Craig Lockwood's profile on surfer and paddleboarder Tommy Zahn ran in a 2001 issue of H20 magazine. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

When Tom Zahn paddled his final strokes beyond life's barrier reef, he slipped across leaving in his wake a superb series of accomplishments as a waterman.

Born in Santa Monica in 1924, Zahn grew up on the beach and served as a lifeguard for all his adult life, working for the cities of Santa Monica and Newport Beach, as well as Los Angeles County, and the State of California.

As Lieutenant Tom Zahn, skipper of the L.A. County 

, he was awarded the Medal of Valor. As a surfer, he had ridden big North Shore surf with the sport’s pioneers in the late 1940s and early ’50s. As a paddleboard racing champion, he established a number of long-standing records, including his 9-hours-and-20-minute solo Molokai-to-Waikiki channel crossing in October 1953, and his 1958 Catalina Channel crossing record which stood for over 20 years.

Zahn personified an idea that his mentor, Tom Blake, had created years earlier. And Zahn, like Blake, never considered his ideals or achievements as credentials; aggrandizement was not his style. Instead, Zahn esteemed order and lived a life of economic simplicity.

While he received numerous awards over the years, and was often cast as a hero, he felt no need to be dramatized as one. He ignored celebrity. Tom Zahn wasn’t a grandstander, he simply stood in the light of his deeds. He didn’t bask.

Intelligent, quiet, dignified, self-possessed. Those are the adjectives that seem to best describe Tom Zahn. But he was also stoic—in the strict philosophical meaning of the term. After his death in 1991, what remained, for those who had not known him well, was the recollection of an image instead of a man. Not that this sometimes-larger-than-life persona obscured him—it didn’t. But Tom Zahn, the man, developed the ability to sidestep that image—as though it were a cardboard cutout.

This left others talking to, or about the image, while the real Zahn remained detached.

Zahn acknowledged that he had initially modeled much of his philosophy and behavior on Tom Blake’s blueprint.

Both seemed cut from the same cloth. Both were Hollywood-handsome. Both were athletes, dedicated to health, hygiene and diet, with physiques that would stand out even in today’s world of buffed health-club studs. Both men revered Duke Kahanamoku, whom they counted as a close personal friend.

Blake and Zahn each possessed a certain aloof reserve, a dignified, gentleman’s reticence that made them simultaneously accessible to those whom they accepted—and unavailable to those whom they chose to ignore.

Both men enjoyed a mutually sustaining and reinforcing life-long friendship, imbued with a love of the ocean, health, and fitness.

Zahn once confided that nothing had ever meant more to him.

Decades before television marketers coined the term “Extreme Sports,” during the years following his service in the Navy in World War II, Zahn’s surfing and paddleboarding exploits earned him the status of demi-legend in California and Hawaii.

Without commercial sponsors, and with no expectation of financial reward, Zahn embodied the then-current concept of a “dedicated amateur athlete” who did what he did solely for the joy of the challenge.

 publisher, Martin Sugarman recalls: “The most salient feature I can remember about him was his incredible quality of aliveness, and physical brightness. I remember seeing him paddling off State Beach every morning year after year, in any conditions. He looked like what you’d expect a lifeguard to look like.

“He was a self-starter, an individual who didn’t need others to get him going. He was disciplined and stuck to an iron-clad routine. I think he set his clock when he was very young and never reset it until the springs wore out."

While he enjoyed surfing, paddling, rowing, and discussing board and hull design, he also enjoyed intellectual conversation, literature and, to some extent, classical art. He disdained as kitsch most elements of contemporary popular culture

He traveled frequently and extensively in Europe and Spain, read widely, and spoke and read German. Tom’s ancestry was Germanic, and he had a deep interest in Teutonic culture and German classical music. Tom read and admired the German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche, and studied Goethe and Schopenhauer.

For his proteges—men like Larry Capune, Mike Young, and Rabbi Norm Shifren, who recently published his autobiography, 

—all of whom were serious about paddling and training, he would suggest reading Nietzsche’s 

, to stimulate their level of commitment. [Note: 

 is actually a George Bernard Shaw play; the title is a riff on Nietzche's concept of the Übermensch.]

One of Tom’s favorite yearly rituals was visiting San Francisco to attend the Richard Wagner Festival, where the famous composer’s 

 cycle was performed. This was an opportunity for him to indulge himself culturally—without being stigmatized as a highbrow.

Zahn was something of a cultural elitist and made no effort to hide the fact.

Because Zahn, like Blake, favored certain now-scientifically discredited and controversial beliefs regarding race and ethnicity, he generally avoided discussing this particular element of his 

, (worldview) unless he knew you well and felt comfortable.

He wasn’t embarrassed about his beliefs, nor did he ever feel reticent about discussing them in detail when asked directly. If you didn’t agree, or felt uncomfortable, he was quick to acknowledge that he understood such concepts had been rejected.

In today’s politically correct climate, Zahn would surely be condemned as socially and politically reactionary, but he was by no means bigoted, or a person who indulged in any form of ethnic or racial hatred. In retrospect, his beliefs seem based on his dismay with what he perceived to be the breakdown of values and the cultural ideals he himself personally cherished.

He very carefully considered people of any race or ethnicity on a strictly individual basis and accepted them as such.

Long-distance paddleboard racing on the Mainland came to an abrupt end in 1961, with the mid-race cancellation of Bob Hogan’s International Paddleboard Championship—the Catalina-to-Manhattan Beach Pier race founded in 1955.

Times were changing. The surf-craze sweeping the country wasn’t grounded in the waterman’s tradition. Instead, it was fueled by the commercialization and commodification of surfing.

Paddleboarding became a victim of the paradigm shift created by the mass-marketing of youth-culture and the onset of the social rift that began after the 1962 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Try as he might, and despite his personal stature, Tom Zahn couldn’t stimulate any interest in long-distance paddleboarding as a sport. Even short paddleboard races—always a component of surfing contests in the past—were being phased out. The surfing industry simply abandoned the sport. Except in Hawaii, there were no longer any venues for long-distance competition.

Zahn discussed the phenomenon with me on many occasions. On one level, he responded positively to surfing’s sudden growth spurt. On the other, he was critical.

“They may be Beach Boys,” Zahn once remarked to myself and Pete Peterson, after hearing a song played loudly on a portable radio, “but they aren't watermen.”

He was chagrined because there were no long-distance events in which to compete at a time when he was still capable of competitive athletic performance.

Two decades passed before long-distance paddleboard racing returned. In 1982, Zahn stood off State Beach in 

 and escorted the lead pack for the Waterman Memorial race into the water. Later that summer Buddy Bohn and Gibby Gibson re-instituted the Catalina race.

In the 1983 Waterman Memorial, Zahn came in third. He was 59 years old.

Tom Zahn's standards were exacting. He did not suffer dilettantes. He took life seriously, but still enjoyed it. To be sure, there was an element of compulsivity to his behavior. He had well-established routines from which he rarely deviated.

In today’s idiom: actions speak louder than words.

"WATERMEN'S LIVES: RECOLLECTING ZAHN," BY CRAIG LOCKWOOD

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