"Clockwork Blue: the Strange Journey of 1970 World Champ Rolf Aurness, by Drew Kampion, ran in the Spring 2001 issue of The Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

In May of 1970, a tall, lean 18-year-old California goofyfoot named Rolf Aurness became the World Surfing Champion by overwhelming a stellar group of finalists —including Midget Farrelly, Peter Drouyn, Reno Abellira, and Nat Young—surfing almost exclusively backside in a decidedly low-key competition held at a remote southern Australia beach called Johanna. Despite the obscurity of the venue, Aurness’ victory rallied considerable media coverage, largely because he was the son of the famous actor James Arness, who played Marshal Matt Dillon in the long-running 

 television show, which was nearly as popular in Australia as it was in the USA. “Marshal’s Son Wins World Surf Shootout” was a typical Aussie headline.

The rise of Rolf Aurness from obscurity to the World Title was classically meteoric. In less than four years he had stormed through the West Coast’s boys division, hit the juniors like a tornado, got a slot on the California team at the 1968 World Contest in Puerto Rico, then leap-frogged straight into the men’s division, where he immediately won the first three AAAA events of 1969 and secured the top spot on the '70 World Contest team.

But after winning the title, Aurness faded from the scene even faster than he’d arrived. Those were twilight years for surfing and American society in general; the pot had been stirred by the turbulence of the ’60s, and the new paradigm had not yet jelled. When the final World Contest was held in San Diego in 1972, Rolf wasn't there to defend his title, but neither were former champs Farrelly, Pomar, Young, and Hemmings, so it seemed almost natural—as if it was mostly a comment on the state of competitive surfing. And by the time the pro tour kicked into gear in 1976, the 24-year-old former world champ was a ghost from a bygone era—nowhere to be found and on nobody’s mind.

In fact, Rolf Aurness' abrupt fade from the surfing scene wasn’t all that abrupt, just as his rise wasn't as sudden and surprising as it seemed. In a pattern almost mythological, the young champion emerged from a long and worthy tutelage to triumph in the public arena and, on a different stage in a parallel quest, on giant waves, too. Goals achieved, expectations satisfied, he withdrew from the limelight to pursue the course of his own internal necessity. The truth of Rolf’s rise and fall is perhaps best portrayed as an orbit or an arc—one that had deep roots in the invisible, burst above the horizon for a brief and spectacular time, then set once again in the West. But just as the sun doesn’t die at the end of each day, neither did Rolf really disappear. He’s just been going through his changes, journeying on the dark side, heading for the next new dawning.

It’s early afternoon on October 20th, 2000, and I’m looking for a parking place in the highly-congested and renovation-rich zone known as Brentwood Village, just west of the San Diego freeway in Santa Monica. The neighborhood is a classic old part of the LA movie scene, yet it’s being completely made over. I find a place in a dirt lot, cut across a confusion of detouring traffic, and make a beeline for the corner Starbucks, where a tall, thin guy sits at an outside table slouching beneath a baseball cap. The logo on the front of the cap reads, “Butt Juice Surfboards.”

He’s lean and chiseled, more like his dad than I remember, but the familiar high-pitched laugh is as young as ever. We walk down the street to a sprawling stucco apartment complex, where he’s lived for the last eight years. His dad lives a couple blocks away; they check the surf together on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, he tells me.

Rolf’s apartment isn’t as messy as he made it sound on the phone, but it’s dim and drab and, yes, a little messy. Lying on the ochre shag carpet is a sweet blue surfboard—a Rolf Aurness Hydroplane—with a Butt Juice logo. He shows me the other room and his Frank Zappa album collection. We talk for a while, catch up on things. He brews us cups of an Amazon tea—green, tannic—a “combo of herbs from the jungle” that he says is good support for his liver.

I first interviewed Rolf back in 1968, when he was the hot up-and-coming junior of California surfing. I was there on the beach when he won the title at Johanna, and I was there the following morning when he ran out onto the low-tide flats with his dog to play far away from anybody and anything. Now, with three decades under the bridge, he seems remarkably like himself—at ease, that glint in his eye, quick to laugh, and, above all, sensitive to the feelings of those around him.

