This was pro surfing Pangaea, a time when giants walked the earth, stalking an alien landscape – Neptune Beach, Fistral, Trigg, Wrightsville – and the tour was populated by characters so large they bordered on self-parody. They were guys who believed the whole point of pro surfing was to make the other guy disappear in your shadow. Ego and rating were tethered. They all could see pro surfing was set to boom, they were all willing it into existence and they wanted to be front and centre when it did.
The class of ’84 was full of future legends. There were the old guard; Rabbit, Shaun and Cheyne, hanging on grimly into the geriatric twilight of their late twenties. There were the new generation; Carroll, Curren, Pottz, Hardman, Barton, Gerr and Kong. But this was not their year. No, it was destined to belong to someone else, and from the very first contest of the 1984 season it was clear who it belonged to… the guy over there being interviewed, staring down the barrel of the camera.
“So, Occy, do you consider yourself a serious contender to be the world champion?”
“Well, yes. Yes, I do.”
Nineteen eighty-four was Mark Occhilupo’s perfect point in time. Occy made his first tour final in the first event of the season, losing to Martin Potter in anemic conditions in Japan. Occ had mastered surfing junk, and the Japanese final announced Occ’s arrival as a serious challenger.
Sadly, the Japanese event was also Joe Engel’s last event on tour. The Australian surfer had won Bells the previous year and travelled on the Billabong team with Occy, but had endured a private hell with undiagnosed schizophrenia, which combined with the pressures of travelling and touring had seen him unravel. Occ watched the plunge at close quarters. “In Japan we all stayed together in one of those Japanese guesthouses with the sliding paper doors, and I remember he was actually quite intimidating to be around. He’d fully had the shits with you then just turn around and go, ‘Nah, just fooling with ya’ and crack himself up. He’d psych you out then be your best friend again. I was 17 and didn’t know what to think.”
Pro surfing was not professional enough yet to deal with the casualties that would become increasingly common as eighties rolled on and the tour sped up. The tour was hardly a fountain of compassion. The tour could eat its young. “Joe dropped off the tour and I remember I ran into him in the surf at Burleigh surfing a board with no fins and no leggie. I said hello to him out in the lineup and he made a sound like a monkey.”
The big change in 1984 for Occy was that he had a coach. The idea of a surfing coach itself was revolutionary enough on its own, before Gordon even hired former top 10 surfer Derek Hynd for the job. Tactically, Hynd was masterful, but his style was so obsessive that he was tough for a bunch of freewheeling kids to work with. He’d carry around an exercise book in which he’d scratch a matrix of shorthand notes, cataloguing every wave, every turn; rating, vivisecting heats critically as only he could. “I never read that book,” laughs Occ. “I wasn’t game. I remember Sunny Garcia wanted to burn it.”
Hynd had lost his eye to the pro tour in 1980 when speared by the nose of his board during a heat in Durban. Like Ahab, he was now scanning the horizon with his good eye for his White Whale – Occy winning the 1984 world title. Hynd’s philosophy with Occ was simple – “You don’t tamper with pure genius” – and he knew what Occ had was special. Hynd’s challenge was that Occ had a tendency to wander in the direction of anything shiny, the problem being that in 1984 everything on tour was shiny.
“Derek and I had a good thing going,” recalls Occ. “Derek was really intellectual and really funny but also really weird.” The pair was a sight; Occ dressed head-to-toe in rainbow pastel, Derek dressed in overalls and a pith helmet – but for six months this odd couple threatened to turn pro surfing on its head.
But Derek also had burn after reading orders. As much as he was there to coach the team through heats, he was there to keep them out of trouble, Occy in particular. Hynd was well aware that Occ was an ephemeral talent, a Ming vase that if dropped could not simply be put back together with crazy glue. Derek famously had a ‘no tolerance’ policy with drugs and would later found a support group on tour called On The NOD (Not On Drugs), the prerequisite was you had to have been clean for two years. On the pro tour in the 1980s this meant it was able to hold its meetings in phone boxes. “Globally it had eight members,” offers Hynd, dryly. “It went nowhere. You’ve got to remember the tour was only 10 years old and there were no checks in place. It was open season.”
In Derek’s tour bus was another Cronulla surfer, Gary Green. Two years older than Occ, Greeny had an infectious sense of fun that lightened the growing seriousness of it all.
“It was like being in a rock band on tour,” remembers Greeny.
“We had a ball,” recalls Occ. “Can you imagine Derek driving a bus with all of us in it? Gordon had given Derek the gold American Express card and we went pretty mad on it. The card only lasted a year. Derek’s humour took a while for me to get because he was just so intelligent, but he liked going out too and checking the talent out, so we had a pretty funny time.” Greeny’s clowning around was the perfect foil to Derek’s intensity. In Capetown, Hynd accidentally ran over Greeny at Outer Kom and put a dozen stitches in his shin. Greeny‘s revenge would come a week later. After contracting a case of the crabs, he rolled around naked in Derek’s bed while Derek was out. Both Occ and Greeny smoked a little weed, which they could hardly hide from Hynd, but in light of what was going on in other hotel rooms at the time, it was let slide.
