Tim Baker's profile on Robbie Page ran in the Aug-Sep 2009 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited.

Four months after being jailed in Japan for possession of LSD, pro surfer Rob Page found himself dining in the home of then-French President François Mitterrand, having recently romanced the great leader’s granddaughter.

This is just one example of the wild ride of peaks and troughs Page has ridden since he emerged from a housing commission home south of Sydney in the early ’80s as one of Australia’s most promising young goofyfooters.

“From jail in Japan to sitting in the President’s house: four months,” says Robbie emphatically, as if to establish the outlandish time frame beyond doubt. “That’s why I knew God was playing a joke—my contrasts have been absurd.”

Indeed. Rob’s path as a professional surfer has taken him from dire poverty and a broken home to the top of his sport—a Pipe Masters title, a starring role in a Hollywood movie, and most recently a World Masters title in Peru. Along the way, he’s put in 22 Hawaiian winters, 12 years living and surfing in France, and ten years on the pro tour. He’s a high achiever by any measure.

The Japanese drug bust at Tokyo’s Narita airport in 1992 saw him suspended by the ASP for 18 months, effectively ending his pro competitive career. This, despite the fact, he points out, that many of the people who voted for his suspension had been known to ingest the odd prohibited substance. His crime, it seems, was getting caught. He spent two months in a Japanese prison, half of it in solitary confinement.

“I asked my mum, when I came out, how come I ended up in there? And she said, ‘Oh, it’s simple. You lost appreciation for the fundamental values of life.’ Rob says, "And I asked her, 'Fuck, Mum, where have I been?’ And she said, ‘Oh, son, you’ve been to Heaven and Hell and back many times.’”

Upon his release, Page flew straight to Hawaii on his original ticket from Japan, simply hoping U.S. immigration wouldn’t notice the "canceled" stamp on his Japanese visa. Miraculously, they didn’t. He dedicated himself to surfing big Pipe, suddenly on the new and uncertain path of the sponsored free surfer, and then traveled on to France to see his sponsor, Oxbow. It was there that he met President Mitterrand’s granddaughter, Pascale.

“I met her and actually thought God was playing a joke on me,” says Rob. “Here I am on the pro tour loving life, then here I am in jail sitting and crying  in a fucking box alone, and now here I am in Hawaii dedicating my life to Pipe so I can get my life back on track. Every time I fall down, I go to the surf. I went to Hawaii and surfed Pipe for those months, then I went to France , and that’s where I met Pascale.”

The French President, among the most powerful men in the world at the time, warmed immediately to his granddaughter’s new Australian surfer boyfriend, despite his colorful history and the fact that Robbie was 12 years older than Pascale.

“The first night I met him, we had dinner and he’d been a bit sick, so he went into the back room to put his feet up, and he called Pascale in, and he said, ‘Is this your first real boyfriend?' She said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You picked a good one.’ And I was really stoked with that because we were in his house. There was an interview with me in 

, the biggest magazine in France, about the whole Japan LSD thing, and Pascale said, ‘My dad read it.' And I was thinking, 'Oh, this is heavy. I knew it was going to come up, but when it got to granddad he said, 'It’s a nice interview, and he’s done nothing wrong.’ That’s from the President! That’s probably what kept me in Europe. They didn’t focus on the kid who just got out of jail on a drug charge. No, this is the great sportsman who’s won a major surfing event, and now he’s dating my granddaughter, and he’s 12 years older than her. I moved in with her and her mum, and stayed at her dad’s house or granddad’s house.”

It was this accepting, cosmopolitan attitude that Robbie says kept him in France for nearly a decade, even though the relationship with Pascale didn’t last. “People would ask why I was in France, and it was three reasons: I had a beautiful girlfriend there, the waves were perfect, and I had a great sponsor. Why wouldn’t I? I was taken care of; those ten years were epic; learning the culture, learning to speak another language.”

His long association with Oxbow, he says, also taught him a lot about the French approach to life. “It was the best sponsorship I ever had,” says Rob wistfully. “Such respectful, caring people. That was such an education. They never played sponsor on you. They were family. You were at their homes sleeping. It wasn’t like, we’re going to sponsor you and give you some money. It was, let's hang out and have a great time, and in so doing they showed me the way to take care of your sponsored athletes."

Oxbow founder Fabrice Valeri once told me, “Robbie is my wizard. He will be with Oxbow for life.” Robbie even dreamed up the concept of the Masters surfing events, which Oxbow initially sponsored, bringing all the pioneers of pro surfing together again. However, when Oxbow was eventually sold, the new owners felt no such loyalty and Rob found himself abruptly unemployed, living in France, and about to become a father. Even so, Fabrice and Oxbow cofounder Isabelle Cachot have remained dear friends. “Isabelle helped me buy my house in France. They’ve been fantastic.”

