Jughead

“I used to get jealous watching all these guys being recognized as ‘big-wave surfers,’” says Justen “Jughead” Allport, as we sift through the jumbled contents of his garage. “Do they even have a seven-footer in their quiver?” 

His nondescript house on a nondescript suburban street on the New South Wales Central Coast does nothing to convey the madness that dwells within him. Only the interior of his garage does. It’s chaos in here, chocked with surfing paraphernalia that’s steered him through some of the heaviest waves ever surfed by flesh and bone. He gives me the rundown as we go. 

In the middle of the floor, covered in clutter, is the jet ski he barely uses anymore because, he says, “towing is lame, most of the time.” A handful of tiny boards scattered around belong to his four children. A tow board in the corner is of the same design as the one he was riding on the day he snapped his leg in five places at Ghost Tree. And hanging above us are the exquisitely shaped big-wave paddle guns that prompted his original quip. 

He lets rip with another one for good measure: “I see guys who can’t make it on the WQS and, the next minute, they’re a big-wave surfer and they’re asking me to teach ’em how to tow, and then after that they’re surfing Jaws at midnight, dropping out of B-52 bombers with a jet ski.” 

He laughs, incredulously. Jughead—so named by 90s pro Jason Buttonshaw, because of a ripping bowl cut Allport had as a teen—is aged 44, and has existed at the pointy end of big-wave surfing for nearly three decades. Pipe, Maverick’s, Indicators, The Right, Himalayas, Waimea, Uluwatu Bommie, Ours, Ghost Tree, Pedra Branca, Shipstern Bluff, Cyclops—he’s surfed them all, and mostly done so off his own back, paying his way around the world while rais-ing a young family as a full-time fireman.

“I just get a buzz from riding heavy, super-thick waves,” he says and shrugs. 

Growing up as one of four children to a young mother and a merchant seaman father, Allport’s childhood was far from ideal. His father would be away at sea for ten weeks at a time, and when he got back, things often grew worse. “My parents did a lot of drugs. I remember driving home, the four of us in the back of our Kingswood, and they were high on acid, freaking that the trees were coming in,” he recalls. 

Surfing was always an escape. A short bike ride from his family’s rental home lay an underwater Never-Never Land of rock slabs and reef breaks. “Surfing was a way of getting out of my little reality of thinking everything was normal and alright when, in the back of my head, I was thinking, ‘Na, it’s not,’” he says. “I liked the adrenaline. I was always scared but I kept going back. I’d be shit scared, I’d be screaming, but I used to fight my emotions.”

He made his name in slabs. His hometown, Long Port (where he still lives today), is surrounded by them. He started young, as an 11 year old, at an appropriately named piece of reef nearby called Crackneck. By 15, he’d graduated to a different rock shelf 100 feet away, known as Indicators (aka The Zone). The move made him one of the first to ever surf the place, and by adulthood definitely the best. Over the next decade he turned slab surfing into an art, piloting the kind of crystalline contortions that give most people nightmares. 

“He’s one of those surfers who shows that the impossible is possible, that the unsurvivable is actually survivable,” says leading Australian big-wave surfer, Mark Mathews, who, when I speak with him, happens to be recovering from a leg injury that nearly required amputation, suffered at a horrendous East Coast slab. “He would give me confidence that I could do it and survive,” he adds. 

Whenever Allport tried to explain his obsession to his mates, they didn’t get it. Back when Jug started his journey, slabs were considered unsurfable for the most part, best left to the bodyboarding community. From shore, his favorite wave, Indicators, looked like a gurgling, unsurfable, below-sea-level monster. Which is true—but for Jughead, that only added to its allure.  

With one leg in the strap and the other free, Allport was spun like a propeller, leaving him with a spiral fracture in five places. He has permanent nerve damage as a result.

“It was a buzz just being out there, ’cos you feel like you’re out surfing these waves that no one even understands,” he says. “Unless you’re there, you don’t know. And it was hard trying to explain it to someone, because I felt like they would never have believed me.” 

As a 15 year old in 1989, he went to Bali for the first time, where he took on a massive swell at the Uluwatu Bommie, developing an immediate and everlasting affinity for the wave. “You’re out there,” he says, “way out there, and it was my first overseas trip back then, so it was exotic. No motor in or out, so if you got hurt you were in trouble.”

He became a regular in Hawaii during the early 90s, surfing giant Himalayas and Waimea Bay with his friend and mentor Kirk Bierke. Today, Bierke is known as the father of Australian big-wave talent Russ Bierke—though back then, he was just a little known shaper and charger living on Oahu. 

As Allport continued to travel, he met other likeminded lunatics in the process. In the early 2000s, while surfing all-time Desert Point, he became close mates with American pro Ken “Skindog” Collins, who invited Jug to stay with him in America and take on Maverick’s. “Ever since I saw Jay Moriarity paddling it as a 16 year old, it was my dream,” he says.

