search

SURFERMAG ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

In 2005, he quit his sponsor and finished second on the WQS, finally making the tour. Bobby does say that quitting pot was the best thing he’s done for himself, and he’s managed to stay off of it. Doesn’t drink heavily, either. Says he’ll go out with the boys for beers to celebrate, but that’s about it.

“I love being sober, man,” he says. “That’s the best thing.”

He says 2006 was the best year of his life on all fronts. He had been engaged. The engagement fell through. He hadn’t really wanted to get married. He felt liberated. He was on the WCT. He was in good health and good spirits. He was the happiest he’d been in a long time. The ’CT was different than the ’QS.

“On the WQS, there’s so many people—anybody can do it, you know?” he says. “So you go to all these weird places where the waves aren’t that good, and there’s so many people that you just kind of mind your own business. On the WCT, there’s only the same guys traveling from place to place. You talk to everybody. For the most part, everybody gets along.”

Yes, he has all the familiar gripes about the WQS. But Bobby isn’t much for griping. He’s more inclined to action. “I’m not going back on that tour, no matter what,” he says. “If I fall off the WCT, then I’ll just have to figure something else out. There’s no way I’m doing that tour again.”

Like that, Bobby’s made his bed. It’s not that hard to fall off the WCT. Finish 29th or lower. It’s happened to plenty of great surfers. But Bobby talks straight, and one gets the sense that he means what he says.

This adamancy doesn’t stem from arrogance. To hear him tell it, Bobby doesn’t have a career in surfing. And he’s well aware that his rookie campaign is over. “I can’t go around and start talking about my career,” he says. “I had one year. And that’s it. So I don’t have a career.”

It’s this humility that seems to be Bobby’s trademark characteristic. He’s clearly uncomfortable talking about himself and his past successes. He says he doesn’t like telling people that he’s a pro surfer, because it’s embarrassing. It doesn’t seem like a real job, he says. Not to people who lay concrete and work hard all day.

When we go to sign paperwork on his new house, he tells me that he finds it embarrassing that he has to declare to these people that his job is to be a pro surfer. When the nature of our relationship comes up in front of his realtor—when it comes out that I’m here to write about Bobby—he seems even more uncomfortable.

At the same time, he’s fully aware that much of his life has been given to him by professional surfing.

“I have dreams in terms of surfing,” Bobby says, admitting that if it ever happened, he’d love to win a world title. “But more than that, I’ve got dreams as a person. I’ve always wanted to own a home, and now I can do that because of surfing, and I realize that it’s a gift.”

The work part isn’t the surfing, Bobby says. It’s putting in the legwork. The industry side of things. Functions and events. Signings. “I hate doing those things,” he says, noting that it all feels vapid. “But I know that a lot of people do things for work that they don’t really want to do.”

Like that, Bobby also endures another part of his career as a globetrotting pro. An interesting wrinkle: Bobby’s afraid to fly.

“I really hate it,” he says.

But he does it, obviously. He sits on the plane and tenses up and endures the flights. “Usually, by the time I get wherever I’m going, I’m fine,” he says. “But I hate flying.”

Last year, everywhere Bobby went, people usually wanted to talk to him. Particularly as he continued to succeed on the tour. It was a good story. The first Mexican-American surfer ever on tour. One gets the sense that Bobby doesn’t much care for this story angle.

I ask him a question about whether or not it’s important to him to have that distinction, even if I already know the answer. He sits back a little bit, seems to stifle an eye roll.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think of it that way. I’m just me. There’s been plenty of Mexican people that have surfed before me, and I’ve traveled in Mexico for a long time and seen a lot of Mexican surfers.”

Subscribe to Surfer Magazine