Tim Baker's 1994 profile of Hawaiian underground surf legend Marvin Foster begins at full throttle.

What sort of a man carries terrorist weapons in the trunk of his car?

I was about to find out. Marvin Foster had been out of jail for a week after serving almost a year in Wahiawa Correctional Facility on firearms charges arising from a 1989 incident when he was pulled over by police with a trunk full of high-powered guns and ammunition.

And I was going to interview him. I walked down a dark driveway and rapped on the door of a dimly lit house. I heard whispered conversations and then, abruptly, all the lights in the house were extinguished. What the hell was going on in there?

Now, I had consumed a considerable amount of marijuana during the course of the day, not because I enjoy its effects, but because to decline every offer of a marijuana cigarette on the North Shore is to characterize oneself as an effeminate she-man.

Still vaguely high and now paranoid to the point of terror, I quivered on this blackened porch waiting for a shotgun blast to splinter the front door. Then, gripped by my drug-addled terror, I fled, unused tape recorder in hand.

Breathless, back on the street, I realized my mistake. Marvin was standing in front of the house next door. I opened a heavy wooden gate in the high front hedge and tip-toed down the garden path. There, on his front step, was Marvin Foster holding his two-year-old daughter. Inside, his girlfriend Jen prepared dinner. It was as cozy a domestic scene as one could ever conjure.

This opener works for an obvious reason, in that Baker has set at least five hooks—guns, drugs, fear, humor, redemption—and the reader (this reader, anyway) bites on every one.

But it works for a less obvious and more specific reason, in that we're being misdirected or at least under-informed, which fits the whole Marvin Foster story like a glove. A year later he was back in jail. The redemption was complicated at best, and possibly flat-out untrue. Eventually, Foster committed suicide.

I'm not saying Marvin didn't have a big heart or didn't love his family and friends, or even that he was bullshitting Baker. He was a beloved figure in Hawaii and abroad, and seemingly everybody who knew him says he was kind and funny and smarter than the average bear. But Marvin was gangster, too, and shadowy, and as far as I can tell nobody outside his closest circle had any real idea what was going in his life. Least of all the surf media. Baker wanted a feel-good story, so that's what he wrote. Other surf writers and filmmakers have similarly positioned Marvin in order to deliver an idea or message that Marvin himself had little or nothing to do with. (This wasn't particular to Foster, of course, he just happens to be the guy in front of me at the moment.)

Now look at me, doing the same damn thing. I wanting to shine a light on a beautiful, influential, and hugely respected surfer, and here I am cudgeling my fellow media folk.

"Local Talent: Marvin Foster," Surfing magazine, August 1980.

 This is more or less the formal introduction. "Even though his name is unfamiliar," Rick Colletto writes, "Marvin Foster has been turning heads." Colletto notes that the 19-year-old newly-minted pro won the first contest he entered, that he rides for Town and Country, and that his favorite breaks are Pipeline, Haleiwa, and Avalanche. (The Avalanche part is more interesting that Colletto lets on. Marvin used to paddle out to that horribly powerful and mostly-unsurfed wave by himself. "It's like Sunset, but a left-hander," he once said. "When it's big it's like four bowls that connect up and the only way you're going to beat it is to make long bottom turns. You just fly through those bowls!")

January 1982 SURFER cover shot by Vince Cavatiao.

 One year earlier, Marvin and highly-touted younger brother Kalani were featured in SURFER's "Pick of the Hot Young Crop." In 1984, Marvin was one of 

 "Twenty on the Rise" picks, even though he was 25 years old, and a five-year world tour vet.

 We'd seen some great pics of Foster by this time, but this is among the first films where we see what made Marvin special. The opening shot at Sunset flows beginning to end, and that back-foot tippy-toe stance he hits at 1:10 is somehow delicate and powerful at the same time. Hats off, too, for that black-railed T&C tri-fin, which I nominate as the best-looking board of the 1980s. Now, if I may unsheath the cudgel for a moment—that is platinum-level horseshit Shaun Tomson offers us in the voice-over. "Marvin's involvement in the National Guard Reserve stands as an example to the young surfers who mimic his slashing style. Kids know style when they see it." I can't find mention anywhere else of Foster serving in the National Guard, but let's assume for a moment that it's true. Is Shaun really asking us to believe that Marvin's military status has anything to do with his rank among young surfers? Shaun himself of course did a mandated two-year bid in the South African Army, and credit to him. But trying to present Marvin as a youth exemplar by way of the armed forces is serving it up rich. He was an example—but of a very different kind. I'll pass the talking stick to Brock Little. "Marvin Foster was [our] role model. The guy was fearless. Burning out [in his car], popping a wheelie on his motorcycle, punching guys out behind the Surf Center, he was someone we all wanted to be like."

