Ambassador Of Aloha: On The Road with Jack McCoy’s Aquamarine Dream
Notes from the Blue Horizon tour.
Jack McCoy’s Australian tour, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Blue Horizon, places one of surfing’s greatest biopics back on the big screen where it belongs. Investigative journo Nathan Lynch went on tour in WA with the greatest surf filmmaker of our generation to find out what drove Jack McCoy — and Andy Irons — to shoot for the impossible.
On stage, Jack McCoy is ageless. He might be in a wheelchair with a busted femur, nursing a nasty chest infection. He might be knackered from days of travel across Australia and back-to-back economy flights. But with the aquamarine backdrop of a full-size cinema screen rippling behind him, Jack’s just as stoked as the line of sun-bleached groms peering up at him from the front row.
You see, Jack’s 77 years young these days. He’s been a surfer for seven decades, since his family made the fortuitous carve from Mainland America down to Hawaii in 1954. But during the opening moments of a surf film in a packed theatre, time is imaginary. As Dave Grohl’s muted guitars chunk in, and the screen fades from rippling blue to a rifling Mentawai right-hander, Blue Horizon is screening. By the look on his face, Jack might as well be 8 years old, getting pushed into his first wave by Pops in Waikiki …
“Since that moment, I’ve dedicated my professional life to being a waterman. Taking movies from the water is one of my greatest joys,” Jack says.
Today, Jack can’t get in the water and film. But nothing enlivens him as much as the pure sound of stoke; the hoots coming from a packed cinema as his vision plays out in film. Real film. Film with grain, grit and rolling at 24 frames per second. Film that was shot in some of the world’s most remote locations, on a 20 kilogram WW2 camera, and then muled in great spools back to a lab in Sydney, eschewing light and X-ray machines, where it was dumped in chemical baths to reveal an invisible magic. In the age of 4k phone cameras, it’s hard to imagine the mix of stoke, fear and anticipation that filmmakers lugged around in the pre-digital age.
Jack remembers it all too well — the whiff of chemicals and the thrill of feeding freshly processed film into a projector. There’s nothing like it. The feeling’s etched on his face, as he sits in the third row at the Margaret River theatre where Blue Horizon is being screened to a packed house ranging from groms through to their parents and an array of flannelette-clad surf addicts.
“I’ve counted it up and I’ve probably shot close to 500,000 feet of film,” Jack says. “You actually had to put the film in, shoot it, process it, work on it, and create it. When you make a movie like Blue Horizon, for one foot of final film, you’d probably have shot 15 to 20 feet.”
As Andy comes on screen, grinding his way through a ten-second tube, the room erupts. There are children in the theatre for whom Andy Irons is a mythical figure, gone before they were born. To these kids, AI is a legend in the purest sense of the word.
His Hawaiian Island Creations (HIC) gun stands as a symbol on stage, alongside the aluminium-wrapped “Silver Bullet” that Rasta rode in the film. Later in the film, Andy will stand tall on that same board as he takes down Slater at Pipe, smashes Jake Paterson’s hopes of a Triple Crown, and snatches his first world title from under Kelly’s nose. The film will cut to Kelly spilling tears in the shower at Jack Johnson’s house, followed by Andy being chaired up the beach on jubilant Hawaiian shoulders.
The hoots from the Margaret River groms, who’ll only ever see Andy surf on celluloid, drown out the remastered audio that’s pumping through 5.1 surround sound speakers.
The other thing Jack loves, almost as much as the ocean, is the music. The ocean is the dominant character in all of his films. But the songs are crucial; the supporting lead. His soundtracks are painstakingly sourced and curated, cajoled for a pittance from the claws of record labels and music publishers. When overlaid with the deep bassy oceanic rumble coming through the rear speakers, it’s a powerful experience.
“Half of it is in the music,” muses Jack, with a shutterbug’s humility. The serendipity of securing the right tracks is almost as incredible as the luck of getting Andy Irons and Dave Rastovich in their prime. To get songs, Jack always had to bypass the agents and the labels and go straight to the musicians.
For Blue Horizon, he swapped a surfboard for a song with Chris Martin of Coldplay. He got Robbie Williams via 1 Giant Leap. He took Dave Grohl surfing in return for two of the greatest tracks to ever grace a surf film.
