by Joe Donnelly
“It really goes back to the kernel of what it is to be an American, the idea that you can do things without traditional impediments,” Colburn says. “You’re not going into a caste system. There’s a possibility that you can be something great. What you’re seeing ties into that, because, in the extreme, that gets manifested in subcultures like surf culture and car culture, where literally you are on the outskirts of the social norm and you’re really pushing the envelope. You can say it’s rebellious, and it is, but on the other hand, it’s so American. I don’t know if we would have arrived at this, or if this dialogue would have gone the direction it’s gone without Craig’s influence.”
In his less-guarded moments, Stecyk forgets that he’s a man who has given up claims to his past. He accedes to the undeniable evidence that he was and still is a part of something that matters. He just contends it should be understood that it isn’t he who matters.
“[It’s about] the theory that you were part of a related group of people and you were interacting,” he says. “The nuances and relationships had value, and it wasn’t about what any one person accomplished.” Stecyk says the beach culture has, at its heart, an ancient sense of community. “In Polynesia that’s more of an attitude because it’s more clan-related, more village-related, more archipelago-related. In surfing, that’s kind of the thing.”
The Malloy Brothers’ Conspiracy
Originally published in the LA Weekly, December 9, 2004
Author’s note: I had no idea when I went back to school in the early nineties with ambitions of wielding the journalist’s pen in the fight for justice that I’d end up writing so much about surfing. But once you start surfing, it can take over your brain, and it was certainly on my mind a lot by the time I became aware of the brothers Malloy. As at home on a cattle ranch as they are paddling into twenty-foot surf, the Malloys were at the forefront of a back-to-basics movement that harkened to the days when surfers were watermen first and wave riders second. Tall, handsome, able to start a fire with sticks and stones, not to mention tie the right knot for the right occasion, they’d be annoying if they weren’t such gentlemen.
The hills are there in front of us, the sun behind, and he’s getting smaller and smaller, framed by the burnishing light, the water, the sand, the hills. I remember for a moment how much beauty is still left in this world. And now here’s my wave, lifting me gently and sending me off in the direction of where he’s glided down the line, disappearing into the reflected light.
I’ll never catch him. He’s a Malloy. He goes first.
It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’m at the place that Chris Malloy and his brothers come back to when they’re done with the adventures that send them off to the rugged shores of western Ireland or the malarial jungles of Indonesia or the jagged reefs of Tahiti. They go to these places in search of things out of the reach of most of civilization: moments of purity, grace, and thrills—a type of simplicity bounded by nature and determined by the sea. Spend time with these guys, and you too will start to believe that civilization has its drawbacks.
The place Chris Malloy has taken me will always be the best place in the world to him. Etiquette forbids me from telling you exactly where this place is, but it’s not far from where he and his younger brothers, Keith and Dan, grew up on a ranch near Ojai. It’s close to where they live now. It’s near his family and his sister, the one sibling who doesn’t surf and never will. It’s where their story began. It’s where their story continues to grow and where it’s likely to become part of the rich local lore, before they’re done. For all their traveling, these part-Irish, part-Mexican young men are still homeboys, after all.
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In late September, I drove to Laguna Beach for my first in-person encounter with the Malloys. Laguna is about a hundred miles and many light-years from where they come, yet there was Chris, the oldest of the three at thirty-two years old, nervously addressing the packed amphitheater at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts. More than three thousand tickets—up from three hundred last year—had been sold on Saturday alone for that day’s installment of the weekend-long Moonshine Festival, a surf-spawned art, music, and film event named for the Malloy-led Moonshine Conspiracy—a collective of surfers and artists who share a certain retro sensibility. Jack Johnson, Will Oldham, the Shins, and others like surfer-musician Donovan Frankenreiter would perform. Among the photographers and artists showing were John Severson, Scott Soens, Barry McGee, and Alex Knost. The event’s proceeds would benefit the Surfing Heritage Foundation, dedicated to gathering, documenting, and making available to the public the artifacts and history of surfing, something to which the Malloys are precociously attuned.
I’m not sure the parade of The O.C.–minted, hyper-sexy girls—and the boys who dogged after them—cared so much about surfing heritage as they did about just seeing and being seen at what has become the Woodstock of surfing, a pursuit that is now officially the primary cultural signifier of the young and/or the tragically hip (like fifty-something Blue Crush producer Brian Grazer), but that didn’t stop Chris from trying.
“Welcome to two years of home movies,” he said, by way of introducing the main attraction, the premiere of the Moonshine Conspiracy’s A Brokedown Melody. Malloy, who directed the film, was as inconspicuous in khakis and a flannel shirt as a man on a large stage with a spotlight on him could be.
