A lot of surfers in the 1950s and '60s—American surfers in particular—were infatuated with bullfighting. Bud Hendrick, an Orange County surfer who and woodworker who did production shaping for Hobie Surfboards, was the only one who actually became a matador. This article is a shortened version of "Bud Hendrick's Open Doors," which ran in the August 2016 issue of Surfer's Journal. The main body of the piece is an uninterrupted first-person narrative by Hendrick himself, as recorded by Pezman. The intro, written by Pezman, included the following:

Bud Hedrick was a name I heard in rarified circles in the 1960s. Back then, I remember Jack Haley mentioning an American by that name who was fighting bulls in Spain. In my neck of the woods, Jack was the guru. To surfers, bullfighting served as a metaphor for surfing in the curl. Jack obviously was struck by Hedrick, which made me curious.

Later on, others I respected—Munoz, Edwards, Flippy Hoffman, Bev Morgan, Hobie—would drop Bud's name when describing a well-made object, or who to go to if you needed some woodwork done. He’d been one of those silent, consistent mid- 60s shapers at Hobie’s when they were cranking out 250 shapes a week (good boards all) to meet the spring-summer demand. Unlike surf-star foam mowers, you wouldn’t see a model named after Bud, or hear of him at all unless you were somehow involved with people who did the kind of things he did. But amongst an elite circle of fellow watermen, he was known.

There was a psychiatrist in Laguna Beach many years ago named Dr. Dunne. He was doing LSD therapy before it became illegal. He liked working with artists. He told me, “I don’t like to work with people who need psychiatric help. I like to work with people who are creative and doing well. I can open them up even more." He asked me, “What are you?” and I started telling him all the things I did. “I’m a surfer, and I’m an artist.” Just naming off all the things that I thought I was, and he said, “No, you’re none of those. Those are just things you do. You’re going to have to go find out who you are.”

So after a lot of searching, I found out I was a human being and that I’d better hold that separate from what I do. But, as far as what I do, I’ve been a surfer, a sailor, and a diver most of my life. I fought bulls in Spain for five years. I’m an artist. That’s all that comes to mind right at the moment.

I’ve always felt that I’ve had a ring in my nose. It’s something that I can’t see, but something tugs on it and it leads me. If I follow, things go well and doors open. Many times I can’t go back and often I don’t want to: I’ve gone from one thing to another, not knowing where I was going, just following that gentle tug. But as I embrace new interests I seem to retain those that I already have. There are some things that interest me very much now but there’s no time for them, or there’s no door there, but later on there might be.

[Flippy Hoffman] took me surfing for the first time, in 1947. Our families both lived in Hollywood and we both went to Le Conte Junior High and then Hollywood High. He had use of the family car at a pretty young age, and I didn’t. One day he called and said, “Whadaya doing? I’m coming over!” You know, it was real quick, like, “This is it! Right here and don’t talk about anything else!” He drove over and he had Walter’s huge old redwood board on top of the car. We went to Palos Verdes and it turned out the reason he took me was to help him carry that board down the cliff.

A couple of other times I went surfing with Flippy on borrowed boards. But in high school I had no way to get back and forth to the ocean, so it wasn’t until I came home from Korea that I really started surfing. I served over there for a year with the 1st Marine Division and I was pretty used up by the time I got home. I didn’t realize it. They didn’t have any name for it then. There was “combat fatigue” or there was “shell shock.” PTSD had not yet been defined. I definitely wasn’t shell-shocked or shaking uncontrollably, but I wasn’t right, either.

After Korea, the Marines stationed me at Camp Pendleton. I had the rank of sergeant, and they assigned me as a troop handler in charge of 200 men. I’d march them to a training area and turn them over to an instructor, then a few hours later march them to a new area. At 4:30 I was done for the day. I wanted to surf, and San Onofre was right there.

From that point on, every afternoon after knocking off, I went straight to the beach to surf. You had to be a San Onofre Surf Club member to get in back then. There was a long waiting list—years. But Flippy got me in right away. You had to have three people vouch for you. Flippy, Burrhead, and Hammerhead vouched for me, so I was in. That’s where I really learned to surf. I was stationed at Camp Pendleton for a year and hardly missed an evening. If there was no surf I’d go down anyway ’cause there were like-minded people there and we’d talk story and play music.

I went through a healing process that year. Surfing and the beach put me back together. It was great exercise, and there’s something about sticking your head in a wave that can cure your ills. At the end of that year I felt a lot better. I was almost back to normal. But I was still trying to recapture the youth that I lost in Korea, a loss due to growing up too fast, the kind of loss that’s impossible to re-gain.

