hahaha i just had to post this one. i have been shaping for about 3 years now. i started when i was a freshman in high school. it has caused more fights between me and my dad than anything else in the house. he always complains that foam dust is everywhere and he no longer can use his garage. he used to say that shaping was the most useless thing he had ever seen me do. but i just wrote a college essay about it and my english teacher commented on how it was one of the strongest and funniest essay topics she had ever read. when she called my dad up and told him about the essay he was shocked. needless to say that quieted him down. my dad and i are super close and shaping would never cause us to really not love eachother, but it was his biggest annoyance for three years and we always bickered over our garage. today he came up to me and said how proud he was of me and how he wants me to keep shaping for the rest of high school and hopefully for the rest of my life.
sometimes the most ironic turn of events teaches everybody a life lesson and gives everybody a good laugh
I love that story. My dad was always indifferent about my surfing. Thought I'd grow out of it. He came and watched me play other sports as a kid, but never had any interest in watching me surf. Then some guy at Scripp.s Institute won a Nobel Prize for Medicine. My dad read the article and learned the guy really just wanted to surf. He finally came and watched me surf in a local contest a few years ago. First time ever after more than thirty years of surfing. I can relate, brother!! Good luck in College. Mike
Yep - despite common media portrayals of the ‘duh-dude’ surfer, there are some incredibly brilliant people out there that the sea has spit up. One that comes to mind from my field of college studies is Kary Mullis - biochemist, Nobel laureate, and inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (said to have been concieved during a surf session) . . .
I’m sure that’s who the previous poster was talking about. Did you know that Mullis testified in the OJ trial?
Or, speaking of surfers who accomplished something… Otis Chandler, former publisher of the LA Times. I saw a very good documentary about the LA Times on PBS recently. Chandler was a very astute newspaperman. All through the segment about him, they kept showing pictures of him at the beach, and surfing. What a bum.
Mine was vehemently against it. I got a part time job when I was 14, and bought a second hand board. My father got super pissed at me. He said I was wasting money on a “toy” that I’d forget about in a year. That was 1964. I have bought and built many of those “toys” since then. Though I never saw him after my folks divorced (1967), there were times much later on when I’d wished I could have rubbed his predicition in his face.
thanks guys. its true, the guy who taught me to surf has been surfing on oahu since it was T of H. one of the craziest guys i have ever met... i still cant find a reef that scares him. hes one of the most accomplished eye surgeons out there too. the stereotypes are funny like that
Haha! The O.J. trial - I vaguely remember the prosecution trying to discredit his testimony by asking if he'd ever taken hallucinogenic drugs, and his reply was something like 'not today'. Classic stick-it-to-the-man attitude!