We sit at a Formica table, and Rolf brings out a couple of magazines he’s saved. There’s a pristine May 1983 edition of SURFER with a Brian Gillogly piece on surfboard design that includes a section called “Rolf’s Fish” about an earlier incarnation of the hydroplane board. “Two years ago,” Gillogly. wrote, “Rolf showed up at the Surfer Poll Banquet looking like Buffalo Bill, with long hair and a buckskin jacket. He had been through a decade of changes and, reportedly, was looking for direction. Two years later, it’s great to see him back—surfing again and stoked."

The other publication is a 1970 issue of 

 with an article—“Rolf!”— written by former SURFER editor Pat McNulty. “Marshal Dillon’s son is very big in the Marshall McLuhan generation," the subtitle reads. "But he probably would have made it in Dodge City, too.” The piece backgrounds Rolf’s World Contest win, provides a forum for the champ’s thoughts on subjects like religion, acting, jazz, the generation gap, and rock music, and paints a warm portrait of a “kaffee klatch” at the Arness Pacific Palisades household (including his older sister, Jenny) on the eve of a Baja-by-air surf adventure.

. Certainly, the story it tells of Rolf Aurness (through no fault of McNulty’s) is idyllically incomplete.

As we’re talking, the phone rings. It’s Rolf's girlfriend, Chenoa. She grows plumeria in Malibu and has called with Rolf’s reading for the day: “I pray that I may let God’s spirit come into my heart. I pray that it may fill me with an abiding peace.”

He calls her Chen (pronounced Shen), and they’ve been together for almost 20 years. They have a lot in common. “I don’t know if she’s really my girlfriend,” he jokes, but he could be serious.

After a while, he asks me if I want to go down the block and get some lunch. "It's homemade," he says encouragingly, and we head out. The neon sign in the window proclaims ORGANIC. Inside, a savvy young boy waits on us, brings soup as thick as porridge, and makes Rolf's smoothie just the way he likes it.

Rolf tells me he’s got high cholesterol, so he’s on a special diet. He eats chicken, fish, turkey, and organic soups and smoothies. He has a theory that excessive cholesterol might be produced by a liver stressed from years of surfing the Ranch in severe conditions. Besides the diet, which includes carrot juice and wheatgrass, he tries to walk two miles every day.

He laughs. “Oh! Haha! Well . . . I make my annual trek to San Onofre!” He says his father went with him in August this year. The surf was up and, he confides with an unabashed laugh, it was a struggle to make it out through the breaking waves.

Next morning, we’re scheduled to have a late breakfast with his father. I arrive a little early. When James Arness opens the door, it takes a couple of seconds for me to adjust. The last time I remember seeing him was on the beach at Malibu with Corky and the AAAA kids, in 1969, looking every bit the confident Giant Marshal. Thirty years later, he’s bent to my height with arthritis, his shock of light brown hair gone white. But the big grin and the penetrating eyes are unchanged.

We sit in the living room. James' wife of 22 years, Janet, brings us tea. We talk about Rolf, and the story takes us back to the beginning.

James Aurness was born in Minneapolis in 1923, the grandson of Peter Arness, who immigrated to the United States from the Stor Fjord of Norway, where the entire population belongs to the family Arsnes. Son of a medical instrument salesman and his homemaker wife, James was 21 and a strapping 6' 7" when his platoon hit the beaches at Anzio in 1944 and began working its way inland. Ten days later, they stumbled into a machine-gun nest in the middle of the night, and a German bullet shattered Jim’s knee. Discharged in ’45, he came back to Minnesota, went to radio school, and got an announcing job on a Minneapolis station for a while before he and a friend decided to try their luck out West. There he found good fortune, indeed. Shortly after arriving, he went down to the beach at Santa Monica, where a new friend showed him how to bodysurf. He loved it, so his buddy took him on a weekend jaunt to San Onofre, where Jim bonded with the local surfers. He became one of the beach bums, living off federal disability, fishing and surfing, and drifting up to L.A. every so often to act in a play or to audition. Big Jim’s strong good looks and easy-going manner were cut straight from the John Wayne mold (both were born on May 26th, in fact). 

