Winter Lion

I find Wayne Rich at work inside a covert Central Coast shaping bay raised from a patch of dirt that once was famous for its greenhouses full of exotic orchids. He’s in the middle of the final push before an upcoming gathering of California’s extended surfboard tribe at the annual Boardroom Show in San Diego. He’ll be working late into the night as he prepares to be both an exhibitor at the event and a competitor in its celebrated Icons of Foam Shape-Off, a contest he’s won more times than anyone else. To power up, he’s devouring an In-N-Out cheeseburger that his wife, Ai, just dropped off. Animal Style.

The honey-hued light of a late-fall afternoon along the coast floods the scene. There is a chill in the shadows, a warmth in the sun. Inside the storage container/shaping room are surfboards in various stages of completion: a hand-routed hollow-chambered balsa gun. A custom Channel Islands log for Mikey February. A 7-foot triple-stringer with wings and a fluted diamondtail. A step-deck variant for Tosh Tudor. A fish for a longtime friend in New Jersey. A high-performance asymmetrical for “Brother Justin.” The variation and execution of such distinctly different designs is dizzying. This is no production facility, nor even one with much commercial consideration. 

“It’s a heavy thing to say, but Wayne Rich is as good as anybody I’ve ever worked with,” says Joel Tudor, who’s been a coconspirator in design with Rich for the better part of two decades. “He’s up there with all the best. There is no limit to what he can build.” And while Tudor has long been a household name among surfers, Rich has largely lurked in the shadows of mainstream awareness. 

As I watch Rich work, the conversation is casual. Wearing Levi’s 501s, an old Rincon Classic T-shirt, and foam-dust-covered black sneakers, he waxes poetic about the difference between a Skil 100 and a Rockwell 626 (the latter for shaping balsa), about sharpening technique and the importance of being able to repair your own tools and cut your own rocker into a blank. He shows me a visible hollow in the muscle below his left ring finger—his hand forever altered by his art, a permanent disfigurement caused by his own, highly modified, Skil 100.

Rich is now in his mid-sixties, an age that might have seemed unlikely for him to reach when he was in his twenties, when his life was defined by drugs, violence, and crime. Today, more than 30 years sober, the regularfoot is as committed as ever to both shaping and riding waves. He embodies a classic if not endangered California archetype, one that combines surfing, motor-powered thrills, and a mind for innovation.

Though the trials of time have softened him, he remains an intimidating presence, his deep-set and hawkish eyes readily suggesting a line that should not be crossed. He’s built strong, forearms rippled with muscle, back broad and outwardly athletic, hands calloused. He exudes an electric current of intensity, an appetite for confrontation. He’s passionate and outspoken and suffers zero bullshit. He is also a friend of the highest order—loyal, accountable, quick with a compliment when he sees fit, and always sincere. For the uninitiated, it is a polarizing blend of personalities. 

Alongside the works in progress in his bay hangs a world-class collection of templates—hundreds of them—representing Rich’s nearly half century of surfboard shaping and then some. Indeed, the array offers a line to the foundation of California’s most revered board builders: Bing. Hobie. Takayama. Yater. Becker. Weber. Jacobs. The space is one of honor and intention, a continuation of California’s legacy of purpose-driven design and precision board building. 

“When someone says, ‘Oh, this is the best thing’ or ‘This is the newest thing’ or whatever the claim is, I just laugh,” Rich says in between his final bites of burger. “Nothing is the best. And nothing is all that new. We are all standing on shoulders.”

•

Born and raised in Hermosa Beach in the South Bay of Los Angeles, Rich came of age in what was arguably the world’s epicenter of high-performance surfboard production for much of the 1960s and ’70s. Hermosa, then a blue-collar beach town, was home to two square blocks of surf factories and glass shops, including those belonging to titans like Greg Noll, Bing Surfboards, Rick Surfboards, Dale Velzy, and Dewey Weber, among others.

The middle child of three, Rich lived halfway between the Hermosa Pier and the Redondo Breakwater and has memories of riding surf mats as a 5-year-old in the shorepound at 22nd Avenue, a place ’60s surfer Henry Ford famously called “the birthplace of hotdog surfing.” 

