Kiki's Coach

Even before the national office of Little League allowed girls to play, Kiki played center field for Eddie’s Plumbing, later Orange County Bank, and for part of one season her assistant coach was Corky Carroll, probably the first professional surfer in the world. If people recognize his name at all now, it’s usually from the first, now-ancient Lite Beer commercials, where he played the goofy, doped-out guy who could trip over his own knobby knees if you let him. Back then, though, he was ripping the world apart, building the career that led eventually to five U.S. surfing championships, international championships in big and small wave divisions, and the ultimate, being named the #1 Surfer in the World by SURFER magazine in 1968.

Kiki described him leaning on the rail at the top of the dugout, keeping track of runs, hits, and errors in the team’s scorebook. She didn’t know why he had volunteered to coach—he wasn’t related to anyone in the league, and during their practices he wasn’t really that good, the way a lot of former players are, at throwing, catching, and hitting. Someone thought it was a community service project for him, something to do when he wasn’t out in the water or working at the surf shop, helping Hobie Alter revolutionize short-board design. Maybe he’d been ticketed for drunk driving or something, and this was his sentence. He drove a white VW bus, never fewer than two boards strapped to the roof. All the time, he looked like he was looking somewhere else.

Joyce Hoffmann is my spiritual older sister, but Corky Carroll is the one I think about when I hear some surfers with chronic localism have stink-eyed an outsider or jacked his car just for being from somewhere else. As if anyone owns a wave. I think of Corky hanging five through the timbers of the Huntington Pier in footage from old US championships that somehow show up on ESPN or the Outdoor Life Network. That wave picked him, and that line through encrusted pilings sharp as razors had nothing to do with his owning anything. Neptune, or God, or the Great Mother gave him that moment, and he kissed them back with his ride. Locals give other people reasons to jump to conclusions about us. They make me angry.


John Keats thought Cortez had discovered the Pacific Ocean, or at least he said so in a poem. Corky Carroll stopped turning up for practice after a while. Maybe Cortez’s name fit better in the line. And maybe Corky didn’t care about conquest or poetry, just the salt holding him up in those long moments between rides, and the fire on a new beach late at night when all other light was gone and the sound of the water was nearly all that remained. The white shadow of foam pulsed at the shore. Did Corky think the ocean wrote his name there? Did he wonder if someone later would misread it? He never made it into the team photo, but I would put his razor line of ride, his easy grace in every poem.