"Animal Tracks: the 50-Year Journey of Robert Harold Young," by Drew Kampion, ran in the Summer 1998 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.

His father was in trucking and liked cricket. His mother was a teacher and dabbled in the occult. Neither knew much about surfing, but they did have the good sense to let their son, Robert, go down to the sea with his surfo-plane.

The boy, at first so small and wiry they called him “The Gnat,” grew out of all proportion to his humble origins. He became the greatest surfer of his time, perhaps of all limes, and an icon of the sport in the tradition of Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Blake, Phil Edwards, and Miki Dora. His magnetic enthusiasm and powerful style on shorter and shorter boards blew open the doors of a new era back in the mid-’60s. He was Australian National Champion in 1965, World Champion in ’66, and could well have repeated in ’68, ’70 and even ’72. By then, the 6'3" man with the size-13 feet had outgrown his nickname, and they were calling him “The Animal.”

Despite the moniker, Nat Young was never comfortable scrounging his way through; he wasn’t willing to live the low life to maintain the beach life. He was drawn to the best the world had to offer, and the best seemed drawn to him. Nor was he ever a committed big-wave surfer—not in the way Greg Noll or Eddie or Mark Foo were. He tried a couple of long seasons on the North Shore in the late ’60s, but he wasn’t comfortable confined on a small, crowded island over a fitful winter with nothing to do but surf. Although he clearly loved (and continues to love) the power exchange inherent in big-surf encounters, he isn’t drawn to the concept of being towed into 30-foot walls, readily admitting that “I'm shit-scared in waves bigger than what I ride now.” No, tagging him “The Animal” was a tongue-in-cheek nod to Nat’s ambition, to his appetites and enthusiasm, to his unquenchable lust for life.

For Nat Young, surfing is only a part of a much bigger picture. Quite often it’s what matters most, but not always. Indeed, Mr. Young, the self-styled icon and tribal elder, the author, publisher, filmmaker, teacher, lobbyist, fashion model, businessman, spokesperson, pilot, gourmand, instigator, theorist, philosopher (surfers do sometimes get wise), surfboard shaper, politician, and skilled practitioner of surfing and other gravitational gratifications including skiing, river-rafting, and windsurfing, is as much a man of the mind as he is a man of the body. His ongoing war, for over three decades now, has been with bullshit, a commodity with which he himself has occasionally been associated. His chief weapon (and general conversational style) has been brutal honesty, admittedly from his own subjective point of view.

Still, few in surfing (or any other endeavor, for that matter) have so thoroughly and diligently pondered their purpose as has Nat Young. And no one in surfing has taken on the mantle of educator, inspirer, enlightener, and leader the way he has. He’s defined the role of a tribal elder so that he can fill it.

This is a renaissance surfer who takes his role and its implications very seriously, who has pondered the nature of our sport at the highest levels, who has considered its fundamental mechanics, championed the preservation of the ocean environment and the preservation of the sport’s history, and who is considered by some to be the greatest surfer in that history and by almost everyone else to be at least 

 of the greats, and who’s still a damn good surfer at age 50.

It’s September of 1992. We’re barreling south on I-5, heading towards San Diego for the Action Sports Show at the Convention Center, and Nat Young is at the wheel of the big Olds Cutlass Ciera he’s borrowed from a surgeon friend in Del Mar. My tape recorder is laid out on the seat between us, and the tape is rolling and Nat is holding forth on the subject of professionalism. As the primary surf-market representative for a Bordeaux-based clothing company named Oxbow, the former World Surfing Champion and four-time World Longboard Champ is taking his job and his position in surfing very seriously.

“One of the best things I learned out of surfing was how to be a professional person,” he tells me as we pull away from a Basilone Road check of Lower Trestles (two-foot sets; 75 guys out) and roar down the ramp back onto the southbound I-5.

“I suppose that means being on time. When you give your word, you’re there. Like, as far as my son [Beau] goes, here he is off to compete on the world tour, to start his career, and I’m trying to give him an understanding. I tell him it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose; what matters is that you’re learning how to be a professional person. What a great opportunity! What better way for a boy or a girl to be a part of a traveling circus—putting on a show!”

Off to join the circus. Putting on a show. Indeed, having arrived at the half-century mark, Nat looks very much like a maturing trapeze artist—lithe, long-proportioned, encumbered (somehow gracefully) at every turn by “professional” injuries. Psychologically, though, he’s perhaps more of a lion-tamer. He’s not what you’d call socially passive. For Nat, all the world’s a stage, and the play of life is creative engagement, maximizing the situation, enjoying the moment and leveraging it for the future benefit of—well, everybody, hopefully, but for sure Nat himself.

