Tim Baker's profile of Rob Bain ran in the September 1991 issue of Surfing magazine, when Bain was 28. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

It's pre-dawn on a frosty Easter morning at Bells Beach. The pros are already hurrying about their business, scrambling to get some vital warm-up waves among the rabid pack in the lineup. The tense mood of competition sits uneasily with the rural landscape. What goes through the top surfers’ minds as they snatch these last moments of preparation before the day’s competition, like so many fighters shadowboxing in their dressing rooms before the bout?

Well, if you're Rob Bain, ASP-ranked number five and serious world title contender, you start wondering about the security men who have been at the contest site all night and what a bastard of a job they’ve got.

“Sometimes you’ve got to think about the sort of money you’re earning and the sort of lifestyle you’ve got compared to some people,” Rob explains to me. “I mean, you get down there in the morning, it’s really freezing and these guys have been there all night.”

Rob distinguished himself at Bells as the friend to the security men, finding time for a chat each morning when he arrived at the contest. “One morning I just said, ‘You guys have got it a bit rough,’ and we got talking. They were genuinely interested—how the points were scored and all that."

As the event rolled on, the security men began to vocally cheer on Rob during his heats. Doesn’t this set him apart from most of his self-possessed peers on the pro tour? “I guess," muses Rob. “Most of the guys just try and hurry past ’em without having to show their security passes.”

That is Rob Bain—surf star for the common man, as humble and unaffected a surfer as has ever pulled on a colored jersey. If there was some sort of measure of how well a surfer’s values have fared during prolonged exposure to the many evil pitfalls of pro tour life, Bainy would be right up there on the morality ratings.

“Anywhere you go, it’s all there on offer—women, drugs, booze. It’s all there and, you know, it’s hard sometimes. It’s hard to walk a straight line,” Rob admits.

Walking a straight line. It’s something Rob Bain has been trying to do for the past six years, with mixed results, as the mayhem of the pro tour erupts around him. Drugs have never been a problem While he’s watched pot and cocaine exact a heavy toll on more than a few of his peers, he’s never so much as toked on a joint.

Women don't ever the picture either. In the midst of the notoriously promiscuous tour lifestyle, tales of Rob's fidelity to longtime girlfriend and now wife, Kath, are legendary. Traveling companions tell stories with genuine awe of Rob forcibly repelling admiring groupies to preserve his honor.

But, the drink? Well, in the past it has been a bit of a weakness—causing the odd cobble in that otherwise straight line.

“If he gets a few beers too many he’s like his dad, he goes daft,” his mother observes sternly in a broad Scottish accent.

It's a weakness that Rob himself is acutely aware of but it’s not one he likes to dwell on publicly. After all, the image of a beer-swilling hell-raiser has cost him pretty dearly in the past. It has alienated potential sponsors and, he reckons, made it hard for the judges and his opponents to take him seriously as a world title contender. The consensus has always been—Rob Bain, good surfer, damn good bloke, but world champion? Despite the undeniable talent, it's somehow never seemed entirely plausible. He has been typecast as the surfer who’ll produce some of the most hideous maneuvers of the event and then lose to inferior opponents through an interference or laughable wave selection—and then vent his frustrations very publicly with a huge performance at the presentation night. His passion for wrestling with a few beers under his belt is renowned. He's competed with his arm in a cast and cracked ribs as a result of drunken bouts with friends — good-natured but still dangerous. “Stay out of his sight,” one of his best mates from his home beach of Queenscliff warns. “When you see that look in his eye, everyone tries to stay out of his sight.”

Bainy turned up at the Coke contest with a look of steely determination, appeared shortly before each heat, won it, then quickly and quietly left. Only when he’d won the contest did he allow a smile on the presentation dais, as his Queenscliff mates chanted, "Robbie Bain walks on water, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la,” saluting his victory with the club mascot, a life-size inflatable Gumby, held aloft.