About a month later, fans would be turned away from the film’s premiere at the two-thousand-seat Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara. Something, it’s clear, is happening, because this film, even more than the rest of the Moonshine Conspiracy’s catalog, isn’t a typical surf film. The Malloys don’t pimp their rides, and their films are leagues apart from typical punk-adjacent contemporary surf videos. Without losing its relevance (how could it when it features Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Tom Curren, and CJ Hobgood?), Melody is thematically and aesthetically reverent to an older, more classic idea of what it means to be a surfer. It draws a direct line from pioneers like Duke Kahanamoku—the Hawaiian 1912-Olympics gold-medal swimmer who traveled the world spreading the concept of surfing—to Slater, who is the greatest surfer who ever lived, and who, like the Malloys, believes in a broader definition of surfer as waterman and steward. Those waiting throngs might not have known it going in, but when A Brokedown Melody is playing, surf church is in session, and the Malloy brothers are leading a revival.
I’ve got all three Malloy brothers in one place, which should qualify me for permanent membership at the Magic Castle considering the difficulty of herding these guys. Keith, the middle brother at thirty years old, has just returned from an excursion to Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands on behalf of Surf Aid. The mission involved traveling upriver to visit an indigenous tribe that still file their teeth into fine points and fashion loincloths from tree bark. The group brought doctors and dentists with them and tried to promote malaria awareness, still the biggest killer in places like the islands. Prior to that trip, Keith had spent most of the summer training for an epic, coed paddleboard contest in Hawaii called the Molokai. He and his partner finished second. Meanwhile, Dan, who is twenty-six, spent the better part of the last month traveling the country to promote artist and fellow Moonshine conspirator Thomas Campbell’s art-damaged surf film Sprout, in which he’s a featured player. He also managed to work in a couple of weeks of surfing in France. Chris, for his part, is just coming off an editing schedule for A Brokedown Melody that would have given a speed freak pause.
We’re at Keith’s house, where Dan also lives, sitting in the bright living room that overlooks the break north of Ventura where Chris and I surfed. A tree in the front yields edible bananas. The place is half home, half warehouse for a collection of gear that can outfit the boys for every kind of water adventure from towing into big waves to paddling sixty miles up the central coast—something Dan and Keith recently accomplished.
Individually, these boys are impressive—each one seemingly taller,
more rugged, and more handsome than the other (Dan was recently paid to model for Ralph Lauren). Together, they are formidable. As Scott Hulet, the editor of the great Surfer’s Journal, told me, “If Hollywood, in its unquenchable hunt for schlock rereleases, ever spanks a Bonanza redo, these three would be a good place to start for the Cartwright brothers. They’re all too smart to bite on that, though.”
Chris Malloy peppers any discussion of surfing with references to legends, like their neighbor, big-wave pioneer Pat Curren, and others like champion swimmer, surfboard innovator, photographer, and philosopher Tom Blake. Or John Severson, the man who started Surfer magazine and was the original surfer-artist. These were men who knew their history, made their own boards, dove for their food, and approached their lives with a poet’s heart and a beatnik’s wanderlust.
“Those guys did everything. They did film, photography, writing, and Pat was just a legend. They were the kind of people I aspired to be like and to experience some of the things they did,” Malloy says. “You know, when my time finally came, and I got to surf these places that I had always dreamt of, and then came home and looked at this depiction of my experience [in articles and video], it wasn’t representative of anything I had experienced. I got sick to my stomach. They were product-driven and missing the experience. Surfing was becoming a commodity so fast. What was a cottage industry has become a billions-of-dollars business. It just wasn’t what I dreamed of being a part of.”
Earlier, at the Moonshine Conspiracy’s headquarters in a renovated Victorian in downtown Ventura, where much of the staff (mostly family) lives and works, Chris drew up a schematic of the gladiator pit that is the North Shore’s famed Pipeline lineup. Pipeline is the serious surfers’ proving ground, and the pecking order goes from Pipe Rulers, right at the wave’s peak, and descends down the shoulder to the Mob, the Brazilians, the body boarders, and, finally, the Japanese body boarders. Lately, there has been an influx of jujitsu enthusiasts among the Brazilians, and the local Hawaiians, who have long seen outsiders crowd their turf in hopes of catching some sponsor’s eye, are always ready to fight. The Malloys have all scrapped their way, literally, past the Mob and into the Rulers.
When they are surfing, they approach the level of daunting—fearless and fearsome, not flashy but powerful, fast and seemingly in total command of their environment.
“There are a lot of guys out there who are fast, and a lot of guys out there who are powerful—they have to be—but we surf every day. If it’s twenty-feet, we surf. If it’s two-feet, we surf,” says Chris Malloy. “By far, if there’s anything that’s significant about us, it’s that we surf every board in every condition, and there isn’t so much of that anymore, which is something they prided themselves on in the olden days. You use the ocean for what it is. It isn’t something we tried to develop on purpose; it’s just that, at age thirty-two, I still surf every day.”
Adds Dan: “If they’re trying to figure out whether it’s big waves or small waves or cold water and they’re trying to figure out who would go, they’d be, like, ‘Get one of those kids. If it’s big or small or rocks, they’ll go do it.’”