, Aurness' first film, released in 1947, with the promise of more to come. Even so, Jim was planning to join the Sano crew’s first foray to Oahu and Makaha when he met a beautiful young actress named Virginia Chapman at the Pasadena Playhouse. Jim didn’t go to Hawaii. Instead, he married Virginia in 1949, changed his name to James Arness, and found work in a string of films, many of them Westerns.

In 1951, Arness was tapped to co-star with John Wayne in 

, in which he and Wayne played investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee, huntin’ Commies in (of all places) Hawaii. The film was shot around Honolulu, and Jim finally got a chance to check out Makaha, but it was flat.

A couple of months later, on February 18, 1952, Virginia gave birth to their second child and named him after grandfather Rolf. Jim returned to Hawaii in 1954 to film another Wayne vehicle, 

, on the Big Island. On his return flight to the Mainland, he and a friend had time to visit Makaha on the layover. “It was November,” Jim recalls with a gleam. “Eight-foot, and beautiful. We had fins with us, and we went out and bodysurfed.” That was it; he fell in love with Makaha.

About that time, Jim got a call from a television production company with a new idea for an “adult Western”—and, well, John Wayne had turned them down, so they were wondering if, maybe, Jim would be interested in the role of Marshal Matt Dillon. 

 premiered in the fall of 1955 and ran for 20 years, in the process transforming James Arness into an American (and international) icon.

When it came time to break away from the Hollywood rat race, Jim knew where to take the family. He found a nice place to rent, right on the beach next door to Doke Klausmeyer’s place, with a view that looked straight into the barrel of Makaha’s point surf. “We rented Jimmy Wong’s house for 15 years,” Jim smiles. “Those were wonderful years there,” he adds with savor. “Those years at Makaha were a precious part of our life. This was the old Hawaii—a special place.”

Big Jim had a special relationship with the local Hawaiians from the start. Besides his obvious notoriety, the man liked to surf and fish and cook and drink and talk story, skills honed on the beach at San Onofre, skills matching the job description of any true Makaha local.

“I remember when he first came to the Islands and threw in with Buff and the family,” says Greg Noll, who also won acceptance at Makaha in the 1950s. “Jim was a good surfer, and Buff and those guys loved him. And when it was time to go for booze, out comes the wallet—‘Eight cases or ten?’ He was the direct line to the beer, the first guy on the guest list, but he’s nobody’s fool.”

Indeed, Makaha was a sanctuary, and Jim was happy to be there. Back on the Mainland, he worked a steady schedule on the production lot in Studio City in the San Fernando Valley. Rolf was about seven when it dawned on him that he was different, and it had to do with the fact that everybody in the world seemed to know his father.

Home was over the Santa Monica Mountains to the Rustic Canyon area of Pacific Palisades, where Rolf went to Canyon Charter School, and his step-brother Craig (by Virginia’s first marriage) introduced him to 

 magazine. The thin, lanky son of the taciturn TV marshal had an early interest in boxing, much to the chagrin of his mother, who was protective and perhaps jealous by nature. She never much liked Jim hanging around with his surf-bum pals, either.

Not so coincidentally, then, it was during the summer of Jim and Virginia's high-profile divorce in 1960 when Jim finally hauled Rolf down to Sano to introduce him to his friends and to his secret love—the ocean. “After the divorce, we would spend whole summers down there,” says Rolf. He started on an air mattress but Jim soon put him on an 8' Bing, and that was that. Jim entered Rolf in the boys' division of the annual competition at San Onofre and he won. He was stoked on surfing and Jim was stoked, too. Then, in 1961, there was an accident that changed his life. Rolf picks up the story. “There was a fort in an oak tree up there in Rustic Canyon,” he recalls. “My mother was quite the landscaper, and she had just placed this huge sandstone slab under the tree. I was working on the treehouse with a saw when I went over the side, and I hit it almost head-first. I lost consciousness for a while, then woke up and walked up to the house. Our big black nanny was there and she started screaming—blood was streaming down—and she took me to the doctor. His name was Dr. Martini.” Rolf laughs, remembering. “He was a funny guy.”

