"Amplified," by Matt Warshaw, ran in the January 1989 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited.

Two months ago in these pages, Richie Collins seemed to give a dying era the final boot when he said, “I’m not a soul surfer—I only surf for competition.” Maybe he means it. Maybe he just understands good copy. Twenty-year-old surfers, by tradition, have had little use for subtlety and reflection—but with regard to the current younger set, the harder-faster pace of the eighties seems to have jackhammered surfing's understated elements to dust.

For better or worse, Richie Collins represents a coming trend for the public face of the sport: a surfer raised entirely in the age of professionalism, keyed on winning heats since his first slide in the whitewater at age five.

Yet Collins also holds on to some timeless surfing values. In many ways, he’s the most traditional surfer of his generation. He makes his own boards, start to finish, believes in the importance of big surf, has an innovative approach to riding waves, and has a fiercely independent nature: independent of the mainstream, and independent of his peers. Next to the more sedate ranks of WCT newcomers, Collins is the Mohawked party-crasher—loud and chaotic. He craves acceptance for his sport but wants to shock the audience at the same time.

He has an overblown confidence, common to young stars in any field, that is completely transferable from his area of expertise to any subject he chooses. He bashes off a series of topics with instinctual, offhand aggression—the same way he'd bash off a series of sections on a head-high wave at Trestles. No hesitation. No cruising and no musing. His surfing is full of energy, and so is his conversation. Some of it has to be taken seriously.

“I’m not going to be like all the other guys, with the long hair and stuff. I want people to see me and go, ’Whoa, look at that guy, he's weird!' That’s what I want. Not like, ‘Oh, look, there’s Jamie Brisick—or is it George Hulse? I can’t tell.’ I don’t want to be confused with anyone else, ever.”

Richie Collins has succeeded. He is not confused with anyone else. He is not impressionable. Tom Carroll, Gary Elkerton and Dave Parmenter inspire him, but none are evident in Collins’ style of surfing. He pays respect, grudgingly, to Tom Curren, but recognizes the former world champion’s influence on so many other surfers that he’s on constant alert against any hint of Curren-like inflection. “I think the guy’s an unreal surfer, yeah. But when I catch myself doing one of those Curren head-snaps, I punch myself in the face. That’s his thing, not mine.”

Collins’ strength is his attack in and around the curl in small-to-medium surf. His range here is phenomenal, as he goes from vertical hairpin snaps to extended floaters, backside and frontside. He can twist each move with a half-dozen variations; sometimes dropping into a slow-motion stall while on top of the curtain, sometimes stomping his fins out mid-carve into a 360. He rides with charged levels of speed and lift, always. Nobody in competitive surfing—or freesurfing, for that matter—puts more commitment into each and every move, and he won’t ease off to ensure a completed ride. "I just hit it again and again, as hard as I can, as many times as possible, until I fall off or the wave ends, one or the other.”

Collins is aware of style and its place in surfing, but never puts form before function. He tried that once. Eighteen months ago he took a close look at himself on video and “it just about made me sick. The way my arms flapped around; the way I was bouncing.” He made an effort to contain his limbs, and to smooth out the weighting and unweighting between moves. His surfing got worse. He gave up, went back to the bounce, and let his arms swing free. Since then, mainly by lowering his center of gravity, Collins feels his style has improved. (He knows the webbed gloves don’t help his look, but he’s now a convert and won’t even consider taking them off. The gloves, he claims, improve his paddling, enable him to surf longer and lend control during critical maneuvers by acting as a pivot point when he sticks a hand into the wave face.)

For all of Collins' abandon, however, there is also a calculation to his surfing. He stays gathered and focused through big moves, with his head and eyes pointed in the direction he’s going. He’s not a recovery surfer, in other words. Reckless, but always conscious.

And what he’s conscious of, more than anything, is winning heats. Collins says that when he was six years old, riding straight whitewater at Blackies in Newport Beach, he saw a kid down the beach doing the same thing. Collins ran over and challenged him to a contest. “The other kid, he was all, ‘What do you mean? I can’t even surf.’ And I go, ‘Neither can I. Let's just see who can stand up and ride the farthest.”’

Collins entered his first contest in 1976, at age eight, and won. Six years later, at 14, after dominating his age group in the amateur ranks for three years, he went professional. Six years after that, the once-absurdly-green pro is ranked 30th in the world, and heading for the Top 16 with a bullet. He is keenly aware of his own ability: “I had a heat against Robbie Page in Durban this year, in rights, so he was going backside and I going frontside. He was throwing slashes instead of going straight-up vert, but he was getting better waves than I was, so I'm thinking, ‘He’s going to beat me if I don’t go left.’ I had to find a left, just to show everyone I could out-surf Pagey backside, and get more radical. So I took off, came around backside, threw it straight up under the lip, spun the tail kind of tucked into the bowl at the same time. Then I rode toward the beach, doing floaters and stuff, then it doubled up on the inside. I had a choice: there was a perfect long right and a little short left. I looked at the right and went, ‘Shine it,’ hit the left, went straight up and straight down, did it again, and did it again."