His parents, JD and Roberta, met in flight school, and both worked in the aeronautical industry. Homelife wasn’t always easy. It also wasn’t always hard. Rich knew he was loved, but money was tight, and, to hear him tell it, JD, a veteran of WWII, was a hard-ass of a father, discipline focused and prone to anger. By the time Rich was finishing elementary school, his dad—an aerospace patternmaker by trade and an exceptional tinkerer—had outfitted him with his own Kennedy toolbox “filled with machinist stuff that he made sure I knew how to use.” To this day, Rich is at home with his head under the hood, monkeying over an engine. He still drives a Chevy van, JD’s vehicle of choice. 

For her part, Roberta (or Bertie, to those who knew her) was something of a waterwoman who dove Redondo’s old horseshoe pier and occasionally surfed and rode mats. She introduced Rich to the ocean at 3 years old by holding him in her arms and plunging under the lip of a breaking wave. She also signed him up at an early age at Hermosa’s Swim Gym, which is where Rich first met Dan Bendiksen, who was married to Rich’s swim instructor. 

Bendiksen was then the head shaper at Bing, in charge of making Nuuhiwa Noseriders and Bing Lightweights. He took a liking to Rich and soon became a second father of sorts, mentoring him both in the water and in the shaping room. By the age of 10, Rich was hanging out around Bing with regularity. 

“I remember watching Dan work over a raw blank. It was maybe fourth or fifth grade,” recalls Rich. “I asked him, ‘How do you know where to make those cuts?’ He gave me this serious look and said, ‘Son, to truly know the answer to that, you would have to spend the rest of your life shaping surfboards.’ That’s exactly what I’ve done.”

Rich’s line through the surf universe, however, nearly never was. Like many in the Southern California scene at the time, his childhood dreams were more motorized than ocean based. Though surfing never fully dropped off his radar, it played second fiddle for much of his teen years to racing motorcycles on dirt tracks. His North Star was the cultural intersection of The Endless Summer and On Any Sunday, and his Mecca was Ascot Park Speedway in Gardena. 

By all accounts, Rich was good. It wasn’t uncommon to find him standing on a podium at the end of race night, side by side with some of the best of his day. Or, as Rich puts it, his understated California twang on full display, “I could be dangerous out there.” 

His skill on two wheels became local lore that echoed for years among his crew of friends and the area’s younger generations. El Segundo’s Tyler Hatzikian, himself a top-tier board builder, wave rider, and accomplished throttle junkie, remembers hearing stories of Rich’s prowess. Some 15 years younger than Rich, Hatzikian worked as a production sander as a teenager at Wayne Miyata’s Shoreline Glassing factory in Hermosa. Rich had already left the South Bay by the time Hatzikian showed up, but his presence endured. “I was too young to have seen it myself, but I heard all about it as a kid,” he says. “Stories about Wayne, his motorcycle riding, his boards. All sorts of craziness. It was hard not to hear about him.” 

Though Rich peaked at the expert-level amateur class, he had a path to turning pro around the age of 18. He and his father certainly had the mechanical chops to keep up with the horsepower arms race at that level. They just didn’t have the money. To help even the playing field, Rich employed a balls-out, risk-taking approach to racing. The strategy matched his intense nature and competitive spirit, but was fraught with peril, and he began stacking injuries: broken bones, torn ligaments, concussions. 

At that time, he had an offer on the table for a full scholarship to the Northrop Aeronautical Institute, a famed finishing school for aviation and engineering. It was obvious what his family wanted, and it didn’t involve dying on a souped-up dirt bike. But Rich half-stepped, taking work pumping oil for his uncle’s company while still flirting with his racing dreams. Eventually the ultimatums intensified, and soon enough he quit the oil job and quit racing. Northrop made too much sense.

“[My parents] made it clear that the fun was over and it was time to figure things out,” he says. 

Only fate is a curious thing. And the combination of testosterone and anger is often a potent sort of alchemy. It was only a matter of time before Rich also quit Northrop. 

