How the yin and yang of Gerry Lopez made him a surfing legend

Surfing legend Gerry Lopez reveals how a mix of aggression and calm has steered him through an incredible life on the waves and land — and the talented Aussie surfer that leaves him speechless.

Surfing great Gerry Lopez in a scene from the documentary The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez. Picture: Jeff Divine

There are few names that loom larger in the world of surfing than Gerry Lopez. It wasn’t just the way he surfed – a mesmerising blend of uncompromising aggression and an almost preternatural calm and a barrel-riding trailblazer. Nor was it just where he surfed – although his love and mastery of the now legendary Banzai Pipeline break on the north coast of his native O’ahu in Hawaii earned him the nickname “Mr Pipeline” and led to the professional event held there being named after him for years.

He also changed the face of the sport itself, first with his revolutionary board design and shaping to accommodate his love of tube-riding, and then as the face of the Lightning Bolt empire, one of the first surfing merchandise companies to truly enter the mainstream in the 1970s.

Ahead of yet another trip to these shores for Q&A screenings of his new documentary The Yin and Yang Of Gerry Lopez, the still spry-looking 73-year-old says Australia has played a “huge part” in his life and his career and the sport and lifestyle more broadly.

“Australia still is a huge part of the whole surfing culture,” he says. “I think in the ’70s they were right at the forefront of it all. I look back at those times and all the surf fashion and so much of the early, small-waves surfboard designs, were Australian. So yeah, Australia and Australians have been a huge part of my life and still are.

Surfing great Gerry Lopez in a scene from the documentary The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez.

“Australia is the surfing country and every time I go there, I realise more and more that every single person in Australia knows about surfing. In America, just a small percentage do.”

Lopez reels off a who’s who of Australian surfers he has admired over the years – from Nat Young to Peter McCabe and Terry Fitzgerald to Wayne Lynch – but he stops almost dumbfounded when he gets to one name.

“Stephanie Gilmore is in her little finger so much a better surfer than I ever was,” he says. “I can’t believe it.”

The task of capturing Lopez’s colourful life and career fell to former pro-skateboarder turned filmmaker, Stacey Peralta, best known for his 2003 documentary Dogtown and Z Boys. The pair had worked together previously on Peralta’s follow-up film Riding Giants, which traced the rise of the big wave surfing culture.

As a surfer himself and a long-time fan and friend of Lopez, Peralta was the logical choice to curate the hours of spectacular ocean footage and somehow capture the sometimes contradictory aspects of the veteran’s personality.

Surf legend, shaper, yogi, and snowboarder Gerry Lopez practicing yoga at Groove Yoga studio in Bend, Oregon.

Lopez begins the documentary by apologising to all the people whose waves he stole – the cardinal sin in surfing – when he was an angry and aggressive young surfer. But as the film progresses, it traces his passion for meditation and eastern religion – showing him preparing for one tournament in lotus position on the beach – and how it affected his life and career.

Peralta initially struggled to crack the narrative for the documentary until a friend told him to embrace the contradictions, that Lopez was both “a soul surfer and a commercial surfer”, a “peaceful guy and a tiger shark”.

“That’s when the concept of yin and yang really came through as an understanding that Gerry is multiple things,” Peralta says. “He is a very peaceful guy on land and he’s very ferocious in the water. One person can contain these different multitudes and his life has been trying to come to an understanding of these different qualities within himself.”

Peralta’s Dogtown and Z Boys was adapted into the 2005 drama Lords of Dogtown, which starred the late Heath Ledger. While Lopez is unsure about who might play him in a biopic (“Brad Pitt?,” he says hopefully), Peralta says there’s no shortage of material to work with. In addition to his exploits on the water, which saw him reach dizzying highs and life-threatening wipe-outs, there are other aspects of Lopez’s life that read like Hollywood scripts.

There’s the rise and fall of Lightning Bolt, a business tale that involves arson, betrayal and deals gone bad. Or his detour into Hollywood that saw him co-star in Conan the Barbarian opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger and briefly embrace the booze, drugs and party lifestyle. Or his adventures finding the perfect wave in Indonesia alongside a former drug-smuggler on the run who was greasing the wheels with local military generals to obtain permits for a slice of paradise.

Gerry Lopez drop drum surfing in 1972. Picture: Jeff Divine

“You can take any chapter of Gerry’s life and do a miniseries out of it, seriously,” says Peralta. “He’s lived these incredible eras in surfing that have changed the sport. It’s historic.”

The bright lights of show business no longer hold interest for Lopez, however. After realising that the sharks of Hollywood were far more dangerous than anything lurking in the Pacific – and that he valued an early morning riding waves rather than nursing a hangover – he was glad to leave it behind.

“I’m glad I made it out the other side safe and sound,” he says. “It was one of the highlights of my life and I sure had fun doing it – but been there, done that.”

Lopez still spends plenty of time in the water – and the stops on his tour starting this week are all suspiciously close to excellent surf breaks – but he now calls the mountain town of Bend, Oregon, home, having fallen in love with snowboarding decades ago. And despite this retrospective on his life, he’s forever looking forward to the next challenge. He recently took up foil surfing and wasn’t afraid to fail time and time again before he succeeded, something that Peralta found inspiring.

“Gerry gets very interested in wanting to learn something new and he’s not afraid of being a kook in order to get through the process of learning to do the thing he wants to do,” Peralta says.

“Seeing him do that was really inspiring for me to continue my own journey.”

* For tickets to this week’s special Q&A screenings with Gerry Lopez and Stacy Peralta in Melbourne, Lorne, Coolangatta, Byron Bay and Sydney, or to find out more about The Yin & Yang of Gerry Lopez visit Patagonia.com.au/gerrylopez.