Rob and his Moroccan girlfriend at the time, Nanu, had two young boys in quick succession, and Rob had to do whatever he could to support them. Even when he was virtually broke, he was still surfing perfect A-frame French beachbreaks or draining Mundaka barrels or towing 50-foot Belharra, keeping the simple yet elusive surfing dream alive. Eventually, he wound up running a beachfront bar in Hossegor, called Cream, that became hugely popular with local and visiting surfers alike. It was a business success. Rob was able to buy an acreage property in the French countryside and invest in some beachfront apartments. But the lifestyle was incompatible with family life, and the relationship with Nanu fell apart. Rob returned to Australia, very nearly broken, to lick his wounds.

He picked up a few acres and a rundown farm house in Kempsey, west of Crescent Head, halfway between Sydney and the Gold Coast, and settled into the familiar Australian bush to heal. In his solitude, he dreamed up unlikely plans for his own wax company and to revive his amateur competitive career.

“I came from a divorce in France, two beautiful kids and a lovely wife and an awesome house, plus a bar on the beach and four apartments on the beach,” he says. “And when you go through breakups it seems like you lose pretty much everything. I came back here and just lay my crushed soul down to rest. I was digging deep asking all sorts of questions, because I've already been to heaven and hell and back, like my mum said, and now apparently I’ve fucked up again. It doesn’t matter whose fault, I’ll take responsibility. And so down in the depths again, down in the black depths, you ask yourself many questions as a man, as a human, and as an athlete. Is there anybody in there? Can you hear me?”

Rob had spent much of his time in France helping to develop a new surfboard technology, Hydroflex, with a group of German surfer-shapers. Along the way, he felt he’d stumbled on the perfect formula for a new wax. At his lowest ebb, and almost penniless, Page embarked on a far-fetched mission to launch a business, taking the name of the bar in France, Cream. And, just as implausibly, he set out to prove his products at the highest level available to him and began competing in the masters division of local amateur events. “I thought I should go back and compete. It will get me healthy and fit. It will help me dig up whoever’s still inside me, and I’ll be able to test these products at the highest possible level. And in doing so, I realized I was there testing myself. I always believed I was an artist as a surfer, and I was fine with that, but I wanted to see if there was some athleticism left over. The artist is always going to be there.”

Remarkably, after not competing for almost ten years, he won regional, state, and two Australian masters titles before heading to Peru for the World Masters in 2008. Rob and I had traveled through Peru 14 years earlier—two years following his Japan bust—on a magazine-video shoot. Rob had been in great form, stepping off the plane and being almost immediately recruited to star in a well-paid beer commercial, then hooking up with a drop-dead gorgeous TV presenter who had come to interview us about our travels.

Now here he was again, in Peru, at a break called Punta Rocas, competing man-on-man against local legend Magoo de la Rosa—our host from that earlier trip—for the World Masters title. Magoo still harbored a friendly grudge from a split-decision loss way back in the 1980s somewhere, and claimed he’d been waiting 20 years for the rematch. Despite massive local support for Magoo, Rob emerged victorious to become the 2008 Masters champ. 

The whole thing was even more remarkable given that ten days before the event started, Rob didn’t even have a plane ticket. Only at the encouragement of his business partners did he pull funds from the Cream start-up money to fly to Lima. "So I really felt that I had to come back with a first," Rob tells me. "I couldn’t justify going away unless I brought back the gold."

He took a couple of new Hydroflex small-wave boards but lacked a gun. “I went and got my board I won the '88 Pipe Masters on, a thick 7' 3" that I knew worked in bigger waves. I took it like someone from the church takes their cross. That’s the last time I was talking to God, as far as competitive surfing goes.”

Sure enough, the surf came up to a solid ten feet one day, and Rob pulled out the Pipe gun to knock out the Brazilian champ and make his way to the final. Anyone who thinks a surf contest can’t be a soulful experience ought to talk to Rob about this event and the impact it had on him. 

“Everybody there is 35 to 50 years of age. Maybe 25% of the guys were former tour surfers; the rest are just really good amateurs, healthy people who have been healthy all their lives, and they were loving having the opportunity to surf against the old pros,” he says. “One of the guys from Trinidad was so cool, full Rasta-type cat. At the end of the contest, he hands me this book. He’s one of Trinidad’s greatest artists, just an amazing painter. He’s a Rasta Van Gogh. I found so much depth and sincerity in these people.They were there for this gathering that I never knew existed.” (Rob also tells me who he loudly cheered on: the one-man team from Mexico, a wealthy lawyer who later thanked him with tears in his eyes. The rest of the team hadn’t come, he explained, because they wouldn’t have passed the strict drug testing.)

