This article ran on Swellnet in July 2015, not long after Michael Tomson, 60, was arrested in Laguna Beach on felony drug charges with intent to sell.

The most distressing thing about Michael Tomson’s 

 over cocaine is that he doesn’t seem able to stop, and unless he does, it’s going to kill him.

"Surfer Dies of Addiction" is sadly not exactly a new story, of course, but here we have a man of fierce intelligence and relatively deep pockets (still) who has had, and still has, the contacts and resources necessary to confront and defeat his addiction, if he ever chose to do so. And surely there must be one friend left in Laguna Beach who could mount an intervention. You’d think.

I say this as a friend of Michael’s, although it’s quite a few years since we last shared a bottle of California Chablis as we talked and watched the sunset behind Catalina Island. When we met more than 40 years ago we were both aspiring writers and editors. Michael had just had an opinion piece published in the 

, and for a moment in time he was more serious about a writing career than he was about surfing, although that changed somewhat when he finished the first year of the IPS World Tour ranked number five, ahead of his more celebrated cousin Shaun.

People tend to forget how good MT was. When they reminisce about the Free Ride Generation and Bustin’ Down The Door, it’s all about Rabbit and Shaun and MR, but Michael was in the thick of it, and he was just as accomplished at fifteen-foot Sunset as he was at Kodak Reef, and provided much magazine-cover fodder for the likes of Dan Merkel and Jeff Divine. Like Ian Cairns, Michael was a big man whose power was matched by his agility, and he planned his way through waves and even heats. A thinking man’s surfer.

I loved to watch Michael surf, but our friendship was built on our shared love of good writing, magazine design concepts and, it has to be said, the devil’s dandruff. This was the ‘70s and coke was unavoidable, but some people constructed better avoidance plans than we did. There were plenty of all-nighters, washing the stuff down with whiskey and wine, arguing with increasingly scary intensity the relative merits of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson. I look back on those times with more pleasure than regret, but we all knew it was a phase we were going through. Or most of us did.

In the ‘80s, I dropped back into mainstream journalism and he went into business, and I didn’t see much of Michael for a few years. When we reconnected, Gotcha had made him a millionaire—but already he’d put much of the profits up his nose. His coke bingeing was an open secret in the surf industry and he was already on the police watch list. Pulled over for speeding one night on the 405, he threw a vial of coke under the wheels of the thundering freeway traffic before the cops frisked him. They looked him up and down, thinking, 

At some point in the ‘90s it all began to take its toll on his health. I remember being a little shocked with his nasal whine and rattly throat when he showed up in France for the first Quiksilver Masters in 1999. Things fell apart, including his nasal passages. One night he nearly died in the ER. Then the dotcom boom was going to save everyone’s arse, but it didn’t, and Gotcha got sold off to Perry Ellis, who stripped out its cred and put it in the big box malls.

“My baby’s turned into a whore,” MT lamented when we were drinking wine on his terrace, his once-handsome face creasing into a lopsided smile. 

And its creator has turned into a train wreck,

Michael’s passed 60 now. It’s time to bite the bullet, to show the strength of character he did when he pulled into all those bottomless pits and just charged. I truly hope he can do it before it’s too late.

"THE INSATIABLE CRAVINGS OF MICHAEL TOMSON," BY PHIL JARRATT (2015)

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