“We’d heard he was in town,” recalls Occ. “It was the day before the Straight Talk Tyres contest started in Cronulla and the waves were pretty solid – six foot. I remember walking over the sand hills and looking up the beach and there was one guy out. It was him. He was on this deep six-channel thruster and ripping like nothing we’d ever seen. He blew us away. He stayed with Jim Banks that first year; Banksy had a house on the beach at Wanda up top of the hill near my school, and that was where I met him. That’s where I met Tom Curren.”
Occ knew of Curren, Curren knew of Occ, but neither knew how entangled their careers would soon become. Their first meeting, in Jim Banks’ lounge room, didn’t exactly feel historic. “I remember his handshake was soft and he didn’t really say anything,” recalls Occ, “but at the same time I was kind of in awe of him, so I don’t think I really said anything either. It was awkward.” Curren won the Straight Talk, and soon after the pair would be interviewed together live on national breakfast television over at Narrabeen, the interview speaking volumes about the contrasting personalities of the future stars. Occ wearing yellow, pink and pastel green; Curren in black and navy. Curren with arms folded defensively; Occ fixing his hair and scratching his arse at the very instant the show crosses live.
Host: “Tom, can I start with you; what are the conditions like down there toda…?”
Occ: “Weeeeell, it’s a perfect day down here todaaaaay…”
Although in personality and colour palette the pair were polar opposites, they shared an uncomplicated worldview, were both savants, and both – ultimately – became a little lost in the black circus of pro surfing. When Tom won the Straight Talk, he was refused entry that night at the presentation by the doorman of the Cronulla Leagues Club because he was wearing thongs. He had to head back and fetch a pair of shoes to get in the door to receive his $18,000 cheque and the keys to his brand-new red Datsun 200B station wagon. The car – and Curren – would stay in Cronulla for a month after his win. While in Cronulla, 18-year-old Tom would marry his French girlfriend, Marie, the newlyweds living with local surfer Iain ‘Ratso’ Buchanan and his girl. “I daaaaaaaare say I was there,” says Occ of Curren’s wedding. “Was it at a golf club maybe?”
The newly formed ASP announced the schedule for the 1983/’84 world tour, and Occ was soon packing his suitcase for South Africa. Up until that point, Pam Occhilupo had chaperoned her only son up to the Capricorn contest at Taree, down to Summercloud Bay and across the bridge to Narrabeen, but her son was now about to head to Durban, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Not only that, the guys who’d be babysitting her little blond cherub not only saw him as a threat to their own careers, they were also largely incapable of looking after themselves.
In the end Pam Occhilupo approached Sydney surfer, Greg Day and asked if Mark could tag along. “She somehow thought I was a reputable type of character, and he was busting to go on the circuit,” recalls Day. “So, she asked me if I could look after him.” Greg had a reputation as a ladies’ man but by tour standards was responsible. Sending a 16-year-old off to compete on the world tour might raise eyebrows today, but in the early days of the tour there were no rules. If your surfing was ready, so were you. The previous season 16-year-old Martin Potter not only did the whole tour, he’d finished the year rated 12th.
So, with two boards and a suitcase Occ soon found himself flying across the Indian Ocean, exquisitely unprepared for the world. His first stop was the Gunston 500 in Durban where he got dropped by the flu, then drew Dane Kealoha – at the time the gnarliest guy on tour – in his first heat. Even at 16 and without ever having been to Hawaii, Occ realised it was in his best interests that Dane win. It was a heavy baptism to tour life, made even heavier when he later saw Dane being kicked out of the hotel they were staying at and a scene erupting. Occ was trying to process not only why security had thrown Dane out, but also why there were no black people on the beach at all. Occ looked around, scratching his head.
Years before Occy needed sanctuary, he was already being drawn toward one. Gordon Merchant had travelled to Jeffreys Bay by freighter in the early ‘70s when it was on the Santosha hippy trail. While speaking to Occ about the prospect of him one day moving north to hone his style on the Gold Coast pointbreaks, Gordon had winked at Occ and told him, “But I know one even better.”
On a July morning in 1983, Occy woke up at Kitchen Windows B&B at J-Bay, walked over to the window and tried to fathom the sight before him. “I thought, is this for real? I thought I was dreaming. It was cloudy, rainy and cold, and the waves were six feet and unbelievable with just a handful of guys out. That was it. Straight away, I was gone.”
In the years ahead, Occ’s world was about to start spinning so quickly it’d occasionally fling him off, and when that happened, he’d invariably wake up in J-Bay like it had all been a dream. He’d walk down the point to Doc’s Place, fill his lungs with the cold vapour of the Roaring Forties and the hot wash of Durban Poison, and his gaze would follow each set wave as it disappeared deep into the bay. “I’ve never missed a year at J-Bay since then,” recalls Occ. “Hang on,” he says, rubbing his chin, “maybe except for those years when I didn’t come.”
Leaving South Africa, Occ went to France where he found “heaps of nude chicks on the beach but no surfers.” He went to Japan where everyone bowed to him, and he ate rice topped with sugar because “everyone else was eating worms and snails.”
“I was a good traveller,” he offers. “The only problem though, was that I had these pointy black shoes I used to wear everywhere without socks. You know how you take your shoes off on the plane? Well, I couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t let me.” Personal hygiene has never been Occ’s strong suit, and after three months on tour the shoes required an exorcism. The first point of order whenever Occ arrived somewhere new was to take them off, leave them outside the hotel room, then wash his feet in the bathtub. One day while he was doing so, Rabbit bagged up the shoes and threw them away.
