Keith Paull of Queensland, as graceful as he was handsome, won the 1968 Australian National Titles, rode "Swell of the Century" Makaha in 1969, and in general was regarded throughout the surf world as the "good Aussie"—as opposed to those louder, more demanding fellows like Nat Young and John Witzig. Everybody liked Keith. By the beginning of the next decade, however, Paull was struggling. What at first seemed like a chronic but standard drug problem was later revealed to be schizophrenia—amplified by drug use. Paull quit surfing in the mid-'70s, was institutionalized, made a partial recovery in the '90s, and died in 2004 at age 57.

"The Sleeper," by Chris Bystrom, was published in a 1997 issue of Pacific Longboards. This version has been shortened and slightly edited. 

Of all the surfers who emerged from Australia during the 1960s, none experienced greater highs nor more tragic lows than Keith Paull. His story unraveled like a Greek tragedy. He created what some have described as the purest, driving, soulful style of any longboard-era surfer, then fell apart in the most public and pitiful manner imaginable. He eventually required full-time psychiatric care.

Drugs played a role in Paul's demise. Alcohol, too, contributed to his condition. But the fact is that without substance abuse Keith was genetically destined to blaze like a comet and burn out like a shooting star. He had a mental disorder—paranoid schizophrenia—and it robbed him of both his talent and his dignity.

Everybody I spoke with for this article seemed to recall Keith as both a half-step removed from the other surfers of the day. “He was a very private guy," Johnny Charlton said. "Kind of like the off-sider in a litter of pups. Keith always had a little question mark in his eye."

Bob Cooper, flashing back to the mid-60’s, recalled that “Keith had no flies on him. He was the cleanest, nicest, most well-spoken surfer. A bit shy. He always impressed me because he wasn’t working on an image. He was just Keith.”

Ken Adler met Keith on the Gold Coast in the early '60s, when surfing was still a relatively new pastime in Queensland. “I only knew Keith in the very early days—between 1962 and 1964. We surfed together often at Kirra, Greenmount and Rainbow Bay. He was a very dedicated young surfer. Super fit, wiry, really talented."

Eddie Sawden recalls that Keith’s nickname was ‘Chocolates’, because of his great addiction to candy. “He had bad teeth—I suppose due to his incredible consumption of sweets.”

In late early 1966, Keith left Queensland to work with boardmaker Peter Clarke, in Sydney. He was now determined to win the Australian Title, and for the next few years he approached his surfing with methodical precision. "Keith was on a mission," said Geoff Darby, a fellow shaper and friend of Keith’s from Queensland, "and he was a total perfectionist, down to the finest detail. He would occasionally get really stressed out because of that.” This stress would, in future years, become unmanageable. But for the time being Keith was holding it together.

Keith also excelled as a shaper. “I had a lot of respect for Keith, for his shaping as well as his surfing," says fellow boardmaker Neal Purchase says. "That flowing rhythm he had in the waves also spilled into his work."

Midget Farrelly speaks of Keith as a "surfer among surfers," and goes on to say that "Peter Drouyn and Keith Paull were able to surf any wave, anywhere, with class." After Dave Jackman and Bob Pike, Keith and Peter picked up the mantel and charged headlong into the towering surf of Hawaii. Randy Rarick says that Keith was also the first surfer to venture out at Supertubes, at Jeffreys Bay, at a time when it was taken as fact that Supertubes was too fast a wave to make.

In 1968, Keith achieved what he had worked so hard for—a win at the National Titles. The victory was decisive. Keith beat Midget, Nat Young, Ted Spencer, and Robert Conneely, in surf that ranged from two to twelve feet. Andrew McKinnon recalls that for the finals of the event at Warriewood (the titles that year consisted of three separate contests) the heat had already started and Keith was nowhere to be seen. His name was announced over the loudspeaker and Keith finally emerged sheepishly from the back of a combi van. He’d been carnally involved with a young lady, unaware the final was underway. Keith paddled out and won the event.

