Rules are Rules: How to Grow Long in the Tooth Gracefully
Mr. Jones / Photo: Rory Jones
Why did Ken Bradshaw, arguably the world’s most famous big wave surfer at the turn of the century, paddle over to Vaughn Jones, a teacher in his forties from Port Elizabeth, aka Billows to his students, and bite his surfboard? Not a nibble. An aggressive, use-both-hands-for-leverage, maintain-eye-contact mouthful. The type of bite you remember twenty years later.
I’ve been ruminating over this for months, replaying the incident on sleepless nights. It happened on a decent July afternoon at the Point, a spot normally packed with groms and weekend warriors. It was intensely crowded and scrappy, the way it tends to get when the World Championship Tour rolls into J-Bay. One moment, we were sitting at the takeoff boil, watching the horizon. The next, Bradshaw was aeroplaning his herculean torso across the water, then locking jaws with Mr. Jones’ 6’7, pistoning his incisors deep into its fiberglass, burning a surreal image into the minds of everyone who saw the attack.
It haunts me that I didn’t do anything about it. Didn’t say anything or try to stop him. Nobody did. It was Ken Bradshaw. He could have severed a human head with those lumpy mandibles. We just watched and hoped for the best. An equally pressing follow-up question is how a decent, mild-mannered person like Mr. Jones found himself crossing Ken Bradshaw?
Here’s what I believe happened: Mr. Jones dropped-in on Layne Beachley, one of surfing’s most famous competitors, halfway to number three of seven world titles, who happened to be Ken’s (to avoid exhaustion, I’m using his first name from now on) partner back then. You could argue that he was defending her honor. There’s enough sexism in surfing (and in general) to justify board-biting attacks every day for the next four decades. But Mr. Jones was no threat to Layne Beachley. And by any standards, a bite that size is a hefty price to pay for one stolen wave.
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Mr. Jones was a teacher at Grey High, an all-boys institution that has been preaching a gospel of tradition and sporting excellence for over a century. There, he played a lot of different roles: teacher, a Master at the boarding house, rugby coach.
Outside of being a father of three and a husband, I believe his best work was being an ally to the growing cohort of surfers who went to this rigid, traditional school that often felt claustrophobic to surfers in the ‘90’s.
Success at Grey meant understanding and embracing a long list of rules. Your hair needed to be cut short, your uniform had to be pressed and neat, your shoes had to be polished, you needed to carry a hymn book for assembly. You needed to look and act like everyone else to avoid trouble. The school’s gravity was always pulling you toward conformity.
By contrast, surfing represented a different set of rules, a freer code of conduct that brought us together the way that school could not. We wore matching trunks and messy hair, spoke common slang, memorized lyrics from dog-eared album covers, learned to read weather charts and barometers.
A friend from Grey High visited me while on business in Portland in 2019. At a local bar, we talked about our childhood, our children, and our plans for the future - and mostly surfing. At one point, he described surfing as a strange tradeoff of rules, as total lawlessness, and adherence in equal measure. I asked him what he meant. “In a wetsuit, you can pee all over yourself. How liberating is that?”
It’s true that surfing does permit one to piss all over yourself while having a perfectly normal conversation with a stranger. At the same time, there are strict rules of engagement that dictate etiquette in the lineup. Without these unspoken guidelines, there would be bedlam in the water since there are so many of us vying for waves at the same time. But like any rules, sometimes you break them and pay a price. Which brings me back to the strange contrast of seeing Mr. Jones suffer such extreme consequences for breaking the rules of surfing.
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I met Mr. Jones when I was eleven years old. My older brother had joined the school surfing club and brought me to an event. By that point, the club had a committee, a calendar of inter-school and provincial competitions, and support from local surf shops. All these things were coordinated by Mr. Jones. There were monthly surf trips you could sign-up for and weekly trips to the beach for students at the boarding house. Between the misery of school and the freedom that surfing represented, Mr. Jones was an important bridge between these two worlds. By legitimizing the sport, he allowed surfers to develop an identity that could exist outside of common stereotypes. We were more than air-headed “waxies” and stoners. He made it possible to be a student at Grey and a surfer, and not feel like you’d compromised all forms of self-expression.