The Masters was also special for Rob because it was the first time he competed under the aboriginal flag. Despite his pale skin and long, blond hair, Rob recently received his official papers establishing his aboriginal ancestry. “I felt really honored. I was saying prayers to the ancestry: 'I hope this is okay. I just carry this flag for you for the moment,'” he says. “People say, Oh, you don’t look like you’ve got any aboriginal. I'm white as a ghost. My dad’s Irish-Scottish. But you know what I tell them? You can’t see the pepper in that food, but you can taste it."

Since returning to Australia and settling in Kempsey, with its large indigenous population, Rob’s aboriginality has become important to him. “It was shocking coming from France to Australia and getting in with aboriginal culture and seeing how thick the tension is and how separate things really are. You can go down the whole main street in Kempsey and not see an aboriginal girl hired in any shop,” he says. “If you look at the world, the aboriginal people who have been here so long didn’t destroy anything. We should learn something from their culture. I mean, look what we've done, it's so bad, the world’s on fire; we’re talking about a melting world, a world that’s spinning on climate change. Modern humans did that in the last couple hundred years. And we know how old aboriginal culture is. Imagine if we would respect that and have a blend of that with our modern life, but definitely put aboriginal culture up where it belongs. Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone learned an aboriginal language at school and learned true aboriginal culture?”

In a sense, Rob's journey, like so many quests for self-knowledge, has come full circle. Returning to the amateurs has allowed him to apply what he’s learned along the way to help him succeed, certainly, but also to spread a bit of his infectious citizen-of-the-planet spirit.

If there's a core message that emerges from Rob’s remarkable journey and his meandering, wide-ranging, philosophical raves, it is this: surfers need to rediscover the fundamental joy of what they do. “Who’s going to turn this around? How are we going to turn it around? I had this 14-year-old kid telling me I’m a fucking kook and to get out of the water, this and that. Stop all that aggro shit. Surfing’s got to be a happy, enjoyable dojo. Those who’ve got 30-plus years in surfing know what it was, and they know how it is now, and they know how it should be. It’s got to be more friendly. If we can't be happy and friendly in the water, where can we? If surfers aren’t going to lead the happy charge, who is? It should be whoever’s a nasty piece of work in the water should get expelled for a week. Everyone has their best surfs when they’re happy.”

It’s an impressive, impassioned oratory that leaves me feeling like Rob deserves some sort of leadership role within surfing as he grows into the unfamiliar position of elder. He’s already doing it in a sense, nurturing some of the young indigenous surfers in his area, encouraging some of the older guys to get back in the water, spruiking his boards and wax up and down the coast.

Whether the company will fly or not is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to argue with the lengths he’s gone to prove his products. Rob has ambitious plans to raise investment capital and go big, but the current economic climate might make that difficult. Regardless, he’s doing the old-fashioned sales run up and down the East Coast in his old van, loaded up with boards, a guitar, and boxes of wax, visiting genuine surf shops, working his network of good old boys.

He asks me, “Do you know what always kept selling during the Great Depression?” He pauses, as if for dramatic effect. “Tobacco. Because the worse things got, the more people needed a smoke. Wax is the tobacco of the surf I industry. We could all be broke and out of work, but we’re still going to go for a surf.” He has a point.

Rob remains torn between Australia and France, flying his two young boys over for lengthy visits or going there to be with them, squeezing in a few extended stays at the Macaronis Surf Resort in the Mentawais for a bit of field research. “They’re going to be little Moroccan-French-Aussie surfers,” he says proudly of his boys, Ismael and Bruman. “They were surfing here and catching octopus and fish. The Aussie in them is so solid.”

They make an incongruous sight—the lily-white, blond-haired dad and his two dark-skinned, dark-eyed boys—but all three with those deep, knowing eyes. In a sense, and perhaps it’s to be expected, this is simply the latest chapter in a life that’s been anything but ordinary, bringing together disparate elements with always unexpected results.

“I’ve walked the red carpet of Hollywood," Rob neatly summarizes, with an odd mix of pride and wonder, "and I’ve had a whole feature film made of my life [

]. I lived with the President of France, been to fucking jail, won Pipe, two Aussie titles and a world title, and carried the aboriginal flag for the first time in surfing history. To the day I die, I’m the first guy to take the aboriginal flag to the top of my sport.” 

[Photos: Tim McKenna, Peter Robertson, Sean Davey]

“DOWN FOR WHATEVER: CARVING ON THROUGH WITH ROBBIE PAGE,” BY TIM BAKER (2009)

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