From the archives: 12yo surfing prodigy Jack Robinson is making waves
Trev Robinson is, in his own words, “hand-rearing a racehorse”. The racehorse in question is his only child, 12-year-old Jack, who could become the Phar Lap of Australian surfing.
This story first featured in The Weekend Australian Magazine on August 7, 2010.
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Trev Robinson is, in his own words, “hand-rearing a racehorse”. And, on paper, it seems he’s right. The racehorse in question is his only child, 12-year-old Jack, whose achievements so far suggest he could become the Phar Lap of Australian surfing. Or, as some surfers are saying, the best in the world.
Jack, from Margaret River, has been entering surf contests since he was eight, when he was crowned West Australian state champion in the under-12 division; he has been a state champion in one division or other ever since. In 2008, aged 10, he made the finals of all divisions of the Western Australia state titles (under-12, under-14 and under-16). Likewise, he made the finals in all divisions of the prestigious 2009 Taj’s Small Fries event, which attracts surfers from around the country. This year, against surfers three years his senior, he won the Small Fries under-16 division. Last year he made a clean sweep of the under-12 divisions of Australia’s two biggest junior events, the Rusty Gromfest and Occy’s Grom Comp.
One of the reasons for his success is that, apart from having extraordinary confidence in serious waves, Jack is regularly performing full-rotation airs (whereby he flies above the wave and does a horizontal 360-degree spin without grabbing his board, before landing and con-tinuing along the wave), a trick that even many top-level pros can’t pull off.
But competitive success is only half of a career in pro surfing, the prize money for which is a small fraction of that for, say, tennis or golf. The other half is marketability for a sponsor, usually a surfwear label. And while his surfing speaks volumes, it’s Jack’s face that could launch a million ad campaigns. He has the appearance of the universal, happy teenage kid, even if he is only 12.
“He’s the cutest kid I’ve met,” says Pat O’Connell, a former pro surfer and now team manager for US surf label Hurley, who saw Jack surf in Hawaii earlier this year. “You look at his smile and you realise why you surf. He just shows the stoke on his face. You look at him and think, yeah, I used to be like that kid.”
Jack is the subject of considerable attention from around the world right now. His sponsorship contract with Australian surf label Quiksilver expires at the end of this year. Trev, who has forgone full-time work to be his son’s coach, says he is receiving a lot of invitations from other companies, but declines to elaborate from whom or reveal how much they are offering.
Whatever the details, Jack’s new sponsorship contract, when he signs one, is likely to be unprecedented for an Australian surfer his age. His eligibility to sign with a new company comes at a time when “non-endemics” - multinational companies from outside surfing that dwarf the surfwear labels - are rapidly building their pre-sence in an increasingly professional, lucrative and marketable sport.
One of the non-endemics’ strategies is to sign not established surfers but young, relatively unknown ones, and let their market share grow with the talent. In the US, 16-year-old wunder-kind Kolohe Andino, son of 1990s pro surfer Dino Andino, recently signed deals with Red Bull, Nike 6.0 and Target. One industry insider estimated the deals together to be worth about $US500,000 ($560,000). The same insider says it is feasible that Jack will be earning similar money by the time he’s Andino’s age.
Which makes Trev’s racehorse analogy all the more pertinent. At what point does the “rearing” of a sport prodigy result in other, more prosaic aspects of parenting being neglected? And what happens when a parent’s ambition for a child becomes the family’s raison d’etre?
One aspect of growing up that Jack and his peers, especially in the US, are missing out on is formal schooling. “Most of the kids that are making a push [in the sport] feel compelled to do home-schooling because their competitors are doing it,” says O’Connell. “If you’re stuck in school while the other kids are out surfing, you’re going to fall behind. The kids are travelling around the world a lot earlier. Whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t know.”
Jack, too, is home-schooled, or at least that’s what Trev says, although he declines to confirm or deny whether he is a registered home-schooler, which you need to be if your child is not attending a school. The West Australian Education Department says there are strict pen-alties for non-compliance and recently fined a parent for failing in this duty.
But Trev’s decision to keep Jack out of school is as much philosophical as strategic. Trev, 49, who started surfing at age 10, has a lot of deep counter-culture ideas and the scepticism he acquired in his youth about the institutions of mod-ern life is magnified in relation to Jack.
