Awesome one from the crew at the Santa Barbara Independent!
When Shaun Tomson draws lines, people pay attention. More to the point, when Shaun Tomson draws lines, the future often follows. It has been this way since the early 1970s, when the rakishly handsome South African regular-foot first arrived on the international surfing scene.
With an aristocratic air and the outward seriousness of a committed, world-class athlete, Tomson would go on to help create professional competitive surfing as we know it while also singlehandedly altering how the best wave riders on the planet surf inside the barrel. His early impact was seismic, but it was also just the beginning.
Next week, at the Waterman’s Ball in Laguna Beach, the longtime Santa Barbara area resident will be recognized by the Surf Industry Member Association (SIMA) with their prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. It is a heady bit of accolades for the soon-to-be 70-year-old, one that perfectly encapsulates his nearly six decades of diverse and dynamic contributions to the sport of kings and beyond.
“The elemental lessons of surfing can offer a profound path forward in life. It provides connection to the natural world, connection to other people, and connection to yourself. [For me], it has been at the core of everything,” explained Tomson recently in a conversation with the Independent.
“It has given me a career and has helped me make sense of pain and suffering…. But, most of all, it has helped me find my purpose,” he continued. “My early surfing years, it was all about breaking ground, competing, and surviving. Starting and growing a company to fund my surfing career. Being an entrepreneur. But so much of my later surfing life has been directly inspired by children. From losing our beautiful boy Mathew to finding new purpose in life by connecting with kids and helping them empower themselves. The book writing and the public speaking that I am doing, it all comes from the core of surfing.”
For the uninitiated, a quick review of Tomson’s résumé is likely needed for proper context around his SIMA award. There is, of course, the aforementioned role he played in giving birth to modern professional surfing with his contemporaries from the Freeride Generation, a group of international surfers who famously put competitive surfing on the map in the mid-1970s and through their sheer will, bravado, and self-possessed vision of the future soon turned it into a legitimate career path. The story of Tomson and peers such as Rabbit Bartholomew, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, and Peter Townend was made famous in the 2008 film Bustin’ Down the Door (produced by Tomson), a movie that lives in local lore as arguably the most popular premiere in the history of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Tomson was the World Champion of surfing in 1977 and remained a competitive force to be reckoned with all the way up to his retirement in 1990, notching numerous contest wins along the way and almost always placing Top 10 in the world at the close of each season. He founded the hugely popular 1980s surf brand Instinct Surfwear and later, working alongside his wife, Carla, the brand Solitude. He also spent time working for industry titans like Patagonia and O’Neill as well as owning a surf shop in Santa Monica called Surfbeat. He was the first professional surfer to join the Surfrider Foundation as an ambassador and eventually ended up as the chair of their National Advisory Board.
Other career highlights include his role as the vice president of the Association of Surfing Professionals, his induction into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, briefly moonlighting as a Calvin Klein model, and his nod from Surfer magazine in 2009 as “the #8 most influential surfer of all time.” The latter, due in no small part to the fact that Tomson’s trademark tube riding style — wide stance, leading arm forward, weight shifting from toe to heel and back again — evolved seemingly overnight what high-performance surfing could look like. In short, his pioneering techniques fundamentally changed how people surfed and what lines they could draw on waves of consequence.
However, even as the surf world gathers to celebrate his storied accomplishments from the past, Tomson is very much living in the present. Tomson has also always been a bit of an intellect with an eye on the big picture. Even as he was working to create a new professional sport and become a world champion, he was also attending university in South Africa, eventually graduating with a degree in business administration and economics and, much more recently, a master’s of science degree from Northeastern University in leadership. In fact, to hear him tell it, it is this aspect of his personality that has led to what he is now most proud of.
After his teenage son died in 2006 during a schoolboy prank gone wrong, Tomson, in his own words, “was totally lost in grief.” Despite his many years of success as both a surfer and a businessman, he felt himself drifting without hope. “I lost sight of what was important in life. I was very raw and struggling to find a purpose,” said Tomson of those first years after he and Carla lost Mathew. But a fateful session at Rincon one afternoon and a chance conversation with Gordon Sichi, then the head of Santa Barbara’s Anacapa School, led to an invite for Tomson to speak with students about his career and the book he had just written, The Surfer’s Code. He had no idea at the time, but that opportunity was the start an entirely new chapter for the former champ.
“I love what I am doing these days. I love it, love it, love it,” said Tomson with an audible tremble of emotion in his voice. “I feel like this is my ultimate path. My real purpose.” Since that first day in front of a classroom, Tomson has turned himself into a potent public speaker and best-selling author of three books, his focus entirely on inspiring people (kids especially) and helping them connect with their bigger purpose in life. From career days at local high schools to talks at Santa Barbara County Jail to high profile gigs for corporate giants such as Google, Gap, and General Motors, Tomson uses the framework of surfing and his personal experiences with success and grief to connect with people and encourage them to walk their own path with pride and courage and deep emotional connectivity to the people and the planet that surround them.
“We live in a turbulent, broken, divided world,” Tomson said. “But I believe we all have a genetic compulsion to be better. To improve ourselves. And, in turn, help others along the way. We all want a life of hope and purpose. We just need a little encouragement to get there.”