ROB MACHADO INTERVIEW

Features - Surf

Photo: ASP

Dominating any line-up, Rob Machado is a force to be reckoned with; a true surfing Goliath. But there’s more to this man than just winning competitions. Stranger caught up with him to find out what really makes him stand out from the crowd.

Interviews by Ross Imms and Bertrand Portrat
Words by Chris Nelson

(First published in Stranger 12, November 2006)

The morning glass has begun to ripple under the light onshore breeze of a sunny Californian afternoon. Cardiff Reef is surprisingly quiet. A handful of surfers pepper the break as a pod of dolphins cruise lazily through the line-up. A figure is crouched on the beach, stretching out before entering the cool, green waters of the Pacific. He eyes the sets with relaxed concentration. This line-up has been his playground since he first took to the water as a skinny 11-year-old kid.

Illustration by Peter James Field

In the early 1990s Rob Machado was one of the ‘knu skoolers’, like Kelly Slater and Shane Herring. They tore down the house with their progressive surfing and ‘banana boards’. Today, he is a more complex character. Even from a distance, his slight silhouette crowned with 1970s style ‘fro, is as unmistakable as his loose, almost Curren-esque style of surfing. He has evolved into a subtle blend of soul surfer and retro enthusiast – a role he wasn’t born into, but one that fits his persona like a pair of comfortable old sneakers. At the core, however, there still beats a heart that requires the occasional blast of competitive exertion. To some this would merely be fulfilling the obligations to sponsors, but to Machado it is a challenge he still relishes – as his victories at this year’s Pipeline Monster Energy Pro and the US Open at Huntington Beach testify.

To make it at any level in professional surfing takes a huge amount of drive and ambition. The hotel rooms, airport terminals and missed swells. Paddling out for a heat when your body clock tells you it’s 3am. There are the first round losses against hungry Brazilians and the time away from friends and family. To actually get within a heat of the world title takes the focus and determination of a Pitbull – not a trait you’d associate with the softly spoken Machado, doing yoga while he talks and stopping every five minutes to cuddle his beautiful children. That Pitbull fire no longer drives the Cardiff local. Everything changed with one wave, in one heat, just over ten years ago.

Photo: ASP

“It had been a wonderful year, 1995; the battle for the title had run all year long and this semi-final was where everything converged,” Machado explains. “We had the line-up just to ourselves, the waves were amazing and we scored several 10s!” The 1995 Pipe Masters semi-final has gone down as perhaps the greatest heat in surfing history. Kelly Slater needed to win the event to overtake Machado and snatch the world title from the grasp of his friend. It came down to one ‘winner takes all’ heat held in perfect 6-8ft conditions. Nearing the end of the close contest, Machado bagged a perfect tube, pulled out and sat up on his board in the channel. As he watched, Slater angled down the face and replied with a mesmerising barrel. Exiting close to Machado, they ‘high-fived’ as Kelly rode past and a hundred clicking shutters captured an iconic moment.

“It was more than a friendship story, a dream session, a magical moment,” says Rob. “We’re talking about the heat which determined the future World Champ and after a barrel, I gave a high five to my mate.” But by waiting in the channel and hooting Slater’s ride, Machado made it out back after the Floridian. Slater snagged the last wave and with it the title. “So what? After this heat, people told themselves ‘Rob, he’s like that.’ This heat made me what I am today, showed me there’s a life out of the competition. If I had been number one, maybe I wouldn’t have met my wife, become a dad and be as happy as I am today. After a few seasons, life on tour was quickly redundant. And competition takes so much time and energy, you’re missing so much…”

Photo: ASP

Today, despite his many commitments, there is still plenty of time for surfing. In fact, he probably fills more pages in America’s surf magazines than anyone else not currently on the world tour. He is known for his love of retro board designs and can be found riding everything from single-fins through to progressive thrusters, as conditions suit. He’s even into paddle boarding, and is experimenting with a new design; a combination of a stand-up paddle board with another board built into it, so you could paddle to an outer reef and take the other board off. For Rob, it’s about having fun and being open-minded.

Photo: Rob Machado

“I was always just intrigued by surfboards and having started surfing in like 1980…1983… you got to think about what kind of surfboards were being ridden then, you know, mainly thrusters. I think my very first surfboard was a single-fin. I learnt how to stand up and then I went straight to a twin-fin… and then it was thrusters. Once I started riding for Al (Merrick), I’d go to his house and he’d have these photos on his wall of his team from back in the late 1970s, and it was just these crazy looking single-fins. I was always asking him to make me one. ‘That’s what I want Al, I want every one of those boards in those photos.’ He would just laugh at me and shrug it off. I think also he’s always thinking of the future, he’s very future driven; he wants to always be advanced in going forwards. To him it was like taking ten steps back. His theory was that they don’t work and I was like ‘but, I never even got a chance to try and make it work’ and all I wanted to know was what the feeling was like.

“That was my theory and finally he made me one. Just a really old-school looking single-fin with a modern twist, and he made the bottom a little more modern, with some more concave and it looked incredible. He thought I was crazy, he was laughing at me. At that time he had guys like Joel Tudor riding all kinds of stuff. So it was just the beginning of that whole movement.”

Photo: Rob Machado

The retro movement has brought a new connection between equipment and style. While Rob is equally at home on a fish as on a thruster, each board brings a different dimension to the flow of the surfer. “You look back and the boards in the 1980s, those boards had a ton of foam in them. They made them work, they made them do a lot of quick turns, but it helped them carry that speed and that flow. I think the first person that comes to my mind is Tom Curren. Curren did it and he did it riding thrusters. You know, he is the epitome of flow. He made the thruster work better than anyone, with style, linking turns and carrying and holding speed and using his whole rail.”

You can tell with Machado that the aesthetics of surfing is something that preoccupies his mind. That translates into his other interests, such as music and especially photography. “I’ve always been interested in it, when I was on tour. I used to travel with different cameras; every year I took a different kind of format. One year I travelled with a Polaroid camera and then one year I took a little 35mm and a super8. It’s weird, you know, a tour is kind of strange. You go to the same places over and over again and you see the same people. After the first couple of years, I thought, I don’t need to take a picture of this because I’m going to the same places and seeing the same things. So I decided to bring different formats, so when I did see things, I could look at them in a different way.”

For Rob Machado the rewards come when he takes time out to look at things from a different perspective, whether it’s board design, the significance of a world title lost, the composition of images or of life itself. Finishing his warm up, his piercing gaze moves from the flow of his green and brown twin fin to the ebb of the moving Pacific. The form, the function and the aesthetics are all linked.

Photo: Rob Machado

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