It’s curious that this fervor for showmanship and professionalism somehow triggers a contrasting memory of Nat and fellow Aussie regularfooter Russell Hughes sharing a toke of black hash in the back of my van alongside Pacific Coast Highway at Malibu, during the Summer of ’69. Amidst the smoke and general cultural mockery, there didn’t seem to be a lot of professional consciousness going on. But maybe there was. After all, Nat was still as good as world champ, and he was the marquee headliner for Dewey Weber Surfboards. He was playing his role as the Animal, as resolutely as Da Cat played his.

Dora seemed larger back then. Nat seems larger now. In truth. I’ve always experienced a fundamental consistency in this man’s nature, despite the fact—like maybe no one else I’ve known— Nat Young embodies Walt Whitman’s simple sleight of mouth: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” Both Nat and Dora are enshrined Knights of the Tubular Order, and both are brilliant men, but they’re utterly different. Nat ultimately strives for order, while Dora embraces chaos.

Back in the car, I ask Nat: ”What does professionalism have to do with being a person?”

“It’s absolutely important,” he unswervingly replies as he guides the big Detroit machine straight over into the fast lane. ”Professionalism, to me, means a lot of things. It means you’re someone who can be relied on; it means when you’re asked for an opinion on something you’ll give it some thought before you give an answer. We could go on and on. But the essence of it is, to my mind, if you're not a professional person, you haven't really lived to your potential.”

“And I think this gets us to the marijuana thing, because that was one of the things that, for a while, stopped me from really realizing my professional potential.”

Ah, yes. The marijuana thing. Nat’s been an advocate for the judicial use of the bud since the late ’60s, when he tried the gamut of psychotropic substances in an era that tended to support and nurture their more positive and visionary effects. In general, he has managed this advocacy so forthrightly that his public image has remained generally positive in Australia, where his fame remains huge. As we roll through Camp Pendleton (cars lined up on the opposite, northbound side to pass through the immigration checkpoint—every Hispanic no doubt paying careful attention to bowel control), he reminisces.

“There was a block there,” he says, squinting past the cars ahead, “that I really thought I had to have this stuff to be able to attain this level of understanding. I’ve gone forward from there, I think.”

“You'll never get stoned again?” I ask.

“No, I won't say that I’ll never get loaded again—because I don’t like to forget the lessons of the ’60s and ’70s, and I think that from that point of view, it probably would be good. It’s just that, in my evolution right now, it would be a more destructive force. So for the last few years. I haven’t seen it [marijuana] as a significant factor.”

“Nah, I tried it and didn't like it at all. All coke did was gave me nose blockage. I detested putting something up my nose as much as the thought of putting a needle in my arm, and I would never, ever do that. So the only question for me was the marijuana thing.”

After the 1970 World Contest in Victoria, Nat, like many of his alternatively-minded contemporaries, was increasingly drawn to the country scene. He and his first wife, Marilyn, sold their home in Sydney’s Whale Beach (designed by the architect Ross Thorne, it integrated a large outcropping of boulders into the living space) and moved north to Byron Bay, where they homesteaded 15 acres in a small community of like-minded folks, very much in the hippie style of the day, using marijuana and psychedelics in a ritualistic and exploratory way. It was there in Byron that their daughter Naomi was born.

This was also when Nat reckons he hit his peak as a surfer, riding the perfect looping barrels of Lennox, Burleigh, and Noosa with a coterie of free-thinking friends, including his good mates from the ’60s, Bob McTavish and George Greenough. The essential cream of those days was captured (and can still be seen) by Alby Falzon in his classic 1972 film, 

“I think my surfing in that period went pretty much as far as I could take it,” Nat says.