On that first trip, however, fate intervened. A giant swell lit up Ghost Tree, and Skinny and Jug decided to tow. After being whipped into the maw of a 50-foot-plus wave, Allport ignored all advice and faded even deeper. “I was just frothing, too psyched,” he says. “I came off the bottom of this thing, got up into the pocket, looked down, and there was this giant boil. I thought, ‘No worries, I’ll just ollie over this thing.’ But I was riding Skinny’s board and it felt a bit funny and, as I landed on the other side of the boil, it just stopped and I got mowed down.” 

With one leg in the strap and the other free, Allport was spun like a propeller, leaving him with a spiral fracture in five places. He has permanent nerve damage as a result, meaning numbness and a 20 percent loss of movement in his foot. The injury has made quick, under-the-lip takeoffs at Indicators a little more difficult—not that he’s complaining, or that it matters. 

“I just had to adjust,” he says. “If you harp on it too long and think about it, you’ll be down. I just think about what I can still do and I don’t whine about what I can’t.” 

He returned to Maverick’s a couple years later to finish the job but, again, the swell looked too big. With a handful of tow teams already on it, including Garrett McNamara and Peter Mel, it looked like Jug was going to miss out on his dream again. Then Skindog suggested they just paddle out on their guns to take a look. 

“So he gets one and I’m like, ‘Fuck that…I’m just gonna paddle over while Skinny takes his and I’m gonna get one,’” he recalls. “And Garrett is on the ski, and he’s going, ‘You know, if you’re paddling I can’t tow?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, well, I just wanna catch one. I wanna catch a big one, but I wanna fucking paddle into one, you know?’”

What happened next remains one of the highlights of Allport’s life. Peter Mel and Anthony Tashnick jumped off their ski, and it became a paddle session. “Within about 20 minutes,” he recalls, “Skindog is back out there like, ‘Yeah Jug! You’re fucking gonna paddle one! Get on the bowl!’ And Garrett was cool, and Flea came up to me all stoked.” 

As tow surfing reached full fad, Jughead found himself arriving at his favorite spots to be greeted by a full-blown circus. He hated it.

In his mind, the episode crystallized the responsibilities of tow surfers when sharing the lineup with paddlers. “It was cool and it was straight up,” he says. “I was like, ‘You know what, these guys are onto it. If anyone is paddling, you just don’t tow.’ That’s gotta be the way it is.”

Up until that point, Jughead’s performances in waves of consequence were undeniable. During one hot streak, he appeared on six magazine covers in an 18-month period—a record for any unsponsored surfer. Soon the surf industry came knocking, first with small offers, and eventually with real money. Initially he accepted a travel budget from a now-defunct independent label, which was enough to get him around the world to a few swells, but the gloss quickly wore off.

“I got obsessed with chasing shots for the magazines to justify the money I was getting. Then I started looking at other guys going, ‘Why are they getting that? Why’s that guy in the mag?’ I got confused about the whole thing.”

As tow surfing reached full fad, he found himself arriving at his favorite spots only to be greeted by a full-blown circus. He hated it. “I just said to myself, ‘You’re an idiot! You need to be getting paid a lot more money to be trapped up in this. Get out while you can!’” 

When Rusty approached him with a five-figure deal, plus the possibility of doubling it if he performed well, he knocked the offer back out of loyalty to his local shaper. “I’d had boards given to me all my life,” he says. “I was nearly 30. I was over the hill. I thought, ‘Why would I shit on the guy who’s given me boards for the last 15 or 16 years?’ I just went, ‘Na, I gotta be loyal.’” 

Jaded, he dropped out and headed for the beating heart of Australian big-wave surfing, the Victorian West Coast, where it was still possible to takeoff on double-overhead waves until your arms fell off, with the assurance that no one would be around to document it. But even there, his newfound celebrity was causing him trouble. “I had a couple of hassles when I turned up. A few guys said, ‘You’ve done the wrong thing down here. You’ve done this and that.’ I told them, ‘I’ve never taken a photo down here, never turned up with a photographer. I always turn up by myself.’”

Just as his disillusionment was peaking, Allport’s world was rocked by the suicide of his brother. In the aftermath, his grief was paralyzing. He admits now that he “didn’t really deal with it.” Instead, he buried himself further in the pursuit of the biggest waves he could find. Eighteen months after his brother’s passing, he found himself in Tasmania riding what was then one of the biggest waves ever caught at Pedra Branca—a terrifying, open-ocean bombora located 20 miles off Australia’s southernmost tip. 

The wave in question, in which he once again ollied off a step on a 40-foot-plus face, won him that year’s Oakley Big Wave Award. Behind the scenes, however, he was falling apart. “I fell into a slump where it hit home that my brother had killed himself. I’d go to work and I’d be numb, and I’d be at home and I’d be numb,” he recalls. 

