SUNDAY JOINT, 10-5-25: THE CASE OF THE SUNBURNED SURF-SHOOTER

Hey All,

The John Whitmore Joint from two weeks ago veered into politics, almost against my will. It didn't start that way but I bend toward apartheid like a shopping cart with a bum wheel whenever South Africa comes up. Blame Tom Carroll. Today we track a few more SA-related threads, none of which—or almost none of which—have anything to do with politics, and let's start with Nobel-winning Irish playwright and saber-tongued wit George Bernard Shaw who, in 1932, after making a spirited arrival in Cape Town, soon found himself in full bathing costume, wooden bellyboard in hand, on the beach at nearby Muizenberg. How did that first glide toward shore feel? Very Man and Superman is my guess. Shaw was 75 during his first and only surf session and living up to one of his pithiest quotes: "We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing."

Shaw didn't stop, period. He won a Nobel Prize in Literature at 71 and a Best Screenplay Oscar at age 82, and kept going into his 90s. Possibly he needed an extra-long life to sort out his not-so-witty feelings on Hitler and Stalin, but we're not doing politics today, so I direct your attention instead to Shaw's impeccable Darwin 2.0 beard (below), his early and abiding fascination with photography, and his quiet nudism. Shaw died in 1950, age 94, after falling from a ladder while pruning an apple tree. 

Agatha Christie, on the way up career-wise but not yet the genre-topping Queen of Crime of her later years, along with her dashing flyboy cad of a husband, Archie, sailed into Cape Town a decade before GB Shaw and also took to the surf at Muizenberg. Unlike Shaw, however, it was not a one-off. The Christies got the surf bug. "Whenever we could steal time, we took the train to Muizenberg, got our surfboards, and went out surfing together." 

Six months later the couple arrived in Honolulu and got right back into it, except this time on full-sized boards. They took some knocks. "We cut our feet to ribbons on the coral," Christie wrote. And later: "My handsome silk bathing dress, covering me from shoulder to ankle, was more or less torn from me by the force of the waves." Still later, her shoulders were soon pink and blistered with sunburn, and the pain was social as well as physical. "One was ashamed to go down to dinner in an evening dress."

No matter, the Christies were hooked. A two-week stay in Waikiki was extended to four weeks, just so they could stay in the water. "All our days were spent on the beach and surfing, and little by little we learned to become expert. It was heaven! Nothing like it. It is one of the most perfect physical pleasures I have known."

The Man in the Brown Suit, published in 1924, two years after Christie returned to England, introduces us to an 18-year-old amateur crime-stopping adventuress named Anne Beddingfeld, who chases clues from London to Cape Town. Murder, stolen diamonds, romance, cryptic telegrams, blackmail—the pages almost turn themselves. Not much time for recreation, but when Anne's detectiving brings her to Muizenberg, she takes in the beach scene and makes a decision.

There was some perfectly entrancing bathing going on. The people had short curved boards and came floating in on the waves. It was far too early to go to tea. I made for the bathing pavilion, and when they said would I have a surfboard, I said “Yes, please.” Surfing looks perfectly easy. It isn’t. I say no more. I got very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I determined to return on the first possible opportunity and have another go. I would not be beaten. Quite by mistake I then got a good run on my board and came out delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.

I described John Whitmore as South African surfing's original establishment figure, with a "GI haircut and penchant for cigars," grousing publicly as far back as 1963 about the new generation of SA wave-riders. By 1966, Whitmore was on a collision course with recent national champion Anthony van den Heuvel, a progressive and super-smooth regularfooter from Durban who had spent most of the year on the road—Peru, Hawaii, California—and in the process made himself over in the bead-wearing cannabis-scented image of Mike Hynson. When Whitmore and his cleancut green-jacketed Springbok surf team arrived in California for the '66 World Championships, they reconnected with van den Heuvel, who asked for a place on the squad despite having not competed in SA all year. Whitmore understandably said no but offered van den Heuvel a spot on the paddling team as a consolation—but only if van den Heuvel cut his hair. "And that," van den Heuvel said later, "was the end of my surfing career." 

