I first met Brad Gerlach in the Cardiff Reef dirt parking lot in the early 1980s. He was about 12 years old and aware that I was writing for some surf magazines.
Even then he was a good self-promoter and he approached me to say that I should write a story on the grommets of North County. I knew what he was getting at, but decided to test him anyway.
“Who did you have in mind?” I asked. “Oh, Kenny Clemmens, John Glomb … me,” he confidently replied.
I never did write that piece, but wish I had, just for the brilliant prophetic quotes “Gerr,” as Brad became known internationally, would have offered. Over the years I interviewed him numerous times.
Once, some friends and I even took him to La Jolla’s Comedy Store where he did a routine about a dog with indigestion. It was so good that I can still smell it and I contemplate the verbal images he served up every time I decide to lose weight.
As anyone who follows surfing realizes, Gerlach went on to be one of the best competitive surfers of the late ’80s, early ’90s, and took center stage again when he and his tow-in partner Mike Parsons rode some of the world’s biggest surf 100 miles offshore at Cortez Bank a few years back.
While his achievements are numerous, I am most proud that Brad became an ambassador of style for North County surfers after he polished his act on the road.
I met Joel Tudor under similar circumstances and in exactly the same place as I met Brad, at Cardiff Reef. In Tudor’s case, however, the young teenager never said a word to me about his surfing. It was obvious even at 12 or 13 that he didn’t have to. It didn’t take a prophet to see that he would one day become known as the most gifted longboarder of his generation.
Tudor appeared on the radar sometime in the late ’80s while longboarding was mid-way through a second growth spurt after the “Shortboard Revolution” of the late ’60s sent most of us knuckleheads into our garages to cut down our classic longboards and reincarnate them into crude mini guns and V bottoms.
Most of the kids who discovered longboarding in the early to mid-’80s climbed onto bigger boards after deserting their shortboarding peers.
As such, the majority of them seemed to be trying too hard, carving big arcs on highly rockered, ultra thin, super light hybrids.
Tudor, on the other hand, went minimalist, riding traditional, heavy, single-fin surfboards, doing wider, more elegant turns and cutbacks and walking to the nose in a style not seen since Hawaiian born David Nuuhiwa light footed it to tip like an eight-pound kitten.
Other North County stylists deserve stand aside this hall of fame duet. Rusty Miller, Cheer Critchlow, L.J. Richards, Margo Oberg, Syd Madden and Linda Benson are chief among them.
Of course, Rob Machado, a world-class competitor who incorporated old-school form into his every movement deserves honorable mention as do Jeanette and Cori Schumacher, Ryan Burch and Zach Flores.
It’s comforting to realize that those mentioned above understand something known as style, a word that has long lived on our coastline.
Here’s to them and to us as we celebrate a tradition going back at least as far as the father of modern surfing, Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku.
