On a good day with no traffic, the drive from South Central Los Angeles to Malibu’s Surfrider Beach takes 40 minutes. Anybody knows there’s no such thing as a “good day with no traffic” in Los Angeles though, which is probably a perfect metaphor for the actual distance between the two. The 16-square-mile area south of downtown Los Angeles is still, to this day, more closely associated with the start of the 1992 LA riots than anything else. Meanwhile, on the other end of that drive and amidst some of the most expensive coastal front real estate in the United States, sits the birthplace of modern-day surf culture as we know it — the place where Gidget got the world believing surfing is a no-worries daily routine of summer bonfires and walking the nose at First Point.
They’re only 30 miles apart but South Central and Malibu exist in entirely different universes.
So when a guy like Giovanni Douresseau says “surfing changed my life,” he’s not repeating a cliché.
“Gio before surfing was a kid that felt abandoned,” Douresseau says. “A kid that was depressed but never spoke about it. The best role models I had at the time were the gang members that lived around my house.”
A chance invite to surf for the first time almost turned into young Gio’s first trip to jail when he arrived early for the field trip shuttle from South Central to the beach. It’s the kind of story that reminds you some of us are meant to find our way into the ocean no matter what it takes, because that same day, Douresseau got his first wave instead. And it’d be easy to wrap it up with “and the rest is history,” but even that wasn’t so simple. Surfing gave Giovanni Douresseau his first waves that summer, a realization that life could be different from what he’d known in South Central, and probably just as important, a male role model by the name of Tim Wingard.
A longtime Malibu regular, Wingard started making the drive into South Central to pick Giovanni up and bring him back for surf lessons outside of the youth summer program that had introduced them. More than a decade later and Douresseau’s still surfing and seeing through to the three promises he made to his mentor.
“The first was to dedicate my life to service,” Gio says. “The second is to finish school. And the third and final wish was to share our story.”
Today, Giovanni Douresseau’s crossed all three off the list in one way or another and revived the same youth mentoring program that brought him to the beach as a kid, spending his summers passing on the exact same thing that changed his life forever.
“Every time I teach a new kid to surf, I can feel him. Every time I can see a smile on a kid’s face because they’re experiencing surfing for the first time, I can feel his energy.”
