Mr. Pipeline is dropping into Carbondale.
Gerry Lopez, who dominated the premiere surf break on Oahu’s North Shore in the 1970s with his elegant tube riding, will appear in the Roaring Fork Valley for the first time during the Five Point Film Festival, which started yesterday in Carbondale.
The valley doesn’t see too many surf legends.
Joey Cabell, an accomplished waterman who won the Duke invitational surf contest in 1969, has a place here and can be found snowboarding at Buttermilk or skiing on Aspen Mountain. Cabell started the Chart House restaurant chain in Aspen in 1962 along with his friend Buzzy Bent.
California surfers Mike Doyle and Herbie Fletcher have visited Aspen as part of the carving snowboard Expression Sessions put on by Cliff Ahumada of Carbondale in the late 1990s, and Doyle had colorful tales of early Aspen.
And highly regarded surfers and musicians Jack Johnson and Donovan Frankenreiter have both recently played gigs in the valley, but their surf status is still slight compared to that of Gerry Lopez.
A laid-back approach
Lopez, 59, would probably rather slip in and out of Carbondale as smoothly and subtly as he has ducked into countless big hollow tubes over the years. But we figured we could blow his cover. After all, he is now an avid snowboarder living in Bend, Oregon, and he’s coming to a ski town.
Lopez is speaking at the film festival tonight, at the showing of a movie about core surfing and Malibu legend Miki Dora called “Chasing Dora.”
He has a new book called “Surf Is Where You Find it,” a collection of essays he has written for a variety of surf magazines, and he’ll be doing a book signing on Saturday morning at Dos Gringos.
He is also an “ocean ambassador” for Patagonia, which now makes surfboards and wetsuits and has a book division, which published his book. And his friend, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, whose own book is titled “Let My People Go Surfing,” will also attend the Five Point Film Festival.
When asked what’s it like going through life as a surf legend, Lopez was unassuming.
“I live in central Oregon,” he said. “Being a surf ‘legend’ doesn’t have much weight there. And I actually prefer it that way. In Hawaii, it is not that big a deal to people, and if it is, they give you a lot of space. I’ve never been in a place where it has been much of a pain in the ass.”
Lopez seems to glide through life, and surfers took notice when he left the center ring of Pipeline, where he won the Pipeline Masters contests in 1972 and 1973, then slid off to the far-flung and once uncrowded waves of G-Land and Uluwatu.
“I just didn’t like surfing where there was a whole bunch of guys,” he said.
In fact, the reason Lopez said he left the surf of Waikiki to head to the “country” on Oahu’s North Shore, where he first surfed Pipeline in 1963, was the growing crowds in “town.”
After becoming an icon at Pipeline, and now admitting that he helped draw the surfing world’s attention to the beachfront wave, he doesn’t surf Pipeline much anymore. He said that one of the last times he visited the beach to watch a contest, he couldn’t find a place to park amid the circus, and instead left to check out nearby Haleiwa, which happens to take the exact same swell as Pipeline. Before Pipeline was even considered rideable, Haleiwa was a showcase break and very popular with surfers on longboards. Lopez said that on the day of the contest he found it 10 feet high — and uncrowded.
“I just went surfing and had a great time,” he said.
He also remembers when Sunset Beach was the main arena on the North Shore, instead of Pipeline.
“It’s more consistent, it’s always bigger, and it’s a better wave in many ways,” Lopez said. “Now it’s kind of forgotten. The attention just shifts from spot to spot, partially as a function of equipment.”
‘A dint of grace’
The five guiding principles of the new Five Point Film Festival — respect, commitment, humility, purpose and balance — are a good fit with Lopez. He applied each of those principles to surfing Pipeline and other heavy breaks, where falls over shallow coral reefs can come with a heavy physical penalty.
“Even as a young, relatively immature surfer, Gerry Lopez had something special going on inside his brain that set him apart from the ’60s masses of teenaged gremmies, so aptly described by Phil Edwards as ‘Legions of the stoked,’” writes Surfers’ Journal publisher and editor Steve Pezman in the introduction to “Surf Is Where You Find It.”
“Gerry’s DNA is part Spanish/German newspaper-journalist father, part lifelong-teacher Japanese mother. Both parents read and wrote extensively. His sharp intellect is instinctual, with a Zen spin, inhabiting a slight frame that articulates a well-coordinated physical presence, one that somehow survives the seemingly impossible by dint of grace and savvy rather than brute power.”
Yes, Lopez rips. And for a generation of surfers, he set the standard of casual, big-wave style.
When Lopez was asked for a photo of him surfing to run with this story, he sent what he called “one of my favorites,” taken by surf photographer James Cassimus.
It’s a black and white shot of Lopez, sometime in the early ’70s, drawing a bottom turn at double-overhead Pipeline in a style recognizable to surf aficionados everywhere.
“It appeared recently in a Drew Kampion book called ‘Stoked,’” Lopez said of the photo. “I had forgotten about it. I like the big bottom turns that the single fin boards where able to do. That type of bottom turn was lost when the boards went to three fins and thrusters. You lost that big turn way out in front of the wave. It’s like a big GS turn.”
When complimented on his evident mastery at Pipeline, Lopez demurred.
“It was pretty much just matching myself to the wave itself, then having the right equipment,” he said. “To this day, and I say this emphatically, I owe it all to the surfboards. I had good surfboards.”
But as Steve Pezman wrote, Lopez surfs “with panache amidst the mayhem.”
And that approach has everything to do with the man on top of the board.
bgs@aspendailynews.com