After my discharge, I hung around Laguna Beach surfing and looking for things to do. One night I took my girlfriend to the roller derby and she told me I ought to do that. I said I hadn’t skated for a long time but she encouraged me, so I went down and skated for about six weeks with the roller derby skaters, getting used to a banked track and learning the techniques of going over the rails. The Hollywood Ravens picked me up and I started skating with them. Then, one night, Dick Lane interviewed me on TV. As it turned out, Flippy had just come back from the North Shore, was diving abalone, and wanted to get in touch with me—and there I was on TV. The next day he came and got me. He said, “You’ve gotta get out of this Bud! They’re kicking the shit out of you! Come on with me and go diving! I can’t stand the guy I’m diving with. We argue all the time.”

I said, “Yeah, but you argue with everyone!”

I went with Flippy and learned commercial abalone diving. This was 1954. We were diving San Clemente and Santa Barbara Islands, which were then totally virgin grounds. Everything was prime and we did real well—made a lot of money. I still have my log of how many dozen we took each day and how much I was paid. There was no limit on the number of abalone you could take as long as they were legal size, and taken in water no less than 20 feet. We used a compressor with a big volume tank and 200 feet of hose. The Fish & Game was a presence even then and they often stopped us to check our loads.

During the off-season we vacationed in Mexico. The first time we went was in 1955. We worked all of’ '54 and when the abalone season closed for two months, from January 15 to March 15, we drove to Mexico. I’d been diving less than a year and had already been able to buy a new car. That’s how well we were doing. So I had this new Mercury and off we went. We didn’t take surfboards but we had spearfishing gear because Flippy wanted to spear big fish, and I was up for that too.

It was hard to get to the ocean or beaches in those days. There wasn’t a coastal highway yet. But we got as far south as Manzanillo and spent two months there during which we went to a bullfight in Colima, about 50 miles away. That really got ahold of me. When I had come back from Korea, I didn’t ever want to be frightened again, but now that some healing had occurred and things were kind of tame and I found I enjoyed the excitement. I was amazed at how the toreros were playing with death. I could see that there was a formalized approach and they were doing it by choice. It captured me.

That year we went to all the Sunday fights in Tijuana, Mexico. There was a lot of interest in bullfights in those years and many friends from Laguna would go down. As surfers, we felt a connection. We’d perform arched poses while surfing waves.

At the end of the 1955 abalone season, I went to Spain with Hank Lass, a surfer friend. We meant to have a two-month vacation but he stayed a year and a half. I met a retired matador, Don Pedro Pedrucho, who accepted me into his bullfighting school in Barcelona so I ended up staying for two years. Don Pedro was a fine man. He helped me a lot. Not only in the school, he also arranged my first fights in Barcelona and Tarragona and never asked for a cent.

Bullfighting is similar to baseball in that you begin as an amateur and if you get good enough you go into the minor leagues. You continue to develop your craft in the minors while getting used to the bigger bulls. Then finally, if you’re lucky and fight well, you move up to full matador. I never got to that level. I was what they call a Matador de Novillos or 

—a matador of the minor leagues. In most cases the bulls are smaller but sometimes you get these big or defective bulls that are blind in one eye or damaged in some way that disqualifies them from being used at the big-time corridas. Bulls from some ranches are already known for their dangerous tendencies. Full matadors, being stars with great influence, will refuse to fight them. “No! I won’t fight any of Fulano de Tal’s bulls anymore!” Those bulls then go to the 

, who will face any bull to gain more experience.

I was received fairly well in Spain. I didn’t have a hometown, which made it harder to get fights because they always wanted a hometown boy to draw a gate. But there was an American submarine base in Rota and an airbase in Madrid, and those places provided my fans. Plus, I could go to the English-language radio station on the base and promote my upcoming fights. However, at the end of two years, broke beyond hope, I returned to California abalone diving for financial sustenance.

I did that for another full year, saving money for a return to the bulls. When I went back to Spain for my second stint, after a full season of diving, I had money in my pocket plus past experience to help. I had fought three times in Barcelona on the first trip, and in other fine rings like Talavera de La Reina and Tarragona, and I knew what I had to do. I got work with a comedy bullfight company that put on Friday night fights in country towns. A band traveled with us and played bullfight music to draw fans. The comedy attraction of the night was the midget bullfighters. They would come out wearing fancy costumes. Some wore papier-mache horses held up by suspenders to imitate the role horses play in a bullfight. The show also featured a young novillero, that was my part, who would kill two young bulls in the traditional style. Except for that, the show was strictly vaudeville. I consider traveling on that bus my second education.