It would be in J-Bay that year that Occ would famously announce himself. The Country Feeling Classic was C-rated, the best wave on tour with the lowest rating, and run out of a yellow double decker bus. Country Feeling was owned by local surfwear baroness, Cheron Kraak who would soon take the Billabong license in South Africa, and, with it, adopt Occy like a son. “I’d never heard of this kid before,” she recalls. “He was just this little blond kid with the squeaky voice who turned up and stayed. I needed to remind him to brush his teeth, but when he paddled out there, he just blazed. That kid was light years ahead of everyone.”
Occy’s surfing at J-Bay in July 1984 tore through time. He flew down the line at J-Bay like a re-entering spacecraft, the whole thing just threatening to blow apart at any second, only for Occ to load up all those G-forces and train them into searing chicanes at the top of the wave, then do it again, and again, disappearing down into the bay. Those there to witness it left with the impression they weren’t just watching the best surfing ever; they were witnessing the best surfing that might ever be. “In my exercise book,” recalls Hynd, “I had to invent new codes for what he was doing.” By the time he’d beaten Hans Hedemann in the final on a dropping swell, Occ came in complaining that his board felt funny. He flipped it over to discover that his inside fin had broken loose and was flapping in the breeze, the board dying there in his arms.
The fruitiness of the Tutti Frutti Pro at Lacanau, the next event on tour, was matched only by Occy’s pink and blue springsuit with the yellow gussets that would become his uniform for the ’84 season. In waist-high fizzing lefts, Occy, surfing without a leash, zipped down the bank before finishing up in the shorebreak amongst the holidaying Parisians, half of whom were naked. Occ took down Curren again before winning the final against Tom Carroll. At age 18, Occy was now number one in the world. When interviewed immediately after the final he stated straight up he was going to win the world title that year. It wasn’t a precocious, youthful boast; most guys on tour assumed it was going to happen. He had Curren on a 4-0 run. Surfing Magazine put him on the cover of the next issue trumpeting, “He’s young, he’s hot, he’s number #1!” Occy’s time had come. It was August 12.
On August 29 he showed up at Huntington Beach for the OP Pro looking, according to Derek Hynd, “Rake thin, a different person, a ghost.” Hynd had lost him in the celebrations after Lacanau, and Occ had found his own way to England before heading on to California. “I’m meant to be taking care of the guy and here I am making calls piecing together where he was.” Occ had vanished and the trail got wafer thin. On the beach at Huntington, Occ walked straight past Derek for his round-three heat with Wes Laine, a heat that considering Occ’s form should have been no contest. Instead Occ lost convincingly… and would continue to do so for the rest of the season.
“At the end of that heat at Huntington I felt Occy’s career was over,” recalls Derek. “It was gone. He came in thinking he was surfing good, but physically he couldn’t string a turn together without looking like a cadet at Cronulla Boardriders. Watching him walk up the beach that day is still one of the saddest moments of my life. I knew he was done. G’Day saw it happening before J-Bay, but I didn’t see it coming cause Occy was hiding what he was doing under the carpet. I should have. He was still leading the world title race a by a long way, but he was finished. He was psychologically in the clutches of a really dangerous scene.” Occ can’t remember when he tried coke for the first time, “France or California maybe? There was always a lot around both events, and they were back-to-back which made it worse. It was pretty rampant back then.”
“I actually had a fistfight with one of his peers over it in South Africa,” recalls Day. “I was really pissed off. It was really sad. He got right into coke during that period. It got worse and worse, and it wasn’t discouraged. Guys even encouraged it. I smoked a little pot, but I have a real issue with stuff like that. As soon as he started becoming famous there were all these people, all these strangers you never saw before who started hanging around him. I remember this one day he goes, ‘I’m just going across the road to the hotel, come on.’ We got to this hotel room across the road from Huntington Beach and the OP Pro, and we walked inside and there were all these guys sitting around. They opened the fridge and had trays and trays of coke in there. Like golf balls of coke, heaps of them. I couldn’t believe it. I was appalled.”
“I just went to California and the parties happened more often,” offered Occ. The tour’s growing professionalism was being counterweighted by a Bacchanalian party culture which, like most ‘80s party cultures, was fuelled by coke. Its use went from world champions all the way down to shadowy acolytes. The scene developed its own economy, helped by the surfers being paid prize money in cash and travellers’ cheques. The touring surfers pretty soon had touring dealers. Two Brazilian guys actually followed the tour from South Africa to Europe to the States that year with a brick of everlasting electric sugar, but opportunistic local dealers would grow out of the sand wherever the tour stopped. Occ never had his own coke, but never needed to. He never developed a habit, but being young with a fragile psyche, it was enough to knock him from a winning orbit.
By the end of the season, Occy would slip to third in the ratings, overtaken by Tom Carroll and Tom Curren. For Occy, the moment was lost, not to reappear again for 15 years. Talking to both Occy and Hynd today it’s clear 1984 was seen through two different lenses. Occ sees ’84 as a triumph, third in the world at 18. “I was happy with third. Tom and Tom were really good. That year was a blur. I was still a kid. It was epic so much fun, but it went by so quickly.” Hynd to this day feels, “Denied and guilty. Dead-set guilty. I should have seen it coming. Occy was denied. Australia was denied. It was the hobbling of Phar Lap right there.”
