A Conversation With Everyone’s Favourite Goofyfoot Maverick, Bobby Martinez.

You don’t hear from Bobby often. 

He’s one of only two career professional surfers (along with Rasta) who have managed to remain influential without a social media account keeping people within the fold of their personal lives. Bobby’s relevance comes not in spite of, but because of, his reluctance to do anything anyone tells him. The guy cannot be brought. He is rumored to have turned down an $800K contract offer in the heyday of the surf industries boom citing “once you sign a contract they own you.” 

Bobby was the first Mexican-American to make surfing’s big league. Had four ASP top ten finishes in a row from 2006-2010. Four tour wins: Mundaka (twice), Teahupoo (smoked Slater), and Cloudbreak, and paychecks rolling in from Reef, O’Neill, and Monster Energy. Now, on the cusp of 40 Bobby is lost on the radar of every social platform and found laying down timeless power tracks on low-tide Rincon walls.

Immortalized by his clash with ASP officials about the league’s updated ranking system, “they were trying to change the ranking system to a tennis format. And I was not about it. You just had all these surfers, who are the best, top guys and all these people who were big tennis fans that wanted surfing to be something bigger than what it was,” says Martinez on the UNLEASHED pod. The short version was he told the ASP to go fuck itself in front of a live webcast audience and sponsors couldn’t leap out of his way fast enough. Except Monster, who had the smarts to realize that aligning themselves with unapologetically frank and colorful characters, in an era of media trained cyborgs, would only benefit their brand’s namesake. 

The Bobpod is a good one.