 In the early- and mid-'80s, Foster was renowned for his ease and creativity riding the tube backside. If the forward-leaning backside rail grab (the pig-dog, except nobody called it that back then) wasn't a Marvin Foster invention (it may well have been), it was so closely associated with him that kids would talk about "pulling a Marvin." What Foster himself 

 liked to do, though, especially later in his career, was stay as upright as possible and not grab rail at all. "He's immune to falling off," photographer John Callahan said of Foster in 1995. "Marvin would rather eat it than grab his rail."

Jock Sutherland did it way back in the 1960s, and Foster protege Shawn Briley did it in the '90s, but Marvin, in the '80s, got the most attention for riding left at Waimea. It was kind of a party trick. If you were comfortable out there and knew what the swell was doing, and how many waves were in a set, etc etc, it wasn't as head-in-lion's-mouth gnarly as everybody thought. Still, riding left at Waimea was and remains rare. In fact, I thought maybe it was a one-off for Marvin—the back-and-white sequence was shot by Steve Russell and ran in SURFER in 1987—but just this week I came across the above pic by John Callahan, which I'm guessing was shot around 1990.

Cameo in the long version of Michael Jackson's "Bad" video, 1987.

 That's Marvin on the right, halfway through his seven-second appearance as "crack customer" in the Martin Scorcese-directed video for "Bad." Watch the full 18-minute clip 

; Foster comes onscreen around 5:10. (And yes, that's pre-fame Wesley Snipes playing MJ's streetwise pal. Snipes later recalled how he got the job. "Me and Prince were auditioning together, and I blew Prince out of the water." Snipes added that Jackson didn't even know he was an actor. "Michael really thought I was in a gang!")

 For my money, this Tahitian-shot sequence is the best thing out there on Foster in terms of film or video. More specifically, the tube-to-cutback shot that begins at 00:59, and boy that is a sweet piece of wave-riding. Meanwhile, the 

 audio here reminds me of what we used to call a "graveyard" back in high school. You'd raid the family liquor cabinet and siphon off an inch or so from three bottles of whatever into a flask, head out for your Friday night adventure, and hope for the best. The canned reggae track at the beginning of this clip sounds like Aspartame tastes. The eye-rolling caused by narrator Matt George as he makes this Tahiti sequence out to be something other than a Quiksilver promo junket triggered a dozen cases of subconjunctival hemorrhaging during the 

 by Tears for Fears—well, I love Tears for Fears, so this puts the whole sequence right as far as I'm concerned.

 The surfing public at large learned of Marvin Foster's weapons-related prison term by way of a 

 Marvin's neatly-penned handwriting fills the bottom half of the page. "Stay cool and stay smart," is his advice, and "avoid coming in here." (In a follow-up letter to 

, Foster wrote "I love my firearms as I love surfing.") Eighteen months later Foster was out of prison and back on the North Shore with his family, at which point Tim Baker profiled him for 

 (scroll back up to the top of the page) and said that not only was Marvin rehabilitated and surfing as well as ever, but he'd become "kind of a concerned shepherd for wayward surfers everywhere." Maybe that was true at the time, maybe Foster was spinning Baker, who knows. Anyway, a year later ASL reported that Foster "broke parole and was put back in prison for six months" and that "his wife and kid bailed." Looking to strike a hopeful note, however, the magazine added that Marvin was "still the best goofyfooter at Backdoor."

Then another parole violation and another prison bid, and the decent thing to do here is to stop digging through the archive and jump to the four-column-wide 

headline reading "Surfer Went His Own Way," from May 21, 2010

 "Legendary surfer Marvin GK 'Carvin' Marvin' Foster, whose distinctive tube-riding style continues to be widely emulated, has died. Foster, 49, of Haleiwa, hanged himself."

When news of Foster's death broke, Steve Shearer, now working the WSL beat for BeachGrit, wrote "I honestly hope that amongst all the eulogizing there might be some spark of recognition that the tacit approval of Hawaiian thuggery/criminal behavior by the surf media might start to change. But I won't expect it. There'll be a media frenzy of eulogizing making a very flawed figure into a saint and next season will see the same hackneyed mythology of the North Shore."

Steve was right, and I expect that he would take me to task for beatifying Marvin here. But maybe we can remember Marvin in a way that is honorable yet non-saintly by just letting his surfing stand on its own. Or better still, riding tandem with Eddie Grant.

ILLUSTRATED MAN: LOOKING BACK AT MARVIN FOSTER, THE HOTTEST COOLEST MESS IN SURFING

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