Reef Doig grew up in a very long shadow. His dad, Geoff Doig, is a bit of a legend in the surfing world, and especially in Cronulla. “He’d sit ten meters deeper than anyone else,” Reef said. “I wish I had his gonads, but to an extent, he had a bit of a screw loose when he was a young ‘un. That’s kind of what I got brought up in. My goals were to get barrels like he did. To get covers like he did. To raise three kids by himself. It’s pretty incredible.”
Reef, along with his siblings, was raised mostly in Bali—a paradise to some, but a hard place to make a name for yourself as a surfer. So when Reef was only 16, he made the decision to take matters into his own hands, packed a board bag with all his stuff, and moved to Australia. “Growing up in Bali, it’s so easy to get lazy and distracted,” he said. “Partying every night, and more than usual. I just thought, ‘you know what? Leave that, come over to Aus, and get some stuff happening.'”
His goal was to hit the QS running and make his way onto the world stage. And while his surfing is certainly world class, surfing in contests isn’t always indicative of your skill on a wave. “When I was like, 16, that’s when I was really on the QS,” he remembered. “Sponsors were hounding me for results and it really screwed with my head. I wasn’t feeling the love for surfing that I always had, and that’s when I ended up getting dropped by my sponsors. It’s hard as a kid, you know, 17 and getting dropped by my sponsors. That was my dream and went straight out the window.”
When that dream went out the window, it took his passion for surfing with it. But after a few years and with a more normal job under his belt, Reef found himself back in the water and more passionate about his first love than ever before. Now, he’s got a few stickers on his boards and he’s surfing as much as he can—and if the video above is any indication, we’ll be seeing a lot more from him in the future.
No matter where his surfing takes him, though, he knows where he comes from. “I feel like I’ll forever be a Balinese kid,” he explained. “It doesn’t matter what color you are. You don’t have be born here to be Balinese.”
REEF DOIG – "THE O'RIGINALS" from O'Neill Australia on Vimeo.
