PETE LOPEZ

Legendary Gulf Coast waterman, veteran wave-rider, and father of two of the world’s top surfers, Pete “Style Daddy” Lopez’s life parallels the evolution of the sport. The 48-year-old Lopez, born in New York City but raised on the gentle waters of the Gulf of Mexico, has traveled from Hatteras to Indonesia in the search for surf. Currently, Lopez is living in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida, with his wife Annie and youngest children Matthew and Ashley. Eastern Surf Magazine spoke with Pete on a Sunday afternoon as he prepared to take his 7-year-old son, Matthew (World Champ - 2015), for a cold front cleanup session off Belleair Beach near Clearwater, Florida.

ESM: So Pete, how did it all begin?
PL: My dad was big on crabbing. We would take big pails and go down to the Causeway and fill up them up with blue crabs. You would just walk along and scoop them up. Then we would go down to the beach and just get pounded by the waves. That was always the funnest, when the wind was blowing from the west, and the waves were up. All I remember was that the time to go to the beach was when the wind was blowing.

ESM: Where did you catch your first wave?
PL: I was 11-years-old, and I went down to the Old Pier 60 on Clearwater Beach; that was our hangout. They used to rent these rubber rafts with ropes around them, and I saw some guys riding them in on their stomachs. I knew one of them, he let me use it, and I went out and caught a half-dozen waves and was hooked.

ESM: When did you get your first surfboard?
PL: The guy next door to me had bought an old Gordon & Smith. It was a 9’6” and weighed about 30 pounds. That was in 1965. I bought it for $20 with money I saved from cutting lawns. I was 14. I met some kids from Clearwater Beach, and one of them let me leave my board at his house. So whenever the waves were up, we’d hitchhike to the beach and surf all day. I bought my first new board, a Tommy O’Hara Noserider, in 1967 at a shop in Clearwater called Surf Shop Hawaii. There were a couple of East Coast shapers—Oceanside and O’Hara—who would bring their boards over. They also had a couple of West Coast boards—The Hansens, G & S, Dewey Weber, Hobie—all 9-foot and up. I think about it every time I see a kid carrying one of these light shortboards up the beach. We had to work at it. All we had were big, heavy boards, and it would always be blowing, just horrible and choppy. There were no leashes, so the boards would always end up on the beach. Then we would have to carry them against the wind 300 yards back up the beach. We would end up dragging them a lot, so the rails would always wear out.

ESM: When did you leave your homebreak up in Clearwater?
PL: Joe Nuzzo started a surf shop down on Treasure Island (Suncoast) in 1966, and we heard it broke pretty well down there, so we started piling in a friend’s Volkswagen and heading down to Sunset, Upham Beach, and Bradenton. We would put six or seven surfboards on top and cram as many guys as we could inside. I even remember sticking a guy in the trunk out front one time. But then we had to step it up a notch because we figured out that if we wanted to surf, we would have to hit the East Coast. In ‘67, the summer of 10th grade, a whole bunch of us spent six weeks in Cocoa Beach. It was the hungriest six weeks of my life. I went over there with $90. That had to pay for gas, food, and rent. We lived off white rice with Campbell’s soup poured over the top. We just wanted to surf. Cape Canaveral Pier was Surf Central in the ‘60’s. That’s where the pros would hang out. We would sit up on the Pier and watch these guys. I remember the first time I saw a noseride—it was Gary Propper—and I said to myself, “I want to be him.”

ESM: Without the internet and surf lines, how did you know when there were waves?
PL: On the Gulf, there were long intervals between surf sessions. We didn’t know what made surf—that it had to be blowing 60 miles-an-hour from the west to generate some waves. As far as the East Coast goes, once Ron Jon opened up, we got to know the people there, and we worked out a system. We would call them collect and ask for Mr. Surf. They would say he would be back in two or three hours, and he was either in the chopping or glassing room. So that meant it was two-to-three feet and either choppy or glassy. We would call the day before and hope it was up the next morning. We couldn’t afford a 45 cent phone call.

ESM: When did you get the travel bug?
PL: Well, we met Nuzzo and his crew of older guys who had already started traveling to Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. So we started learning the spots out-of-state to surf. That Christmas we went to Eleuthera— a place called Surfers Beach—and stayed in Gregory Town. We would walk every morning two or three miles to the beach. All we ate was bread, and when we ran out of money, we slept in caves on the beach. It was the first crystal clear water we had ever seen. The waves were excellent—lefts that would wrap down a reef—you could ride them 100 yards. What a great thing to do in 11th grade.

ESM: What kind of boards were you riding?
PL: They had just made the transition to the 8-foot range. Hansen had just come out with a deep V, but still single fins.

ESM: Sounds like you have had to make some sacrifices for the sport.
PL: We had no social lives; we would do anything to go surfing. We were desperados on the interstate. We were driving whatever somebody’s mother would let us drive, saving up every dime we could make to pay for gas, which was 19 cents a gallon, and getting there at three
in the morning then sleeping in the car until the sun came up. We would tell our parents that we were staying at each other’s houses, sometimes sleeping on the beach, doing whatever it took.