“My dream was dead,” he says. “Can I tell you something? It still hurts, man. It still hurts a lot. I’ve buried it away my whole life, but the pain is still right there. And I hurt my parents making those choices the way I did. I’ve tried to make it up in the surf world. I’ve really tried. And I’m still trying today.”

After bailing on college, a fully committed surf life became Rich’s singular focus. While Bendiksen’s mentorship was his entry point, other Hermosa shapers began slowly opening their shaping-room doors—household names like Phil Becker and Dewey Weber, along with lesser-known but equally important characters like Mike Geib and Bob “Red Man” Manville. A world-class, albeit informal, education was underway. Rich soon started shaping for the Weber team as well as working on his own label, WR Surfboards. He additionally helped to spearhead the revival of Jacobs Surfboards alongside his friend and partner, Ray Lucke. 

Unfortunately, Rich was also becoming an addict: cocaine, alcohol, crystal meth. “We took being a degenerate to the next level,” he says. “It was a really fucked-up time, and I was at the head of the class. I was out of control. Sure, we were building some incredible boards, surfing great waves. But I was high as a fucking kite the entire time.” 

Rich’s reputation grew in Hermosa—and not in a good way. He was running heavy with the drug crowd and had little regard for the fallout. He carried guns. He helped move narcotics. He got arrested for assault. He was on a speed-fueled path toward oblivion, with either jail or the morgue as the most likely outcome.

Before the close of the 1980s, word came from a friend on the inside that the police were getting ready to drop the hammer on Rich’s whole scene. A raid was imminent. With burning bridges lighting the way, he fled with the help of his lifelong friend Mike Pace. They loaded up a trailer in the middle of the night, and Rich disappeared north with $3,000 of unpaid-for Clark blanks in tow. 

He landed on the Avenue in Ventura, a place that had much more in common with skid row at the time than the hipster haven of industrial cool that it is today. Rich’s new home breaks were Silver Strand and Oxnard Shores, hard-edged places not welcoming to outsiders. The waves were serious too—dangerous, even, on the wrong day. He took work on a lobster boat to keep a low profile, but kept up his drug use and criminal-minded approach to survival. Multiple stints in Ventura County jail ensued: felony gun charges, felony drug charges. A 5150 arrest, which allows an adult who is experiencing a mental-health crisis to be involuntarily detained, led to time in a mental-health facility. At one point, police had seven warrants out for him. 

“Complete wreckage,” he says of his early days in Ventura. “It got to the point where I was likely headed to the state penitentiary. That’s just what happens when you’re already on probation and get arrested again on multiple felony charges. The animal in me had taken over.” 

Whether he was in the lineup, out to sea on a boat, or laying low in cheap hotels, it seemed that all of Rich’s life had become a pressure cooker of potential trouble.

Remarkably, it was in this environment where he finally found his way. His surfing life remained vibrant thanks to the power of the nearby beachbreaks and the unwavering support of friends like Steve Huerta, Butch Towers, Stan Fujii, and Ben Aipa through Ventura Surf Shop, and Dennis Montag and Dave McLauren of Ventura Ski and Sport, all of whom gave Rich a place to shape or some rack space to sell boards, despite his struggles with addiction and escalating legal problems. 

Meanwhile, Lunada Bay’s Zen Del Rio took Rich to his first 12-step meeting, and in February 1991, he finally put down the booze and the drugs for good. “[The process] didn’t stick right away,” he says, “but luckily I had the right people still in my life. Eddie Piper from Hawaii. Mike Ortega. Woollybear. My different probation officers. They all taught me in their own way how to reel it in from the edge. And surfing—there is no doubt that surfing has saved my life. The grace of God, brother. The grace of God.” 

On the legal side, Rich will also be the first to tell you that the system worked for him. There was a period of house arrest followed by nearly six years of probation—all of it a court-mandated high-wire act that promised time in prison should he make a misstep. “I know this isn’t true for everyone, but law enforcement helped me. I never would have made it without the system steering me straight,” he says.

In time, Rich’s northern drift continued, and with it his surfing and shaping education. By the mid-’90s, he was based in Santa Barbara, the clarion call of Rincon and various points west simply too intoxicating to ignore. Clyde Beatty Jr., one of his partners from his tenure with Jacobs, helped him set up shop shaping in the room next to Reynolds Yater on Gray Avenue. The late, great John Bradbury, of Creative Freedom fame, became a friend and shaping contemporary, as did other local craftsmen, like Matt Moore and Max McDonald. The area has been home ever since.

