What everybody remembers about my 1989 SURFER profile on Richie Collins was that he spoke, on record, briefly but proudly, about masturbation. He was and remains a devout Born Again Christian, and therefore wasn’t supposed to be having premarital sex. But he was also a first-rate provocateur. At some point during my talk with Collins, the conversation veered to the place within striking distance of both sex and religion, I asked Collins if he was a virgin, and this is what happened:

Of course I’m not a virgin. But I haven’t been with a girl for a long time. When it comes down to that I’ll just go crank it in the corner. I tell girls that’s what I’m going to do, like, “I’m just going to go in the shower for a while.” [Collins at this point made the international up-and-down motion with his fist, smiling.] And they’re all, Whaaat? But some of ‘em . . . they like you for it! They like that you’re just coming out and saying it!

I, for one, certainly liked Collins for saying it. Kept a friendly, neutral expression on my face, but I remember feeling a thrill, as juvenile as it was professional, that I had a top world tour surfer on tape talking about masturbation.

You may remember Richie Collins as a punk and a brat and a loudmouth. A lot of people do. That, plus the fact that he didn't put much value on board-riding form or style. Colllins' nickname was "Skeletor," and there was indeed a cartoonish flair to the way he surfed—all flying elbows and knees, and a shaved head back when that had real shock value. Richie went big on the claiming, too. Man-on-man against Tom Curren, the contrast was almost dizzying.

But Collins was unique, amazingly so, in a lot of ways. He made his own boards, for one thing, and unless I'm mistaken he was the last WCT-era surfer to do so. Slightly weird-looking boards too, different from anybody else's, with pronounced wings, and blockier rails, with Collins' own kindergarten paint-splatter artwork on the bottom of the deck. 

More than that, he was simply the most confident 20-year-old I've ever met. You could see it in his surfing, which was fast and creative and nearly brake-free. ("I just hit it again and again as hard as I can, until I fall or the wave ends, one or the other.") I watched Collins win the 1988 Coldwater Classic in mushy kelp-laced rollers at Steamer Lane, a break that could not be any more different than the Orange County shorebreak waves he grew up in, and he didn't put a foot wrong all week. Again, not the prettiest performance. But lots of abandon, and total control. He won going away.

Collins' confidence was directly plugged into his showmanship, which expressed itself best by tearing down surf-world pieties. The first time I ever talked to Collins was for an overly-earnest 1988 SURFER survey article called "Changing Shades of Soul." Asked about their definition of "soul surfing," other respondents offered the usual gauzy mind-body-spirit tropes, often at length. Collins batted the question away with "I'm not a soul surfer. I only surf for competition." That line had the purists shrieking—which, in Richie's mind, I"m sure, was pretty much the whole point.

Today, reading the transcript for my Collins profile, what jumps out more than anything else is how open Richie was about his relationship with his father, Newport kingpin shaper Lance Collins. This is how I handled it in the article:

There is no question that Richie Collins is a chip off the old block, and that Lance Collins was, and still is, the most influential person in Richie's life. For the most part, they hang around together with the natural ease of two brothers, not father and son. They can be nearly identical in appearance, attitude and mannerisms. Both are cold, and quietly hostile, to people they don't know. Both will go to extreme lengths to help out a friend.

There's an intense love-hate connection between the two. When Richie was younger Lance would walk into his room early in the morning, announce that he was going surfing, then go out and start the car, leaving Richie to chase after him down the street in his underwear, holding on to his board and struggling into his clothes.

He received no encouragement from Lance in his early competitive career. "When I was a little kid I'd win a contest, come home and tell my Dad, and he'd say I was still a kook. That night I'd go to bed and lay there for hours, thinking, 'That asshole. That prick. Man, when I'm world champion he's just going to be bowing down to my knees.' So I've always had this feeling of, 'I'll show him, I'll show him.'"

A few minutes later, Collins followed up with this. "People, my Dad and everybody else, tell me not to do things. But the thing is, I already know I'm not supposed to do things. I know it. I kind of wish my Dad and everybody else would just go, 'Okay Rich, you do what you want to do. Just be careful.'"

Collins was weirdly naive and advanced at the same time. It is amazing to me, looking back, that while Collins was barely out of his teens, he didn't hold those thoughts in, or try to spin them in any way. Just venting and grappling with a complicated issue and doing so in a way that strikes me as honest and healthy.  

One final example of how Collins was different. Again, in retrospect, this seems remarkable for a 20-year-old: "When you go into my room, there's not one picture of surfing on my walls. They're just clean, white walls. I think about surfing so much that sometimes I hate the whole thing by the time I get home. I just want to go to my room and lay my head down, with nothing on the walls, and think of anything besides surfing."

RICHIE COLLINS HAD THINGS WELL IN HAND

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