When Surfing Isn't Enough

Surfing seems like it should be a salve for mental health problems, so what happens when it isn’t?

- Justin Housman

Sunny Garcia scares me. Always has. For one reason or another, when I was a young surfer in the early 1990s, I picked Sunny out of the constellation of hard-ass Hawaiians I could have feared to be the surfing boogeyman. Of course, I had nothing to fear from Sunny, or Johnny Boy Gomes, or Marvin Foster, or any of their contemporaries from where I lived, thousands of miles away on the Central Coast of California, with plenty of deranged beardos yelling at unfamiliar faces over wonky reef breaks I should have been afraid of instead. But, nope, it was Sunny who haunted me. I’d flip through the pages of surf mags and see Sunny glaring out at me through an ad. Press play on a video and watch him cleave a poor North Shore wave in half with an honest-to-god man turn. Walk into a surf shop and see a poster of him standing tall and Buffin a horrifying inside Sunset barrel and I’d be intimidated, a little frightened even. Not just because the dude looked like he could flay the skin of a haole’s back with one sideways glance, but because his entire approach to waves—powerful, consequential waves—called my hesitant ass into question. This was a man for whom the concept of “fear” could not possibly exist. His badassery frightened me because it reflected my own shortcomings back in a big, giant mirror. When I first ventured to the North Shore, my main concern was not in any way pissing Sunny off.