After returning from Tasmania, and a brief family holiday in America, he couldn’t bring himself to surf for three months. He didn’t know why at the time, other than that it just didn’t feel right. He sought solace in family life, but when that stopped bringing him joy, he realized he was really on the ropes. His friends were prepared to stage an intervention.

Fortunately, it was around this time that he began speaking with Matty Dee, an Australian who owned the indie surf label FTW [Fuck The World], the same brand that sponsored Bobby Martinez during his now infamous World Tour resignation. Despite its name, FTW was actually dedicated to suicide prevention and raising awareness about mental health issues. And Dee was well positioned to offer Allport advice, having lost his own brother and sister to suicide. 

The pair would spend hours on the phone in the coming months. “I felt comfortable with him,” Allport says, “because I didn’t know him, so I was just telling him my little problems. Actually, most of the time it wasn’t even my problems. I was just chatting to him. He’d been there and I knew he understood, so I felt comfortable talking to someone like that.”

Dee wanted to give Allport added purpose by offering him a role as a brand ambassador for FTW. There wouldn’t be any money in it, Dee said, but Allport would be helping fight depression and suicide. Jug didn’t take the decision lightly. By then, he hated the idea of self-promotion, and the surf industry in general. “But I got thinking. I said to myself, ‘If you’re not gonna do it for yourself, do it for your brother, do it for Matty, do it just to, you know, raise awareness about suicide prevention.’” 

He was in, but in order to fulfill his role he needed to start surfing again. He’d spent so much time out of the water that he wasn’t sure if he could even surf his favorite waves anymore. “I started to wonder, ‘When a certain wave breaks, will I even takeoff?’” he says. 

Then one day he “snapped” and went for a surf. “It was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I felt like the biggest weight had been lifted off my shoulders.” Looking back, he thinks he banned himself from surfing as a form of punishment. “I felt guilty for something. I don’t know what, maybe not being there for my brother. I don’t know. But I was really punishing myself, and I wouldn’t admit that it was why I wasn’t surfing.” 

“You go through a stage when you’ve been chasing all these waves, and you’ve got all this adrenaline, and then all of a sudden you stop. You’re left a little bit empty.”

The time out of the water also made him realize how much of his identity had been tied up in surfing big waves. “You go through a stage when you’ve been chasing all these waves, and you’ve got all this adrenaline, and then all of a sudden you stop. You’re left a little bit empty. What are you gonna fill in the time with? What are you going to use to fill in the excitement that you used to have? You get used to it. You want bigger, you want gnarlier. Then all of a sudden you don’t have it. You feel lost and that can create mental health issues.”

Given the kinds of waves that Jughead remains attracted to, it would seem obvious that he can’t go on like this forever. For instance, at the 2016 Red Bull Cape Fear event at Ours, he put on a master class in what was undoubtedly the most dramatic and dangerous day of competition ever seen in Australian surfing. Catching mutant wave after mutant wave, he was on his way to victory in his opening heat when he went over the falls on a set and cracked his head on the reef, resulting in a concussion and 15 stitches. He was ruled out for the remainder of the event, but he also maintains that he would have surfed the following day with a stocking covering the flap of skin on his head if he’d been allowed to.

Yet, paradoxically, it seems as if slowing down might be even more likely to kill him. As his wife explained, by riding the heaviest waves he can find, he’s not only doing right by himself, he’s also doing right by his family.

“My wife brings me back,” he says. “She goes, ‘Hey, how are [the kids] gonna go aspire to be anything if you haven’t got any aspirations and goals, and can’t show them those? By surfing, you’re showing them you can have dreams, and you can go and chase them.’”

Following that advice, he’s committed to going harder than ever. “Sometimes I get up a bit slow or don’t make a drop like I should, and it rattles me a bit,” he says, laughing. “I don’t do any exercise other than surfing, so I might have to do yoga or meditate or eat a bit better.” As our chat winds down, Jug is ready to head off again, this time to Hawaii, where he will score massive Jaws on the same day the mistaken nuclear missile alert is issued. He also lets me in on another addiction he’s developed along Australia’s southern coastline—a wave they call Cancer. “We named it that because if you surf it, you can die,” he says.

According to Jug, Cancer can hold up to 15 feet, and churn out tubes as round and perfect as anywhere. The only catch is a large rock that pops up in the middle of the tube when you’re in it. “Every wave comes in from a different direction, and five out of ten barrel straight through the rock,” he says. “You’ll be in the pit and you can see the rock down the line—a dry rock popping up—and you just have to pin drop in the pit and get washed on it. But it draws you back. You think you just want one out there. Then you get one and you make it and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is a bit addictive.’”

[Feature image: Photo by Brett Hemmings/Red Bull.]