal with it. I’m not that person. If something bugs me, I try to address the problem so I can deal with it and remove it from my life. I’m real honest about everything. I try to be, anyway.” 

“Were you worried about the consequences?” I ask. “Surely you knew it might be the end.” 

“I never do anything out of fear,” he answers. “Like, ‘I want to say something, but I’m not, because then I’m going to get cut, and then the surf industry isn’t going to touch me’—I just don’t think like that. I was just like, ‘Fuck it. Whatever comes my way, I’ll deal with it. I know this isn’t where I want to be, so let me just move on, and whatever happens is going to happen.’ I wasn’t afraid to give up this lifestyle.” 

“Were you aware of how big of a deal it was at the time, and what people were saying when it happened? There were what you might call a lot of opinions. Lots were supportive. Like, ‘Bobby stuck it to the man.’ But some people seemed really offended or pissed off—like, ‘How dare you bite the hand?’ Then there was some stuff, mostly comments online, that were very personal and downright nasty and—” 

“I’ll just say this: People can say whatever they want about me. I did it. I was there. I know what was going on. Most people who have something to say, they don’t know what it was like. Whatever. What I do care about—what I appreciate—were the people who supported me. People who had been there, who knew: Pancho Sullivan, Freddy Patacchia. Sunny Garcia texted me after and just said, ‘You won.’ All that meant a lot to me, because most people disappeared. I see some of those people who disappeared nowadays, the same people who were saying the same things I was saying but behind closed doors, and I don’t have anything for them. But it’s cool. I don’t need that. It was my decision. I didn’t do it for anybody else.” 

“It’s funny, because surfing loves to lean into its history of rebellion.” 

“But then you turn it around on them,” he says, “and they go, ‘Oh, don’t do that here.’” 

“Do you think the portrayals—of what you did, of what you said, of you—were fair?” 

“I don’t think people understand that I don’t hate everything. I’m grateful for the stuff they were trying to do to benefit surfing, to make this a livelihood for us, for me. I respect that. I met my wife through the tour. I have my family because of it. So there’s a lot of great things that have come out of it, things I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to even have without people supporting me to follow the tour or be a pro surfer. That’s something that obviously gets lost, because I highlighted things I didn’t like, because of how I did it. But it’s more complex than it’s made out to be.”

“Are you proud of what you accomplished? You were—are—a good surfer.”

 

I realize it’s an understatement the moment it comes out of my mouth. It’s moot, anyhow. 

“You know, I never thought I was really good,” he says. “Like I said, I always had confidence issues. I never was a person who would just walk in the room and be like, ‘Fuck, I can do this.’ Looking back at it now, I pat myself on the back for being able to get up from where I came from and go see the world. But I’ve worked for it. And it’s a good feeling, working for something. So I’m proud of what I’ve done, but I have a hard time patting myself on the back, like, ‘I’m a good surfer.’” 

“Why’s that?” 

“Because it doesn’t even matter. Being a good surfer doesn’t make you a good person. Or a happy person. And I feel like I was able to figure that out and chase what’s important to me. Once I stopped caring about being a ‘good surfer,’ my life really started. And I struggled with it all for a long time. I wasn’t very positive. I had to really look in the mirror and think about how I saw things and habits that I had. It’s been a big, long process. It’s still ongoing.” 

Bobby rests his arms on the fence post and leans back on his heels, stretching out. 

“You know,” he continues, “I don’t have any trophies I won. I threw them all away. That shit doesn’t mean a fuckin’ thing to me. If I’m not a good person to my kids—if I don’t tell them I love them and do things to show them that—but I have all these trophies, am I all cool then? Or if I’m not a good husband to my wife, and [don’t] show my kids I love their mom and treat her right?” 

He’s not asking. We stand looking at nothing waves rolling in until Bobby picks up the slack. 

“I have to go,” he says, and starts toward his truck. “I’ll let you know later about tomorrow.” 

“Last thing,” I say. “Do you think about the tour and the industry and New York and the rest of it very much?” 

“Nah,” he says, shaking his head as a grin cuts across his face. “Not unless somebody asks me about it, bro.”

*

At the Motel 6 South in Carpinteria later that evening, I flip on the TV. Monday Night Football is a blowout early in the second quarter, and I start thinking about what exactly I’m doing up here. I start feeling silly again. I’m hardly the first to come knocking since Bobby hung up his jersey for the final time, asking the same questions, hoping for new answers, desperate to be entertained, wanting more Bobby, even though Bobby doesn’t seem to want more of “us,” meaning surfing as a collective. 

Part of it, surely, is innocent enough. We all want to see more of that talent. 

Part of it, probably, is that in a niche subculture with stars uniformly always feeling good and happy to be here and endlessly positive, Bobby is honest and has the nerve to back it up. And whether we agree or disagree with him, we do love our rebels. That’s not “we” in the collective surf sense, either. It’s in the collective everybody sense, all the way back to antiquity. 