“We love it. We’ll go do it,” says Keith.
Usually, they’ll do it together. There is one entry for all three Malloy brothers in Matt Warshaw’s indispensable TheEncyclopedia of Surfing. Whether they like it or not, they are indelibly linked in people’s minds. They seem okay with it, the linking part, but they do want people to understand that they are three individuals as well.
“I always tease them that they’re the guys you don’t want to sit next to on an airplane, because they’re going to talk your ears off the whole way,” says Keith, who fashions himself to be the quiet one, more like his father. “We usually get along real good, but we’re normal people. We’ll scrap it out. Usually not in a fistfight, but you know. We never get to the end of the day without figuring it out and making amends, you know?”
You can see that in person, all three shooting the bull in Keith’s living room. Despite their prowess and their über competence—they are the kind of guys who can do what men are supposed to do: fix things, work things, lift things—they’re just too damn gentle to be intimidating. We’re talking story, as they say, and the brothers are regaling me with some of the gnarlier sides of being a modern-day adventurer. Like the time a few years ago when Keith was in the Spice Islands coming into a break on his boat and the water got lit up with Uzi gunfire. It was just days after Muslims had massacred 500 Christians.
“We pulled up, and these guys started firing off rounds. They jumped on their motorized canoes and were coming out and firing shots. I was thinking, I’m fucking dead in a couple of minutes.” He tells of walking around Indonesia and natives wearing Osama bin Laden T-shirts with the Twin Towers blowing up on them.
On a recent trip to get footage for A Brokedown Melody, Dan found himself delirious and alone at a rat-infested hospital in Jamaica, suffering from Dengue fever. “I was so tweaked and dehydrated, and I’d be asleep and awake and asleep and awake,” he recalls, smiling with gallows humor. “They call it break-bone fever. Every joint in your body and your eyes and everything hurts. Never have I sweated so much in my life.”
These, though, are the risks they take in search of the golden moments, like the one Chris had with surfer, musician, and Moonshine Conspiracy cofounder Jack Johnson. They were on a mission to find a never-before-surfed break in the Bay of Bengal that was just a wild rumor at that point.
“I had been talking to this guy, this crazy guy named John Callahan, who had been doing his homework on that area for years and mapping out the weather systems and timing when he thought there’d be a swell. So we said, ‘If we get to Thailand on this day, we can drive through the jungle for nine hours and get to Burma, where there’s a boat we can catch that goes across the river, and from that island, we’ve got a charter company that will take us across,’” Chris tells. “We’re sitting there with maps, and it’s real old-school, and for the final boat trip we got this funny English guy and his sailboat to take us out and go do it. He’d done dive charters and fishing charters before. He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take you out there, sure. There’s nothing there, no waves.’ We said, ‘Well, we think there are.’”
They found a wave, all right.
“I remember sitting out there on the bow of the boat, and the sun came up and just watching it and thinking: This is the last time this wave will ever be a virgin wave. It’s surreal, taking off on a wave that’s never been ridden before, and people come out of the jungle to watch you and they’re cheering. I’ll never forget it.” That session became the inspiration for the Moonshine Conspiracy’s Thicker Than Water, the first of the four films the independent-minded collective has put out in the past five years, Melody being the fourth.
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These stories aren’t told with any dick-swinging swagger, but rather with an appreciation that the world is a sad and beautiful place—a place where people like them surf virgin waves while the locals die of malaria. They spend more time than most of their contemporaries trying to close those gaps. It’s a rare quality to find in young men, especially those who can glean the tube of a triple-overhead closeout. But once you know who they are and where they come from, it’s not surprising that the Malloy brothers should possess it.
Who they are is inexorably tied to where they came from. “Let me put it like this,” says Chris. “My brothers and I literally came out of the sticks. We grew up with pigs and horses and chickens and goats. It was a few acres up in Ojai at the base of Los Padres National Forest.”
Back then, Ojai wasn’t the New Age spa getaway for well-heeled Westsiders that it has since become. The Malloy lineage goes back five generations in these parts. Their great-great-grandfather was a muleskinner and worked the oil fields. Throughout the fiftiess and sixties, their father, Mike, was a fixture on a longboard at Topanga Beach’s right-breaking point. Topanga
Beach was different then, too. It wasn’t a state beach, but an eclectic beachside community, home to colorful characters, dropouts, derelicts, and Miki Dora when the break was working. Mike Malloy felt comfortable there.
But change came quickly in the early seventies. Los Angeles was getting more and more crowded, the Topanga community was razed, a state beach was put in its place, and Mike Malloy, a construction worker with a little cowboy in him, moved his fledgling family up to Ojai, where they had roots and the land was cheap.
Although the father was turned off by the shortboard revolution that came with the late sixties, he encouraged his boys to surf. They’d get dropped off or hitchhike the fifteen miles over the mountain to the beaches where they still surf today.