Reborn To Rescue

Photos courtesy Surfzone Relief Operations

On this September day in the Year of Crazy Water, Malibu is on orange alert. A perfect storm, deep in the South Pacific, has produced what all the surf forecasters are predicting will be a historic swell. Tahiti already got it, Hawaii is getting it, and Malibu is about to get it. An electric charge is firing through the surf community, the way it does when big waves are on tap after an interminable summer drought. The swell is enough to threaten homes on a high tide. Matt George is tempted to go but asks about the water. Someone tells him the red tide is in, thick and brown, and Surfrider Beach is littered with dead crabs.

“Pass,” says George. “I’ve had enough dirty water for a while.”

One would guess so. A week after Katrina slammed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, George found himself at the helm of a large Yamaha WaveRunner, motoring nine feet over the streets of the 9th Ward. He was there as a civilian with connections, supporting eight trained, professional swift-water rescue teams from the California Task Force. There are a lot of qualified, gung-ho Los Angeles County lifeguards/watermen/swift-water teams who weren’t allowed to go to New Orleans, and so it was a special privilege for George to be up to his chest in toxic sludge, in the heat, in the line of fire, in the water with starving dogs, water moccasins and gators, trying to persuade holdouts to evacuate.

So, instead of surfing, we meet for lunch in one of the cabanas in the back of Santa Monica’s Viceroy Hotel. The hotel is one of those well-done boutique makeovers of a place that used to have some ragged charm, at best. George is a former pro surfer of some renown, and he lives in Venice. He’s had his time with Hollywood, but he has never been in a Viceroy cabana. He likes it back here, mostly hipster-free and quiet, clean and well-lighted by a pale-blue, late-summer, world-class Los Angeles sky. Palm trees reflect the cool, clear, chlorinated water of the swimming pool.

George orders an ice-cold beer — “a luxury, considering where I’ve been this past year.” I get the $15 gourmet chili fries. He may be of this world, in a fashion, but he’s certainly not in it. With his bald head, distant eyes and air of quiet intensity, George seems out of place here. He has been back from New Orleans for a couple of days but wants to return. He knows there are people down there who have been forgotten.

Matt George has worn more than a few hats in his 46 years: pro surfer, globetrotting surfing journalist, screenwriter, assassin in training, actor, provocateur. He’s had successes that became failures and vice versa. At the first artificial-wave-pool surfing contest, held in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1985, George jumped from the crowd to the stage in a pair of bun-huggers to compete in a Hot Buns contest. He won the $1,000 first prize even though it was for ladies (which caused a minor civil disturbance), and when he did a victory leap from the stage back to the crowd, he broke his ankle.

In the early ’90s, George joined the Navy and entered the SEAL program. With his taste for adventure and physical prowess, George appeared to be an ideal candidate, but he ended up washing out of the program, something he publicly blamed on problems caused by his broken ankle. But there were other reasons.

Over the years, I have known a lot of Matt Georges, and I haven’t liked all of them. The bikini-contest guy I liked — how could you not? But in 1998, he went Hollywood and got the chance that all surfing journalists wanted. George wrote and starred in a high-budget surf movie called In God’s Hands, which focused on the growing conflict between paddle-in surfers and those who use Personal Water Craft (PWC) to catch big waves. It was intended to say something about the soul of surfing. The entire surfing community was pulling for him, until the movie hit the screen. It was a self-important and humorless flop, and I said as much in a piece in Surfer magazine. The rest of the world had a similar reaction. The movie bombed, but it spun off a TV show called Wind on Water, starring Bo Derek, that got yanked off the air faster than The Princes of Malibu. By many accounts, George was crushed by these failures and lost his sense of purpose.

George’s latest incarnation — semiprofessional and sometimes-unsanctioned water rescuer — was inspired by the Sumatran tsunami in December of 2004. The word that the earthquake was centered near Nias and that the islands of northern Sumatra were devastated rang red alerts in the ears of surfers. These islands are the crossroads of the surfing world, where some of the best waves in the world can be found. Matt knew the area well, knew many boat captains, villagers and their families personally, and knew he had to get over there to help. Orange County surfer Bill Sharp felt the same way, so they flew to Indonesia, hoping to be a part of some organized relief effort. On the ground, in the middle of bewildering death and carnage caused by waves that not even surfers could imagine, Matt found the “organized” part to be a canard.