1960s Gold Coast surfing champion Keith Paull’s rise and fall detailed in new book by Chris Gudenswager
HE might have been the greatest Gold Coast surfer most boardriders have never heard of. Tanned, blond and looking like a “male model” with the most “beautiful styles in surfing” he had the world at his feet. That’s when his life took a dark turn.
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KEITH Paull might have been the greatest Gold Coast surfer most boardriders have never heard of.
In 1968, almost 50 years today, Paull beat surfing legends Midget Farrelly and Nat Young to receive his first and only Australian surfing title.
Paull was tanned, blond and looking like a “male f------ model” with one of “the most beautiful styles in surfing” at a time when surfing culture was exploding globally.
For a few short years Paull had the surfing world at his feet, scoring contracts to top surfing teams and travelling to Hawaii and across Europe to surf the world’s best waves.
But over the next few years Paull’s experimentation with LSD escalated as his mental health declined until he became better known for erratic behaviour than his surfing.
Paull then “fell off the map” after a dark day in 1975 when he almost drowned his infant son in front of the surfing world at the Pa and Ma Memorial Surfing Contest on the Sunshine Coast.
Little has been written about Paull, despite the calls from surfing champions for him to be included in the Surfing Australia Hall of Fame since his death in 2004 aged 57.
But Now Paull’s surfing life has been chronicled by self-published author Chris ‘Swag’ Gudenswager in a new book titled Smooth/Radical: The Keith Paull Story.
Gudenswager details his rise as a larrikin champion and fall as troubled adult through stories from more than 30 leading surfing figures.
TEENAGE KEITH’S RISE
“IS this kid having a go at us?” said surfing pioneer Bob McTavish recalling a teenage Paull’s surfing at Snapper Rocks in the mid-1960s.
At the time McTavish, who would become a key figure in surfing’s so-called shortboard revolution in the 1970s, said Paull was so talented he could copy the moves of top older surfers with ease.
“I remember Keith then as the up and coming kid on the block, then one day in preparation for one of the big events, we were surfing really good Snapper and Keith was purposely alternating waves just so we could see him imitating what we had done on the wave before almost to the tee,” McTavish said.
“Always with a huge grin he would literally copy each and every thing I did with a kind of smugness to show us how capable he really was. As if to say look out you old guys, I’m coming through.”
Former world champion Nat Young said while Paull was a rival he was also important to the sport.
That is despite Paull breaking Young’s winning steak of Australian titles in 1966, 1967 and 1969.
“Keith was a good strong figurehead of the tribe and we needed him more than he knew, even more as surfing expanded over time,” Young said.
Wayne Lynch, the “teenage messiah” of Paull’s era, also admired his surfing.
“He was just a real, natural surfer. A purist. His surfing was truly refined, really good, beautiful in fact, very complete for those days,” Lynch said.
“He could surf the small waves as well as the bigger ones and was a good tube-rider you know, really good. He impressed me enormously. He was a great-role model for us kids and that’s an important thing to say back in that period.”
OUTRAGEOUS BEHAVIOUR
WAYNE ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew revealed an episode where Paull upstaged surfing legend Michael Peterson, also famed for his undiagnosed mental health issues, at a heat-draw held in a pub before a surfing contest.
“Other strange cats attempted the pre-contest psych out on each other in various ways and it was hilarious to witness all this as a young guy,” Rabbit said of Paull, his sponsor at the time.
It turns out Paull’s idea of a “psych out” was to drive a panel van into the front of a building.
“I remember watching the white panel van come down the street towards the Pearl Hotel and I yelled excitedly: here he is, here comes,” Rabbit said.
“And (Paull) instantly accelerated and the old Holden just goes Kaboom-Kaboom-Kaboom-Kaboom, straight up the concrete steps of the pub.”
When he jumped out of the wrecked car, Rabbit said he saw a stranger.
“I walked over to the van and the door flings open and out steps Keith with a shaved head and blue rings and stuff painted on his skull,” he said.
“This is the same guy I’d seen earlier that morning at the factory, my boss, my hero, the super-healthy Mr. Clean Cut, Mr. Professional Entrepreneur, and I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”
MICHAEL PETERSON SENSED IT
“YOU can talk, it takes one to know one,” said Tommy Peterson, the renowned surfboard shaper, to his famous brother Michael when he thought something was wrong with Paull in the early 1970s.
Tommy said MP, who famously went undiagnosed for schizophrenia for much his life and became publicly known for using illicit drugs, was one of the first people to recognise there wasn’t something quite right about Paull during a drug-fuelled Hawaiian trip.
“Would you believe, out of everybody — it was Mick (MP) who sensed it first,” Tommy said.
“He said: Tom, something’s wrong with Keith, he’s acting a bit weird and I don’t like it.”
In 1983, MP was involved in a 20-car police chase from Beenleigh to the Story Bridge in Brisbane after he was startled into a panic by a police siren.
As a result MP spent time behind bars at Boggo Road Goal. He died in 2012 aged 59.
“The pot calling the f------ kettle black there mate, you’re worried about Keith while I’m worried about you,” Tommy can now joke.
PAULL’S DOWNFALL
“By 1972 he was hooked on acid, by 1975 he started losing his mind,” said Gudenswager.
He said Paull dropped away from surfing in the years after a crazed episode where he almost drowned his son.
Paull’s ex-wife, Colette, recounted for the book the harrowing episode when her son was taken from her at the beach and taken into the water.
“I had no forewarning he would do this, just a sinking feeling that something was wrong,” Colette told Gudenswager.
“It was one of the most fearful, heartbreaking things I had ever seen.”
Colette revealed the pain that comes with sharing a child with someone at a time when many mental illnesses went undiagnosed.
“(In one episode) he drove on the wrong side of the road most of the way from Tugun to Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast (to a surf competition),” she said.
“Mental health wasn’t even a term back then ... I’d even mentioned to Keith’s mother that he may have had some mental instability ... she basically dispelled the idea there and then. She even suggested it was me that had the problem.”
THE JANITOR
PAULL worked as a janitor in his later years and was hassled by a company foreman.
That was before Greg Ryan, a surf-mad colleague, recognised who Paull was.
“I said to (the foreman) mate you shouldn’t be giving that guy a hard time, he’s rather famous in certain circles,” Ryan said.
Ryan said it wasn’t until he brought in a pile of Tracks surfing magazines to the workplace that the foreman was convinced who Paull was.
“He changed his tune quick smart (after seeing the magazines), I’ll never forget the moment, it was a classic. Keith was a humble guy, very humble indeed,” Ryan said.
He said the years weren’t kind to Paull.
“I sensed Keith kind of realised that he had kind of missed the boat a bit, he looked like he really needed the job,” Ryan said.
“(So) he put up with whatever treatment was handed out to him by that stage of his life.”
While Paull appeared “overweight and slow” Ryan said he took solace in shaping surfboards.
“What he was doing in his spare time was shaping and glassing these incredible boards, they were beautiful.”
PAULL’S LEGACY
EACH year Gold Coast surfing champion Peter Townend, recognised as the first IPS/ASP world surfing champion, casts a vote for Paull to be inducted into the Surfing Australia Hall of Fame.
Despite his darker period, Townend said Paull’s contribution to the sport is significant.
“About the time I got started Keith was a new force emerging in Aussie surfing,” Townend said.
“He shocked every one of us by winning the ’68 Australian Titles in Sydney, trumping the then favourites who had a tight hold on glory and the media, Midget and Nat,” he said.
“Every year when my ballot comes for the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame, KP’s on the top of my list of selections.
“I can’t believe he hasn’t been voted in yet.”
