Gerry Lopez: Don't Be A Kook

An open mind is what led Mr. Gerry Lopez—rather, Mr. Pipeline—into a career in surfing. He wasn’t ambitious so much at the start as he was plainly curious. Surfing, at least in Hawaii, at the time he was coming up, was “just another sport,” in his eyes, and “not something to be taken seriously.”

Not that Lopez wasn’t a humble grom; “I started surfing when I was 10 years old. I was intimidated by older surfers,” he told me, particularly in respect to Paul Strauch and Jock Sutherland–whom he admired as much as he feared. In due time—four years, to be exact—he’d earn his stripes and their respect, if not quite adulation. After all, competitive athletes—even retired ones—have to leave room for rivalry.

He took the same approach with higher learning, and getting a taste of life on the mainland. Arriving in California in 1966, he encountered a coastal population still smitten by Gidget and The Beach Boys, idolizing surfs as gods, which he maybe found a little silly. Did he kvetch? No, he got his kicks and left: “Afterwards, looking back, I just went, geez. Well, live and learn. But it was great being in California, I’ll tell you that. It was 1966 and there was a lot of good stuff happening.”

Down to gear: It pays to imagine, and perhaps—or at least be willing to—kook out on that front, too. Just look at Gerry’s very first surfboard design, led by little more than curiosity, which could just as soon have gone wrong as it did take off and set him off on another (simultaneous) career. Even in his yoga practice, Lopez didn’t turn his nose up at the first offering of a yoga mat, something he didn’t even know existed.

The same went for windsurfing, which caught his eye in the early ‘80s, and which introduced him to his future wife.

Then, in his 40s, Lopez picked up snowboarding. “It was my wife’s idea in the 89-90 winter. She goes, let’s go try this snowboarding thing.” 35 years later, guess where the Lopezes spend the preponderance of their year? “We came [back] with another couple and the girls found a house right away, like three days into the trip. My friend who’s a little older and maybe a little wiser than me said ‘Let’s get down to the real estate office and sign the paperwork before they find a more expensive house.’ We’ve both been here from then on.”

Stabs at standup paddle-boarding and foiling followed. “It’s okay to be a kook, you know. When we were doing the Yin & Yang movie, Stacy [Peralta] came down to Mexico and we went surfing one day and I was trying to learn how to ride that foil thing… I was, like, totally kooking out, and I come in and he’s just dancing on the beach, he’s just ecstatic. He goes ‘I just shot solid gold!’ You know, that’s it. I mean, everybody’s got to be a kook sometimes. So when you’re a kook, accept it.”

As father did with snowboarding, SUP-ing, and foiling, so did son with surfing. Rather than push his son to surf, Gerry let Alex find his own way, but provided him the right arena to kook out in comfort. “An opportunity arose where with a bunch of friends we went down to a really great wave in Mexico just north of Mazatlan that was a nice long peeling left–a place called Cardón–and I thought, well this might be a great place for him to maybe get stoked on surfing.’ Again, that was another process. That was something that–it took several of these week-long annual trips. But there were a bunch of friends, very encouraging, fathers with their sons, but all of them surfed and Alex didn’t. And then it happened. It wasn’t until the second trip that he really started having any kind of success. Now he lives in Oceanside and he’s a much sought-after surfboard shaper, and he hasn’t even been on his snowboard this year.”

And you can’t ignore this philosophy if you’re considering yoga, too. Sure, you may not be the fittest, most flexible bag of bones in the room—and almost certainly not in your first class—but when you find yourself on the receiving end of a stink eye from some high-minded creature or another on the next mat over? Lopez says “Just look them in the eyes and go ‘Ommmmmmm.’”

So maybe that’s what progression is all about, within one’s self and one’s sport. And maybe being a kook is that first step and and every one of us takes in any and every endeavor within our earthly wares. What’s to lose? Dignity? Hang onto your ego, to paraphrase those silly Californians, The Beach Boys. Embrace your inner and outer kook.