“Who do you want to be the author of your kid’s brain?” he asks me as we sit on the beach at Fingal, on the Gold Coast, watching Jack practise for a junior event at nearby Duranbah. “You can hand-pick that. That’s your decision. Will they [the Education Department] be around to pick up the pieces if the wheels fall off?”
Perhaps not. But what is Jack learning at home? “I make Jack read a lot of history.”
Like what? “Oh everything, from all cultures around the world. I consider history, to see where building blocks occurred in societies. He’s read everything. How the Egyptians put their buildings together. There’s just too much. We’ve just been to Indonesia, seeing how they survive in their climate like they do, seeing how they conduct the patterns of the day ... There’s a reason why people conduct themselves the way they do.”
Later, I ask Jack what he’s been learning at home. He replies with a vague, “all sorts of stuff”, before Trev interrupts with, “there’s too much to compile it in a few words”.
This is clearly an uncomfortable topic. “Where is this leading?” Trev wants to know.
In some ways, Trev is the model father. He adores his son, and even tells him he loves him in front of me, to which Jack responds with an only slightly embarrassed smile. He is also keen to ensure Jack doesn’t develop an unhealthy ego. “I say to him, ‘Look, you might be able to surf good but that kid over there is really good at some other task.’ It’s really important. He’ll still dig a sandcastle with another kid on the beach. He just cruises. He won’t talk about himself.
His personal awareness is knowing that you’re always learning and you’re never complete. That’s one of the most important things you can give back to yourself.”
Trev ticks some of the main boxes in Raising Boys, by Steve Biddulph, one of the definitive and best-selling books on fatherhood. Dads should, says Biddulph, be active with their sons, teach them things and take them on adventures. Jack and Trev have been to Hawaii and G-Land (otherwise known as Grajagan Bay) in Java together, and surfed amazing waves, which is more than most kids can say about their dad.
Hawaiian professional surfer Jamie O’Brien says he saw the pair out at Pipeline and was immediately impressed. “They were both having a dig,” O’Brien says. “His dad’s a good surfer, too. He was getting his son pumped, getting him deeper in the line-up. It was really cool. I liked their commitment and I liked the father-son thing.” Like O’Connell, O’Brien couldn’t help liking Jack. “He’s a classic little kid,” he says. “Every time you look at him he’s goofing off and got a smile on his face.”
But these days Trev seldom surfs with Jack. If Trev surfs, it’s by himself early in the morning, before he returns home to pick up his son. Then he turns his focus to being Jack’s videographer.
He allows Jack to make all his own decisions in the water. “We pull up to a beach, he looks at it, he sees himself in situations out there, then he makes the move, whether he wants to be part of that or he doesn’t. I don’t tell him what to do. I taught him the skills of assessment. He believes in his assessment and his problem-solving. He’s the author. His imagination isn’t stifled by some-body else’s.” Later in the day, Jack, Trev and mum Mersina will sit down and analyse the footage. “We operate as a family unit behind him,” Trev says. “We have lived and breathed every stage of his development.”
Despite this, Trev adamantly refused to be photographed with his son for this story. “I’d rather keep my own privacy,” he says. None of the surf photographers contacted by The Weekend Australian Magazine had any shots of Trev, despite having plenty of Jack.
Time management
West Australia’s most successful pro surfer, Taj Burrow, is astonished at Jack’s ability in serious waves. Jack is a regular at North Point, Cowaramup, an unforgiving wave where Burrow once suffered a nasty head injury after a wipe-out.
“North Point is a serious wave, and he charges it,” Burrow says. “He grew up around Margaret River and a lot of people [in the line-up] are giving him waves. Everyone wants to see him charge. I haven’t seen him pull back once. Every time I’ve seen him, he’s blown me away. He’s got freakish talent.” Fellow West Australian and former pro surfer Jake Paterson is equally impressed. “Jack could be the next Kelly Slater,” he says.
But the road to the top is already rocky, which Trev alludes to when he says he and Jack were “banned” from the state team to compete in the national titles in Coolum, Queensland, last year. Trev says it was because the team management wouldn’t let them travel separately from the rest of the team.
Not so, says Tim Thirsk of Surfing WA. The team bent the rules to exempt Jack from training camps and allow father and son to travel separately and stay in separate accommodation. But Trev also wanted to participate in Jack’s coaching at the event, which is where Thirsk drew the line. “Trev said, ‘That’s not fair, I want to control what Jack does in and out of the water’,?” Thirsk recalls. “We said, ‘Look, it’s getting outside the scope of what we do here. We’ve already bent the rules.’ We were really pas-sionate about Jack competing, very supportive of Jack, but we can’t have parents dictating to the state association what we can do.”