In 1973, looking for another change, Nat sold the land at Byron and bought a ranch near Grafton, an hour or so inland from the stimulating right-hand point at Angourie. It was just 2,000 acres to start with (it’s since grown to 3,500 acres), and he stocked it with a sizable herd of cattle (which he later sold to finance his film, 

). Here, in 1974, Marilyn was delivered of their second child, a son they named Beau, but by the time the home was built, the marriage of the national surf hero and the school teacher was turning sour. When circumstances led them back to live in Bungan near Sydney in 1975, the disintegration of their relationship accelerated. They were divorced in 1977, and Nat was soon living with his second wife, Ti, the daughter of a prominent Sydney printer. “I met Ti in 1977 while I was looking for a girl to do the skating segment of my movie 

Nat continued to use the farm as a retreat when he needed to escape the city, and things were going well up there—until a guy in a helicopter, looking for a prize bull, instead spotted a plot of marijuana plants in a far corner of the farm and called the cops. “We knew nothing about this,” Nat says. “Ti and I had just got on a plane to go skiing back to the States, and the airplane was about to depart, when they came on board and pulled me off. And so I spent the weekend in jail.”

There were headlines, and Nat was charged with owning the property on which an illegal substance was found. The crop had been planted by friends of Nat’s farm manager, Jim Mclnnes (who's still with him), and they all testified that Nat knew nothing about the crop, so he got off. Jim, however, spent eight months in jail.

We're approaching Oceanside, and Nat wants to stop and check in with Donald Takayama. We pass a cloud of dust and a half-dozen Marine tanks playing like BMXs in the scrub-covered moguls, while the ocean shimmers blue in the distance. Takayama’s Hawaiian Pro Designs builds Nat’s longboards for the U.S. market. "Were you confused in that era of the early 70s?” I ask him. “I’ve seen pictures of you where you looked pretty spaced-out.”

“Aw, yeah,” he says without hesitation. “Absolutely.”

“I was a devotee of the idea that marijuana was good for everyone, and that LSD was the best thing ever. I was of the school of Timothy Leary, y’know. I believed pretty much everything I was being told in terms of psychedelics.”

“When did you start to come out of that period?”

“When I started to get more responsible about my life,” he says, then pauses. “Not that long ago, actually. For a long time, I believed that the ingestion of marijuana improved my surfing and skiing, and to some degree, I still agree with that. But there was no way to do that and keep going at the pace I’m on. I’d blow up, I think. I wouldn't even try. I mean, especially when you start flying airplanes. Then you’re calling for real centering.”

Nat’s a good letter writer, although the way he crafts his letters—a strong, broad hand on lightweight airmail paper—makes him seem a couple of centuries behind the times. He despises keyboards and has only reluctantly got himself connected to the internet. He very grudgingly checks his email every couple of weeks.

Nat’s kept a daily diary in longhand, too, since the ’70s and before, and that wealth of written material is serving as a memory warehouse for his ongoing personal and general historical projects. “I need that sort of thought process,” he says of longhand, “and how long it takes for that to come out on the page is the way I’ve taught myself, because I’m a self-taught whatever the fuck I am.”

Robert Harold Young was born in Sydney, Australia, on 14 November 1947, to Harold David Ernest and Greta Young, a polite ten-year interval after two older sisters (Pam and June). Surfing owes a debt to June, who came to baby Nat’s rescue when a flock of magpies attacked him in his pram.

The roots of the family tree were sunk deep into obscure places—all the way back to Australia’s convict period. Greta’s father was kin to the fearsome James “The Black” Douglass of Scotland and married a German woman, though the particulars are buried in the confusion of emigration. However, they arrived in Australia with some money, and were Christians. Greta was a practicing Baptist when Nat was a lad, but she had inherited a taste for the occult and the language of German mysticism. She used a tarot deck for divination and believed that human fates were held in the hands of larger powers. She was a kindergarten teacher and wrote a couple of children’s books—a keen, enterprising and spirited woman who did what needed to be done to support the old man and her family.

Harold was a taxi trucker, and one of his jobs was delivering 

 to Sydney's north beaches, from Manly to Palm Beach, a 20-mile stretch of points, reefs, beaches, and coves that would become his son’s childhood playground and coming-of-age lifeblood. Raised on a small farm by an aunt in the inland suburbs of Sydney, Harold had done well during the Depression, had a good factory job during the War, and was completely obsessed with material possessions. He was, additionally, a hard-ass guy—a cricketer, not a waterman—and Nat doesn’t talk about him much, except to say that Harold didn’t hesitate to knock him around some if he felt the boy had it coming. Simply put, father and son agreed on little, and Nat was much more inclined to seek out his mother’s company and counsel.

Nat has a brother, Chris, four years younger, who tried to follow in his footsteps for a while, but the prints were too big and the stride too long. Chris peeled off into an itinerant, twilight sort of life, beyond family contact. Drugs, alcohol and resentment over Nat s remarkable success seemed to paralyze him. Nat’s two sisters, Pam and June, were much older (10 and 13 years); they were married and out of the household by the time Nat got into surfing. Both were driven from the house by Harold's dominating personality; he died in November 1993.