The music and the footage work together in a kind of synesthesia, where only a surf filmmaker and his audience truly know the feeling.
The idea behind Blue Horizon found its genesis in Hawaii, way back in the 1960s, when Jack was competing in surf contests in an effort to win a trip to Australia. He recalls feeling deeply confused when he won the trip to Oz, but discovered his friends were pissed and bummed that they had missed out. Is this side of surfing really the aloha spirit, he wondered?
“I wasn’t competitive. And I thought, is that the result of competitive surfing? It really upset me. So it’s an open secret here that I’m prejudiced in favour of free surfers versus competition,” Jack tells his audience before the film.
The commercial genius was to secure funding for a surf film, from a major clothing label, and then drive the audience back towards the sheer expressive joy of free-surfing. This is the guerrilla theme that runs through all of McCoy’s work. In doing so, he single-handedly opened up a pathway for the vagabonding “free surfer” as a profession. Without Jack’s films, there would be no Margo, Rasta and Billabong Challenge series.
For Blue Horizon he pitched an idea to Billabong’s Gordon Merchant of running the two stories in parallel, seeing where the serendipity of surfing led them. He had no idea Andy would go on to win three world titles during filming. Meanwhile, Rasta put in some of the most soulful and inspiring performances of his career. When the duo first met in Tahiti, it was Rasta who pushed Andy to take off under the peak, ditch the rail, and stand tall. By the end of the day, of course, Andy had the best ride in Jack’s can…
One of the complexities of Jack’s films — as for many of us in the wavesliding game — is the love-hate relationship with competitive surfing. It drives absolute performance excellence, but often at the expense of stoke and aloha. This has been a puzzle that McCoy has wrangled since his brief foray with competition in Hawaii in the 60s.
Never has this conflict been more evident than in Blue Horizon. The cracks in Andy’s mental state are evident just days after his first world title, as he drives around the island of Kauai questioning why he’s unhappy. With the passage of two decades, that footage is rawer than ever, taking on a new tragedy with our awareness of the demons Andy wrestled. He had everything he thought he needed in life. He was standing on top of the pro surfing mountain, unassailed. He had taken Kelly’s pretty picture and just crushed it. Yet he still didn’t feel right.
What was it all for?
Meanwhile, Rastovich is drawing his own lines, on wave faces as in life.
Rasta says in the film: “I wanted to really love my surfing — my entire life. I went to Billabong, very, very nervously, and asked them if I could please become a free surfer. They said: ‘Sure, we’d prefer you to do that!’ And this amazing golden path opened up in front of me.”
For Andy, meanwhile, the money and the success was all-consuming. Irresistible. He had no choice but to grind towards the summit, whatever personal price the piper demanded.
Jake Paterson recalls watching this world title drama play out in Hawaii in 2003 with a mix of awe and amazement. As the shoe-in for the Triple Crown that year, he had a front row seat in the battle between Kelly and AI. One scene at Sunset that year was pivotal in Andy delivering an axe blow to Kelly’s run of world titles.
“The world title was pretty much decided. The last two events were Sunset and Pipeline and Kelly had a huge lead for the world title race,” Jake Paterson recalls from his home in Dunsborough.
“Sunset was a WCT event that year … in Round Three I had Kalani Robb and we knocked out Kelly. I remember Andy was in the next heat and Kelly was paddling in while he was paddling out. He says: ‘You just left the door open for the world title.’ Kelly’s eyes went wide open — ‘Wow’. And that’s exactly what happened. Mathematically, Andy pretty much had to win the last two events to win the world title.”
And Andy went ahead and did it: second place at Sunset and a win at Pipe. History was made. The footage of Kelly crying in the shower after losing to Andy, supported by his brother Sean, is one of the defining images of that epochal surfing rivalry, as captured in Blue Horizon.
The whole movie could have had a very different ending if it wasn’t for Jake Patto and Kalani, McCoy says, laughing.
“Andy just had to push everything to the limit no matter what he was doing. Surfing big waves, surfing small waves, his tuberiding, big airs. Everything just had to be pedal to the metal. That was what I admired about Andy. He wasn’t waiting for anyone,” Jack recalls.