“And that was it! They were on the beach, the judges and everyone, thinking, 'Maybe that wasn't as long a wave as Pagey's, but how much more radical was Richie getting?”’

His long description is clinical and arrogant. Then again, the question Collins asks is a no-brainer. How much more radical was he getting? Page is solid, but Collins is evolutionary. He was getting 

But with the WCT judging standard being as conservative as it is, getting radical may not be the quickest way to a world title. Collins consistently loses by going too hard, too fast. So when he says he wants the title more than anything, then later says he refuses to throttle back just to get through heats, there’s a conflict.

He resolves the problem by saying he’ll just get so good that he can’t be denied. “I hope to be so explosive that it has to go my way. Like when Occy came on, he was so incredible. He was always blasting and always radical. But he only got to third in the world. He could have been world champ, but came up short. He got sidetracked. I’ve got no sidetracks.”

What counts with Richie Collins is what he’s saying at the moment, and it’s not long before he forgets what he’s just said about no sidetracks.

Followed by: “And being a Christian is the other hangup.”

Pause. “Wait, being a Christian isn’t a hangup—what I mean is, it's hard being a Christian and being on the world tour.”

Religion sets up the biggest paradox in Collins’ life. Since fifth grade, on and off, he’s been Born Again, gone to church and Bible study groups, and “learned about walking with God.” Worthwhile competitive success, Collins says, didn’t come until he realized that he had to do it all for the Lord, not for himself.

A turning point came at age 16 when he began losing contest after contest in the now-defunct NSSA Pro Division. “Every time, I was out in the first or second round, or something lame like that, and I finally asked God, ‘Man, what do you want from me?’ I was praying all the time, doing this and that, and all I wanted was win a contest. So I said to God, ‘Hey, look man, I don’t know what to do right now, I’m confused, so I’m writing you off.’ And I started doing better in contests. But the thing was, I didn’t have anyone to share it with. I was stoked, but I wasn’t. Even though I was winning, I was still confused. Then right before I started the WCT, about a year-and-a-half ago, I finally realized that I’d been doing it all for myself, not for Him, and I started getting back into God.”

But Collins got back into God in his own way. He has blown apart the quiet, humble Christian archetype. Most obvious is the hairstyle: By keeping his 'do in a constant state of change—from shiny-bald to prisoner camp stubble to any one of a number of Mohawk variations—Collins’ outward appearance is 180 degrees removed from other hardline WCT Christians, like Dave MacAulay, Gary Clisby and Pierre Tostee.

He curses with the ease of an average hedonist.

He flips people off, “if they deserve it.”

He sometimes takes out his frustrations behind the wheel of his massive 1978 GMC four-wheel-drive truck, gunning around the streets of Newport and getting up on two wheels around turns.

He’s been in fights. In fact, he describes a punchout last year with a Corona Del Mar surfer—resulting in 75 facial stitches for Collins—in blow-by-blow detail, and how the incident affected him afterward. “A lot of times now, if I see someone coming up fast, or if a guy even looks at me wrong, I psych myself out so bad that I want to destroy him instantly.”

It all gets back to a desire to do things on his own terms. “You don’t have to be totally humble to be a Christian. I follow a different way. I follow my own way, but I know it’s right. A lot of Christians won't understand where I’m coming from, and I'm sorry if I don’t follow it the same way you do. But I’m just too aggravated and stressed to be humble."

What repeatedly saves Collins from coming off as a blowhard is that now and then he will drop the confrontational tone and admit that different forces within him do not mesh at all. Religion and fighting, for example: “I know those things don’t go together. I know I have this attitude, and that maybe it’s not good.”

Then a flash of vulnerability: “I’m so afraid of getting beaten up again. I’m trying to stay mellow, but since that happened I’m still really worried.”

In other aspects of Christianity, Collins takes a more traditional stance. He doesn't drink or party or do drugs, and has a preacher’s view on sex: once a backslider, it's now abstinence until marriage.

Except, as mentioned, girls remain the number one distraction. “I shave my head pretty much to stay out of that whole thing. But right now I’m letting my hair grow out a little bit, just to kick back and talk to girls—to let ’em know I’m a nice guy, not a total asshole. Right now if girls want to talk to me, I’ll fully talk to them, and they walk away going, ‘Hey, he’s a nice guy." But if too many talk to me I’ll just shave it again, and they’re all like"—here Collins makes a horrified face—"

“These days I'm right up front with girls. I’ve got nothing to hide. A lot of people beat around the bush—and I used to be around the bush a little, too—but now if a hot chick walks up to me, I’m just, ‘You think you’re hot, don’t you?’ And I’m laughing. They’re thinking, 'I can get this guy easily ’cause I know I’m hot.’ And I’m just, ‘Nah I'll see ya later,’ and I bail.”