Nat spent his first years in Auburn, near Parramatta, in the landlocked doldrums of Sydney’s western suburbs. In 1949, the family moved to idyllic Collaroy, into an old doctor’s home called Westward Ho. It was a big, rambling house, one of 20 or so right on the beach about two clicks south of Narrabeen’s clean, hollow lefts. The beautiful beach at Collaroy, sweeping south out to the headland at Long Reef, became Nat’s fantasy land. He learned to swim at the Collaroy Beach pool (he was pushed into the adult pool by a friend and—swam!) and started riding waves on surf-o-planes, the inflatable rubber mats popular in Australia in those pre-bodyboard ’50s.

Young attended Narrabeen High School, but he and his best friend, Henry Verkroost, would cut classes regularly to spend time as gofers down at the beach, taking abuse from the big lads of the Collaroy Surf Club. So puny and wiry was Robert that the clubbies nicknamed him “The Gnat.” (Like his ancestors before him, he showed no signs of tallness until he was into his teens.) Robert got his first surfboard, a used 10'6" balsa, on his tenth birthday and was guided into the mysteries of the occult sport by his next-door neighbor, Robert “Kenno” Kennerson.

, “I was surfing down at Collaroy Beach, on the north side of Sydney Harbor, and getting into more trouble than I managed to keep out of. My mother bought a board registration sticker for me (it cost 10 shillings) because, like most surfers, I thought the registration system was a rip-off; getting my board confiscated for two weeks didn’t help. A few friends and I formed the Collaroy Surfing Association, which had 17 paid-up members, 10 hangers-on, and about the same number of girls who just hung around the beach looking beautiful on weekends. The ’association‘ had its clubhouse on the beach or in my bedroom. We also had our own social club, which held parties and organized fund-raising activities. At school, all we thought about was the latest surf equipment and what pigment we’d use on our new boards, and to further establish our identity we carried our boardshorts hanging out of the back pocket of our jeans. The local gremmies were also busy peroxiding their hair to make it look as bleached as possible, tuning up on American slang and trying to get enough cash together to buy a surfer van.”

Another boy at school was an English-born North Avalon surfer, Rodney “Gopher” Sumpter. Seeing the Gopher surf his local spot blew Nat’s mind, and he and Rodney became regular mates. This in turn led to an acquaintance with Bronte Beach surfer Lee Cross, who had quit his job in advertising and lived for a time in an abandoned ’38 Dodge in the North Avalon carpark. Cross was about six years older than Rodney and Nat, and even after he was evicted from the carpark he’d still come around to pick up the kids and take them on surf trips to the beaches south of Sydney. In 1961, having seen John Severson’s first copy of 

, Lee unabashedly ripped off the design and concept, launching 

 magazine (he produced two or three issues). To gather editorial material, he invited Rodney, Nat, Midget Farrelly, and a kid named Les Mulray to travel with him up to Queensland. They got great surf, but Cross’ money ran out in Coolangatta, and the lads had no choice but to take menial jobs to get gas and food money to keep surfing and make it home. Rodney and Nat shelled shrimp, Midget mowed lawns, and the surf kept pumping, culminating in one classic day at Snapper Rocks that saw Nat and Midget in a wave-for-wave duel with filmmaker Bob Evans shooting from the beach. It was a crossroads moment, as it turned out. When Midget and Gopher hitched rides back to Sydney, Nat stayed with Cross and Mulray. They had to bum gas, a gallon at a time, to get back to Sydney. It took five days, but they made it just in time for the Avalon Surf Club’s first Malibu Surfboard Riding Championship. That was in May of ’61, and Nat edged Gopher and Bobby Brown to win the juniors.

Midget Farrelly, a Manly kid who’d lived in Canada and England before his family settled in Sydney, was the first truly great Australian surfer. He modeled his style on the great American surfer Phil Edwards, and eventually, at times, surpassed his teacher. Midget was the most consistent surfer I’ve ever seen. His ascension to prominence was sudden and, from the point of view of the dominant California-Hawaii surf culture, shocking. He was strategically encouraged by Californian Bob Cooper (who was on a surf-and-homestead reconnaissance in Australia), and traveled to the Islands for the first time in 1961 with a group of fellow Aussies, at which point the rest of the surf world got its first look at wave riders from Down Under.