“I’m proud of what I’ve done, but I have a hard time patting myself on the back, like, ‘I’m a good surfer.’ Because it doesn’t even matter. Being a good surfer doesn’t make you a good person. Or a happy person. And I feel like I was able to figure that out and chase what’s important to me. Once I stopped caring about being a ‘good surfer,’ my life really started.”

Part of it is that maybe we struggle to accept how someone so gifted at riding a wave—so good at the hard part—would so willingly give up all the rewards it entails. Or, stranger yet, reject them outright. So we project. We theorize. We construct narratives. We debate about him. We hold him up as a pariah. We offer armchair psychoanalysis of someone we don’t know from Adam. We want an answer, even though he’s given us the answer many times over. We just can’t accept it. From afar, it doesn’t make much sense. 

And it’s not like he’s hanging on. Sure, he’s still paid to go surfing, but among a species gone totally mad with self-promotion, self-curation, id, ego, the individual as brand and as entity, self-assurance, any and all attention, relevance, Bobby’s not chasing the spotlight. He doesn’t have active social media and he doesn’t have a YouTube channel and he doesn’t release clips or films. He follows hardly anything in surfing. He doesn’t care much for “surf culture” as it exists, especially in its business and in its media. He likes good waves, and that’s about it. He said his piece, his goodbye, and he really meant it—at least to surfing’s industrial complex. 

These days, he just does his thing. He’s at the park with his wife, walking Bonnie. He’s at the gym, making easy work of the speed bag. He’s at the local city beaches in the summers, pushing his kids into tiny waves, maybe swinging for a couple for himself. He’s down at Rincon when the waves are not tiny. Or at spots up and down the coast, most better left unnamed, enjoying himself with few people around. Every once in a while, he’s on a trip somewhere warm. He could be just one of any of the millions of people around the world who count themselves as surfers. Except when he stands up. Then he’s transcendent. Still. Even if he doesn’t think so, and even if it doesn’t matter to him. He can’t walk away from that.

 With Troy Aikman, Joe Buck, and the sound of the 101 freeway as company, I think about the last thing he said to me earlier that day. Based on what I’ve seen and what he’s told me, Bobby indeed has a full life. Surfing is only one part of it. I realize, much later than I should’ve, that he draws a hard line between it and everything else. And I’m aware of just which side of that line I’m on.

*

Tuesday morning, a few minutes short of 10 a.m., I meet Bobby, with Bonnie on a lead, on the sidewalk at Shoreline Park, a short drive from his house. He has about an hour, just enough time for a lap. It’s bright out again, though the air has cooled. Bobby’s wearing a black hoodie, gym shorts, and running shoes. 

It’s crowded: walkers and joggers, skateboarders and cyclists, even a couple of rollerbladers. A high-intensity-workout group grunts while counting backward in the center of the grass. Other dogs, some dragging their owners behind, some off leash. We take a slow pace, weaving and dodging and stepping around and stopping, Bobby in the mix, waving, smiling, making small talk. 

01

02

03

+ Click to enlarge

“Hey.” 

“How’s it going?” 

“Nice day out.” 

“She’s big.” 

“As long as she’s sweet.” 

“Have a good one.” 

Shoreline, perched above the valley, offers a full view of both Santa Barbara itself and the farther reaches of the coastline. As we make our way along the path, Bobby traces around it, giving directions and descriptions to places of note. Some hold real significance, like the spot down at Leadbetter where he duck dove into Andy Vogel and the whole thing kicked into high gear over 30 years ago. Others are of lesser interest, like where he likes to line up at Sandbar, out there in the distance, the harbor jutting out from downtown. From up here, it’s easy to see the town in all its gorgeousness, tucked between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific, only one major highway in or out, more than a hundred miles of green hills and chaparral from the sprawl of Los Angeles. 

“You think you’ll stay in Santa Barbara forever?” I ask. 

“As far as we see ourselves now,” he says. “I don’t know where else we would go. This is home.” 

Eventually, we pass the playground and make our way to the park’s westernmost corner, where we step off the path at an empty picnic table. Bonnie lies down under it, and Bobby takes a seat on the tabletop, his legs dangling over the side. 

“You spent so much of your life on the road,” I say, “living the so-called dream, chasing waves. Now that you’re not, do you ever get a little restless?” 

“I do like getting out sometimes,” he says. “But I don’t like flying too much. I don’t mind it every now and again. But it’s one thing when you get on a plane because you want to go somewhere, as opposed to when you don’t want to. When you’re on the road so much, going here and there, it’s draining. That’s why we got the van.” 

“That’s got to be a little different than the pro-tour jet set.” 

