This is about that one moment in life when you are simply doing what you do and something magical happens. ADVERTISING This is about that one moment in life when you are simply doing what you do and something magical
This is about that one moment in life when you are simply doing what you do and something magical happens.
We have these images in sports that personify iconic moments of achievement, like the baseline, hanging, reverse layup by Julius Erving in his ABA days, Curt Schilling’s bloody sock, Earl Campbell breaking into the secondary, tearing through a defense that was tearing apart his jersey.
We could do this all day, but it is less often that those frozen moments come in a disaster and then open the door to a career.
That’s essentially what happened to Hilo body boarder Spencer Skipper 20 years ago at the Pro-Am Trials at Honoli’i.
“Pretty much,” he said last week in a phone interview from Oahu where he owns an operates Hidentity Surf at Kalama Valley, “my crash put me on the map, you could say.”
It couldn’t have come at a better time and had it not come, it’s possible the outside world might not know Skipper, who now has his own line of body boards and is still enjoying the benefits of a 20-plus year career in surf sports.
A Hilo High School grad, Skipper learned the sport from his father Steve, a military brat who had surfed as a kid and taught Spencer’s older brother Shayne who, in turn, helped his younger brother.
“It was not long after (high school) graduation,” Steve Skipper said. “I went to Spence and said, ‘Dude, let’s start making some plans,’ but he said, ‘You know, I’d like to just cruise a little bit.’
“We made a deal,” Steve said. “I told him I’d give him a year to cruise, see if he could get something going in (body board) tournaments and whatnot, but he would have to earn some money and help on expenses, then after a year, if it wasn’t working out, we’d talk about college.”
Spencer had already won a US Amateur championship at Huntington Beach, Calif., and had been offered a contract by Morey, but he surprised his father when he declined the deal because the water had been pretty flat, he didn’t extend himself much and didn’t feel it would be a good offer.
Not much later, at the Pro-Am Trials at Honoli’i, Spencer was having a good day in the top group but nobody had been able to separate from the pack.
“There was a big north swell running on the sand bar,” Spencer said, “nobody really wanted to surf there; it was kind of a do or die type thing, but I had a couple friends telling me, ‘You better do something,’ so yeah, I went out for it.”
Skipper said he got up on the fat lip of a heavy wave, way up top, but he got pulled under, spit up and came back down hard.
“It crushed me,” he said. “The idea was to do an aerial, a lip side floater thing but I just basically got smashed. It took me down, tore my leash away, ripped off my fins and jersey, I was a mess.”
A beautiful mess, as it turned out.
The image was captured, spectacularly, and found its way to the cover of of Rip Tide Magazine, the most prominent body boarding publication on the planet, and not just any Rip Tide issue, but the end-of-year Pictures of the Year issue.
There he was on the cover of the keepsake issue every serious body boarder perused with great interest, and kept on the shelf for a long while. The deal with Morey came through, then another sponsor materialized, and another.
Spencer Skipper was traveling the world, representing Hilo, his sponsors, and most assuredly, his family.
He worked his way through the ranks. Skipper defeated defending US champion Mike Stewart, won tournaments around the world and was ranked first in reader’s polls of favorite body boarders, regularly appearing in Top 10 lists. His role near the top of body boarder competitors was assured.
Since then, money has flowed into surfing, bringing new waves of sponsors and the rise of paddleboards has also eroded interest from body boarders, but they are still out there, testing, risking, exploring, testing the biggest waves before surfers venture out.
And sometimes they crash, majestically, historically and paradoxically, for all the right reasons.
(Contact Bart with ideas, comments battribuneherald@gmail.com)