Shortly after winning the title, Keith embarked on a six-month journey that took him to South Africa, Europe, Puerto Rico and the United States. He'd been dreaming of a trip like this all his life. It was a great success, but it also threw a light on his own fragile nature.

France was the hot ticket that year. Nat, Ted Spencer and Wayne Lynch arrived in Biarritz with Paul Witzig, all of them shooting footage for Witzig's upcoming film 

. Meanwhile, Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman were there with Billy Hamilton and Mark Martinson, shooting 

 Keith joined up with MacGillivray-Freeman and got into the heavy nightlife at a notorious local restaurant-club called the Steak House. Biarritz was also an easy town in which to score recreational drugs, and psychedelics were everywhere. World travelers congregated here because of its reputation as a wild place to party.

While in France, Keith surfed his brains out every day and spent his evenings flying on LSD. He did his best to maintain his image as the clean-cut Australian, but within himself a battle to maintain sanity had already begun.

Keith left Europe to compete in the 1968 World Titles at Puerto Rico, where he failed to make the finals. He then flew to Southern California and began working with Bing Copeland in Hermosa Beach.

This was a radical time in the surf industry. Sales of longer boards were stagnating, as the new shortboard revolution had begun. Hermosa was America’s ground zero for surfboard manufacturers and, at this was a critical moment as businesses struggled to remain solvent in the face all the new developments. Rick Surfboards tried to shroud themselves in mystery with the release of the UFO model. Weber Surfboards hired Nat Young to pitch their product. Jacobs Surfboards went with Mike Purpus. Bing Surfboards called on Rolf Aurness and Keith Paull.

Red-hot Hermosa Beach surfer Dru Harrison had heard rumors of Keith’s psychedelic exploits in France. Hermosa had an abundant supply of drugs and Dru offered to turn Keith onto some Californian LSD. Keith replied that he'd had some bad trips while in France and wanted to clean up his act. “The entire time I knew Keith in Hermosa," Harrison recalls today, "he was on a real even keel." Mike Purpus says the same thing. "Keith and I drove to Trestles together a few times while he was here. He was totally straight and clean during that period."

The following year, Keith flew off to Hawaii, where he met up with Randy Rarick and lived at his house on the North Shore during the fabled winter of 1969. Rarick was running the Weber franchise in Hawaii and remembers Keith was feeling the pressure of being a former Australian Champion, as well as the public face for Bing Surfboards. Keith and Randy surfed Sunset Beach regularly, which proved to be an excellent training ground for the largest waves they would ever face.

Shortly after midnight on December 5, 1969, Randy and Keith were awakened by the sound of gigantic waves pounding the outer reefs. At sunrise the next morning, waves were coming over Kam Highway and sweeping homes off their foundations. The two friends piled into Randy’s car and sped over to Makaha, where they were greeted by huge glassy Point Surf—the biggest Makaha had been in more than a decade. Both surfers were confident in their big-wave skills, but neither had ever seen waves like this. Before deciding if they wanted to paddle out or not, they drove up to Kaena Point to have look. Approaching the Kaena Headland, the surf was positively—fifty-foot, seventy-five-foot, who could tell? They watched for a while, they turned around and headed back to Makaha, where they continued to watch for a half-hour. Finally they decided to paddle out. "Keith said he wasn’t going to take any chances," Rarick says, "and neither was I. The agreement was, if we didn’t feel comfortable out there we would simply paddle in."

All of Keith's experience in the ocean came to his aid that afternoon, as he took off on the biggest wave of his life. Randy had seen Keith ride plenty of big waves that year already, but this monster started breaking way beyond the point, and Keith was there to meet it. He was riding an 8’6” gun, which was barely long enough to pull off the drop. The ride stretched across an endless wall, then poured into the infamous Makaha bowl. Keith stayed high as he possibly could, then drove down just ahead of the pitching lip, and glided onto the safety of the shoulder. Midget Farrelly watched Keith's wave from the beach and later said that it was "the greatest surfing achievement I’ve ever witnessed.”