“It’s cool,” he says. “We do little trips, camping stuff. We’ve gone to Zion. We went over through Oregon. We did the Sawtooth mountains in Idaho. We did a month up in the Sierras. We did the Tetons for two weeks. Yellowstone for a week. We’ll drive around here sometimes, up the coast for a day to hang out. I really love the mountains, the serenity of the mountains. They’re peaceful. We’ve done so much stuff I’ve never experienced before. My whole life, I’ve only gone to places that are ocean-based. It’s a big world out there. There’s a lot more than just surfing.” 

He’s facing away from town, toward the Santa Barbara Channel lying flat and calm through the trees. In the distance, the four Northern Channel Islands are etched into the glow of the horizon. We are at the edge of the continent. 

“To keep the theme off of surfing,” I say, “let’s talk boxing. You’ve been at it for a long time now.” 

“When I was in my later teens,” he says, “I walked into a gym and boxing became my out. Even if I was on the road somewhere, I’d find a gym. It did something at that point that surfing couldn’t, you know? It was like when I first started surfing, as a kid. It gave me a lot of confidence. It helped me grow as a person.” 

“You seem like you take it pretty seriously.” 

“The thing is that we’re in a really rich boxing area here—one of the best in the world,” he says. “And these guys are fighting for their livelihood. I knew that it wasn’t the same for me as it was for them. For me to be like, ‘I want to be a fighter too,’ it just felt stupid. It’s easy to be humble when you walk into an environment like that. With surfing, of course you can get hurt and you push your limits and the ocean can win. But on a day-to-day basis, it’s not, right? Boxing is different. You get in there, and you can get really hurt. I understand that and I respect it. I don’t ever want to fake the funk, you know what I mean? Surfing is my avenue.” 

“And you’re in a strange place with surfing,” I say. 

“I do want to be involved in surfing,” he says, “but not in the surf industry. Not because I’m getting paid, but because it’s special. I was thinking about it after we talked yesterday. And one thing I forgot was something I’ve just started doing, which is taking kids surfing—kids I can relate to, who are growing up similar to how I grew up, that might not ever have a chance to go surfing otherwise. There’s a guy named Eddie Donnellan who runs an organization called MeWater in San Francisco that helps minority kids get to the beach and surf for the first time. I was sitting around one day and saw a video about what they do. So I found his email and sent him a message.” 

Bobby turns away from the water to face me, backlit by the sun. He wants to make sure I get this.

“We’ve organized a couple days down here in Santa Barbara,” he continues, “where kids from the area who’ve never been to the beach—kids who don’t even know how to swim, kids who’ve never thought about surfing—and show them all of that. The kids love it. They ask to come back. Some kids were like, ‘It’s the best day we’ve ever had.’ I think it’s important for those kids to try something in their life that is so left field. I want to give back to where I came from. I’ve been fortunate. A lot of kids I grew up with didn’t have that option or the opportunity. Surfing and the beach and the ocean, it’s just a different lifestyle than what they have.” 

“Sounds more meaningful than chasing a 7-point-whatever.” 

“I want to take older people, too,” he says. His voice gets louder, his words run faster. “I sent out a text the other day to some friends who are my age. They’ve never gone before. A lot of them have had a difficult life. They’ve made bad choices that have ruined their lives, or cost them their life for a bit. They’ve gone places they don’t ever want to go back to. But they’re on the right path now, and they have the right mentality. Growing up, I took a lot of shit for being a surfer. Kids from my neighborhood used to try to embarrass me about it. Not all of them, but some. I used to get teased, like, ‘Oh, you’re doing a white-boy sport.’ Or, ‘Fuck, you’re a white boy,’ and all this shit. And I never folded to try and fit in. There’s still people that think that way. But the ones that don’t, they’re the ones who want to go. So we can go to the beach instead of them just having a barbecue and getting drunk. I want to keep taking people so that they can use it in their life. The way I use it.” 

“What do you use it for?” 

“It makes me feel good,” he says. “It’s an outlet for me when I need it. Even when I don’t get in the water, I have to see it. And now to be able to watch my kids ride waves, just have that fun, it’s trippy. I want to be that family. I’m not trying to groom my kids to be pro surfers or anything. I just want to be able to share it with them, where when I’m 60 and they’re 25, I can call them and say, ‘Hey, you want to go have fun? Let’s get in the water.’” 

He checks the time on his phone and slips down off the table before tugging the leash. Bonnie stands up too. 

“I think it’s the best thing in the world,” he says just as they fall in step, headed toward, well, who knows. 

I start to follow but, thinking about the line, stay seated. 

“I just don’t do it the way I used to,” he continues. “But I still love it. It’s my favorite thing. That’s why I’ve done it forever. I’m not going to do anything that I don’t like, and I still do it.” 

If a realer answer exists, I’ve never heard it.

[Feature image by Seth de Roulet]