Martini stitched the boy up, but Rolf could only make gurgling sounds, then he lost consciousness again. In the ER, it was discovered that his skull was punched open and three shards of bone had protruded into his brain.

“He couldn’t talk, just made these noises,” Jim recalls. “The fracture had broken into the speech center of his brain. We got him in and they operated right away, and we waited. We didn’t know what to expect for 48 hours. When he woke up, the doctor asked him some questions about the accident and he talked normally. Boy, were we ever relieved!”

Seeing your child come so close to a possibly debilitating, possibly fatal injury can affect a parent in different ways. For Virginia, it was time to put on the brakes, but Jim felt it was imperative that young Rolf work through it. "I really pushed him,” he admits. “He started surfing when he was a little kid at Sano and loved it. But his mother didn’t want him anywhere near a surfboard with that hole in his head.”

Jim held firm, insisting on nothing less than full-bore rehabilitation. He developed a training program and devoted himself to Rolf’s recovery. “He started surfing every day,” Jim says. “We’d get up at dawn and go down there every morning, and he’d surf with the businessmen from the area who were out before work. Every day, gotta go down, whether it was 8 inches or 8 feet. He had a hole in his skull with nothing but skin covering the brain, and that took a long time to fill in, so we got a batter’s helmet and I sawed off the bill. He wore it to school— everywhere.” For surfing, Jim would duct-tape the helmet to Rolf's head.

“From then on, it was partly my feelings about the thing that contributed to him doing all the contests,” Jim continues. “So he wouldn’t think of himself as a cripple, I took him around in our camper to every contest on the coast here, and he kept charging and winning, right through each division. We had a great time throughout those years.”

“Dad became my mentor and coach,” Rolf says. “He entered me in contests, took me up and down the coast to compete, took the motorhome to Baja. I concentrated only on surfing for 10 years—San Onofre all summer, Makaha and the North Shore three times a year, Hollister Ranch, plus I practiced in Santa Monica before and after school.”

He got teased at San Onofre during the helmet era, where his buddies there were the Hops brothers (Mike, Steve, and Eric), Tony and Billy Martien, Dane and Mark Silzle, Don and Tom Craig, and later Brad McCaul, who introduced him to Corky Carroll. He got teased, but he was starting to make an impression. “I met Rolf at San Onofre when he was pretty young,” Corky remembers. “He was a long gangly kid, and had to wear that helmet, but he showed a lot of potential.”

Periodically turned loose on the golden sands at Makaha, young Rolf found himself in a tropic playground, free to surf, wander the beaches, and explore the neighborhood. “I think 1 was 12, and I walked down the beach, and the pond was there at Makaha, and I started digging a ditch to drain the pond. Just playing in the sand by myself, and this Hawaiian guy walks up, and he says hi, and starts digging with me.” Rolf laughs with delight at the memory. “And that was the first time I met Buffalo. It was great.”

“I watched him when he was a small kid because he had the helmet on, and Jim said to make sure he kept it on,” says Buffalo Keaulana, who spent much of his lifeguarding career at Makaha. “I used to always play with him—make boat, put in stream, sail around.”

When he was 13 and 14, Rolf surfed with the Sunn kids, Martha, Rella, and Anella, and Buffalo used to take them out in his 9' Glasshopper. The hull was transparent, so the kids could see the fish through the bottom, and its catamaran shape made it good for surfing: “You just lean to the right and lift the left side of the hull and it climbs up the face of wave,” Buffalo explains. “Great fun!” When Buff left it anchored out in the bay one night, and the swell came up to 20' and broke the Glasshopper into a thousand pieces, Jim heard about it. “Next time he come back to the Islands, he picks me up and drives me straight to the boat store and says, ‘Eh Buff, check out this 13' Boston Whaler with the 33 Johnson,’ and y’know, he bought that thing for me!”