By which he meant surfing competition. Or conventional existence in full, actually. Van den Heuvel went back on the road, landed in the shrub-dotted dirt camping area at Jeffreys Bay in 1968, and bascially never left. He surfed, stayed high, made leather boots, and depending on how you look at it was either the uppermost name on surfing's drug-struck casualty list, along with Hawaii's Jackie Eberle, or a soulful and celebrated example of a hardcore surfing life taken to the extreme. SURFER editor Chris Mauro spent time with van den Heuvel in 2003, when "the last camper" was 59 and living inside a tarp-covered bush just off Supertubes, and while Mauro can't help but romanticize things a bit (van den Heuvel is a "proud holdout of a wonderful bygone era" and a "town treasure"), the grinding details crowd in one after the other. "We've got to build a fire, man, I'm fucking freezing," van den Heuvel says early on, sending out a lackey to gather wood. "While you do that I'll spark this bit up and prepare our smoke." There is coughing and hacking, and while some part of Mauro is excited to be squatting inside a bush with a truly singular surfing character, he is rightly on edge at watching what is obviously a kind of slow-rolling surf-themed seppuku. "I can only wonder how many winters he has left," Mauro asks himself. None, in turns out. Van den Heuvel died four weeks later.

Lastly, and here we dip our wing ever-so-briefly back into politics, let's jump ahead to 1984, the wham-bam professional breakup between Shaun Tomson and Tom Carroll, and the unexpected happy result. Setting the table: After Quiksilver sacked Tom Carroll in early 1982, Tomson signed Carroll to a contract with Instinct, his just-launched surfwear brand. Shaun and Tom got along well, traveled together, inspired each other, and while it seems bizarre now, looking back, that the two best surfers in the world (arguably) were also employer and employee, we were all just digging the show in 1984 season as Tomson and Carroll, in that order, were #1 and #2, going down the homestretch. Tom then high-lowed the boss, first taking the title in the last event of the season, then announcing that he'd be boycotting the upcoming South African events because of apartheid. Shaun was fine coming in second to Tom in the title race. Not so much with having his country's racist policies spotlighted by a corporate underling. "And that," Carroll later said, "was the end of my professional association with Shaun."

The cheerful epilogue is that before Tom could peel off his J.M. Coetzee bumper sticker and yell "braai at my place, bru!" he was back with Quiksilver, and to literally and figuratively make the prodigal son feel welcome, the company hired filmmaker Jack McCoy to do a short on Tom living and surfing in Newport, NSW, his beloved hometown.

Watch here.

My favorite part is at the beginning, when Tom weaves his bike to and fro down a High Street sidewalk, tucks into a tree-branch tube, then scores a free apple off the fruit-stand girl without even stopping. Also great is the bit with Tom in the backyard showing off his quiver, talking dimensions and rocker and whatnot, I can't remember, my eyes were glued to Tom's sweatpants because the waistband is cinched up around his navel while the legs are tucked unironically in his socks. The defining power surfer of his generation, maybe any generation, looks like he should be miniaturized and attached to the zipper of a Disney Princess backpack. 

Tom Carroll is to this day a beacon of likability. May his bike chain never rust. May his apples always be free.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Matt

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Agatha Christie in Waikiki, 1922; Tony van den Heuvel, Durban, 1965, photo by Ron Perrott; George Bernard Shaw posing as "The Thinker" in 1906, photo by Alvin Coburn; Tom Carroll at Burleigh, early 1980s; detail from Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit book cover; changing huts at Muizenberg in the 1950s. GB Shaw at Muizenberg in 1932. Agatha and Archie Christie in Waikiki. Christie portrait from the early '20s. Van den Heuvel surfing Durban in 1965, photo by Andrew Ogilvie. Portrait of van den Heuvel by Olgilvie. Van den Heuvel at Jeffreys in the early 2000s, photo by Lance Slabbert. Tom Carroll at Jeffreys, 1984, photo by Pat Flanagan. Carroll and Shaun Tomson by Flanagan. Carroll with boards in his backyard, by Jack McCoy]