Keith Paull was the only Australian to surf Makaha that day.

1969 was also the year Keith met his future wife Collette. She was a pretty, easy-going local girl from Currumbin. Keith and Collette would eventually marry, and together they had a child named Jody in 1974. Collette warmly remembers the early years she and Keith spent together. But she also says the changes began almost right away. "He began to go really strange in 1970." Keith confided to her that he knew he had a problem, and it was called schizophrenia. Collette, young and naive, said whatever was wrong they’d be able to deal with it together.

Meanwhile, Keith's work with Bing had come to an end. He decided to utilize his considerable skills by opening up a Gold Coast shaping business simply called ‘Keith Paull Surfboards’. The influence Keith had on other Gold Coast surfers was immense. Peter Townend, the first professional surfing champion, often said his main inspiration was Keith Paull.

Two years later Keith opened a surf shop at Kirra called “Harmony,” and sponsored two radical local grommets named Guy Omerod and Wayne Bartholomew. A 1972 trip Guy took to Bells with Keith was pleasant, but three years, during another Bells run, things with Keith got difficult. At one point, Guy recalls, Keith streaked naked around the Torquay Pub, and on the drive home he kept jumping out of the car and running off.

, Bartholomew goes into detail about Keith’s1975 breakdown. “The trip North to the Sunshine Coast for the Pa Bendall Memorial that was memorable for the antics of Keith Paull. I was sponsored at the time by Keith, and he offered me a lift up, but I’d already arranged to go with my shaper Gil Glover, so I told Keith I’d see him up there. That evening, in Caloundra, all the competitors gathered at the Pearl Hotel for the contest meeting, and I spotted Keith outside the pub driving his panel van. Next moment, he drove up on to the footpath and I thought, “Classic Keith, what a way to make your entrance and intimidate your opponents before a contest.” But then he drove up the stairs of the hotel and lodged his van halfway in the entrance. I was impressed! And again, I'm thinking, "Keith's really surpassed himself here. This is the greatest stunt I’ve ever seen. The showmanship!" When I was walking over to congratulate him, the van door opened, Keith got out, and his head was shaved bald and painted with concentric blue circles. I stopped in my tracks. This wasn’t the Paull I’d seen that morning. Keith’s antics became increasingly weirder as the event progressed, culminating in him rolling around in the shorebreak before his heat and telling a TV camera crew that he was an oyster."

Tony Phillips was business partners with Keith’s at the Harmony surf shop, and he believes that Keith's surfing renown was by this point doing him more harm than good, “He got away with a lot of aberrant behavior over a very long period of time because of who he was.”

Late in my research for this piece, I was able to get in touch with Keith Paull, and he described the symptoms of his illness. As far back as 1970, he said, he began suffering extreme paranoia and obsessive behavior. Eventually he began hearing voices inside his head, and the voices often instructed him to do harm to himself. These audible hallucinations plagued Keith for 16 years, until finally a combination of medications brought them under control. Today his only real problem is the occasional anxiety attack.

Today Keith lives at home with his new wife, and he’s slowly coming back to a more comfortable state of mind. He’s learned a lot since he last surfed, more than 20 years ago, about what a vulnerable person he is. Today he mostly stays at home, indoors. His medication can bring on an allergic reaction if he goes in direct sunlight. He says he gets a lot of enjoyment from reading. That Keith Paull has survived to this point, and is able to communicate at all, is a tribute to his own inner strength. I sincerely hope that, in the near future, Keith will once again be able to rejoin the tribe that still admires and respects him.

[Photos: John Witzig, Jeff Carter, Art Brewer]

"THE SLEEPER: THE RISE AND FALL OF A GREAT AUSTRALIAN SURFER," KEITH PAULL PROFILE BY CHRIS BYSTROM (1997)

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