Buffalo helped coach Rolf into the waves at Makaha. “Rolf’s surfing just got better and better,” says Buffalo. “He surfed outside Maile Point and out front of Jimmy Wong’s—he got some beautiful left waves out there. The father took films. That kid was always smilin’ and always wantin’ to surf. He was in the water all the time."

On the Mainland, Rolf moved through Paul Revere Junior High, where he received early exposure to drugs and sex, and on to Palisades High, where he was a good student with an increasing attendance problem. He finally transferred to the small and highly-flexible Olympic High, a continuation school, and got his diploma there. Meanwhile, Jim took Rolf and Jenny down to the Del Mar Club (south of the Santa Monica pier) every morning, where Rolf had to swim a mile every day, plus underwater laps in the Olympic-sized pool. “We didn’t know it, but we were training for the big waves,” Rolf observes.

“All the training gave him the edge when it came to contests because he was proficient in any size or type of wave,” Jim says. “He practiced so much that he could surf anything.”

Jim’s pride in his son’s recovery and achievements was well justified, but it belied a deeper motivation. “Dad was a huge Hollywood personality,” Rolf points out. “And he had to make a choice of what to do with us kids, and he chose to keep me out of the business because he felt it was nonproductive. He also felt that his own success was almost totally due to luck or some kind of divine providence because he had seen hundreds of people in the business who never made it—they had horrible lives. He didn’t want that to happen to us, and so surfing became an activity like Little League, with all the contests, so that was what he wanted for me."

The Hollister Ranch turned out to be the ultimate training ground for Rolf’s wave-riding style. “I think it was from surfing up there, as much as at Makaha, that Rolf developed his backside ability,” opines Corky. “Most of us thought that he went right better than he did left.”

 fans] back when nobody but the Santa Barbara Surf Club could get into the Ranch,” Rolf says. “They couldn’t get in at the gate until 8 a.m., and they had to be out by 5 p.m.—but we’d park our camper at Rights & Lefts—and we’d already be finished with our morning session before anybody else showed up. We got it great, got to know the regulars—Danny Hazard, Sean Claffney, George Greenough, John Bradbury, Rennie Yater.”

Quiet and unassuming though he was, Rolf blazed a trail through the boys’ circuit, then moved into the juniors with his friend Brad McCaul and started winning there, too. Inspired by the surfing of David Nuuhiwa on the Mainland and Jock Sutherland in Hawaii, he says he was shocked when Nat Young beat David at the 1966 World Contest in San Diego, and impressed that Jock was versatile enough to finish runner-up in the small surf.

Rolf became a team rider for Bing Surfboards, ripping on a 9' Bing Pintail. “Rolf was always shy and such a gentleman compared to most of the surf team guys,” Bing Copeland remembers. “I’ve always had a really positive relationship with him and his dad. He was always so happy and honest that it was a delight to have him on my team.”

Corky was on the Hobie team, but (then as now) that made little difference in day-to-day surf friendships. Carroll remembers: “His dad bought a house in Cypress Shores next to Cotton’s Point, where I surfed all the time. Rolf and I became good friends. He was really fun to surf with because he was good and getting better, and it was sort of a constant pushing each other to go for it deeper and better or whatever. I think we were good for each other in that way. Competitive friends. We went to contests together and took quite a few surf and ski trips; the dude was a great snow skier! He used to kick my butt playing one-on-one basketball; he was tall and had been to John Wooden’s basketball camp. We had knock-down drag-out ping-pong matches, too. It would get bloody—welts all over from slam shots to the belly!”

Complete focus and dedication had everything to do with Rolf’s success both in his daily surf sessions and in competition. By 1968, he was chewing up asphalt at a remarkable rate, getting all the waves he could find. “Brad and me went from San Diego to Santa Cruz almost every weekend,” he recalls. The vehicle was his ’68 Plymouth Barracuda, with Poi Boy (Rolf's Japanese Ainu dog) riding shotgun.