He led the ratings for much of the 1990 season and only dropped off the pace when Curren’s irresistible charge gathered momentum. Still, a fifth-place season’s finish was enough to signal his arrival as a contender. Already, he’s gone to an early lead after the Australian leg of the 1991 season and happily sipped mineral water after accepting the Coke Grand Slam as the best-performing surfer throughout the Australia contests.

So what’s happened? Well, to some extent at least, it seems as though Rob Bain has exorcised a few of the demons. Among those were a lingering bitterness over losing to inferior opponents, a string of sponsorship hassles in his early days on the tour that saw him earning a less than a lot of lower ranked surfers, and a gnawing frustration at not fulfilling his potential.

One of my most vivid images of Rob Bain took place in Europe in ’87, always a particularly social part of the tour. A bunch of surfers were staying together in Biarritz, France, and everyone who’d been knocked out of the contest had bolted across the border to surf Mundaka, the famous rivermouth lefthander. I tagged along. When Bainy got knocked out later that day and returned to the house ready for a bender, he found the place empty. When we returned late that night to a completely darkened house, we switched on the kitchen light and found Rob quietly sitting at the kitchen table, Walkman on, table littered with empty Kronenburgs and a heat draw in front of him. Scrawled on the page were his own derisive nicknames for all the surfers who had advanced. It was definitely a time to avoid his line of sight.

Bainy can manage a laugh at such memories these days, but there's also an air of relief that those kinds of counter-productive frustrations seem to be behind him.

“I think I’m finally starting to eliminate all the bullshit” he explains succinctly.

“It’s taken me a hell of a long time to have confidence in myself. I would surf emotionally, thinking to myself, 'that guy earns heaps more money than me or gets way more recognition.' And when I'd lose a heat to someone I thought I should have beaten, I would take it out on myself for days afterwards. I almost had things figured out in a lot of ways. I’d do everything right up until the heat. Then I'd sort of lose myself, then lose the heat, then give myself shit and go out and write off. I'd do that in front of the judges or the officials or someone who really mattered, you know. Word gets around, and there goes your sponsorship for the next year.”

Rob then explains a little coyly that he’s been seeing a sports psychologist over the past year or so to get some of this stuff in order. He urges me not to play this news up too much for fear that the average surfer out there might consider it a bit of a wank.

“This newspaper article said I was having sessions with a psychiatrist, like I was some kind of basket case. It’s not like that. He’s a friend and he helps me out heaps. I’ve always been a bit of a stress-head,” he says, almost apologetically.

The friend's name is Eric Fleming and he is actually a professional motivator whose other clients include two of Australia’s largest banks and an automotive corporation, who call upon him to work with their top executives.

“We’ve been acquaintances for a long time. I used to bust him for smoking on the school bus,” Eric tells me. He was a faculty member when Rob was a bit of a young hood at school and they grew up and surfed in the same area. Years later, Eric happened to witness one of Rob’s more monumental screw-ups in a heat and decided that once again his intervention might be called for.

“It’s about working toward the mental discipline required to consistently produce peak performance in competition,” Eric says. He doesn't want to get into too much detail, he will reveal that he has taught Rob self-hypnosis. “He can put himself into a hypnotic state very easily," Eric says approvingly.

Another big part of it has been discouraging that tortuous self-reproach after every defeat. “Part of the process is eliminating all forms of negative thinking. He certainly used to give himself shit."

Bain's entire life more or less defines the archetypal Aussie battler—the perpetual underdog striving against adversity. His father died from lung cancer when Rob was 13, and his mother was left to bring him and his sister alone while working as a hospital clerk.

Rob learned some heavy lessons at a young age when he made the Coca-Cola skateboard team and toured the country doing demonstrations soon after his father died. “I copped the heaviest time at school from being on the team. It was semi-jealousy but you don’t understand that when you’re 13 and your mates are giving you a hard time. So I had a really big chip on my shoulder, and remember going to school one morning. I think I was crying because I’d just had enough. Even my best mates were picking on me over these magazines and stuff. I said to my mum, 'I’m gonna murder someone today.' I walked out the door and she rang the headmaster and said, 'Look out, he's coming.' But I was ready. I was going to ’em all. And I got in heaps of fights.”

