This profile article ran in the April 1982 issue of SURFER. It has been slightly shortened and edited.

Bobby Owens is a most unusual surfer. Small in stature, fair-skinned and freckled and, well, skinny. At 140 lbs., he’s hardly the archetypal Big-Wave Rider. Yet Owens' home break and favorite spot is Sunset Beach. And since he lives just a stone’s throw up the green tropical hillside behind the beach, when the surf is pumping Owens will almost certainly be out there.

Those opportunities, however, are rarer than Owens would probably care for. The reason? Since 1976, the first year of the then-experimental IPS world surfing circuit, Owens has been on the road with the pro tour.

Owens’ dedication to competition surfing is unquestionable. The six years of traveling the world tour are proof enough of that. Yet Owens is not your stereotype contest rip-and-tear merchant either. Owens is known around the world for a smooth, flowing approach, and most observers, when trotting out the over-generalized pigeon-holing of surfing styles, would consider him "soul” rather than “competition" oriented. Still, while Owens has yet to win a major pro surfing event, his contest record demonstrates that without having to compromise his surfing style, he can get good results.

“I seem to have one foot in each camp," says Owens of his brand of surfing. “One foot is in the contest school and one foot in the more artful, flowing school. What is really important to me is not to allow the competition scene to make my surfing too mechanical.”

Owens had been facing a tough time of it on the pro tour last year, trying to break back into the all-important Top 16, and thus secure a guaranteed invitation to all of this year's world tour contests. As I write this, gazing out at an uncommonly flat North Shore day, the World Cup is on hold, awaiting the next swell. The World Cup will be crucial for Owens as his rating is currently hovering in the mid-teens. A good result will put him back among the top seeds for 1982.

When I talked to Owens at his Sunset Beach home, his mom interjected from time to time to say, “all he’s got to do is catch more waves! He always seems to get just one too few." Bobby seemed cool and confident and rejuvenated. Confident enough, in fact, to talk about how he “lost momentum” and slipped back to 20th in the ratings after having finished 12th in 1977 and seventh in 1978.

“At that time, I was thinking about what I was going to be doing five years down the road. It was reflected in my surfing. I was taking it all too seriously. I should have been concentrating on being a surfer and not a pro surfer. That’s what I’m doing now. I can't let thoughts about the future interfere with my surfing performances now. That’s the most important thing.”

A self-confessed “soul surfer” who states that to do better he has to take it less seriously? Clearly, Bobby Owens is an unusual type of pro.

Owens describes his favorite kind of surfing as “down-the-line, flowing,” and says this is largely due to his formative surfing years in Hawaii. Bobby’s father, a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, was posted in Oahu in 1966 and soon learned to surf under guidance from a surf-stoked sergeant. Bobby, nine years old at the time, and quickly caught the bug as well.

As it happened, Col. Albert Benson's family, a virtual surf team themselves, lived next door to the Owens family, and regular visitors to the house included prominent watermen like the Butch Van Artsdalen and the Aikau brothers.

“It was like having a direct hit of the Hawaiian lifestyle,” explains Bobby. “These people were heroes to me and they had a profound effect on my attitudes on surfing. The Benson kids were my first surfing partners. Blanche and Guy were already into big waves by then, and I started by surfing after school with Becky and Fielding and my brothers, first in Haleiwa whitewater and then at Chun’s Reef.”

Owens goes on to analyze the origins of his style. “When I really fell into surfing in a big way, the mini-guns were happening. So at first was riding a big tanker. But watching people like Reno Abellira and Joey Cabell on their new mini-guns made me develop a more flowing and down-the-line style.

“People who grow up at a beachbreak where there’s a strong club scene are more likely to develop a style that says ‘competition.’ There was hardly any competition in Hawaii in those days, so I started out at the other end of the spectrum.”

The Owens family Hawaiian idyll was interrupted in 1970 when Bobby’s father retired and moved to Florida for two years. It was then that Bobby first became involved in contest surfing in local amateur events. It was also, he is quick to point out, a time when he had to get used to riding small waves and become less fussy about conditions in general. He began to concentrate, instead, on perfecting maneuvers. That experience would prove to be valuable in later years when many events he encountered on the pro tour were held in three-foot and smaller waves. In 1975, after the family had returned to Hawaii, Bobby took second in the amateur division Smirnoff Pro-Am at Sunset Beach. He decided it was time to turn pro.

"I sort of drifted into it,” he explains almost apologetically. “There was really nothing else to do at the time. There was no amateur World Contest. Going pro just seemed to be the obvious step.”

Owens was fortunate that during those early days he had the total backing of his family, in both emotional and financial terms. “They’ve been stoked all the way,” he says. “There was no fighting or hassling about my career choice; they've been supportive and encouraging the whole time."

While Bobby’s contest record built up — second in the '77 Duke, second in the '77 Hang Ten, second in the '78 Florida Pro, fifth in the '78 Stubbies — three years on the pro tour had returned little but some great experiences. The money was coming in, as expected. Owens' IPS rating was good enough to enable him to go around again next year, but he increasingly had a feeling that it was not really all worth it.