ESM: So now it’s the summer of ‘69. Weren’t you guys afraid of getting drafted?
PL: We all knew people that had been killed in Vietnam. Nobody wanted to go. We had just gotten out of high school, we wanted to surf, not go kill people. There was a doctor over in Tampa who was against the war, and he would write you a letter saying that you had asthma. He gave us all letters, but I never had to use mine because they switched to a lottery, and I had a high number and didn’t have to go. The day after I graduated, I packed my Volkswagen van—it had a 36 horsepower motor and cost me $200—jump started it, and took off for California. We got so hot in the desert, we had to wet towels and put them over us. We finally got there and hung all summer, surfing all the spots from Huntington to San Diego. Then we decided to go to Woodstock—two vans piled with surfboards. But we had a blowout and flipped the van. So now we have got six guys in one van. We were within 10 hours of the place, when we called some friends in Carolina who said the waves were good. We heard the weather was bad at Woodstock, so it was a no brainer… stand in the rain with a million people or go surf some good waves.

ESM: Did you think about college?
PL: I enrolled at Brevard Junior College and signed up for night classes so I could surf all day. I tried, but it didn’t last. It was the late ‘60’s. Surf all day, play all night. So after hurricane season, I moved back home, doing whatever to save money. We heard Puerto Rico had 20-foot waves. So a group of us flew down there… We had enough money to stay two-and-half months. We were stoked, but some of the guys went into town to gamble and lost all their money. So now we don’t have enough money to pay the rent. We went into town, got some lumber, and built a house in the trees overlooking the beach at Rincon. We stayed there for two months, eating white rice, Campbell’s soup, and catching lobster on the reef. We were the novelty… hippy surfers living in a tree in Puerto Rico.

ESM: How did you survive?
PL: We would work and save money. I would glass boards—do whatever. The summer of ‘70, we lived in a little surfer’s commune in Sebastian until I got burned out and moved back home so I could save some money and go to Hawaii. I surfed the South Shore, worked as a bread baker at night, then moved to the North Shore and surfed there. Then I had to make a decision. I could catch a sailboat ride to Tahiti, Costa Rica, or go live on a farm on the Big Island. So I stayed in Hawaii, lived in a shack with a tin roof and no running water in this beautiful valley about three miles from the beach. It was a rivermouth sandbar break, and I stayed there six months, working part-time on a taro farm and surfing whenever I could. I was living in paradise—the Garden of Eden. You didn’t need Campbell’s soup: there were fish to be caught in the lakes, crawdaddies in the stream, and plenty of fruit. It was a breadbasket.

ESM: So let’s fast forward… You move back to Florida, and Shea is born.
PL: We started doing trips to Southern Mexico. Shea took his first trip down there when he was four. We went pretty consistently, mixing in East Coast trips whenever we could. Then Cory came along. They played baseball and soccer. We went to all the games, but we would go to the field with surfboards on the roof then head straight to the East Coast. That got old. Eventually, we just went surfing.

ESM: Sounds like you got to relive your surfing youth again with your boys.
PL: We started doing ESA contests. It would always be cold, windy, and nasty… the last day you would ever want to be on the beach. We would have a car full of wet, grimy, spitting, cussing, farting, complaining, little kids. Cory would always be going, "I want to go speed skating; I want to go to a party.’’ Shea would be saying, “I want to win.” But we traveled all over Mexico, surfing the points and some secret areas like “The Ranch.”

ESM: So you were the consummate supportive surfing parent?
PL: I wouldn’t say it was only me... It really takes two parents to be supportive. My wife Annie was right by my side during all the contests, trips, wetsuit changes, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We transfered them out of school here for a while, took them to Hawaii, and enrolled them in high school there. They went to Mexico and Barbados. Both boys spent every summer in California since the time they were 12. Then Shea moved to the East Coast and enrolled in school there. We never really worried about them because they were always living with families. That’s how the surf community is—like one big family. As a family, we went to eight East Coast Championships in Hatteras and two U.S. Championships in California. Shea went off on his pro career. Cory was right on his heels.

ESM: Have you have gotten to travel a bit with the boys as pros?
PL: I’ve been to Cuba and Indo, but the contests make me nervous. And I only have so much leisure time. I would rather spend it with my younger kids, Ashley and Matthew.

ESM: But even with two youngsters at home, a full-time lawn business, and managing the financial affairs of two professional surfers, you still live by the 6-foot glass rule.
PL: It doesn’t matter what is happening—a dinner engagement, a play to go to—if it’s 6-foot and glassy, you drop what you are doing and go. Sometimes you can bend it a little, and that’s called the 3-foot glass rule. Six-foot rule on the East Coast, three-foot rule on the west coast. That’s all you need to know.