That kind of behavior continued. Rob drifted in and out of the surf scene during a boisterous adolescence characterized by plenty of drinking and fighting with his partner in crime and best mate, Adam Stubbs. Both were little blokes for their ages, but at 15 and 16 they were pretty infamous around Manly for taking on a circle of older bigger guys. “It was pretty radical," Bain recalls. "We got in heaps of blues,’ remembers Stubbles, now an orderly in a Sydney hospital. “Rob would always get beaten up. He’d fight anyone. I’ve dragged him out of heaps of fights. A 6’10” bouncer at a club, no worries, he’d be straight into it, wouldn’t take a backwards step.”

Rob left school at 16 and worked into a succession of menial jobs, mainly in the carpentry trade, looking for an apprenticeship but merely getting underpaid and exploited, and then laid off when he was due for a pay raise. “By the time I was 18 or so, when the money is supposed to go up, no one wanted me. So I was stuck with no trade and nowhere to go."

Meanwhile, with the encouragement of his Queenscliff mates, Rob had started competing in the local club contests and in the space of a few short months showed rapid improvement. Up until that point, local legend Steve “Teary” Garth had had things pretty much all his own way in the club competition. He still remembers well when the little blond kid began to make his presence felt. “I remember a particular man-on-man contest, a semifinal, me versus him. It was really close. He beat me in the semi and from then on he kept getting better and better, the bastard. And a goofyfoot at that. We had a bit of a rivalry going. He's always been competitive.” The two are still great mates and served as best man at each others’ weddings.

Regional and state amateur successes soon followed and before he’d ever really thought about a surfing career, Rob found himself on the Australian team for the '84 world amateur titles in California. The sudden success came as a bit of a shock to everyone—so much that he didn’t have the money to get himself to America. “It came time to go away and I had a bit of money saved up so I sponsored him,” his girlfriend Kath recalls. From there he linked up with the pro tour, doing it very tough financially for the first few years, and earning that troublesome beer-drinking reputation, but also doing enough in the water to make him a feared opponent. Bain's rise on the rating's board not been meteoric, but steady nevertheless. From 35th in his first full year on the tour, he has successively ranked 18th, 13th, 9th, 9th, and 5th.

The reality doing manual labor for a living, something not many pro surfers are familiar with, has given Rob a profound gratitude for his good fortune as a surfer, even during the ugliest of those ruthless pre-contest warm-up surfs. “The other day I was out in the water and everyone was hassling and dropping in and I just sat there and thought, 'A lot of my mates are at work right now, and I could be in a factory right or something. But instead, I’m sitting here at Bells—who cares if they drop in?' Sometimes you’ve just got to slap yourself.”

At 28, and after six full years on the tour, Rob’s career should have begun that gradual parabolic downward curve of the typical pro surfing career. But then, Rob’s career has never been typical. “I’ve looked at it over the last year or so, and I’m getting better. I’m going to go really hard and surf as well as I can. I don’t want to focus on winning and I don’t want to focus on the world title. I just want to surf as well as I can. If I can do that consistently, I’ll be a contender, I reckon."

Bain's motivation comes from a few different sources. He has a deep and burning desire to give his new wife Kath the sort of comfortable existence he’s always dreamed of for them. He very much still wants to disprove the doubters that have plagued his career. And on the flip side, he wants to make good on the support of every friend he's ever made, from schoolboy mates to contest security men. Longtime friends like Adam Stubbs have picked up on the subtle change in Rob this year. “He always has a few beers, but this year he brings a couple of lights and that's it. But no one bags him anymore because we all know how good he is. How good he could be.”

And if he were to take the world title? “I’d throw a huge party for him," Stubbs says proudly. "That’s why I hope he wins it."

[Photos: Art Brewer, Martin Tullemans, Brian Stephen]

"THE SURFING PROFILE: ROB BAIN," BY TIM BAKER (1991)

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