THE SURFER PROFILE WITH MATT ARCHBOLD

Messing with Will and Ford - a morning ritual.

“I used to feel guilt for letting my sponsors down,” says Archbold. “I didn’t like being anywhere if I couldn’t be 100 percent. I’d be blowing off promos and autograph signings, even heats. Then I’d feel guilty for that and the pressure would keep piling on.”

Dibi Fletcher, who’s watched her own kids, Nathan and Christian Fletcher, struggle with fame, remembers watching Matt tussle with the limelight. “He hated it,” she says. “He thought it was strange that kids would put him on a pedestal for doing nothing. People want to ask these guys how they got to where they are—what they did—when in reality they did nothingc’mon. They’re just kids who went surfing and were having fun. That’s it. End of story.”

Deep down, Matt really was just a fun-loving wayward kid, innocent of any evil doing but certainly prone to mischief. Sitting in my office I remind Matt of one incident from our tour days that I’ll never forget: one of him skateboarding through an airport terminal in Tokyo weaving through throngs of people with headphones on, while being chased by a squadron of Japanese police blowing whistles at him to stop.

“Yeah, they frowned on that,” he says. “I guess I knocked some people over without knowing.”

Once Archbold was released from prison he found his first marriage deteriorating rapidly. He tried to do the right thing when he got word of Ford’s impending arrival. “But we were pretty doomed from the start because we were both kids.” The couple split and Matt was flirting with probationary disaster in the months that followed as he began celebrating being single again. After a few close calls with his overly eager probation officer, he fled to Hawaii with Ford to start anew.

In Hawaii things started looking up again. Between his rehab stint and his time in jail, Archbold had managed to rack up a total of five Bud Tour victories and a Hollywood stunt gig in Point Break. Then one year after his move he returned to California for an air show and was pulled over by an undercover cop in Newport Beach. The officer knew Archbold was in violation of his probation for crossing the state line and being behind the wheel without a license. Ford was just 2 years old sitting in the back of the car as Matt was being thrown into a spread eagle. “I told him I was being arrested because I didn’t have my seatbelt on—ya know, teach him something I guess.”

Suddenly, just when things were looking up, he was facing two years in prison. “I had to use a public defender, too, because the judge told me if I ever showed up in her court room again not to even bother with my fancy lawyers. That was probably the scariest day of my life.” The judge had already reviewed his file. She shocked Matt when she claimed to be proud of him for his recent progress. She still sent him back to jail, but only for 45 days. “It could have been much worse. I was actually relieved even though I was going back to jail. Plus, she ordered me to go back to Hawaii when I got out.”

When Archbold got back to Hawaii he did his best to settle into a new life for himself. He was married a second time to a woman, who, like Matt, was trying to stay out of trouble. The couple enjoyed the arrival of their new daughter Ruby. But the North Shore was still a dangerous place for Matt to be, especially when the surf world arrived every winter. When he slipped back into self-destructive patterns, that marriage also ended abruptly. Ruby’s mother left Hawaii for the comfort of her family back in South Carolina, where Matt says, “She’s doing a really good job of raising my daughter. I get to talk to her all the time, which is great, but it sucks not being able to see her much.” The failure of Matt’s second marriage led to another drastic turn for the worse. “That’s when the rolls really started to escalate,” says Garth Tarlow, who became Matt’s team manager after he signed with O’Neill. Tarlow had tried to warn his bosses of the risks associated with Archbold even before they signed him. He knew Archy well. Tarlow had even let Matt and Ford live with him. Of course, marketing directors don’t always see eye-to-eye with team managers. One can look past the indiscretions and use them to his benefit, the other has to deal with the day-to-day nightmares of getting athletes where they need to be. “Matt was still bankable the whole time, because all through this crap he was still blowing people’s minds in Hawaii,” says Tarlow. “So long as he could keep getting away with it nothing was going to stop the cycle. That’s why everyone was complicit on some level to his demise.”

“None of us were innocent,” says Ronny De La Rosa, a childhood friend who survived many of Archy’s illicit misadventures. “But Matt was the guy who would push things to the next level. Whether it was coke, heroin, you name it—it didn’t matter. It was usually his idea and his money. The rest of us actually had to get up and go to work. He didn’t. He would be so out of it we’d have to call his sponsors and tell them to come get him before he killed himself. At one point he was more comfortable being locked in a room with a bunch of strangers than he was with his own family. That’s when I knew things were getting bad.” Tarlow recalls several horrific scenes. “If you saw the places where I’d find him—just the scariest things, bloody rags from bad needle pokes, crap everywhere. Not good. And they were becoming more and more regular. I couldn’t take it anymore. I had my kid to worry about. And Matt didn’t realize a lot of these people just wanted to have an ‘I partied with Archbold’ story. One time I came back to the team house in Hawaii and my team grommets like Roy Powers and Timmy Reyes were doing shots with him just getting lit. He was pounding the table and egging them on. It scared the crap out of me. I freaked on him.”