The following year, Farrelly returned and entered the Makaha International Surfing Championships, the closest thing to a world contest in those days. The waves weren’t huge in ’62, but Midget blew the minds of a couple of the judges—Dick Brewer and Buzzy Trent—and the 17-year-old won the title.

Shortly thereafter, filmmaker Bruce Brown came through Australia shooting a movie with Phil Edwards. Along the way he met Paul Witzig, an architectural student who’d dropped out of university after three years to go surfing, and maybe make surf movies. A year later, Brown called Witzig and asked him to shoot a sequence for his new film, 

. Find a couple of hot Aussie kids, Bruce told Paul, and take ’em somewhere. Witzig jumped at the chance. He got in touch with Gopher and Nat, and the two boys, having already got their priorities pretty well straight, cut school and joined Witzig on a six-week surfari across the Nullarbor to Western Australia, Nat wondering all the while why he was picked instead of Midget.

Witzig was a refined, almost elegant guy—a gentleman—and the budget was good, so he consigned his VW Kombie to the railways while he and the lads crossed the big empty heartland in comfort; Paul in an impeccable white linen suit, the rowdy lads imbibing toxic levels of alcohol, experimenting on this new road of freedom. Along the way they showed Bruce's 

 to various assemblages of West Oz surfers. They camped in the bush and surfed some fun small waves, then the lads failed to make it out at big Margaret River for Paul’s camera, so they railroaded back east, tails between their legs.

A brief sequence of Nat wiping out at Bell’s Beach was all that made it into Bruce’s big movie, accompanied by a zinger about hanging ten—and then Nat “hangs body” by walking off the end of his board.

All of this was new territory for Nat in 1963 (hell, it was new for everyone). He’d just been sponsored for the first time, by Gordon Woods Surfboards. At the suggestion of Bob Evans, Woods, Sydney's biggest boardmaker, had come up to Collaroy to watch Nat surf and was impressed. He met with Greta and told her he’d like her son to ride on his team, and Nat would get free boards. After just a few months, Woods said he'd give Nat five pounds for each surfboard order he took. And just like that, at age 15 and still a second-year schoolboy, Nat was a professional surfer.

The following year, when Midget returned to Makaha to defend his title, Nat came along. At 16, he’d won the open division at the 1963 Australian Championships at Bondi Beach, and first prize was first-class round-trip airfare to Hawaii and California—travel and expenses courtesy of Ampol Petroleum and the 

. Sponsorship for the event had been organized (once again) by surfing cinematographer-publisher-entrepreneur Bob Evans, who had made Midget a star (in 

 and other films) and was now, it seemed, hoping to do the same for Nat. Evans was the most powerful man in Australian surfing. It was extraordinary, really; he was directing the sport’s development at all levels—magazines, movies, events, even infrastructure. He had recently (along with Paul Witzig’s brother John, Ross Kelly and Ray Young) invigorated the Australian Surfriders’ Association, a body that set surfing apart from its traditional association with Australian's Surf Lifesaving Association. John Witzig wrote for Evans’ 

The scene on the victory stand at Bondi had gone beyond symbolic; maybe it was ritual. The grand-prize plane ticket was presented to Nat by none other than Duke Kahanamoku. It was only Duke’s second visit since he introduced surfing to Australia at nearby Freshwater in 1914.

At the time, Midget was Nat’s idol, and Midget tolerated the up-and-coming lad, even let him drive down to Victoria with him for the Bell’s Beach contest (in fact, it was Midget’s sweet-talking that coaxed Greta into letting Nat go), and then up the coast to Newcastle (where Mark Richards was about six and just getting into surfing) to join Midget in a promotional surfing exhibition. The hierarchy was still visible. Midget imitated Phil, Nat imitated Midget. And since Midget hadn't entered the Bondi contest Nat had just won, Nat had no illusions that his new title meant he'd displaced the most famous surfer in Australia. Just the opposite—he was still very much in awe of Farrelly’s meticulously-honed skills.

So The Gnat and The Midget (curious how Aussie nicknames outlive given names) flew to Hawaii. Oddly—or prophetically—Midget flew coach and Nat flew first class. It was Nat’s first trip to the Islands, and neither he nor Midget (nor Kevin Platt, who shared a house with them on the North Shore) made the finals at Makaha that year. The fact the Aussies’ boards were stolen a few days before the contest may have been a factor. Even so, Hawaii was an adventure. Nat got to drive (at 16, with no driver's license, on the “opposite” side of the road, at a hundred miles an hour) proto surf traveler Peter Troy to the hospital for numerous stitches after Troy's encounter with an old lava head at Pipeline. Nat surfed Pipeline for the first time and found it, he said, much like any other North Shore spot.

