Jeff Hakman’s story
This book is not a literary work, but it does provide an insight into the beginnings of professional surfing, from its infancy on the North Shore to its commercialization through the IPO of the iconic surfwear brand, Quicksilver.
Jeff Hakman’s biography is also the story of a man who is willing to reveal the darkest facets of his history in order to make peace with his past, and with the individuals who crossed his path.
This account shows how the moral revolution of the 70s affected the surfing community in the U.S. and Hawaii. If Jeff’s biographer emphasizes the discovery of drugs, which is a characteristic of this period, what about his idealistic, anti-establishment side, which seems to have slipped off young Jeff’s shoulders like crystal-clear water, as he concentrated on perfecting his surfing.
In the midst of Apartheid, when half the world is boycotting South Africa, young Jeff agrees to travel there to take part in a competition. His compatriot, a native Hawaiian, is banned from the hotel because he’s black, but this does nothing to dampen Jeff’s spirits, as the ups and downs of the world should in no way distract him from his quest for happiness.
Every surfer knows that immersion in the ocean frees him or her from the world and its vagaries, but landlubbers run the show, and the surfer who returns to dry land has to play the balancing act between his or her hedonistic aspirations and the vicissitudes of terrestrial life.
Here, we have a very Wasp reading of life, which boils down to social and professional success: success in competition and in business are the story’s common thread, endangered by Heroin, Jeff’s diabolical alter-ego.
The Quicksilver version of the American Way Off Life? Undeniably, a page in surfing history. At least, one of its facets, the testimony of a surfing pioneer.
Female readers, and Tahitian women in particular, will be jumping up and down when they read the passage about Hakman’s Tahitian holiday, a description perfectly in tune with the communications of the major surf brands of the 90s: women, an object of pleasure that extends the pleasure of surfing.
Anecdotally, if you’ve read L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être, you’ll have a good laugh when you read this sentence, by which Jef Kakman intends to describe his happy youth on the beaches of California:
“When I remember that year, I think of the title of Kundera’s book, The Incredible lightness of being, because that’s how I lived through that period.
I hope that since the first publication of his biography in 1997, some generous soul will have explained to Mr. Hakman or his publisher that this book by Kundera, whose title he misread, and probably not its content, is rather about the difficulty of living, particularly in Czechoslovakia under the Soviet yoke, in 1968.
And it would have been happier to draw parallels with Hakman’s life in the chapters on his drug addiction, which illustrate the weight of the choices we are led to make over the course of a lifetime, rather than in the chapter describing the wonder of young Hakman immersed in surf culture.
Mr Sunset, The story of Jeff Hakman, The stormy and radiant life of a legendary surfer, Phil Jarrat, Editions Vent de Terre.
