THE SURFER PROFILE WITH MATT ARCHBOLD

"The best part about surfing," says Matt, "is I can still go out and feel like that 10-year-old kid inside."

When Archbold was 8 years old his parents divorced just after they finished building what they hoped would be their dream home near T-Street in San Clemente, California. After the split, Matt’s father promptly took off on a multi-year journey around the world. “I didn’t think much of it at the time because I was so young,” says Matt. “My older brother Brian definitely took it harder. But I thought it was pretty cool when my dad would send us postcards from places like Fiji or Tahiti. When you’re that young, you don’t think about the fallout, like my mom having to work full-time to support us. It’s easy to see now that my brother and I got away with a lot since there was hardly any supervision.”

As a witness to the shenanigans, I can validate that the Archbold house became a natural staging area for juvenile assaults on just about everything: the beach, the bike jumps, and the far corners of the neighborhood. And Matt was usually the combustible force sucking everyone into things, whether it was a game of stickball, tackle football, or a trek up to 7-11 for some candy. By age 11 he was already a Pop Warner football star. He ruled the neighborhood skate ramp which resided in his driveway. And he even appeared in Morey Boogie ads that were running in SURFER Magazine. Things started revolving around Matt very early.

Matt Archbold was selected for the prestigious National Team after his first full year in the NSSA, but his stint was short lived. “Making that team was all I wanted at first,” he recalls. “But they were pretty strict when it came to, well, everything.” Matt was struggling in school, a prerequisite for NSSA membership, plus he sensed a disconnect with his team leaders, Ian Cairns and Peter Townend, during their annual trip to the North Shore. “When P.T. and Ian would march us out at giant Sunset most of us would be following orders, just drinking the punch,” recalls Jeff Booth, an NSSA teammate of Archy’s. “But if Backdoor and Off the Wall were 8 foot and perfect, Matt was the first guy to say ‘screw it.’ He’d just bolt for it. Nobody else really had the balls to do that.”

When Cairns and Townend tried to rein him in with strict discipline, Matt perceived them as out of touch and outdated. Meanwhile, back home in San Clemente he was getting all the validation he desired from those around him. By the age of 15, Matt was already getting more press than most of his NSSA counterparts. His friends and growing fan base were so awed by his increasingly acrobatic brand of surfing that he was becoming a cult leader, attracting not only a regional following, but also an international one in the form of Martin Potter, a regular visitor to T-Street. “Pottz knew how far ahead of the curve Matt was,” says Mark Price, who was wearing several hats at Gotcha when Archbold was readying himself to turn pro. “We needed a young American star to bolster our international guys like Cheyne Horan and Pottz. Archy fit perfectly because we were looking for individuality.”

“I had no idea what I was doing,” says Matt, who was 16 years old when he signed his Gotcha contract by himself. A persistent Michael Tomson and Mike Cruikshank had setup a meeting in the parking lot at Salt Creek with him to go over the documents. “When I got there the waves were going off,” Matt recalls. “I didn’t see those guys around so I shined them and went surfing. I figured they’d at least paddle out. But they thought I was playing hardball.” In the end, Cruikshank approached Matt as he was walking back up the hill. Looking stressed, he offered Matt double the original offer if he would sign right then and there. “That’s still the easiest raise I’ve ever got,” he laughs. “I would have taken their first offer.”

Within days Archbold was a high school dropout getting paid $70,000 a year through combined-sponsorship agreements to surf the fledgling ASP World Tour, which was in its third year. “There were no waiting periods, no agents, no managers, nothing,” Matt recalls. “I remember being stuck in Heathrow airport just wondering what the hell I was doing and where I was going. I always prayed there’d be guys on my flight who had an idea of what was going on.”

According to fellow Californian Mike Parsons, Archbold was an instant hit on tour. “By then, Archy was making a higher percentage of aerials than anyone else in the world,” he says. “He was surfing so fast on the side of the contest areas—just flying over sections upside down, grabbing and landing like it was nothing. They didn’t know what to think. And with those guys, it didn’t hurt that Matt liked to have a good time.” At the time, if you asked Archy, his sponsors, and his family if throwing a 16-year-old high school dropout into the world unsupervised with a wad of cash was anything worth worrying about, the answer would have been “no.” Naturally, Archbold found the tour to be lonely. The world was a bigger place without things like email or Facebook, and contact with friends back home was rare. That compounded Matt’s daily frustration with the judges, the waves, and the never-ending traveling circus. The more frustrated he got, the more he joined the partying that was taking place on the ASP’s whirlwind romp that made 25 stops per year. “It started with your basic drinking and things just escalated from there.”

Archy’s big nights out quickly turned into regular affairs, yet few people truly understood the warning signs. According to Price, the industry shares culpability for Matt’s subsequent slide into drugs. “The only thing I’ll say in the industry’s defense is that in those early days the average age of management at companies like Gotcha and Quiksilver was still very young. None of us were really parents—certainly not to teenagers. We were immature ourselves. The larger issues were much deeper than we knew how to handle."