The only memory I have from of a lengthy 1989 interview I did with Matt Archbold, in the living room of my San Clemente house, is that he was the most monosyllabic person I'd ever met. Just this side of mute. Still a teenager, but two or three DUIs on his record already, and it was clear that he was still struggling. 

But Matt was sweet, too, in his own way. Not a trace of the free-floating anger Christian Fletcher (whom I'd interviewed in the same room just a few months earlier) carried around with him like luggage. I was just a few years older than that whole generation of post-Curren surfers, and connected with a lot of them. But Archy? Nothing. Blank. Living so deep inside himself, every banal sentence I pulled out of him was a small victory.

But he was a surfing genius of the first order. I mean, Wayne-Lynch-level genius. Tom Curren at that time was the only American surfer with as much natural talent as Archbold. Curren was more refined, more flowing, more complete. Arch was looser, more spontaneous. Both were so wary and distant on land; part of what resonated while watching them surf—part of what made them surf so well, maybe—was the sense of release, of unwinding, of letting go.

Arch, especially. Curren had music. Curren had a wife. Matt had surfing, nothing else, and if you look beyond the water-shifting turns and lofty prototype airs, what you see is a person returning to the one place where he was blessedly at ease with himself. All the self-destructive tendencies were banished, temporarily at least, while he was in the water.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON FORMER BOY-WONDER MATT ARCHBOLD

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