“I was looking at maybe going back to school,” says Bobby reflecting. “I was looking at where my surfing was going, at my lack of sponsorships. I was in a negative frame and had lost momentum.” By the end of 1979 he’d slipped to 20th in the world.

As the new year’s circuit started again in Australia in 1980 Bobby was faced with the prospect of breaking back in through the trials—which are cutthroat events unto themselves, with up to 120 surfers going hell-for-leather to get a crack at Big Time Pro surfing.

"I felt I shouldn’t have to be there,” says Owens. After he bombed in both the Straight Talk event in Sydney and then the Stubbies Trials at Burleigh Heads, he turned around and flew back to Hawaii to "surf Sunset and clear the head.” Bobby is a great believer in the therapeutic effects of just going surfing. He refers to it constantly in conversation, the soul surfer side, seeking self-expression in the Zen of surfing.

By the time Owens came back on the scene in November for the North Shore sequence of events, both his frame of mind and sponsorship situation had changed. His surfing was fired up. He kicked off by winning the Pro Class Trials at Sunset, reaching the semifinals of the Pipeline Masters, and taking third in the World Cup. It wasn’t good enough to put him back among the Top 16, but it seemed like a good indication that he could do it.

In addition to the therapeutic effects of being at home in Hawaii for a few months, Owens received an invitation to join Team Lightning Bolt. In fact, it was likely the Bolt that did most to light up his self-esteem and quell the notion that he couldn’t combine his very important “soul surfing” needs with the necessities of “surfing to the system” in the pro contest scene. It was a great relief to the 23-year-old that he could relieve his folks of the financial burden of his continued world tour pursuit.

The results were evident right off the bat. In Australia early last year, Owens won both the Quiksilver Trials at Bells and the Bolt Trials at the Surfabout. While he had no main event IPS victories over the year, his consistent placing in the quarter- or semifinals were racking up valuable rating points. Then he had a stroke of luck: with Critter Byrne and Tom Carroll not competing in the latter part of the circuit and Peter Harris not competing at all, Owens was able to skip the trials and move directly to the main events in South Africa, Japan, and for the all-important Hawaiian contests.

As Bobby Owens started out on his hard road back into the top seedings, he worked hard on his equipment, experimented with a lot of different kinds of boards, and established a new working relationship with Bolt shaper Bill Barnfield. This move ended an era. Up until the Bolt deal, all of Bobby's equipment was made by Harold Iggy, a veteran shaper whose design experience spans two decades.

“I had no complaints there," says Bobby of his early mentor. “Iggy and that whole involvement was unbelievable. The amount of knowledge I got through working with him and riding his boards is something I really value now.”

Bobby has been putting that knowledge to maximum use, and although surfing Barnfield’s boards in all the competitions, he was experimenting while in Australia with Dick Van Straalen’s twin-fins (with the fins foiled on the inside edge). As he puts it, “I thought it was about time to start playing the game.” The game referred to, of course, is racking up points in small wave contests. Right now Bobby is aiming at “eliminating the variables," in his equipment. He finds that communicating ideas to Barnfield is an easy process. “That’s all part of being an experienced shaper,” he says. “Then it all just comes down to fractions of an inch."

By the end of the 1982 season, all the changes and all the hard work seemed to pay off. Bobby placed fifth in the Pipeline Masters, fifth in the Duke, and made the semifinals in the World Cup. Put it all together, and it was enough to earn a Top 16 seed for 1983.

While the results were gratifying for Owens and vindicate his resolution not to compromise his classic Hawaiian surfing style, it does mean that for the seventh consecutive year he'll be on the road, looking for that elusive victory in a top-rated event. The traveling, he says, doesn't bother him. Perhaps the result of his upbringing in a highly mobile military family. He also says that while the high points on the road have been nearly always associated with doing well in competition, he has found traveling to be an illuminating experience and has always tried to make the most of it. He says that wherever he goes he tries to assimilate the local lifestyle. In Japan, where many surfers ache for the chance to eat at McDonald’s, Bobby is happy to drink the local green tea and eat raw fish. Japan, he says, is, "a unique cultural experience. The people are so hospitable you almost feel embarrassed because they treat you so well." (Then again, when asked about the most memorable experience of his many years of traveling, the one which still stands out is the six days of perfect surf he had at Jeffrey’s Bay two years ago.)

Still, Owens is always glad to return home to Hawaii. “I consider Hawaii to be paradise,” says Bobby, "and that’s a real comforting thought when I'm on the road. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that when I'm feeling bummed out. I tell myself that this won’t last forever so go for it—these are valuable years for me.”

The day after the World Cup finished and the final rating points for the year were being tabulated, Bobby came around to our house on the North Shore. He said that the swell was rising and Sunset would be good for an afternoon session. “I’m glad this is all over,” he said, referring to his sixth year on the circuit. “Now I can just get out there and go surfing like a normal person."

There is something very Zen about Bobby Owens and the way he treats surfing and the pro tour. That, perhaps, is why this quiet competitor, while he has yet to find himself with fame and fortune in professional terms, still surfs to the sound of one hand clapping.

"BOBBY OWENS: THE QUIET COMPETITOR," BY PAUL HOLMES

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