 “I remember when [Rich] first showed up here,” recalls Chuck Ames, founder of True Ames Fins in Goleta. “He wanted custom fins right from the get-go. I was like, ‘Whoa. Who is this guy?’ It kind of bugged me.” 

Ames came into work one day to discover Rich in the back, using Ames’ tools to tune up some fins that hadn’t been foiled to his liking. “He was back there tweaking the fins in my own shop,” says Ames with a laugh. “It probably should have pissed me off, but I was impressed. He was so into the details. The word ‘obsessed’ comes to mind. It wasn’t long before Wayne was at the top of my list of people I like to work with. If you ever watch him draw curves, he’s just so good at it. I’m in awe, actually. His ability to have a vision and see it through to reality is as good as anybody out there. I mean, I’ve seen him spend more than two years working and refining a fin design just to get it right. You can’t say that about many people.” 

Through the ’90s and into the aughts, Rich continued with his sobriety while establishing himself as a top-tier board builder among the inner circle of legacy shapers in California. He was making boards for world-class longboarders like Kenji Webb, Jimmy Gamboa, and Oliver Parker, as well as local standouts like Char Harris, Vincent Felix, Mike Furner, and Randy Stoker, along with twin brothers Cole and Brett Robbins, aspiring pro longboard phenoms at the time. He also maintained his status as a wave rider of great ability. From big and scary to small and perfect, he rode with a classic and aggressive style on boards of his own design, equipped with fins drawn by his own hand. Though creeping up on the mid-century mark, he was still very much on top of his game. 

Then came an inflection point: December 5, 2007.

A large west swell filled into the Santa Barbara Channel, a rare 265-degree behemoth as big as anywhere the lee of Point Conception can handle. Rich was surfing a certain spot outside of Santa Barbara, which he speaks about with hushed reverence and simply calls “the Point.” 

He was sitting at the top, as deep as possible, where the wave can ferociously and unexpectedly slab out over nearly exposed boulders. It was a solid 8 to 10 foot Hawaiian with current and a touch of devil wind that would sometimes clock offshore. Rich was riding a board he’d specifically built for such an occasion, and he was confident as he dropped in on his second wave of the day, an ugly beast, the type where half the wave becomes the lip before you can even make it to your bottom turn. 

I was paddling up from the inside and witnessed the fall. It was painful to watch, the loud smack of his upper body on the water audible even from a distance. I remember wincing at the sight and muttering “Fuck…” to myself as he was sucked over the falls directly into the rocks. 

“I was paralyzed for, like, 10 seconds,” Rich says. “I couldn’t swim, couldn’t really feel anything. Scary shit.” 

Eventually, Rich got flushed to the inside and clawed his way to shore. He knew he was injured but had no idea how badly. As his muscles began to lock up, he opted to paddle back out, thinking he’d merely suffered a bad stinger. Somehow, he caught two more waves before overwhelming pain pushed him back to land. That night, he couldn’t sleep. There was pain, but also anger gnawing at him. He didn’t want to miss such a rare swell. He woke early the next morning and paddled out again.

Lacking health insurance, Rich was slow to get help. When he did, the news was grim. He’d obliterated a disk in his cervical spine and damaged others. There was bone fragmentation and debris pushing on his spinal cord. It was an injury not too dissimilar from that which paralyzed Christopher Reeve. His doctors were horrified that he’d continued to surf. According to one, even a bad sneeze could have paralyzed him for life. 

Six months to the day after his wipeout, he had surgery and came home with a titanium plate, four screws, and a whole lot of uncertainty about his future. It was another nine months before he could even think about getting on a board, an act made possible only with countless hours of physical therapy, a devout daily stretching practice, and the aid of custom-made wedges and bubble-wrapped support devices that he fabricated. 

A secondary injury, his xiphoid process popping through his abdominal wall, added further complications and required additional surgery. All in all, the wipeout led to a messy, long decade of physical struggle and financial stress. At one point, Rich was out of the water for nearly two years and largely unable to shape.

