“You have to bust down the door before they hear ya knockin’.” —Rabbit
In the winter of 1975, South African and Australian upstarts Shaun Tomson, Rabbit Bartholomew, and Mark Richards arrived in Hawaii with little else than their surfboards and their love of surfing. With courage, skill, and raw ambition, they not only set a new standard for wave riding, but also succeeded in transforming surfing from a casual lifestyle into a professional sport. Published to coincide with a documentary feature film narrated by Academy Award nominee Edward Norton, Bustin’ Down the Door tells the incredible story of these free ride pioneers.
With essays by the surfing legends themselves, along with previously unpublished photographs by award-winning photographers such as Dan Merkel, Bustin’ Down the Door re-creates the genesis of modern surfing from the perspective of the visionaries who turned their unlikely dreams into reality and revolutionized the sport of surfing.
Shaun Tomson was the 1977 World Champion on the International World Surfing Tour. A native of South Africa, he spent fourteen years on the Tour (1976-1989), nine of which in the top six. With twelve contest wins, including a record setting six year winning streak in the prestigious Gunston 500 in Durban, South Africa, he was considered one of the world's finest surfers.
He has been featured in more than forty surf videos, was profiled in an Outdoor Life Network (OLN) documentary series in 1998, and starred as a surf journalist in the major motion picture from TriStar/Sony Pictures 'In Gods Hands' in 1998.
Additional honors include nine appearances on the covers of Surfer and Surfing magazines, as well as being an inductee to the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame. He has most recently been listed as one of the 25 most influential surfers of the century by Surfer magazine(1999) and as one of the 16 greatest surfers of all time by Surfing magazine in 2004.
He is currently Chairman of the Advisory Board for The Surfrider Foundation and owns the apparel company Solitude in Santa Barbara, California. He lives with his wife, Carla, in Montecito, California and continues to travel the world, reaching out to surfers of all generations, with his innovative surfing and world renowned tube-riding style.
I loved the documentary and was really psyched to see there was a print version. There are six essays written by: Shaun Tomson, Mark Richards, Peter Townend, Ian Cairns, Michael Tomson, and Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew. As interesting as the documentary was, it was even better to read the snippets as written by each individual, describing their own unique experiences during those pivotal years.
Makes me want to get in the water even more!! And if I could meet Shaun Tomson, that'd be okay too. Just saying.