The matadors in Spain had a strong union and there were rules requiring that part of each event be conducted in the traditional fashion—perform a real bullfight, in addition to all the comedy sideshows and music. I filled that role throughout one summer and I got a lot of experience. I got the job because I was willing to pay my own personal expenses, although the company paid for everything else. From those fights, I received enough exposure that I could get better fights and I left the vaudeville deal behind, But that was a wild time— really wild. I learned a lot of Spanish riding around in that bus with the midgets and musicians—although most of it can't be used in polite company.

For two more years, I lived in Madrid and fought whenever and wherever I could. I got seriously gored in San Sebastian de La Reina and spent ten days in the bullfighter’s sanitarium. The doctors there were very good, being familiar with wound surgery and expert at getting the matadors back out into the rings so that they could fulfill their contracts. I fought with a lot of toreros that were hurt badly yet still fighting. One time, two friends and myself were all changing clothes in a barn. We had gone to fight some calves on a ranch. I was just wearing Levis while they were wearing the 

, or country clothes, with the flat hats and vest and chaps. As one friend was changing his pants, I noticed that he was wearing a Kotex over his rear end. It covered an open wound. He’d been gored in the anus in South America, a month previously. The horn had perforated his rectum and he still had drainage tubes in him. We went out and fought calves all afternoon and he fought so brilliantly that you would never know he was hurting. I was amazed at his courage. One of the things that I had learned in the Marine Corps was that courage is the control of fear, and he had demonstrated that control.

I was gored where my leg meets the abdomen. It missed the femoral artery but that goring broke me—not physically but financially. There was a very good and well-connected manager who offered me a contract to book a string of fights for the year. But to do it, I had to come up with a buy-in of 50,000 pesetas for publicity. I just didn’t have it. And then a friend secured me a five-month job as a stuntman on the American film 

, which was being shot in Madrid. That door opened at the perfect time. I left the bulls behind. With a bit of a limp, I went home and back to abalone diving. It was time. I was in my early 30s by then and it wasn’t going to happen for me.

I returned to California in 1962 and dove abalone for a couple of years and then sailed and worked on boats out of Newport Harbor. In the mid-6os I started working at Hobie Surfboards. Phil Edwards was head shaper and he was instrumental in getting me that job and coached me as to how the boards were to be shaped. There were five or six different models at that time. I worked there for five years and shaped a thousand boards a year. Terry Martin, who worked next to me, shaped twice that many in the same amount of time. They were all primo boards too. Flawless. What a great craftsman he was. Terry taught me many fine points of shaping. There were four or five of us working there year-round.

In 1969, Flippy asked if I would help him take his motor-powered catamaran through the Sea of Cortez. If things worked well we would dive the gulf and then continue down the coast of Mexico, surfing beaches, offshore rocks, and islands as far as Acapulco. That was a three-month trip and we dove and surfed the entire way—an epic adventure that I’ve written a book about.

While in Acapulco I met David Crosby who was sailing his schooner 

 from Florida to San Francisco. After returning to California, he offered me a job on his boat. That led to 20 years of sailing the Pacific and the Caribbean, during which I met Casi, my wife. We’ve been together 43 years. We raised our daughter Toyoko on the boat and we sailed through some sweet times. The best part was the diving and surfing and watching Toyoko grow up on a schooner in an island environment. She had the opportunity to swim with whales and dolphins and walk reefs collecting shells. Casi schooled her daily using the Calvert School program.

But at sea there can be hard times too and we saw some of those. We were struck by lightning in the Bahamas and went through three hurricanes.

We left the boat in 1990 and traveled through Mexico for six months, ending up in Sausalito where we settled. I did boat carpentry there and made furniture for the next 20 years.

After retiring, I wanted to confine my skills to doing only tasks that required my best work. I had come to dislike commercial work, as it requires taking shortcuts to win a bid. Corners are cut and the end product is seldom what it could have been. I wanted to leave that behind and reach for the best work that I was capable of. So I moved on to building string instruments and have found it very gratifying. At this point, I have built 27 instruments. The violins are my favorites but there are two very nice violas that I love too. One of them is a five-string. Then there are five mandolins, three guitars, and a bunch of ukuleles, all of which have been well regarded.

Several years ago I took up photographing birds. It opens a door to nature and I am drawn by their varied beauty and enjoy the hunt and stalk without killing. We live in Napa now, a half-mile from the Napa River and two miles from the Back Bay. Our daughter and granddaughter live five blocks away.

The surf? Sometimes I drive over to Point Reyes and watch the big combers roar in from the north. I’ve not grown tired of the Pacific Ocean yet.

BUD HENDRICK: SURFER, SAILOR, BULLFIGHTER

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