"TC," Tom Carroll's new Random House biography, written jointly by Tom and Nick Carroll, comes out today. Apart from being a two-time world champion and a power surfer for the ages, Carroll has always been one of surfing's friendliest and most cheerful figures. Everybody's good mate. It turns out he was also a longtime drug user and, during his post-retirement years, worked his way into a daily methamphetamine habit. Older brother Nick, while often having to cover for Tom, didn't fully understand the extent of the problem until Tom checked into rehab in 2007.

"TC" is written in alternating sections: Tom's voice is in past tense, Nick's in present tense. In the excerpt below, Tom talks about how meth was as seductive as it was horrifying. In the second part, Nick tells about visiting Tom for the first time in rehab.


At first, the drug brings on a very crystal clear, sharp mental state. No fuzzy edges at all. Really clear concentration. Sharp responses to everything. Efficient, sustained, concentrated efforts. Clear responses from the body. Heightened senses. But not high, so you’re out of control—just a high that senses everything. The world around you becomes much sharper.

It wasn’t just ten minutes, or twenty minutes, or an hour or two hours —it was ten hours at a stint. It was on for a long period of time. From using just a little bit. That was because I was fresh and ready for it.

I started taking it orally. I’d get a little bit, thinking, 

But because it was so insidious, because it fit in so perfectly with my pathology, I was gone. I was a goner. Everything was set up in place in my nature and what had been developing over the years and —

In the beginning it seemed like it helped me. It seemed like it backed me up with everything. I was there for people, I was getting stuff done, I was engaging. But then you 

it to do things. And then it wears off, and you’re left with yourself.

I’d use fairly regularly, but I wasn’t using too much. I was a functional user. It was the kind of drug where I couldn’t use huge amounts. I was on a downhill spiral though, slowly going deeper and deeper. I became more and more covert, more underground. And eventually you end up wanting to inject it, because the effects start to back off and you have to use more.

Then I began studying the drug I was taking, started reading the horror stories and started seeing it all going on for myself. It was scary. Really scary. Another level of fear that you can’t express to anybody. But I kept going because I had set up that compulsive obsession with the drug. When it wasn’t around, maybe one-eighth of me would be thinking about what was in front of me, and the rest was consumed thinking about it: 

How am I gonna get it? Gotta get on the phone. 

I already had the covert behavior pattern in operation.

I did all sorts of things to try to score, because it was pretty scarce. It brought me into contact with some really seedy people. People who died doing it. A guy I knew committed suicide. That was a really frightening thing because I realized that was where it leads, that was the end point. But understanding what happened to that person didn’t stop me. It wasn’t me, after all. It didn’t happen to me. The nature of the beast is to keep going until it stops.

The ritual of smoking it becomes so addictive. Just like smoking. I’d never tasted smoke like that. It was a totally different kind of smoke. It was just all white. It was like a vapor. The smoke became a heavenly thing. I still like the thought of it. Such a cool smoke, such a beautiful thing. So I’d end up doing more than I’d think because I liked the ritual so much. And all of a sudden you’ve got more in you than you need, and then you go on for longer. And eventually your body needs more. The spiral becomes quicker, downward, a steeper gradient, falling deeper, steeper and deeper. It’s brutal at that point, because you’ll have lost so much sleep, and you’ve got to regain it. I might sleep for twelve to sixteen hours at a stretch.

There’s a certain amount of life force given to you from the beginning—a number of heartbeats, the amount of energy it takes to give you those heartbeats, what the Chinese would call the 

I really felt that I was taking a big chunk of my 

and throwing it down the drain. Literally burning it on the spot—

gone.I would sleep for sixteen hours, [my wife] Lisa wondering what the hell was going on with me. I just wanted to get my normal energy back, but I knew as soon as I did that, my mind would be straight off again.