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In the late sixties, Ken Bradshaw moved from Texas to San Diego, an iconic city with a dense population of surfers that hasn’t stopped growing. The result is constantly clogged lineups, stiff competition for waves, and local surfers who maintain the hierarchy with an appetite for power that keeps the swelling population in check. What I’m getting at is this: if I think about it, Ken’s gross sense of justice in the water can be traced back to where he cut his teeth as a surfer.
Gqeberha (nee Port Elizabeth) is not exactly a surf mecca. Most spots in the bay are sheltered from open-ocean swell and often blown flat by gale force winds. Which is pretty cruel when you consider J-Bay, a world renown surf destination with perfect waves, is only 45 minutes away. Yet, it’s precisely because of these things that surfers from there are well-attuned to changes in swell and wind direction, deeply appreciative when conditions are right, and expertly trained in the art of carpark shit-talking - which is where we’ve all spent many hours staring at crappy waves.
At school, I remember how it felt to look out the window while sitting in class and see clouds start to move in a westerly direction. You’d know deep down that the waves were probably as close to perfect as they get. There was something cathartic about having a senior staff member like Mr. Jones to share in your pain. You’d pass him in the hallways between classes and commiserate over the lost opportunity. In response to the oft-lackluster conditions we would face after school, his most common response was, “Well, if it’s wet and it’s moving...” an optimistic mantra from someone who loved it all, good days and bad. As for his nickname,
Mr. Jones was called “Billows” by students because his suntanned face resembled the texture of biltong. Those wrinkles were symbols of his dedication and love for surfing, lines that told the story of weekend trips to J-Bay, and countless days at Pipe, Black Bottoms, sneaky afternoons at Avalanche or Humewood.
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Once upon a time, I had a lick of street cred in my hometown. I won a few regional contests and took myself seriously for someone whose competitive career was more of a mental mirage than reality. That version of myself didn’t last long. I’m in my late thirties now. Life is busy. Between work and parenting, I don’t have much spare time to work out or do yoga. And this is not so helpful when you’re scratching for three-foot runners on the weekends I can surf. I’m not ready to longboard full-time, but I bought a 6’5 mid length and it feels like I’ve rediscovered surfing. I surf less but love it more than ever.
There is something very satisfying about fading into anonymity. About letting everything you held onto for selfish reasons, for stupid reasons, for pride, just fall away. What you’re left with is the chunk of coal in your stomach that has been smoldering since your first wave. But here’s what’s tough about growing old: you never stop being a grom in your mind. Never stop wanting to surf as well as you could in your prime. Your mind knows what the body wants to do, but your legs and arms can’t always cash the checks. Mr. Jones surfed like someone who never needed fame, attention, or props. He was entirely at one with his lanky body and his oversized surfboard, and happy to sail across the mellowest of walls if, when, and how he saw fit, especially when accompanied by his children.
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Culture is fluid, always changing, responding, shifting. Things that were acceptable in the eighties, nineties, and early aughts would be considered outrageous today. At school, I saw teachers lose their tempers in ways that would not be tolerated today. Grey, with its giant, rolling list of rules, tended to create pressure-cooker situations.
But the only time I saw Mr. Jones get visibly angry was on a school surf trip to East London. To cut a long story short, we were at Yellow Sands on a beautiful, windless afternoon. It was inconsistent and the swell was fading. He and I sat and waited for a decent set to pull through and ended up staring at the horizon longer than either of us anticipated. Probably 15 minutes or so.
When the set we’d been waiting for came along, I couldn’t let him have it. I did the most selfish thing possible at that moment: I dropped in on him. There was something surreal about the moment. Billows was right behind me; I could hear him whistling and calling me off, but I just thought: hey, he’s my teacher, what can he really do to me? When I finally kicked out, I saw his face roiled in frustration, like he could have bitten my board if I was someone else.
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Right now, with a pandemic still upending life across the world, rules feel comforting.
