ack McCoy's face fills the Skype window on my computer screen and once again I am reminded that the man is imposing. On the way to imperious. Yes, he has the easy summery drawl that is the birthright of all postwar American-born surfers, but don't be fooled. McCoy is Patton with just the lightest glaze of Rob Machado. I love bastards like Jack McCoy. I love guys who have been in the game as long as he has (nearly 50 years, going back to the days when he was hanging posters for MacGillivray-Freeman), and who never ever phone it in. 

McCoy turns 66 today. It's always a pleasure to talk with him.

Your Billabong gig, starting in the early '90s, was probably the best filmmaker-patron deal ever in terms of great movies. 

, on and on. How did that whole thing start?

I was invited to go on a trip north with the Billabong team in 1989, which was basically Gordon Merchant sussing me out. Munga [Michael Barry] was there, Ronnie Burns, David Cantrell. Dougall Walker was team manager. We came back and all Dougall could do was tell Gordon that I’d blown his mind in terms of how I worked. How I motivated the guys.

"Motivated!" There was an interview with Munga a few years later where he made it sound like you were standing over everybody with a bullwhip.

Basically, surfers are lazy. They’re fuckin lazy. They’re getting paid to surf, but unless the waves are perfect most of them are laying around doing bong hits. And making ten times as much money as I'm getting. Put it this way, I never did anything to any of those guys that was remotely unfair in terms of how a regular person might go about his or her job. Yeah, I made 'em work. And you know what the funny thing is? These days? Every one of those guys has come up to me at some point and thanked me and said how much they appreciate the way those movies came out. How good I made ‘em look, in other words. How stoked they are to show those movies to their kids.

Yes. We did a few more team trips, then Gordon gave me a small budget to make a film. I’d just had a baby, and was looking for a paying gig, so to help push things thing along my wife and I added ten grand of our own money on top of Gordon’s, and we put 

 together. Gordon and Bob Hurley were at a trade show in California when it arrived. They put it in the VHS player, watched it five times in a row, called me up and said, “Start the next one.”

You shot on film, went high-end all the way, and even on our shitty VCRs the quality you brought to the table was obvious. But meanwhile, that whole DIY down-and-dirty surf video thing was just blowing up. Were you kind of rolling your eyes at all that? Or just ignoring it?

[McCoy thinks a moment; shifts into diplomacy mode]

 Well, horses for courses, right? I did what I did. Those guys did what they did. My whole deal was quality. It's a beautiful sport; do it justice. 

 Water shots, okay? Just for starters. Put the viewer 

 Put the viewer where Bud Browne put me when I was a kid. I mean, basically, I think you’re a hoax if you’re not swimming out there and getting water shots. Get up under the lip. Take a few on the head, you know?

It must have been gratifying when all the video kids, a decade or so later, started more or less trying to make movies the way you’d been doing it all along.

They kind of had to. One day you wake up and realize you’re either gonna take the work seriously or you're not.

Why do you think the Billabong partnership worked so well?

A lot of it came down to creative freedom. The company just more or less turned me loose. Gordon trusted me. He had input along the way on a couple of things, but basically he let me make the movies I wanted.

Maybe. I don't know. Probably not. It's so much easier and cheaper to hire some kid to go out there and make the same movie every other kid is making. There are a hundred kids out there that, you buy ‘em a plane ticket around the world, and they’ll make your movie. And for that price, you’re not going to get anything that’s going to last, or be anything that people want to look at 25 years from now. Or even next year. [INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW]

Occy's comeback. You had a big hand in that whole amazing episode. How did it start?

 shoot, I put Occy on a plane to Europe and I knew he was in a bad way. Really bad. And sure enough, in France, that’s when things went off the rails for Mark. Then he comes home and lives on the couch for three years. A lot of credit here goes to Gordon because during that whole period he kept Occy on the Billabong payroll. One day Gordon and I were talking—there was a long period there, years, where Gordon and I talked every day, without fail—and I said “I think it’s time Occy got off the couch. Why don’t you send him to me and we’ll see what happens.” Mark at the time was married to a woman named Beatrice, she had a lot to do with him going; she was great. A very warm, gentle person, but very persuasive; “Honey, it’s time for you to get out there.”

You were living in Western Australia at the time?

Yes, in the southwest. I was living there with my brother and sister-in-law, they had a big farm, four kids, I had two kids, and we’re all kind of living the hippy lifestyle—good food, plenty of sleep, plenty of work to do around the farm. I’d spent a lot of time with Mark during the 

 period. He loved my family. He trusted me. Really, at that point, he was looking for a mentor.

Absolutely. But mostly, you know, we just had a really strong friendship. Everybody by that point had kind of bailed on him, except Gordon and me. So Occy came and lived with us for six weeks, and that was the beginning of his road back.

A lot of it was just diet and exercise. And surfing. Every morning we’d walk two kilometers down the beach, lugging my cameras and stuff—which right away, you know, was good for him.

Huge. Huge. Yeah. There are a couple of shots of him in 

It did. Six weeks later, I mean, nobody was thinking world title or anything, but by that time Occ totally believed in himself again. And the weight was coming off. He took it from there.

Weren't the Billabong Challenge contests designed partly to show Mark off to the world?

Partly, yes. But also . . . Gordon at that point was so sick of the world tour. Just putting all that company money into this stupid tour only to have the finals at, I don’t know, Manly Beach at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon regardless of what the surf was doing. So we came up with the idea to give Occy an opportunity to take measure of where he was at 

 do a different kind of contest. A better contest than what we were seeing with the ASP. The original idea was to put Occ out there with Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, and Martin Potter. Just those four. Two weeks at G-land for the first contest, then two weeks at Jeffreys for the next one. We wanted to do it in secret, and surprise everybody. Right? Can you imagine? We actually thought we could pull that off. You wouldn’t even dream of that today. But we hit some roadblocks, and long story short it ended up being Sunny Garcia, Kelly, Machado, Shane Powell, who were the four top-rated ASP guys at that moment, plus Johnny-Boy and Paul Paterson. And we did that first one at Gnaraloo instead of G-land.

Ripped it! And ripped the next one, too, at J-Bay. And, not patting myself on the back, but I think those two events gave him the confidence to get back on tour full-on and then take the world title.

Jack, before we say goodbye, I have to ask. The mid-'80s, around there, when you had that big beautiful Tom Selleck mustache—was that thing magic for you?

I grew up in Hawaii, and my good friend Roy Mesker, Big Roy, he was a couple years older, and he worked as a male model. Gerry [Lopez] got all his style sense from Roy. So when I’d go back to Hawaii in the ‘80s, Roy and I would go out to dinner, and he’d pick someplace where the lights were low, and he’d introduce me to people as Tom Selleck.

Did you ever sign an autograph as Magnum PI?

 There was a time or two where I didn’t say I wasn’t Tom Selleck.

JACK McCOY: AUTEUR AND SEXY BEAST

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