The man certainly had vision. Photo: via Encyclopedia of Surf
On an inky-black, stormy night in 1996, surf filmmaker Jack McCoy stood on a sandstone bluff along the rugged Western Australian shore, cursing his fate as he watched a rare torrential deluge sweep his dream down off the craggy cliff and into the Indian Ocean. McCoy found himself here at Three-Mile Camp, a remote desert outpost located on the Gnaraloo Station, a one-time commercial sheep ranch located 90 miles north of the city of Carnarvon, having assembled his forces deep in the “woop woop” (Aussie for “middle of f-cking nowhere”) for the second iteration of the Billabong Challenge.
The term “forces” applies literally — this experiment in surf filmmaking and product marketing disguised as a surfing competition took shape and was executed solely by the force of McCoy’s will. Who else in the entire world of surf media had juice enough to convince a half-dozen of the world’s best surfers to make the long, arduous trek into the outback, camp for potentially two weeks in what could only euphemistically be called “rustic” conditions, compete against each other in the grinding left reef break known as “Tombstones” for an unsanctioned title, only to have the whole experience filmed and packaged for use by a company in direct competition with their own sponsors?
Having pulled off this miracle in the desert the year before gave McCoy that juice. The premier Billabong Challenge, despite serious logistical hurdles and even several mutinies among the invited pros, was counted a success by its sponsor, that was more than happy to finance a follow-up extravaganza. Which was why McCoy now stood in the rain at Three-Mile Camp. He’d traversed almost 100 miles of washboard dirt road, transporting multitudinous tents, cameras, boats, fishing equipment, generators, a refrigerated food trailer and a ping-pong table. Then watched as what seemed like the region’s nine inches of annual rainfall fell overnight, threatening to wash this whole caravanserai – in essence a manifestation of his vision of how surfing should be portrayed and perceived – into the sea.
No way Jack McCoy was going to let that happen. And another Jack McCoy legend was born.
Dedication to presenting his vision of surfing to the world is why Jack McCoy was never destined to be a successful restauranteur (having, for a short time, run a vegetarian café in Jan Juc, near Bells Beach). There was obviously something about the depiction of surfing that intrigued him, right from the start. Which for McCoy was growing up in Hawaii in the late ‘50s, early ’60s, not only watching those early surf films by Bud Browne, Greg Noll and Bruce Brown, but along with fellow grem Randy Rarick working for filmmakers Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman, festooning neighborhood telephone poles all over Honolulu with posters promoting the pair’s latest screenings at the Roosevelt High Auditorium. The Endless Summer, Free and Easy, The Golden Breed, The Cosmic Children; the titles alone of the surf films Jack McCoy steeped himself in throughout the sixties articulated an aesthetic that would influence his own film work in the years to come: that at its heart, surfing and the surfing life was all about freedom.
In keeping with that theme, in 1970 McCoy traveled with Rarick and the rest of the Hawaiian team to Australia, there to compete in the World Contest at Bells Beach. Yet unlike the rest of his teammates, he stayed, evolving into what could only be described as an atypical Vietnam-era expat — the guy got right to work. First, with encouragement from Australian surf filmmaker Albe Falzon, shooting photos for Tracks magazine, then transitioning into 16mm film, eventually collaborating with cameraman Dick Hoole and editor David Lourie on the film Tubular Swells, released in 1976.
This was one of a pair of period surf films featuring a curious blend of the nascent progressive school of professional surfing with the more sublime attraction of exotic surf travel — specifically to the Indonesian island of Bali. While not as slick and innovative as 1977’s Free Ride, which featured a professionally written script performed by actor Jan Michael-Vincent, and the extraordinary water cinematography of Dan Merkel, Tubular Swells nevertheless had a more immediate feel, with the action portrayed more as being witnessed, rather than curated.
It also featured a hallmark of all the McCoy films to come: fine attention to its musical score. Perhaps the last of the surf films to completely ignore copyright protection, Tubular Swells brazenly featured plenty of “needle-drops” from prominent acts like Santana, The Doobie Brothers, Gary Wright and The Allman Brothers, each carefully chosen by McCoy not merely as background music, but thoughtfully placed to establish a mood; the blend of music and action would add a sensual aspect to this and McCoy’s later work that belied his often-wooden narration and corny humor skits. This acumen reached its height in Rip Curl’s 1976 promo short, “A Day In The Life of Wayne Lynch,” which, thanks in no small part to a meticulously edited score featuring Supertramp, Loggins and Messina and The Alan Parsons Project, is still one of the best surfing profiles ever produced for film. McCoy would later team with Lynch for the spectacular closing segment of Hoole/McCoy’s follow-up effort, 1982’s Stormriders, which featured the reclusive goofy-footer surfing alone in epic conditions at Tombstones, to the melodic strains of The Little River Band’s “Cool Change” (paid for this time).
