Sunday, October 01, 2006

Noll


N WIND 10 TO 15 KT.
WIND WAVES 2 FT.
W SWELL 6 FT AT 12 SECONDS.

Since it is the weekend of the Noll Classic it only makes sense...

Some quotes from "Legendary Surfers" website by Malcolm Gault-Williams...

"I was kind of like a mosquito always buzzing around Velzy. I had to get in there and see what was going on, boy, whenever he would put down a tool, I'd be right there to grab it. God I just drove him nuts, every time I'd pick up his drawknife, the Hawk would scream, 'Hey, put that down son, you'll cut yourself.' Somehow I had this hunch that he would eventually teach me. After months of dogging his every step and being his shadow, I was allowed to do some small task. I think it was sweeping up the balsa shavings. I was so pumped, it was like I'd arrived. It was totally bitchin'."
-- Greg Noll

"We grew up quickly, surrounded by guys eighteen and older, in their prime. They lived to surf, drink, raise hell and score heavily with women. I saw these guys going up and down the coast on surf trips, drinking and bagging girls, and all I could think of was 'What a neat life!'"
-- Greg Noll

"People turned around and came back to watch. An enormous crowd formed. Ampol Oil took films. When we left Australia, we also left our boards for the Aussies. Those films were shown all over the country to different clubs. The films and our boards became the basis for the modern surfboard movement in Australia."
-- Greg Noll

"After becoming established as a surfboard manufacturer and surf film producer whose films were shown on TV, all of a sudden all the teachers and counselors who wanted nothing to do with my ass during school were wanting to kiss it. They'd be interviewed by a newspaper of magazine and their tone would change. 'Oh yes, I knew Greg Noll. He was in my class. Fine, upstanding young man.' What bullshit."
-- Greg Noll

"The forbiddenness of the place is what made Waimea Bay so compelling. I wanted to try it but didn't have the balls to go out by myself. So I kept promoting the idea of breaking the Bay. Buzzy Trent, my main opponent, started calling me the Pied Piper of Waimea. He said, 'Follow Greg Noll and he'll lead you off the edge of the world. You'll all drown like rats if you listen to the Pied Piper of Waimea Bay.'
One day in November, we stopped at Waimea just to take a look. I finally jerked my board off the top of the car and did it."
-- Greg Noll talking about November 5, 1957

"Within minutes, word spread into Haleiwa that Waimea Bay was being ridden. We looked across the point and saw cars and people lining up along the road watching the crazy haoles riding Waimea Bay. There must have been a hundred people -- a big crowd for that time."
-- Greg Noll on Waimea, November 5, 1957

"I'd love to say something heroic. I'd love to say we made history. But basically it was a bunch of guys parked around the Bay there, and somebody grabbed a board and went surfing, and it looked so good the rest of us guys said, 'Hey, we got to get in on this.'"
-- Greg Noll on November 5, 1957, in Surfers, The Movie

"Phil Edwards is the guy who tagged me with the nickname Da Bull. One time, when we were at Pipeline, he accused me of being bullheaded because I knew I was going to get wiped out on this one wave, and instead of ejecting like I should have, I just squatted down and got eaten alive. Afterwards, Phil said, "You bullheaded sonofabitch, I think I'll just call you Da Bull from now on." The name stuck."
-- Greg Noll

"I hated seeing the drug scene shift into high gear like it did. I feel a little self-righteous standing on my soapbox with a bottle of beer in my hand, and I can't claim to have been a total virgin when it came to experimenting with drugs. But I can look back over the years and say that I saw a lot of neat, healthy young kids who I know would have become great athletes if they hadn't gotten overly involved in drugs and gone straight down the shit chute. With some guys, drugs became a way of life. They went through tremendous personality changes, or they died. Drugs didn't do them any good. In the same way, at certain times in my life, alcohol didn't do me any good. A lot of kids today seem to be taking themselves, their health and their education more seriously, and that's good."
-- Greg Noll

"... They all were well-known big-wave riders, including Fred Hemmings, Bobby Cloutier, Wally Froiseth, Jimmy Blears. I had surfed different places with these guys for years. You could tell that this was no normal day. Usually, we're out there laughing, joking, giving each other a hard time. When the surf gets really big, all that bullshit goes out the window. At Waimea, for instance, when the surf starts coming up, guys' attitudes would change. Peter Cole would get a little more hyper, Buzzy Trent would start talking faster, Pat Curren would get quieter. Peter likes to joke about how I'd start hyperventilating extra loud to try to psych guys out. Today it was serious business. No laughing, no joking. Some of the guys were glassy-eyed and there was talk of calling in the helicopters. Since that morning, when many of the guys had first paddled out, the surf had been steadily building. Now, it was at a size where all but the most experienced big-wave riders call it quits."
-- Greg Noll talking about Makaha, December 4, 1969

"After I had analyzed what I'd done, I asked myself, 'You're not going to top that, so where do you go from here? What so you do now?' I didn't want to be like a punch-drunk fighter, going around and reliving the big moment..."
-- Greg Noll talking about Makaha, December 1969

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