How could a cocky blond 20-year-old upstart from Australia be about to win the most prestigious surfing competition in the world: the 1978 Banzai Pipeline Masters in Hawaii?
This gruelling competition takes place in ‘one of the most dangerous, snarling tubular masses of water on the planet’, which has killed more surfers than all the other surfing spots in the world combined.
The Hawaiians, possessive of their own world-beating surfing prowess, did not like what they were seeing. They gawped as the young, fearless Larry Blair won heat after heat, reached the final – and then had the audacity to win the competition, thanks to what he describes as ‘the added wiggle, making sure to spend more time in the deepest, nastiest caverns of the tube.’
Reading Larry Blair’s exhilarating memoir, brilliantly put into words by his friend and co-surfer Jeremy Goring (hotelier to the Royal Family), is like riding a liquid roller coaster in itself.
It would be gripping enough if it were simply about how a boy with a surfing obsession became a global champion.
The descriptions of being inside a vast wave (‘a liquid cathedral’) are mesmerising as well as terrifying, and Larry’s love affair with surfing makes you understand the addictive magic of the sport.
Reading Larry Blair’s exhilarating memoir, brilliantly put into words by his friend and co-surfer Jeremy Goring (hotelier to the Royal Family ), is like riding a liquid roller coaster in itself. Pictured: Larry Blair
Aged just 19, Larry won the Australian ‘Surfabout’ competition, earning him a huge cash prize. And the next year, he won the Banzai Pipeline Masters in Hawaii
But that’s only half the story. The other half is that Larry’s mother Patricia and his stepfather Frank ‘Baldy’ Blair were two of Australia’s most hardened thieves, and Larry grew up as their well-trained apprentice.
Their family home in Sydney ‘looked like Harrods or Saks Fifth Avenue’: full of stolen goods. His parents would sit up all night planning their crimes: how they would ‘liberate’ $200,000-worth of goods in their next heist.
Young Larry knew no other lifestyle. His parents dressed him in silk and cashmere. He gratefully accepted the ill-gotten gifts that Frank (‘a gnarled bundle of scar tissue’ whom he calls ‘Dad’) gave him – one of which was a 7ft 6in red spear-shaped surfboard: ‘To this day the finest thing I’ve ever owned and the only inert object I’ve ever truly loved.’
At first, Larry describes the criminal underworld he grew up in as a bundle of fun: his effervescent mother’s ‘good looks, sparkly openness plus resourcefulness and guile made her especially good at thievery’, and she often invited Larry along to help her in the art of distraction. But the crimes grew more audacious.
Frank’s armed gang started targeting banks, and ‘anywhere you could point a gun at someone’. Then, aged 12, Larry overheard them plotting the biggest armed robbery in Australian history: an armoured van carrying cash.
Taking the drivers by surprise at gunpoint, when their van door was open during the lunch hour, Frank and his gang ran off with over half a million dollars in cash. ‘The World’s Most Expensive Lunch Break,’ blared the headlines.
After hiding the cash in a betting shop ceiling, Frank took the family out to a Chinese banquet. Then they had to go into hiding in the desert for a while.
Frank comes across as a lovable, big-hearted, rogue. He paid a terrible price. One of his co-robbers gave him up, and he was hunted down by a gang of even more ruthless criminals known as the Toe-Cutters, who kidnapped him and cut each of his toes off one by one, asking him where he’d hidden the loot. Then they killed him, and dissolved his body in a barrel of acid.
Their family home in Sydney ‘looked like Harrods or Saks Fifth Avenue’: full of stolen goods. Pictured: Surfers at Bondi Beach in Sydney
From then on, Larry’s mother Patricia became a criminal in her own right, running an efficient network from her house. When Larry was in his mid-teens, she and her friend John started a scam redirecting dole payments into fictitious accounts. Larry took part in this. In a good week, $1,000 could be paid into his fake account.
But the police were on to them, and they had to run away again – this time to the UK, where Patricia joined the British crime network
Larry didn’t take to Britain. He decided to use his funds to buy a ticket to Hawaii – where he fell in with the global surfing community, of discontented viscounts, druggies, misfits and escapees like him.
On return to Australia he was arrested – and freed, but the fright that gave him marked the end of his criminal career and the start of his surfing one.
The descriptions of the tower-block-tall Hawaiian waves in this book are unforgettable: giant swells of water colliding with the islands’ steep volcanic peaks. The waves echo tempests that happened 3,500km to the north several days ago. A slight holding back of energy at the last moment ‘creates a final, mighty concentration of power’.
Aged just 19, Larry won the Australian ‘Surfabout’ competition, earning him a huge cash prize. And the next year, he won the Banzai Pipeline Masters in Hawaii.
The global fame went straight to his young head. By his own admission, he ‘drank, partied, sh*gged and crashed cars’ all over Sydney. No girlfriend could stick with him for long: he was too obsessed with surfing.
There was darkness at the heart of the world of competitive surfing. ‘Localism,’ he explains, ‘is one of surfing’s ugly secrets.’ Larry naively blurted out in a magazine interview that he intended to win five Pipeline Masters victories. That was the catalyst for the revenge of the locals.
Larry didn’t take to Britain. He decided to use his funds to buy a ticket to Hawaii – where he fell in with the global surfing community, of discontented viscounts, druggies, misfits and escapees like him. Pictured: Australia’s Tyler Wright takes part in Hawaii’s Banzai Pipeline
At his third attempt at the Banzai, in 1980, he was hounded and chased off the waves by a gang of three or four Hawaiian surfers. ‘I felt like a seal hunted by orcas.’ He crashed out of the competition.
‘That irritating swagger had become my Achilles heel,’ he writes. ‘It had made me a target.’ He decided to quit competitive surfing for good. He made his living doing TV adverts and taking roles in TV soaps, before becoming a chef. He now lives happily in Bali with his wife, Nyoman.
As for his mother Patricia, in 1980, she and her friends planned and executed the most brazen jewel theft in Australian history: the Goloconda diamond, or ‘Glonda’, which was on temporary display in a glass case in Sydney town hall. They pretended to be the diamond-cleaners. Once they’d stolen the diamond, they didn’t know what to do with it. To this day it is listed as missing.
Patricia died of a brain tumour aged 48. Mother and son had matched each other in audacity. Her theft of the ‘Glonda’, Larry writes, was ‘the high point of her mad, dangerous, hilarious and utterly incomprehensible career. It was ‘her Pipeline.’
BOOK OF THE WEEK: THE OUTSIDE, by Larry Blair and Jeremy Goring (Penguin Random House Australia £17.99, 320pp)
