Surfer Gerlach Has a Certain Style : Flamboyance, Personality Set Him Apart on Pro Tour

When professional surfer Brad Gerlach was 14 months old, his father threw him off the high dive into a swimming pool. When Joe Gerlach plunged in, he found his son paddling underwater as furiously as an otter.

Upon surfacing in his father’s arms, his first words were “More! More!”

When Gerlach was 4, his father tossed him out a two-story window onto a piece of foam, and after amused Johnny Carson and viewers of “The Tonight Show” with the story.

If Joe Gerlach’s child-raising strategies never received an endorsement from Dr. Spock, it was only because he was not an average parent.

A world professional diving champion in 1963 and 1964, Joe Gerlach later earned his living by jumping off 10-story buildings. He had the broken bones to show for it. But he recognized in Brad the same athletic talent and fearless nature.

If the ends justify the means, it appears that Joe Gerlach did very well by his son. At age 20, Brad Gerlach is one of the most promising--and flamboyant--surfers on the world tour.

“There is a mental attitude that Brad has always had,” Joe Gerlach said. “It’s the winning attitude. Whether it was just inherent or whether he learned it from me, he has the desire to be a world champion.”

Gerlach also has a streak of nonconformity that sets him apart on the tour, perhaps the effect of idolizing a man who performed stunts on television with Evel Knievel.

“It’s really good that I’m like my Dad,” Gerlach said. “He’s a classic. I don’t know anybody like him.”

He recalls watching his father dive off a platform 40 feet above the floor onto a large sponge constructed between the blackjack tables of a Las Vegas casino.

“When I was 3, I remember watching him at Circus Circus,” he said. “I knew the whole speech and I used to do it at home, ‘Joe Gerlach, the daredevil--’ and then I’d fall on my face, just like I was him.”

It is probably fortunate for Brad Gerlach’s life and limbs that he was raised in Leucadia, where the most convenient outlet for his vast energies was a beach rather than a shooting range or auto raceway. Nonetheless, his mother, a former professional water skier, half-jokingly blames him for her gray hair.

“He was on first-name basis with the people in the emergency room,” Cheryl Gerlach said, describing his three broken collarbones, a dog bite in the eye and various broken fingers. “We’d bring him in and they’d say, ‘Hi, Brad!’ His father told me to lock him in a padded room until he was 21.”

Brad said: “Some people said I was an incorrigible child. My parents raised me to be independent, and that’s what they got.”

But he survived his accident-prone childhood. And despite an early surfing mishap that resulted in 150 stitches in his mouth and nose, traces of which are still visible, he knew by the time he started attending Huntington Beach High School that he had found his calling in the waves.

“There are days in the water when I feel immortal,” he said. “I’m the kind of person who gets bored easily and I have a really short attention span. But every single wave is different and that’s the challenge.”

He was riding high as he returned to Huntington Beach this week for the Op Pro Surfing championships, the most important contest in the continental United States in terms of money, points and prestige.

Gerlach recently moved into second place in the season standings of the Assn. of Surfing Professionals. Early in the summer, he placed second in the Gotcha Pro in Hawaii and again at a competition in South Africa. But he was eliminated from the next contest when he accidentally missed the start of his heat while watching the action from his hotel window. Then, he bounced back last week at the Foster’s Pro in England by finishing second behind World Champion Tommy Curren, whom Gerlach has never beaten.

“Brad’s certainly made quite an impact on the tour with his surfing and his personality,” said Ian Cairns, executive director of the ASP. “He’s a bit like a house on fire.”

But some say Gerlach, who finished his first full season on the tour in a respectable 27th place overall in 1985-86, may not be consistent enough to stay in the top 16 over the course of the season.

If he feels the pressure to improve, he doesn’t let it show. That’s something he was taught by his father.

“I think (Brad) has had the benefit of someone who has been through what he’s going through now,” Joe Gerlach said. “That sort of advice is rarely available in most families.”

Joe Gerlach, who now owns a laser entertainment company, is familiar with pressure. As an 18-year-old diver on the Hungarian national team, he was one of 35 athletes to defect to the United States at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, where he placed fourth.

He went on to become a Big 10 champion diver for the University of Michigan, a two-time U.S. national AAU champion, a coach of 1964 Olympic bronze medal winner Larry Andreasen and a stunt man who once plummeted out of a 100-foot high hot air balloon at a Monday night football game in 1972.

His son was born when Joe Gerlach was 27. Not only was Brad a precocious swimmer, but he began to talk very early. Some say he hasn’t quit since. He seldom meets a subject he doesn’t like and he sometimes worries that his penchant for conversation saps his energy.

He can get enthusiastic about everything from how terrific he feels when he wakes up every morning to his mostly vegetarian diet to Zen Buddhism. His faith in himself seems unlimited.

“I love food,” he’ll say. “I think I could be a great cook, if I concentrated on it.”

Or: “I really like music--all kinds of music, rock ‘n’ roll, reggae, classical, country-western. I could be a rock ‘n’ roll singer. I know I could manipulate a crowd. I can just picture myself singing with the whole crowd around me . . .

“I can act, too. I see movies like, ‘The Breakfast Club’ and I know I could do that . . .

“I should have studied languages. But I can speak (a little) Spanish, French and Japanese. When I’m in France for a couple weeks, it blows them away how well I can speak.”

His impersonations are famous on the tour, particularly one of South African surfer Shaun Tomson. That talent even allowed him to perform at an amateur night at La Jolla’s Comedy Store recently.

His admirers call him unaffected and optimistic. His critics say he sometimes sounds arrogant. He disagrees.

“I don’t think I’m overly arrogant,” he said. “I don’t think people feel like, ‘Oh, God, shut this guy up.’ ”

For the most part, he believes he backs up his words with his surfing performances.

“He’s a fantastic surfer, a very creative surfer with very radical moves,” said Op Pro beach marshall Ron Grimaud, past president of the National Scholatic Surfing Assn. and its current competition director. “He has an excellent sense of where the power of the wave is. Being such a gifted athlete, he can do things a lot of others can’t manage.”

Added Cairns: “He likes the big moves, big re-entries. Any shortcomings, such as a lack of finesse, he makes up for in enthusiasm, aggressiveness and flamboyance.

“He’s very entertaining. He’ll jazz it up and the judges like someone who projects that, someone who looks like they’re working hard.”

Cairns said Gerlach has matured since his days as a teen-ager when the NSSA refused to renew his membership on the national team because he wouldn’t follow orders.

“I’ve had heaps of hassles with Brad in the past, but basically he’s grown up in the last year,” Cairns said. “He’s learned a lot of lessons--it’s bloody hard work and discipline and sacrifice and all those cliches no one wants to hear when they’re young and wild.

“But I think he still has some smoothing out and growing up to do. One thing that goes against Brad is that he’s only been on the tour one full year. He hasn’t been to all the places and learned how to handle all the things that can go wrong--you have to be able to be hot Wednesday through Sunday in eight cities on three continents in eight weeks. It’s a matter of pacing.”

Considering his father’s background and his own personality, one thing Gerlach isn’t concerned about is a lack of name recognition. For example, he was walking on the beach near a contest in Australia not long ago when he saw a very tall blonde sunbathing.

Gerlach started a conversation, which he said wound up lasting three hours. At first, he didn’t recognize that the woman was Daryl Hannah, the star of several films, including “Splash” and “Legal Eagles.”

Didn’t he think it was strange that she didn’t tell him she was Daryl Hannah?

“Well, I didn’t say I was Brad Gerlach, either.”