A nice American boy with a college education, I was a little shocked when I migrated to Australia in 1985. Australian kids regularly did what I only did in fear and trembling when I was in high school and the waves were too good to resist - wagged (ditched) school. Not only that, an alarming number of them dropped out at age 15.
Bob Hawke was Prime Minister of Australia at the time. A "true-blue" Aussie Labor man, he made it easy for Australians to go on the dole. All you had to do was sign up and a handsome fortnightly cheque from the government was yours. It was too good a deal to resist. And so the Bob Hawke Surf Team was born.
He may not have been a member of the Team, but Mark Occhilupo was definitely an inspiration to thousands of young Australian grommets in that era. Occy quit school in 1983, as close to his fifteenth birthday as possible and immediately took the surfing world by storm. By the time I arrived in Australia in '85, he had already taken out the Pipeline Masters and the OP Pro and was a force to be reckoned with, right alongside the two Tom's - Carroll and Curren. Then Occy fell even further and faster than he had risen, but he picked himself up again and took out the 1999 World Title.
I learned a lot about Australian culture and ideals from Occy and the kids who looked up to him. Australians like to think of themselves as "battlers" like Occy and not "bludgers." Sure, they took advantage of Hawke's free lunch, but they didn't sit around doing nothing. They did what they loved to do and did it passionately. When it dawned on them that they weren't going to cut it as pro surfers, most of them got jobs and worked hard to be sure they and their children could always afford to surf. Today, a lot of those kids have become more successful than many squeaky clean college kids became and they're teaching their little grommets to surf. Watch out world, the grandchildren of the Bob Hawke Surf Team are on their way.
Written By: Rob Schneider