That winter delivered yet another symbolic moment. Phil Edwards happened to be in Hawaii that year, and Nat made it a point to watch him surf as often as possible. Here he was, studying the hero of his hero—the source! Nat worked on his repertoire of “Phil moves” until one day he found himself out in the water at Pupukea with Phil, and Nat threw a couple of big maneuvers right in front of Edwards, after which Phil came over, complimented him, and struck up a conversation that naturally led to their boards. Phil was riding “Baby,” his magic balsa, which, he said, was trained to return to him after a wipeout. He offered to let Nat try it.

As Nat began to catch waves on Baby, the board did indeed seem magic—so smooth, so sleek, so balanced. After watching the brash young Aussie kid rip a few waves, Edwards was so impressed he actually offered the board to Nat. Maybe he felt this act would be a conscious passing of the torch. Maybe it was his way of saying, 

 Overwhelmed by this flattering but excessive generosity, Nat declined.

“Phil knew that I was sort of his protege, I suppose, and I felt strongly about that association,” Nat tells me as we pull away from Takayama’s shop, where we’ve paid a brief visit, and resume our drive south. “That was actually my first falling out with Midget Farrelly, as I sort of turned from one hero to another.”

“From Midget's point of view, yeah. Not from mine. Kids change heroes, you know? That's what I did.”

Meanwhile, down the beach from the Aussies’ house on Ke Nui Road that winter, a mixed crew of Australians and Californians was packed into one of the Quonset huts at Rocky Point. With Midget suddenly giving him stinkeye at home, Nat naturally gravitated there. Turns out one of the U.S. kids was from Malibu—Butch Linden—and he invited the Aussies to come stay at his house in California. A month later, Nat was in Los Angeles, heading out to the Coast Highway with Linden and a bunch of other Malibu surfers, when they were busted (all 12 of them) for stealing a single tube of toothpaste, and Nat spent the night in jail because there was something amiss with his entry papers—he was under 17, and no one under 17 was admitted into the U.S. without a legal guardian. Someone in immigration in Honolulu had made a mistake, and Nat would have to chill till they figured out what to do. Three days later he was released into the protective custody of Butch Linden’s mother, and so the lucky lad found himself ensconced in luxury in the same Malibu Colony where Duke Kahanamoku himself had stayed back in the ’20s.

Naturally, it was all perfect. Butch had a ’48 woody, but Nat's Island board wasn't appropriate for California. Wouldn't you know it, there's a dusty old board under Butch’s house. They pull it out for Nat to try—an old balsa. Scrape off the crud and old wax and—wonder of wonders!—it had been shaped by seminal techno-sage Bob Simmons. Thus Nat surfed a 10-year-old Simmons balsa up and down the coast, from Rincon to Baja, where he experienced flaming hot tacos, tequila shooters, and a Blue Fox floor show that featured a Mexican woman performing sex acts with a donkey.

Back in Australia, Nat returned to school, but it wasn’t the same. Now an honorary member of the Malibu Surfers Association, surfing was firmly in the center of his consciousness and spread out till it reached right across to the edges. He had no doubts. Maybe he didn’t know who he was, but he knew where he was headed.

Meanwhile, his home life disintegrated further as the family moved a mile inland to a relatively sterile neighborhood. His father made a rare attempt or two to reintegrate the family—trips to Tasmania and Queensland, where Nat’s beloved dog had to be put down near where he’d shucked shrimp a couple of years before. He was feeling pretty low and trapped when he and some mates chipped in a pound or two each and bought a beater surf car, a ’38 Dodge, and finally got some mobility.

Exiting the freeway in Del Mar, heading for a quick tennis game with the surgeon friend who’s loaned him the car, I ask Nat about Bob Evans.

“Bob was a really successful entrepreneur of surfing in an age when the very idea of such a person didn’t even seem possible,” Nat tells me. “He was the one who taught me about being a professional person. He taught me things like, before you go into a meeting, you go out and buy a new shirt. Or a new tie, whatever it might be. If it’s an important enough meeting, you always put your best foot forward, so’s you felt you were absolutely ready to make your best showing. Bob was a very good salesman. And I think that had much to do with him having a strong conviction that surfing was the absolute epitome of life.”

