SURFERMAG.COM INTERVIEW: Bernie Baker

SURFERMAG.COM: If you could change one thing about the North Shore experience, what would be the one thing that Bernie Baker would change?

BERNIE BAKER: You know, I mean, if I want to be selfish, you know, I could say, “Hey I’d like to get rid of, um, the last, I’d say probably the last 10 years of crowd.” And it’s not coming from the North Shore, it’s just coming from the world. And that’s not to say I don’t want anybody to surf here, it’s to say that every spot has got that max output level; and you hit that point where there’s just not enough waves for everyone sitting in the lineup. Doesn’t matter if it’s a west swell or a north swell; it’s just too much of a surfing population for the number of waves, and yet, there are so many days here in the course of eight months, not even four or five, but in the course of eight months, where you get so many waves to yourself. No, it’s not going to be Pipe, its not going to be Rocky Lefts, it’s not going to be Sunset Point, it’s not going to be Chun’s or Laniakea, and it will just be one of the myriad of other spots that exist here that guys still really aren’t surfing because their feelings or their thoughts are “I need to surf Pipe,” or “I have to surf Pipe,” or “I have to surf Sunset.” So, there’s just so many other waves around here that I’d have to honestly say there’s really nothing that I’d say that I’d change radically. I think everything has progressed in a style and way in which it was supposed to have.

SURFERMAG.COM: There is a vocal group of surfers, it might be a minority group, but either way, it’s a vocal group, that is…I guess you can characterize them as being anti pro-surfing events. Do you think the balancing act between the number of professional surfing events and that group’s concerns is on a level plane, or is it tipping one way or another?

BERNIE BAKER: You know, it’s funny, cause I’m able, luckily I’m able to go back just far enough, so if you want to put that at 20 years, 25 years, and remember where the, not hostility, but where the negative side was of surfing as a group versus professional surfing as a sport. I remember when everybody in the community was negative toward, not surfing as a sport, but toward Australians as a group. And then I remember when things swung from that to the Brazilians in the mid-‘80s. And now it’s sort of melded down into where it’s just looking for an excuse to be grumbling about something. If you take a look at who we are as a community, as far as waves go, not as far as people, I’d have to say that there’s always going to be some sort of an ‘anti’ kind of lash back at whether it be surfing as a sport or a group of people, and thinking about how it’s progressed over the last 30 years, there will always be a group of recreational surfers that will say, “You know what, we really really want to keep these waves for ourselves. We really don’t want to see things like a contest coming to our break.” And then as I’ve said over the last few years, you know what, these people tend to be of the older caliber, and their children are now growing up as amateur surfers and they’re starting to say to mom and dad, “Leave it alone, mom and dad. We want to compete. We want a contest. We want something that’s called organized sport. No, we’re not playing soccer on the field at the elementary school or high school level, we’re not playing organized sports. We enjoy surfing, we want to surf, and we want to compete. And we want the contest. Whether it be an amateur or a pro event, it’s not every week. And mom and dad, leave it alone.” And you’re starting to see that a little bit more where people are starting to think it out a little bit more, and it’s like, “Okay, well, we can do with X amount of days,” and that’s really where the permitting process comes in from city and county of Honolulu. Basically X amount of months are divided up into 14-day packages, or whatever, and people receive a permit based on a little bit of a seniority kind of a rating to where they’re able to continue to run the events, and that’s the way it should be.

SURFERMAG.COM: For a long time there’s been a sort of negative vibe or a bad boy element in this community, and as wrong as it may seem morally, I’m wondering if it doesn’t serve a greater purpose?

BERNIE BAKER: You know, when you start to think of, when you try to define that bad boy image, whether it be an individual or it be a grouping of people loosely defined with a title or a t-shirt that it wears or something, you know, who’s to say that the hostility side of surfing, let’s say on Oahu, or any island, or even the North Shore if you want to get specific, is any different than, let’s say, Palos Verdes in Southern California, or maybe Swami’s, or any place where you’ve got a group of guys that are trying to play some sort of a role so to speak, um, does it in the long, in the bigger picture actually play out to where it, if you look back at it in 20 years and you say to yourself, “It was probably good that there was some physical social control?” No, I mean that’s not going to stop anything, because ultimately, life’s going to progress, population’s going to increase, and the numbers are going to be there, and people are going to go surfing. And if someone drops in on somebody, I think it doesn’t matter really what beach you’re at and where you live, I think that there will always be a group of people that will go, “You know what, that guy’s not cool,” or “this situation’s not cool,” or “we’re going to try to override this for a while,” and then it dissolves, and then you get into another mess—it’s the rats in the maze. I mean, how many rats can you put into that little box before they start pounding on each other or stealing food? And it’s a social situation where it gets very, very complex, and from complex it gets multi-complex, to where you get maybe a bad boy situation even when it comes down to something like a science experiment, to where, “Who becomes biggy rat?”; he’s biggy rat for a period, and then maybe three or four other rats go, “Okay, you’re not going to be biggy rat anymore, we’re all going to be biggy rat,” and it just compounds itself and it multiplies over itself, and all of a sudden you take a look and you go, “Gee, it’s not happening anymore.” Something happened, it sort of dissolved naturally on its own. So I mean, for the North Shore and anywhere else, again like I say, it could be anywhere in the world, you get a bad boy image, or you get a grouping of bad boy images, and I mean obviously it’s not a playground, it’s an open playing field when it comes to surfing as in a couple of sports, and you get that, and it’s a social structure—there’s no arguing that. It’s going to be there. There’s no way of saying, “It shouldn’t be there,” or “It’s not going to be there,” because it’s going to exist.

SURFERMAG.COM: Over the entire period that you’ve been here, thinking of all the surfers that have surfed on the North Shore, and specifically the local surfers—the people that have lived here year in and year out—who is the greatest North Shore surfer ever?

BERNIE BAKER: If I was going to admire one particular North Shore surfer and say to myself that that person probably in my mind would typify everything that I would like to see every other surfer act like, behave like, surf like, um, as a surfer and as a social human within our community and within the community at large, obviously there are people who I admire and respect and even idolize, I’m not sure I’m even using that word, and that I’d say to myself, “That’s a person that I’ve always looked up to,” I mean, it’s, as I think anybody is going to answer a question like that, it’s going to be a mix of this person, that person, another person, somebody who’s passed away, somebody who’s coming up that’s very young who I just admire as being 18 years old and wish that I was that way when I was 18, and there may be somebody who might be 65 right now who I highly, highly admire, um, if I take somebody who’s alive today—I hate to use those words—but alive today and say that I really admire this person for what they did in their career as a surfer and who they are today as a human being on a social level, I actually sort of tip my hat to Barry Kanaiaupuni. I really believe that, if you take a look at the hero worship that he got and that he deserved in the ‘70s, in the early ‘70s, what he did actually in putting himself together as a human in the mid- to-late-‘60s—I surely didn’t know him, I was just a little kid in junior high in Carpinteria and that area, but I’d say Barry Kanaiaupuni, because you take a look today, um, beautiful family, raised a wonderful group of kids, has done everything you could possibly do as a surfer, to where, as a businessman, between he and his wife, the company that they run, the businesses that they run in Haleiwa and on the West Side, and just what he has attained for himself, I just don’t think you could put the package together any better than BK has.