In his rookie year however, it would be America that would really blow Occ’s mind. The same intrigue that had preceded the arrival of Curren in Australia was matched in America for Occy. America was waiting for him; the girls, the fans… and the guys he’d be surfing against. On a flight to North Carolina, American pros Brad Gerlach and Jeff Novak walked past Occy on the plane. Never having seen him in person, Novak sat down commenting, “Fuck, how big is his head!” Gerr concurred, nodding. “His head’s fucking huge.”
The American hype though really did go to his head. Occ tripped out on the colour and hum of Huntington. His mirrored sunnies reflected hi-cut bikinis and crimped hair and yellows and pinks and a sea of humanity as he stuck his head out the car window on Highway 1 and sniffed the brown air like a dog. Despite losing in the OP Pro trials that year and watching Curren go on to win the whole thing, Occ felt Huntington was the stage he’d been looking for since he was an eight-year-old in a dress.
After lambasting the American guys on tour as “Seppo wankers” in Tracks magazine back home, it would ironically be an American who would quietly ignite Occ’s career. Occ at the time was riding an orange and blue Jim Banks board that surfed “squirrelly” in the small waves that littered the tour. While surfing a PSSA contest in San Diego, one of the judges, who did a bit of shaping on the side, noticed the board grabbing, so went home and shaped Occ a board. Rusty Preisendorfer flattened the decks and rockers, added volume in the nose and massaged foam out to the rails. Occ hadn’t asked for the board, had no idea why it worked, but from his first wave felt his surfing transform.
Rusty soon after left Canyon Surfboards and struck out alone, forging a famous label that like, Billabong, would be launched on the back of Occ’s success. As for that first board – a modest-looking 6’0” squash – Occ “rode it until it died.” He would snap the nose of it in Japan at the Marui contest in October, staying on the board and making the semis before losing to Curren in their first ever man-on-man heat. The board surfed on despite what Occ called at the time “mega-dings.” By that stage Occ had his own surfboard label in Japan – his name licensed out to some guy he didn’t know – yet he only had one surfboard himself and that board didn’t even have a nose.
Occ arrived in Hawaii for the first time on the old Honolulu night-flight, made it out to the North Shore in the early hours, and crashed on the couch of one-armed kneeboarder Buddy McCrae. Having never been to Hawaii before, Occ’s head was swimming with crazy aloha, fuelled by the low frequency rumble coming up through the couch. He woke the next morning and looked out across the Sunset lineup, which was eight-foot, top-to-bottom and growing alarmingly out of the west. “That first day was unbelieeeeeevable. It picked up all day and Sunset was just perfect.”
As only Occ can do, on his first day in Hawaii he managed to blunder into a beef with Derrick Doerner, who at the time was in the top five (or bottom five depending on which way you read it) of Hawaiian guys you wanted beef with. “I took off on a wave at Sunset and Derrick dropped in on me. Maybe we were a bit tooo close but we both made it through to the inside bowl and flicked out. He paddled straight up to me and slapped me across the face and said, ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know what you’re doing out here?’ And I’m like, ‘Err, no and no.’” North Shore, day one and Occ was figuring at least it couldn’t get any worse.
It got worse. “Anyway, for no reason – I don’t know if I was paddling for the same wave or not – but I got in Ken Bradshaw’s road and we bumped each other a little bit. Well, Kenny’s paddled straight over to me with eyes like fire and the big Chuck Norris beard, grabs my board and bites a chunk out of the rail! He spits these chunks of foam and fiberglass out of his mouth while he screams at me, ‘Get out of here, grommet punk!’ I paddled straight in, and Buddy was there again – it’d only been 10 minutes since I’d paddled in with Derrick – and he’s like, ‘What happened this time?’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck, this big guy who looks like Chuck Norris just bit a chunk out of my board!’ Buddy had this guy with him at the house, talking about real estate and stuff, and the guy goes, ‘Get back out there and tell him I sent you!’ I’m like, umm, okay, are you sure?’ And he goes, ‘Just do it and tell him I sent you.’ I go, “Umm, okay… Who are you?’ And he goes, ‘Just tell him Eddie sent you.’”
But after his baptism of fire, the islands quickly adopted Occy. While most haoles tried to stay invisible on the North Shore, Occ got straight into a groove, disarming the gnarliest of North Shore locals with his goofy charm. Occ could do no wrong on the North Shore. “He was the only haole guy who hung out with the Hawaiian guys and could pull it off,” recalls Brad Gerlach. “The only guy.”
Occ flew home for the close of the ’83 season, which in those days finished in April of the following year. The Beaurepaires contest, held in Cronulla, saw Occ beat Curren for the first time and blaze all the way through to the semis. The result not only created a huge buzz in Cronulla, it also meant that Occy finished the year on 2690.59 points (what earned you 59 hundredths of a ratings point is anyone’s guess), scraping into the elite Top 16 by a whisker for the 1984 ASP season.
The Beaurepaires contest had also hosted the world’s first night surfing exhibition, which saw 40,000 people cram into Cronulla to watch the world’s best surfers under lights surfing knee-high dribble. Pro surfing was about to boom, fuelled by a new generation of surfing stars.
None of them would be bigger than Occy.
The full story ‘The Boy King’ features in SW423, on sale now.