Mentored by his father, anxious to please and succeed, Rolf was attentive to the wisdom of his elders and gained knowledge and skills beyond his years. “I was never in the junior lifeguards or anything,” he shrugs, “but we had this one friend, John Horn, who later became captain of the L.A. County Lifeguards. He was the one who first got me set up with Bing Copeland. John was rigorous about training, and he was knowledgeable about all the risks on the North Shore and Makaha; he knew exactly what to do. When we were 13 and 14, he’d take us around the North Shore. We’d go to Waimea and he’d say, Well, this is where the rips are, and this is how you swim in,’ so I was getting an idea of what the future was going to be at a pretty early age. Of course, it’s a personal thing when you have to grow up and pit yourself against nature—y’know, put your life on the line. It’s a long process, training for that.”

And pitting himself against nature was what it was all about for Rolf. “To me, the whole deal of going through all the competition and eventually achieving the goal of winning the World Contest was part of it, but the main thing that really influenced me and what I took more seriously as far as a life-long goal was to ride the big surf, and that all started with my dad’s mentoring and coaching.”

Jim loved the big Hawaiian waves. He still remembers vividly one Easter week at Makaha when the point was glassy and peeling perfectly, “just like 15' Malibu.” Encumbered though he was with a bad knee, he had ordered up a big red gun from Dick Brewer and charged the Makaha walls no matter how big.

“Dad got a 13' Brewer gun, probably in the early days of Dick’s shaping,” says Rolf. “He loved that board, and he actually did pretty well. One time in the mid-’60s, we caught Laniakea when all the locals said it was the finest day they’d ever seen there. It was about 20', light offshore winds, absolute perfection. I think I was 14, and I borrowed a board from George Downing and went out. I was scared to death, but Dad said, ‘You’re goin’ out.’ So I went out and watched everybody ride these beautiful waves. This huge set came in, and I remember my dad turned around and dropped in. It was a total do-or-die situation, and he made it all the way through. Afterward, George was on the beach and told Dad, ‘You woulda liked yourself on that one!”’ Rolf laughs hard with sheer delight at the memory.

Jim’s interest in surfing and skiing meant a lot of quality father-son experiences, and his celebrity brought Rolf a level of access and mobility other kids could only dream about. They’d ski every year, traveling to Aspen or Sun Valley, and Jim bought a cabin up at Mammoth for winter escapes.

There was also a 1,000-acre ranch in Simi Valley, stocked with Husquvarna bikes and horses, and then Jim bought one of the first available Hollister Ranch parcels in the early '70s. When they wanted a getaway surf adventure, they'd hop in Jim's Cessna and fly down to Baja.

Bing recalls joining them on one of their Mexican jaunts. "Big Jim took Rolf and me on on a trip to Baja, and I remember he had these big tires on the plane for landing on the beach at low tide. He also carried plywood strips so we could push the plane above the high-tide line. I remember landing at Scorpion Bay where we camped on the beach, cooked steaks on a campfire, and had a great evening drinking scotch and telling stories. The surf was perfect, but only about six inches high. It was a great trip anyway.”

Back in Brentwood, we pile into Rolf’s car and head out to grab a late-morning bite at The Greek’s, their regular breakfast haunt. Rolf has fruit, yogurt, and tea. Jim and I have eggs Benedict, home fries, and coffee. Afterward, we come back to the house, and Jim starts foraging around for artifacts that might help with Rolf’s story. He finds Rolf’s 1970 World Title trophy—a little pitted and tarnished, surprisingly lightweight and ephemeral—and manila envelopes full of photos and old press clippings, most from around the same time. In a storeroom above the garage, Jim shows me an old Bob Simmons balsa board, a Joe Quigg paddleboard, and a Greenoughesque kneeboard carved out of white polyethylene on which Big Jim surfed his last wave at the Ranch in 1986.

Later, back at Rolf’s apartment, the tape recorder spins and more of the story unfolds.

Synchronous with the newly-created AAAA circuit in 1968, Rolf Aurness shifted into high gear. He rode an 8' Bing Lotus at the rivermouth contest in Santa Cruz, narrowly losing to Phil Irons in the junior final, but the second-place finish gave him a slot in the men's division at the next event in Carlsbad, where he and buddy McCaul did well enough to qualify for the rest of the year’s AAAA contests. Taking advantage of an early-summer break in the competition schedule, he joined his dad for the Trans-Pac race aboard Big Jim’s 58' ultralight (designed by Rudy Choy, Warren Seaman, and Alfred Kumalai of CSK Catamarans) to break the record. Despite very light winds, they were first to finish in only nine days.