“He wanted to be the best. He wanted to put the best performances in, and he was gonna do anything he possibly could to get that done. We miss you, Andy. We love you. AI forever.”
Time and waves are both relentless, unforgiving mistresses. While Jack still feels like a stoked kid being pushed into waves in Waikiki, his body tells another story. On his neck is a scar from where the camera water housing smashed his helmet while filming Blue Horizon, driving a blade of plastic just millimetres from his jugular vein. The doctor who sewed him up said he was very lucky not to bleed out in the water. He was, of course, back out filming the next day with stitches and a munted jaw.
Jack’s femur is still recovering from a nasty break, relegating him to a wheelchair for the Blue Horizon tour. And the hayfever that drove him out of Yallingup in the 1990s is back with a vengeance, a wry welcome home to the wilds of South-West Oz.
Jack is well aware that the hands of time are as persistent as winter groundswell. And he wants to spend that most precious of commodities doing what he loves most: projecting his visual artworks onto a big screen, redlining the needle on his inner ‘hootometer’.
This tour has turned into a gruelling journey for Jack and his son-in-law Luke Campbell, who’s running the show, but it’s where he wants to be … travelling from one surfing town to another armed with his celluloid stoke generator.
“Right now I can’t shoot any more, but I’m going through all of my old film and finding gold that never made the cut. I’m making clips and little bits and pieces with these clips that I have. It’s a trip. It’s a souvenir of my life, that’s how I look at my movies,” McCoy says. “They’re great memories, and I get to share them with you guys.”
For anyone who surfs, this film tour is a piece of history, a piece of nostalgia, a piece of art, and an opportunity to talk story with one of the greatest surf filmmakers we will ever experience.
“I always set myself a goal with the start of each movie, so I wasn’t making the same film over and over again. I wanted to test myself and learn. My objective for Blue Horizon was to tell a great story, and this was after the Occumentary, which inspired me to tell that story,” McCoy says, a grin on his water-weathered face and his eyes lighting up like a pair of old-school film projectors.
“But to be able to touch, move, and inspire people in that manner is what I live for. That’s the reward that I get in my life — to be able to share.”
After the Fremantle show, Jack and I have a great rave about the film. As I go to leave, McCoy digs into his black puffer jacket and pulls out a card.
The world’s greatest surf filmmaker don’t need no business card, I think.
“Have you heard about the Duke’s cards?” he asks.
Despite an embarrassingly encyclopaedic memory for surf trivia, I’m stumped.
“No.”
He passes it with Japanese reverence: two hands. It’s a replica of the “creed” cards that Duke Kahanamoku gave out as he travelled the world sharing the art of surfing. The Ambassador of Aloha. Jack still carries one wherever he goes.
On one side, the dog-eared card has a picture of Kahanamoku standing in front of a 12-foot board emblazoned with the iconic letters DUKE.
On the back, the cards featured the Duke’s philosophy on what it means to be a waterman.
“In Hawaii we greet friends, loved ones or strangers with ALOHA, which means with love. ALOHA is the key word to the universal spirit of real hospitality, which made Hawaii renowned as the world’s centre of understanding and fellowship. Try meeting or leaving your brother nobles with ALOHA, you’ll be surprised by their reaction of ALOHA of LOVE. I believe it, and it is my creed. ALOHA TO YOU, Duke.”
Jack had the card printed as a reminder of what the true spirit of surfing means, in practice.
As McCoy leaves me with the Duke’s creed, his eyes twinkle.
“When I grew up in Hawaii, that’s who you wanted to be. A waterman. A gentleman,” he says. “Aloha!”
The “creed card” is a piece of surf history I never knew about. A symbol of stoke. An invitation to embrace and amplify the great spirit of aloha. In the context of the film we’d just watched, perhaps it was a missing link in our culture? Something we had forgotten in the relentless urge to shred?
As I walk away, buzzing, it hits me that Jack’s films are a “creed card” borne of his own imagination. A modern, cinematic version of the Duke’s simple poetry. Wherever he goes, McCoy shares his stoke, celebrates the spirit of the ocean, and carries on the tradition of the great Hawaiian watermen.
And like the Duke himself, Jack plans to see out his days on earth travelling, sharing the stoke, spreading the aloha, and luxuriating in the simple joy that a life in the brine has bestowed upon him.