It was a vicious, vicious cycle. And I had no say anymore. By the time [my daughter] Grace was two years old I was in the full grip of it. I thought I was really covert, really clever and secret. It would be my secret, a whole other life, all for me, no-one else. It’s still really appealing to me. Fuck! And you don’t pick up what people are seeing. You can’t hear anyone anyway. There’s too much going on in your head. Your thoughts are too loud. Only the dealer, maybe. There was always that weird connection with the dealer. A conspiracy to escape and make this deal and get high. Often it’s done behind the back of someone he’s involved with. So it’s a very secretive enticing space.

Fuck everyone else. The dealer would understand.

My ice dealer, in Mona Vale, I remember getting some from him and we were having a pipe together, and he looks at me as he’s lighting the pipe, and says, No one understands, do they, Tom? No one understands.


I can’t protect you from this. I don’t even know what to protect you from. This part of you is as big a secret to me as it is to everyone else. The ice dealer is invisible. I ask around; nobody knows who he is, or if they do, they’re not telling me. They’re doing me a favor, I realize later; ice dealers aren’t surf industry fluffers to be threatened on the phone.

Who or what have I been protecting all these years, editing out the drugs from your life and my so-called journalism? Careers, hell. We’ll paddle out in waves of any dimensions, but we can’t even face our families. We love surfing, but God help the people who love us. Gobbo and Woggo, I think wryly. The Newport hell grommets. The legend surf hero and the top surf writer. The adulterer and the ice addict.

The day you go [into rehab], I’m flat out in surgery being pinned and screwed back together.

You call me a couple of times in the following week, tell me little bits and pieces about how things are going, about something called Family Week, where family members enter the process for five days. Your voice isn’t exactly joyful, but it’s not hesitant, and you don’t disappear mid-conversation. You ask if I can do the Family Week process with you and Lisa, and of course I say yeah, as long as I can use crutches.

I drive up there and hobble to the front door, and note it’s about 100 meters away from where they’d operated on your knee twenty-five years ago.

The place is a house on a hill. It’s cramped, dark and smells of cooked lunch and new paint. There are no straight lines in that building; to get anywhere you have to walk around looking at room numbers and following signs.

It’s soon clear to me that rehab is imitating life: everyone loves Tom. It drives Lisa a bit crazy. She wants something else from you; some sort of suffering, perhaps. She is alternately angry, happy and blinking back tears.

I am amazed at how angry I am. At silly things; how you drop out on the phone. The way you say, ‘I’m with ya!’ when you’re not. At how you drive your car, for fuck’s sake. ‘Our sister died in a fucken car accident,’ I say, ‘do you 

that? I’ve only got you now, do you think I want to lose you like that too?’

You hear it all, calm as the midsummer Tasman Sea.

We are in a circle one morning late in the week when Brian, the psychologist in charge of the session, introduces the subject of motherhood.

One of us says something. I can’t remember which of us says it, but whatever is said rips the room open.

We look at each other for a long moment, the air crackling.

The facilitator, Brian, says, ‘Look, this is not what we’d ordinarily do, but I think you need a half hour by yourselves, so you’ve got it. Go wherever you want, just be back here in half an hour.’

We walk out into the fresh air. A light nor’-easter’s blowing. It’s almost midday. We drive in my car around the headlands, looking at the little waves. You tell me the ridiculous story about trying to sneak lollies into rehab, and that sort of squashes any thoughts about going to the shops for a soft drink.

Somehow we find ourselves driving up past the Duke Kahanamoku memorial on top of Freshwater, pull in and stop near the statue of Duke, both thinking the same thing: of how we’d come up here a couple of years before on a Saturday morning to check Queenscliff Bombie in a big swell, and some wit had tied a tutu on Duke overnight. A lovely silvery tutu, shimmering in the morning offshore.

We clamber out, me wrestling with the crutches, and walk and hop our way along the path through the bushes, looking at the names here and there on the world champ inlays: BL, Dooma, Midget, Nat, Pam, Layne, you. Nobody else in there, just us, and these plaques.

And out of nowhere, we’re crying. Sitting and crouching now, under cover of the bushes, holding on to each other and crying like babies. Like the little boys we were and still are.

[Printed with permission from Random House Australia.]

TOM CARROLL'S FULL-REVEAL NEW BIO: READ AN EXCERPT

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