“We came around Diamond Head, finally hit the tradewinds, and we were doing 28 knots,” Rolf remembers. “As we pulled into the Ala Wai yacht harbor, I jumped off with my surfboard and caught some waves at Ala Moana.”

Returning to California in time for the summer contests, Rolf made the finals at four events in a row and earned a spot on the WSA team at the World Contest in Puerto Rico. At age 16, he was the youngest Californian in the contest and looked to be a fair match for Aussie goofyfoot phenom Wayne Lynch. Neither surfer advanced to the finals, but both were impressive nonetheless. “I knew with Aurness I was seeing something different from the older style of surfing,” said 1964 World Champ Midget Farrelly (who would lose the 1968 title to Fred Hemmings on tie-breaker). “Rolf wasn’t influenced by other surfers. He didn’t wave his arms and stick out his backside and hang five toes over the nose. He was completely involved, seeking out the power in the wave, constantly in motion."

Simultaneously, an equally fresh and innovative female surfer was enjoying a parallel rise to the top. Winning nearly every contest she entered in ’68 and ’69, Margo Godfrey was, like Rolf, a spectacularly different kind of surfer. The two met in Puerto Rico, where 16-year-old Margo became world champion, and their friendship grew from event to event on the 1969 circuit. They were the king and queen of the 4A prom.

They were both successful and shared an outlook on life, and it was natural that they would become a couple—although few outside their circle of close friends knew about the relationship. "We had fun and were good friends and at that time, among the surfing circuit, there were plenty of couples out there.”

Rolf dominated the California AAAA circuit in 1969, ripping off a historic three-event winning streak (Redondo, Oceanside, and Malibu), unseating his friend Corky from his near-perennial hold atop Western Surfing Association ratings, and earning the top position on the U.S. Mainland team for the upcoming World Contest (planned for South Africa, but moved to Australia in the final months).

With his sudden personal success, young Rolf seemed to come out of his father’s shadow. When he turned up in Hawaii in November of ’69, he boldly stepped forward to claim his share of the famously big surf that rolled into the North and West shores of Oahu that winter. Still just 17 years old, he took 4th place at both the Duke Invitational and the Makaha International. In a less-heralded moment, he and a handful of big-wave riders paddled out into the huge and still rising surf at Makaha on the morning of December 4th.

“That year, 1969, we’d wake up every morning at Jimmy Wong’s house, and if the point was breaking, we’d look at it and say, ‘How are we gonna go out there?”’ Rolf remembers with a laugh. “But we’d go out, and somehow we survived. Tuesday of that week, Makaha was the biggest and probably the best I’d ever seen it—it was totally glassy, between 20' and 30', and none of the guys showed up. I was the only guy out there, and my gun hadn’t arrived from the coast yet, so I was riding an 8' minigun. I never made a wave—I would make the drop, but then I wouldn’t make it down the line. But a couple days later, when the big one hit, we were all kind of used to it. The fire trucks were evacuating the beach, but we went out anyway. Well, I went out . . . . "

"Rolf and Jimmy Blears both surfed on that big day at Makaha,” says Greg Noll, who rode his last great wave that afternoon. “When I first pulled up, I ran to the point to get a handle on what was going on, and Lord James Blears, Jimmy's dad, was out there with his camera, in tears. He said, 'Greg, do me a favor, try to talk Jimmy out of the water. I’m afraid for his life.’ Not what you want to hear when you’re waxing up.”

“The big day at Makaha, Rolf was the second youngest guy out—next to Shaun Tomson, who was just a lightie at the time,” recalls longtime big-wave surfer Randy Rarick. “However, Rolf had confidence beyond his years, and while he never got into any of the giant ones—those were reserved for the big boys—he ripped the Bowl and had some great backside moves going in the early morning glassy walls. I think he and Jimmy were the only goofyfooters who tackled Makaha.”