But temptation waits around every corner on the WCT. And while Collins is a practicing and dedicated Born Again Christian, he is also a healthy young man. "Maybe I'll take a girl home and sleep with her—but I mean sleep. I won’t do anything. Like, this year at the Gotcha Pro, I went over to this girl's house and I was up all night just looking at her, going, ‘My God, I must be a fag or something.' But, see, I know that was the devil telling me, ‘Hey, you better go for it or you’re a fag.’ So I didn’t do anything

“Like I said, I want to be totally different from the other guys on Tour. I don’t want to go out and grab chicks just to get’em in bed. I’m not a virgin. But I haven’t been with a girl for a long time. When it comes down to that I'll just go crank it in the corner. I tell girls that’s what I’m going to do, like, 'I'm just going to go in the shower for a while’”—Collins makes a quick up-and-down motion with his fist— "and they’re all, 

 And some of ’em, they like you for it! They like that you’re just coming out and saying it!"

“I want to get married really bad. I want to start a family. I just want to wait until I meet a girl I really like, and hopefully she’ll be a Christian girl.”

Richie Collins dropped out of his independent studies program in 1986, the day after turning 18, two credits short of a high school diploma. Leaving school isn’t something he recommends. “All those kids thinking about dropping out and turning pro, they have to ask themselves: What do I have to fall back on?’ If one of those guys breaks a leg and can’t surf, he’s stuck. But I can shape, I can glass, I can airbrush. I can do those things in a wheelchair if I have to. If you don't have things like that backing you up you’d better get your ass in school and study your brains out, otherwise you’ll be working at a gas station all your life.”

Collins quit going to school full-time in 1984, at age 16. Lance Collins, his father, and owner of Wave Tools Surfboards in Newport Beach, reacted badly. Richie remembers: “Oh, he kicked my ass. He wailed on me, just 

Knockout! I had a bloody lip and he was chasing me around, the whole thing. But a couple of days later, he said, ‘Rich, sorry. I should know by now that you’re old enough to run your own life.’ Since then it's been pretty cool.”

There is no question that Lance Collins was, and remains, the most influential person in Richie’s life. He’s close to his mother, Tera Lee (currently separated from Lance), and his only sibling, older sister Duranne, but there’s a special tie between Lance and Richie. For the most part, they hang around together with the ease of brothers, not father and son. They look alike, and have almost identical attitudes and mannerisms. Both are cold, even quietly hostile, to people they don’t know. Both will go to extreme lengths to help out a friend.

There is a lot of friction between the two, as well. When Richie was younger Lance would walk into his room early in the morning, announce they were going surfing, right now, then go out and start the car, leaving Richie to chase after him down the street in his underwear, holding on to his board and struggling into his clothes.

Richie received no encouragement from Lance during his early competitive career “When I was a little kid I’d win a contest, come home and tell my Dad, and he’d say I was still a kook. That night I’d go to bed and lay there for hours, thinking, 'That asshole. That prick. Man, when I’m world champion he’s going to be bowing down to my knees.’ So I’ve always had this feeling of, ‘I’ll show him.'”

Collins says he was raised differently from anyone he's ever known, “almost like an experiment.” He now figures there was a certain method to his father’s ways. “I think he knew what he was doing. Now it seems like he’s going, 'Yeah, I knew it would work.'" Richie claims he wouldn’t change a thing about his upbringing but is stumped when asked if he’d bring up his own children the same way.

Today, Richie says the main problem between him and his father is that they don't get to spend enough time together. The WCT has separated them. The two used to go to the movies together all the time, and Richie misses that. Now they speak by phone at least once-or-twice week when Richie is gone, and more often when he’s got problems to work out. “We love each other and we care about each other, and we know we’re not going to rip each other off.”

But the potential for conflict still exists between the two, and Collins expresses textbook adult-son frustration as he describes a recent flare-up: “My Dad started to lecture me about this and that; mostly about my attitude and the way I approach things. And a lot of the stuff he was telling me I already knew. A lot of it. When you hear something you already know you just kind of get sick and tired of it. So I said, ‘Hey, I don’t like saying this, Dad, but I just don’t want to hear it anymore. I’m sick and tired of hearing it.’”

Here, Collins seems to move the object of the conversation away from his father and puts it on authority in general. "It’s this stuff that I’ve heard all my life, from my Dad and everyone. I listen to it, and inside I’m thinking, ‘Hey, man, just 

 Let me just do things. Let me find out for myself. Big deal if it I blow it! The world’s coming to an end anyway, the way I figure it. So I run into a car? Or I get a ticket? Or whatever? Big deal! It’s 

“See, people tell me not to do things. But the thing is, I already 

 I’m not supposed to do things. I know it. I’d like to get everybody, put ’em in a room and tell ’em: ‘Just let me do it! 

I... know... what... I’m... doing... wrong!’"

At this point, Collins isn’t speaking as a future world title contender. He’s a universal 20-year-old, with a universal urge to be anything but average as he steps into adulthood world.

His voice drops. “I wish my Dad and everyone else would just go, ‘Okay, Rich, do what you want to do. Just be careful.’”

[Photos: Art Brewer, Mike Moir, Tom Servais, Peter Brouillet]

"AMPLIFIED: RICHIE COLLINS PROFILE," SURFER PROFILE (1989)

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