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Bertlemann, Larry

Creative, intense, cocksure Australian surfboard designer-shaper from the North Coast of New South Wales; best known for his 1980 reverse-teardrop Lazor Zap design and for his professional association with top Aussie pro Cheyne Horan.

McCoy was born (1948) in Gosford, New South Wales, the son of a farmer, began surfing at age 14 and shaping at 17. He made boards for Sydney mainstays Bennett Surfboards and Keyo Surfboards in the late '60s, and was cofounder of the short-lived M&M Surfboards. In 1970, the blond-haired shaping prodigy founded McCoy Surfboards in the Sydney suburb of Brookvale, and shortly thereafter became one of the first Australians to make twin-fin boards.

McCoy team riders over the years included world tour standouts Mark Warren, Larry Blair, Pam Burridge, and Damien Hardman, but his partnership with Horan—initiated in 1976, three years after McCoy moved his company to Avoca Beach, just north of Sydney—brought both to their career peaks. The Lazor Zap (generically known as the "needle-nose" or "no-nose") was developed in part because McCoy, as he later said, "always had this vision of surfboards looking like triangles." The strange wide-backed craft, with its drastically reduced nose area, dropped the board's wide point well below center, creating a small-wave board that pivoted effortlessly but was incapable of holding a sustained turn. The prodigiously talented Horan nonetheless rode the Lazor Zap to a second-place finish on the world tour in 1981 and again in 1982. The pure no-nose design itself was nearly obsolete by 1982, but the tri-fin board—introduced in 1981 by fellow Australian shaper Simon Anderson—incorporated a narrow McCoy-style nose.

McCoy Surfboards had meanwhile became one of the surf-world's hottest labels, with outlets in California, Hawaii, and Japan, but in 1984 the company went bankrupt after a business associate vanished and left McCoy with debts totaling nearly $400,000. McCoy continued to shape, but never regained his place in the surfboard manufacturing hierarchy.

His self-esteem, however, never flagged. "McCoy-Horan was the most dominant force in surfing around the world," he stated in 1992. "We were doing all this new, exciting stuff, [and] the opposition were just cringing." Later that year McCoy was named as one his country's 50 most influential surfers by 

 magazine; he was also listed in a poll by his fellow shapers as surf history's fourth most significant boardmaker.

As of 2013, McCoy was living in Byron Bay and still making surfboards, including the popular stubby-outlined McCoy Nugget model.

McCoy, Geoff

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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