Rolf had a close call. “I got caught inside; I almost drowned. My board washed up on the beach in front of our house, so it actually went across the channel. That says something—it closed out the bay! I didn’t figure I’d ever see it again.” Lord Blears called Jim after that session. “Jim?” Blears reportedly said to Arness, who had no idea what was afoot. “Your son’s alive!”

That afternoon marked the end of Greg Noll’s big-wave career. Rolf would soon have a similar experience. “After that day, Greg kind of said, well, enough is enough. For me it was a few weeks later at Waimea,” Rolf tells me. “I already had this feeling, after Makaha, that I was close to achieving my goal of actually challenging nature, of putting my manhood on the line. But there was still a little further to go. We drove up to Waimea one day—Corky, Mark Martinson, and I— and it was huge. Eddie Aikau was on the beach. ‘It’s closed,’ he said, ‘you can’t go out.' We stood there for an hour and watched it. I really thought long and hard about what to do next. I’d never ridden Waimea before. I finally said to myself, ‘Well, y’know, here I am. What’re you going to do with your life? What’s your goal?’ I picked up my board and walked down and paddled out.”

Rolf describes that day at Waimea as one of “life’s most astounding experiences,” and marks it as the day that began his personal transformation. “I think what happened to me was, I actually had a feeling that my life was saved or protected that day, and that idea has been with me ever since. It was a feeling of some kind of higher power. The first wave that I rode was about 15'—just a freefall straight down. It was an out-of-body experience. I felt a kind of light—a message in a way—and I finally got to the bottom and made the turn. I’d just picked up my Bing gun the week before, a 9' navy-blue pintail, and it worked perfectly. But that's what I remember best; a feeling of being protected. It’s stuck with me my whole life. But, like Greg, after that I said, Enough is enough. And looking ahead a few months, I think this is what led me after the World Contest to say, well, I don’t really have to pursue those goals any longer."

Rolf's surfing in that era elicited great respect from numerous surfers, including Hawaiian ace Paul Strauch: “He developed a very recognizable, smooth, flowing style. He rode the back half of his board most of the time and was constantly turning, climbing and dropping, cutting back, and reversing his direction. He surfed with the same agility as Makaha goofyfoot master Conrad Canha, except Rolf was faster and more agile. Every year he came back to Hawaii, I watched him get better and better. And it wasn't just the riding itself. His wave savvy, his timing, were right on. Rolf was always in the right place at the right time. This was before leashes, and Rolf almost never lost his board."

During the winter of ’69-70, Rolf spent time with Sunset Beach resident Randy Rarick and so became friendly with Randy’s winter houseguest, 1968 Australian champion Keith Paull. “Keith got to know Rolf over the winter and then went to California and shaped some boards for Bing,” Randy recalls. “This was the model known as the Foil, which was the basis for Rolf’s quiver that he took to Australia."

Rolf remembers his World Contest-winning board very well. “Back in those days, I left all the design and equipment up to Bing and Dan Bendiksen and Mike Eaton, so technically I didn’t really understand what was going on,” he admits. “Bendiksen was experimenting with the hard-railers, round tails, slight vee, and he made the 6'10" for me. That was a California board. We were more interested in the miniguns for Hawaii, the narrow boards that Reno Abellira and Dick Brewer had invented, but for California, Dan had started coming up with these really hard down-railers, and that’s what I took to Australia. You could really crank it off the bottom, and you’d stand back near the tail and it would arc and carve really well. That’s a style I picked up from surfing Rights and Lefts—working the pocket with wide, sweeping turns."

One reason that Rolf’s surfing looked so different is that he hadn’t been swept away by the Australian revolution. He’d seen Bob McTavish surf Rincon and recognized the innovation there, but was more impressed and influenced by the North Shore surfers—and the lines he drew reflected more of a “Rights-and-Lefts-meets-Makaha” scenario than the Aussie minimalist approach.

"CLOCKWORK BLUE" - THE ROLF AURNESS STORY, BY DREW KAMPION (2001)

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