Having established himself as one of the last of the traditional 16mm surf filmmakers, as well as having developed into one of the sport’s most proficient water-cinematographers, during the 1980s McCoy rose along with the tide flooding the surf wear industry, working on notable projects like Quiksilver’s The Performers (1984) ,widely acknowledged as the very first commercial VHS surf video (that a young McCoy tacked up posters for MacGillivray-Freeman’s 1965 film of the same name had to be a coincidence).
Yet it wasn’t until he aligned with Billabong to produce a string of promotional films that he vaulted to preeminence in the new video age. Starring top ‘Bong team-riders like Mark Occhilupo, Shane Dorian, Luke Egan and Munga Barry, shot on 16mm (rather than video), featuring sophisticated production design and plenty of McCoy’s superlative camerawork in the water, releases like Bunyip Dreaming (1990), The Green Iguana (1992) and Sik Joy (1994) set standards that most of the period’s up-and-coming, “point-and-shoot” filmmakers didn’t even try to emulate, essentially conceding the medium’s upper echelon to McCoy.
Subsequent Billabong projects cemented that status. Titles like Sabotaj (1998), Occy: The Occumentary (1999) Blue Horizon (2004), Free As A Dog (2006) and Deeper Shade of Blue (2012) justified McCoy’s reputation as the best in the business…as well as one of that business’s most demanding director/producers. Asked in an interview to comment on being regularly described as a stern taskmaster by many of the surfers recruited for his films, McCoy minced no words. “That’s because surfers are f-ckin’ lazy,” he said. “Put it this way, I never did anything to any of those guys that was remotely unfair in terms of how a regular person might go about his or her job.”
Tough love, or just tough talk? Truth was, without a camera in his hand Jack McCoy was the most openly affectionate, supportive friends one could ever hope for, extending so much of his grace to the surfers whose personal journeys he chronicled. In any case, nobody could deny that McCoy’s work ethic and attention to detail meant that most of the pressure he was under to deliver excellence rested firmly on his broad shoulders.
Which brings us back to that stormy night in Gnaraloo Station. No mere assignment, this whole “experiment in the desert” thing was his brainchild, a better way to highlight state-of-the-art surfing performance; a better way to bring the story to life. No biblical downpour was going to stop him from doing just that. Standing ankle-deep in a rapid current of muddy run-off, McCoy quickly reviewed his options, of which there weren’t many. Then he raced to his tool tent, grabbed a couple of shovels, handed them to me and WA invitee Paul Paterson, and yelled, “Start digging!” We spent the next few hours fighting that storm by hand, with McCoy and camp manager George Simpson joining in our furious efforts to carve out channels directing the run-off to flow around, rather than right through the site’s various tents. By 2:00 a.m. the rain had stopped, the mud ceased to flow; all the tents were still standing.
When the rest of the competitors showed up the next morning, they all agreed that the camp set-up looked great. A few of them tossed their gear into their tents, then drove off in their rental cars to the Gnaraloo Station headquarters to call girlfriends on the shire’s only phone. Jack McCoy just smiled — this year’s Billabong Challenge was already a groove.
As it turned out, after a few days of small surf, enjoying a number of adjacent breaks with senseis like Simpson and Maurice Cole, fishing for barramundi, playing ping-pong and guitar sing-alongs under the desert stars, on the penultimate day of the waiting period several rounds of competition were finally held in epic, eight-to 10-foot Tombstones, covered from every angle by McCoy and his five-star camera team. Oddly, the finalists chose to put the event on hold, citing fatigue and holding out for even more epic conditions on the morrow. Naturally, the clouds came in and the wind went onshore.
No matter, though. Jack McCoy had the whole wild, wonderful week on film, and the lack of a competitive winner did nothing to diminish the resulting film, Psychedelic Desert Groove, which with its evocative blend of character, action and music painted an almost enchanting vision of a communal surfing experience, transcending the period’s standard promotional fare. In other words, classic McCoy.
Upon news of Jack McCoy’s passing, well-deserved tributes have started to pour in, each one pointing to the man’s lifelong expression of creativity, generosity and heartfelt belief in the spirit of surfing. Thinking back on almost 45 years of our friendship, the entirety of all those fine attributes were captured in an image I’ll never forget: Jack, streaming wet in the dark of the Western Australian night, shaking his fist at the storm, fighting to keep his vision alive…and his surfer’s tents dry.
