This Is How Mickey Munoz Plans To Be Surfing At Age 100

It’s not that most of us are dying to figure out how to make it into triple-digit territory.

But finding hacks to surf until we’re 100 means we could apply them early — and make the most of our 40s, 50s, and maybe beyond.

In typical YouTube fashion, Kyle Buthman’s new mini-doco on Mickey Muñoz packs a little clickbait into its title — Mickey is only 87.

You don’t need to know who Mickey Muñoz is (though Joel Tudor might put you in an armbar for not caring). You might walk past him on your way to the water, dismissing him for his wacky analog selfie stick.

But then you’d miss the chance to chat with one of the few living men who pioneered Waimea in the late 1950s — back when no one knew if you could survive a hold-down at The Bay. You could hear firsthand accounts of Malibu in the early 1950s, when surfing was true counterculture and uncontaminated by Wavestorms and Sprinter vans.

Born in New York City in 1937 and surfing since the age of 10, Muñoz now lives in Baja California, where surfing remains at the center of his peaceful existence.

Buthman — who directed Everything & All: The Peter Mel Story for Stab — opens this chapter of his Brainwork series with Mickey attempting to describe an indescribable experience at Desert Point: 

“We haven’t figured out how to go faster than the speed of light, physically — but mentally, we have,” he says. “I came out of the barrel younger than I went in. It changes you physiologically, chemically.”

For many, their final stretch is spent immobile in a chair, surrounded by others who are also immobile, and sometimes no longer aware of where they are. But not for Mickey, who remains lucid and joyful in his pursuit of elusive perfection, which he believes is exactly “what keeps you in the game.”

The loss of youth collectively terrifies us. And generation after generation, we make the age-old mistake of arrogantly assuming the old have little to teach us.

But it wouldn’t hurt to listen to someone who’s lived two, three, or four times as long as we have. Maybe it would help us come to terms with the inevitable passing of our own youth. And besides, people like Mickey come with bonkers stories, hilarious anecdotes, and hard-won advice from mistakes we haven’t made yet.

They’ve lived through what we haven’t. They’ve seen what we’ve yet to see. And in Mickey’s case, we’d only be so lucky to live half of what he has.