He’d Still Rather Surf Than Work : Corky Carroll Cultivates Image of Living for the Next Wave

Corky Carroll once made $30,000 a year as a professional surfer, but when the sport’s popularity waned in the early ‘70s, he had to forge a meager existence in such endeavors as a dishwasher, waiter, ski boot riveter and musician. He supported himself in the summer of ’75 by selling balloons at the Orange County Fair.

Today, he is back doing what he does best--selling himself and the life style created by his friends of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Step right up, and meet the man who doesn’t work for a living. A first-class raconteur. A man who once fell off a skateboard on the Johnny Carson Show. A man who once piled 40 surfboards atop a Volkswagen Bug and drove down Main Street, Huntington Beach.

“Hey, it’s hard keeping up this image of not having a real job,” he said, adding that he finally is considering his place among America’s working force.

And get this. He wants a job. Any job. “I could use the money, I don’t have any,” he said. “People seem to think I’m rich because they see me on TV. But I’m not.”

Carroll’s eyes explode at the thought of a real job, but soon he comes to his senses, and says, “Well, not really a job, just a steady income.”

Carroll has tried it all: the shams, the promotions, the hustles. He most recently has supported himself by endorsing sunglasses, sunscreen products and a casual clothing line. But his bread-and-butter is a beer promotion.

His on-camera persona of professional beach bum has brought surfing’s romanticism to the steel mills of Pittsburgh and the corn fields of Kansas.

But is life really just one big hustle?

“What you see is what you get,” Carroll says. “Being me isn’t that bad because there is a funny character in here somewhere. People relate to it. They say, yeah, that is the guy who never holds a job. If I just try and be me, people tend to get a kick out of it.”

Carroll’s depiction as happy-go-lucky bachelor is a bit skewed, however. He and Cheryl Carroll have been married 21 years, though they’ve been separated for four years. They have a 20-year-old son, Curtis, who lives in San Clemente near his father.

Then there is the matter of age. Carroll, it seems, sometimes likes to evade the issue. He says he is 39-going-on-20, trying to remain forever young.

But he is 42.

As middle age creeps up, his hair is no longer the color of straw, having turned salt-and-pepper gray. His middle is paunchy and his once-taut cheeks are sagging. But he can still turn a few heads at his local break of Cotton’s Point in San Clemente. In surfing parlance, the dude can still rip.

By perpetuating the image of beach bum, it often is forgotten that Carroll is perhaps one of the all-time best surfers. He helped forge the short board generation in the late 1960s that radically altered the sport. Surfing went from a sport where musclemen and women rode on bulky 10-foot boards to one of lightning quick maneuvers by kids on lightweight fiberglass boards.

Carroll learned to surf as an 8-year-old on a borrowed board near his parents’ home at Surfside. He began competing by age 11 and turned professional at 13. He was a five-time U.S. surfing champion when the championships at Huntington Beach were the world’s premier contest.

“My parents didn’t think much of surfing until I started making a living from it,” he said. “Then they thought, ‘Hey, this is all right.’ ”

Known for his rambunctious nature, Carroll recalls those halcyon days of professional surfing as some of the best of his life. He was a big-time goof-off, known for starting the infamous mash potato wars--a full-scale food fight--at Marina High School.

Though he would rather have been on the beach than in the classroom, Carroll said he never ditched school to go surfing.

Well, almost never.

“We did it once and the vice principal walked out on the Huntington Beach Pier and waved to us,” Carroll said. “He said, ‘I’ll see you guys in my office tomorrow.’ ”

The young surfers received a lecture, but talked their way out of disciplinary action.

Carroll says he was a good student, but perhaps his best subject has been surviving.