“I was pretty close to giving it up,” he says. “Like, real close, man. I couldn’t surf. I couldn’t shape. Some days I didn’t even have a real place to work. You know, I haven’t had a full night of sleep once since my injury.” 

He credits Makaha local Claudia Woo with helping him turn the corner. “She was over visiting and wouldn’t let me stay on shore. She forced me to paddle out,” he says. “I don’t think I even stood up that day, but it was a turning point. I was back in the water and back on the path.”

A period of profound affirmations followed. Rich was inducted into the International Surfboard Builders Hall of Fame, won two Icons of Foam shaping contests (the Renny Yater Spoon Tribute and the Carl Ekstrom Asymmetrical Tribute), and finished runner-up in the same event twice (the Marc Andreini Tribute and, more recently, the Bing Copeland Tribute). 

Also, while surfing for Santa Barbara’s Hope Ranch Surf Club, he won multiple age-division titles in the California Club Contest circuit, including the 2014 Malibu Surfing Association (MSA) Classic, the 2014 Logjam in Santa Cruz, the 2015 Malibu Call to the Wall, and the 2015 MSA Classic, the latter proving to be extra special, as the other winners that day—Joel Tudor, Yuta Sezutsu, and Taylor Jensen—all were riding boards shaped by Rich’s hand. 

•

My phone vibrates with a voicemail more than two minutes long. The text translation is a mostly incomprehensible jumble of exclamations and excited adjectives. The effect is that of someone describing their wave in a foreign language with aggressive hand jive and contorting body postures: You get the gist but have no clue what, exactly, they are talking about. Instead of listening to the message, I call Rich back and get the lowdown. 

In short, the Point had broken big and strong during a historic run of winter swells. Rich says he went out with low expectations: “Just wanted to stay out of the way and experience the energy.” 

Instinct took over, and in a matter of seconds, Rich was locked into a barrel. His line was true and he came out like a rocket.

He found a wave. Or maybe it found him. 

It was well overhead and heaving across the boils. Instinct took over, and in a matter of seconds, Rich was locked into a barrel. His line was true and he came out like a rocket. 

Soon enough, iPhone evidence arrives in my inbox. 

“Redemption,” I tell him. 

“A gift,” he says without hesitation. 

Today, Rich is shaping and surfing at a level that he thought he’d lost. He has a distribution deal with Surftech that pays a modest amount without violating his code of ethics about board building. He also has a partnership with Channel Islands Surfboards, which has resulted in the CI Log, a traditional longboard complete with no edge in the tail and low-apex rails. The board is the result of a collaboration with Devon Howard that spanned multiple years and 13 different handshaped designs before arriving at its destination. 

Tellingly, it was developed without computers or scans or copies. Instead, it was drawn from Rich’s collection of templates, Howard’s feedback, and the shaper’s intuition about how to get there. In many ways, the collaboration is emblematic of Rich’s personal love affair with surfing itself. It’s not just riding waves or building boards that he has given his life to—it’s the chase of an idea and all of the relationships that are born from it. 

There is little he enjoys more than making a new board or fin and evaluating the hell out of it with his friends, investigating and iterating until he gets to where he’s aiming to go, something that was impossible when his body was broken. “I consider it the blessing of a lifetime to be back doing the things I love,” he says. “I thank God every day for it. I thank my friends. I owe it all to them. It is just so fucking cool I get to still do this.”

Recent years have also seen the shaper return to the racetrack for the first time since walking away as a teenager. He’s back to occasional racing—and occasionally standing on the podium. Instead of motorcycles, he’s driving a nine-second dragster, a 1,300-horsepower machine easily capable of speeds in excess of 140 mph in less than a quarter mile from a dead stop. 

Indeed, a lion in winter is still very much a lion. Of course, you’d never hear it from him.

“I think Wayne would rather die than promote himself or tell you how good he is,” says Tudor. “He comes from a different time, man. That old Hermosa crew was heavy. You had to be humble—or else. There was no fame in bragging back then. It was all about humility and respect. Wayne keeps that code alive.”