Evans was the rarest of birds in surfing during the early ’60s—much sought after as a marketing and promotions man, with real credibility in the corporate world. “As far as putting Australian surfing on the map, he did more than anybody else,” Nat says. “Midget was the surfer, but the man that took what Midget did in Hawaii in ’62 to the media back in Australia was Bob Evans. The reason Midget became a household name in Australia was because of Bob Evans. The reason I became a household name was because of Bob Evans.”

Under Evans’ tutelage, Nat acquired a certain polish, got a basic course in good food and wine, and learned how to look and behave with his “betters.” Evans would take a dressed-up Nat along to meetings in corporate offices, as a representative of the sport of surfing, while Evans tried to interest sponsors in a great new idea he had: a world surfing contest.

“Evans single-handedly put the ’64 World Titles together with Ampol petroleum, who were the biggest company in Australia,” Nat explains. “That was his largest coup in surfing.” Evans signed the big oil company as the headline sponsor, added a slew of other sponsors and full media support, and surfers flew in from all over the surfing world to Sydney’s Manly Beach for the 1964 World Surfing Championships. Huge crowds swarmed the beach and bluffs, the event was an overwhelming success, and Midget won by a whisker. (After talking it over with Evans, Nat competed in the juniors rather than the Open Division, and lost to Robert Conneeley; who knows what a 1964 Nat-Midget duel might have wrought?)

Nat’s stock, already hot, rose steadily in the weeks and months following the World Titles. Over in California, prescient Hang Ten founder Duke Boyd had heard about the kid and signed him to a modest contract. Nat got a driver’s license and wheels, and he began driving to nearby Brookvale to work as a shaper for Gordon Woods, who let him cut his teeth on pop-outs for a Sydney department store, apprenticing under craftsman Wally Edmonds. When his schedule allowed, Nat surfaried up the coast with Evans, ripping for the cameras. His shaping got better and better, and so did his surfing.

Sometime in that Summer of ’64, Woods decided to put out a Nat Young Model, and Nat got both a shaping fee and a royalty. Suddenly and happily flush for the first time in his life, he negotiated a sponsorship with a local auto dealer (Young’s of Collaroy, coincidentally), without Evo’s help, and was soon driving a new VW wagon. Life was good, and it was getting better—in part due to the influence of a Queensland shaper and sometimes disk jockey named Bob McTavish.

“I first met Nat in Sydney in ’62,” McTavish told me. Bob was living at Collaroy, shaping at Scott Dillon’s factory. "Nat was just a raw kid—gangly, but incredible talent. He was mimicking Midget, and Midget was mimicking Phil Edwards, but I had no doubt that someday Nat would ride over that—just become his own man. One day at the Narrabeen carpark, l had a little talk with Nat about that. I said, ‘If there’s two trains on the same track, one can never overtake the other. But if you change tracks you can roar off at your own speed.’ Nat took it very seriously. At first he thought he had to mimic what I was doing, with my crouched style but he soon broke away from that and combined his height with what he learned from Edwards to move into what we called the ‘involvement’ school of thinking, which meant making maximum use of the waves and staying close to the curl.”

Nat defeated Midget at a Bell’s Beach contest later in 1964 and then entered a 16-kilometer paddling race, organized by Bob Evans, who got Nestle to pop for a round-trip airfare to Peru for the winner. A large number of surf clubbies entered the race, but Nat had been training hard (big steaks and lots of paddling) and won almost literally by a mile. So it was that Nat, Midget, and Evans—yes, those very three—boarded a plane to Hawaii, where the two rivals trained for a week before flying on to Lima and the ’65 World Contest. Unlike Manly the year before, the surf for the ’65 Titles was big and rough. The judging definitely favored the locals, but Nat still lost to the title to Lima’s Felipe Pomar by a mere half-point, perhaps because the Peruvians liked him, since Bob Evans had taught him to be polite and to show respect for his elders. That went a long way in Peru.

“The approach we came up with,” continued McTavish, “was boiled down to the basics—you rode hard and deep and steep, and how you looked was a byproduct. And that’s what Nat took to California in 1966, and that’s what he was looking like when he won the World Contest.”

"ANIMAL TRACKS: THE 50-YEAR JOURNEY OF ROBERT HAROLD YOUNG," BY DREW KAMPION

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