Wash your hands.
Work from home.
Maintain a distance of 6 feet from people when making runs to the grocery store.
Wear a mask.
These are easy enough to follow. Steering clear of the beach is not so simple.
Between scrutinizing every tension headache and tickle in one’s throat, worrying about your family, and seeing the world as we know it grind to a halt, rules offer a course of action.
Back in March, 2020, as the crisis ramped up and state parks were about to shut down, I took a break from my phone, newsfeed, my work, and went surfing. Was it absolutely essential?
It felt that way.
For one thing, after weeks of escalating panic, it was great to see that nature was still there, not sick or frail, not dishing out opinions via social media. The trees were just as tall and sobering, the trail toward the water just as green. And, my god, it was good to be in the water. Going to the beach felt like breaking the rules. It was crowded and everyone there seemed sheepish, weary, guilty for the same reason.
The truth is that I am terrified of this virus. Of catching it, spreading it, losing loved ones to it. And because of this, I did my best to keep a distance from others, limit conversation, stick to my own business in the water. But there was one thing I hadn’t factored in before paddling out: surfing’s different rules. In the lineup, surfers were still blasting snollies and spitting in the water, still peeing all over themselves. This didn’t ruin my last session before lockdown, but it didn’t help. I tried hard not to think about it and steer clear of my peers. Around the world, surfers started losing their minds when the beaches closed.
And I totally understand it.
Surfing is not a hobby, it’s not the same thing as a gym membership, a newfound interest in road biking or yoga.
It is something else. Our lust for waves can make a person do wild things.
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Ken Bradshaw could have severed a human head with those mandibles, but not Mr. Jones’s surfboard. Billows was something of a mid-length maverick back then. He rode a 6’7, sometimes a 7’0, that was seen as unnecessarily long and full of volume at the time. It was the perfect board to cruise across the flatter, windblown walls of Pipe, easy to paddle, steady as the tides (local shaper, Dennis Ellis, would convert him to riding much shorter boards later on). It was the ideal board for surfing’s everyman and probably the only board a human being, even one as strong as Ken Bradshaw, could not bite through. I’m not sure if this was luck or kismet.
As for Mr. Jones, he didn’t say much about the incident. Just cracked a few jokes at his own expense and moved on.
There comes a point in every famous surfer’s career where they inevitably become less famous, even to surfers. Mark Richards, for example, arguably the second greatest competitor in history, could walk into a bar in J-Bay tomorrow (in-person bar visits are allowed right now in this hypothetical) and only get noticed by a handful of fans.
Kelly Slater, often heralded the Greatest of All Time, would probably face a slightly shorter line of autograph and selfie-seekers than he would have a decade ago, but he still wields the type of fame that makes him recognizable in Minnesota and Utah. One day, that’ll change; maybe that’s all Kelly is fighting at this stage of his career by still competing at 48, the exact same age as Ken when he lashed out at Billows.
When you strip away all the scaffolding and lights of fame, they’re just regular people who want as many waves as possible.
By 2000, Ken Bradshaw had already surfed an eighty-foot (or however many feet it was) wave, starred in the Odyssey, established himself as a household name. He was probably just beyond his physical peak, still in his prime board biting years but not quite top of the heap anymore.
In any other scenario, I keep thinking that he and Layne could have had a really good conversation with Mr. Jones that day, and probably shared a good laugh.
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There are times when I think about the board biting incident late at night, wild-eyed in frustration, and it makes me physically angry. I’ve gone as far as emailing Bradshaw and Layne Beachley and asking for their sides of the story, to no avail. And truthfully, I don’t expect them to answer for it; I have acted like a complete dickhead many, many times.
I can only imagine the endless reasons he did what he did on that day back in July 2000, but it likely boils down to the heat of the moment. It was crowded. We were all trying to get our fill. The rules couldn’t stop everyone in the water from stealing waves.
Billows likely saw a good one, a stream of other takers, and the prospect of a long wait under similar circumstances if he held back. So, he burned Layne Beachley, broke the rules, and figured, “hey, what’s the worst that could happen?”