Trev’s involvement in Jack’s surfing is both controlling and liberating. He teaches Jack to pace himself in the lead-up to an event or fresh swell and not show his opponents everything in the first heat. He has gleaned this from the way top pro surfers approach events. “They’re accurate, they know their own luxury of thought, they know their time management and they know what they want,” Trev says. “And they’ll increase the accelerator if they have to.”
By managing his approach to events and surf sessions, Jack maximises his freedom to perform well. What Jack does on a wave is up to him. “He is the author of the new criteria,” Trev says. “And his imagination can’t be stifled.”
As if to prove his dad’s point, Jack paddles out for a late-afternoon session with some of his peers at Duranbah. He is a stand-out, even among kids two years older than him, not because of his manoeuvres but because of the way he starts a ride: his transition to his feet is extraordinarily fast and smooth, which gives him space and time to set up the ride. While other kids are immediately on the front foot, generating speed in a mad rush, Jack subtly bends his back leg as if easing off an accel-erator, waiting for the moment when the wave gives him an opportunity to shine, which he unfailingly does.
This is what sets him apart from all the other ambitious 12-year-olds in the world, says two-time world champion Tom Carroll, who saw Jack at G-Land in July. “He’s got a maturity in his ability to read waves,” Carroll says. “He under-stands water really well and having that assess-ment is a big plus for someone his age.”
Jack is at a loss to explain what all the fuss is about. When I ask him what he hopes to achieve in the sport, he says: “I’ll just see what happens. I don’t know. I’ll just do what I can do.” So what would be the best thing about life as a pro surfer? “Surfing good waves, having fun.”
And there’s the rub. Surfing is not just about having fun any more. Well, not if you want to make a career from it. There’s just too much money at stake these days.
Former West Australian pro Ian Cairns, who now coaches some of the best juniors in California, says that he’s a “cautious optimist” about prodigies such as Jack; despite the kid’s considerable talent already, it will still be “about as close to impossible as you can get” for him to make the highest level of the sport.
“It’s super difficult for people to maintain the growth and momentum,” he says. “Jack is yet to go through the growth changes, then you have personal motivation. Is the mission that he’s on his, or his dad’s mission? Is the pressure that’s being applied to him as being the best in the world going to create expectations in everyone’s mind, including his? How do he and his team handle that? What pressures are sponsors going to put on him for the money they pay him? Put all of that in a big pot and stir it. History says that most of the young brilliant talents don’t make it.
“I’m not trying to put the mockers on Jack because he’s an awesome kid and a great surfer, but the thing that I hope and pray for these young kids is that they have a really good support team that guides them really carefully through these growth periods.”
Cairns is also wary of the psychological leap that Jack will inevitably make some time in his teens. “I don’t know whether it’s a genetic fact that young men must rebel against their father,” he says. “But how are they going to handle that phase, when the boy goes into young manhood and has a desire to go his own way? You need to go from control to support. Trev is a genuine alternative thinker. He’s interesting to listen to. But my style with kids is to keep it simple.”
Carroll believes greatness in any field never comes easily. “People who have achieved some-thing have always been challenged by something at a deeper level that might appear cruel,” Carroll says, in an oblique reference to the fact that his mother died when he was six and his father was forced to “work his arse off” to keep the family afloat.
“I don’t think anyone who’s been talented has let it all come to them. Talent alone doesn’t do it. It has to be circumstances along the way that focus the mind. The dreamy idea that everything has to be perfect - forget about it.”
Even if Jack becomes a world-class surfer, there is still no guarantee he’ll make millions. Queenslander Bede Durbidge came second in the world in 2008, yet spent most of 2009 without a sponsor, financing his world-tour travel from prize money and personal savings. Even Mick Fanning, Australia’s most successful surfer of recent years, earns only about $2 million a year. Below him, the financial rewards trail off pretty sharply. Australian coastal towns are littered with former pro surfers who spent their youth pursuing momentary fame before being spat out the other end with little to show for it.
Nevertheless, failure is something Trev refuses to contemplate.
“I don’t live in worry,” he says. “I don’t live in panic. And I don’t live for nervous energy. I believe that if you keep a core awareness and you’re in ownership of your thoughts, you can travel at the speed you can cope with. And don’t be pushed. Don’t be pushed.”