Michael Tomson lived his life exactly the way he wanted to and didn’t care who cared. Image: Screenshot/Bustin’ Down the Door
On October 7, Michael Tomson died after a long, hard fight with throat cancer. He was 66. His death marked the end of a life lived far beyond the boundaries of what general society might consider normal, but that willingness to stray off the beaten path was both a reason for his success and a road to some self-destructive tendencies. “He carved his own path,” Shaun Tomson, 1977 world champion and cousin to Michael, wrote me in an email. “Like he said, ‘No one took off deeper.’ He was fully committed. That is how he lived his life – full-on – maxed out.”
Tomson was born in 1954 in Durban, South Africa. At 10, he, along with younger cousin Shaun, began surfing together on the same day on the same type of surfboard in the Bay of Plenty. Shaun, of course, would go on to become a world champion. Michael, although never reaching the levels of competitive success his cousin did, may well have had an even bigger hand in shaping the entirety of global surfing culture. But just because he didn’t win a world title didn’t mean he wasn’t talented enough to do so — his courage in waves of consequence was the stuff of legend.
“Mike was the most courageous surfer I had ever seen,” Shaun remembered, “Bay of Plenty, Cave Rock, Sunset Beach, and Pipeline. Wowee – at Pipeline he was a gladiator throwing himself over the edge into horrendous double-up tubes.”
There are a few names associated with the Bustin’ Down the Door generation — Shaun Tomson, Mark Richards, Rabbit Bartholemew, and Peter Townend, for example — but Michael’s is often left off the list. He was right there with them in the fray, though, pushing the limits of what was possible, turning the surf world on its head, and paving a new road to surfing’s future. “My guess is that playing second banana throughout his formative years to a younger and slightly better-looking relative had much to do with what Michael achieved in his career,” Matt Warshaw wrote, “beginning at Pipeline, where he never out-surfed Shaun but often out-gritted him. Shaun was a surgeon on those big hollow walls. Michael was a bull at full charge with six banderillas stuck in his back.”
That fray, though, had a flimsy door that led to a dark room, and Michael walked through it often and with great relish. “I loved to watch Michael surf, but our friendship was built on our shared love of good writing, magazine design concepts and, it has to be said, the devil’s dandruff,” Phil Jarrett wrote in an article for Swellnet in 2015 that was republished on Encyclopedia of Surfing. “This was the seventies and coke was unavoidable, but some people constructed better avoidance plans than we did. There were plenty of all-nighters, washing the stuff down with whiskey and wine, arguing with increasingly scary intensity the relative merits of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson. I look back on those times with more pleasure than regret, but we all knew it was a phase we were going through. Or most of us did.”
As it would turn out, it was more than a phase for Michael, and pro surfing couldn’t hold his attention for long. In the late seventies, he threw himself into surf journalism. He started a magazine in Durban called Down the Line and became the assistant editor at the now-defunct Surfing magazine.
Despite his long affair with drugs — or perhaps because of it — Michael was a constant creative force. It was a rushing, violent fountain of ideas; often divisive ones, but they almost always did what they were intended to do: make people take notice. That, perhaps, was one of his greatest talents. He had an innate ability to turn heads, whether it was through an advertising campaign or simply his force of personality. “In his early twenties, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about apartheid in sport that created a firestorm in his homeland of South Africa,” Shaun wrote. “No one knows this but after the article, he was asked to run for political office by the government’s opposition party.”
It could be argued that Michael’s biggest achievement in the surfing world was his creation of the Gotcha brand. In 1978, he emigrated to the United States, put down tentative roots in Laguna Beach, and along with a non-surfing friend from college named Joel Cooper, opened up shop. “Calling it Gotcha was my idea,” he said. “And it’s a fuckin’ lame name. But, you know, it’s no lamer than the Beatles.”
His design knowledge, advertising smarts, industry contacts, and an inherent understanding of what was “cool”, paired with Cooper’s business know-how quickly turned Gotcha into a juggernaut of a company that employed some of the world’s best designers and had a team of the world’s best surfers. At one point in time, it seemed that Gotcha, and by extension Michael, was dictating to an entire industry what surfing was going to become.
“He was a font of creativity and originality and if there was an envelope to be pushed, Mike mowed it down,” Shaun wrote. “Then he had the Gotcha Pro at Sandy Beach – surfing’s first rock and roll event. And then followed it up with the first-ever event at Teahupo’o. And then he made Surfers: The Movie, one of the greatest movies – even getting Miki Dora to finally go on screen in an unforgettable scene.”
In business, Michael knew enough to know that he didn’t know everything — an important trait in anyone who’s successful. “Every surf company, if they expect to make it, needs a non-surfer to help run it,” Michael told Matt Warshaw in 1995. “It’s absolutely necessary. All the stuff I didn’t know about business, Joel knew about… The company concept was mine, yes. I didn’t know jack shit about production, operations, or administration. I had a few things going, though. I knew something about design and I understood a little about advertising. I knew the right people. I’d saved a few thousand dollars. And above all that, I could take off in the pit at Sunset.”
Gotcha’s popularity exploded almost the moment it started. In under a decade, it was doing $65 million in sales. The brand used aggressive advertising campaigns, most famously employing the “If You Don’t Surf, Don’t Start” catchphrase. While it likely seemed a counterintuitive marketing device that potentially pushed new consumers away, it caught hold of a group of people who felt as though they were in an exclusive club. In 1987, Gotcha’s sales were only eclipsed by Ocean Pacific and Hobie. Like all things in fashion, though, Gotcha eventually fell from the spotlight. By the early nineties, Tomson wasn’t in control of the company anymore, and after bouncing around in the hands of different owners, it was eventually sold to Perry Ellis in 2005. “My baby turned into a fucking whore,” Michael said.
But he had seen the writing on the wall in the late eighties, and Michael started another brand that was under the Gotcha umbrella: More Core Division, or MCD. It, like Gotcha had, caught fire, but the flame only burned hot for a short time. In that brief period, Michael assembled a surf team that might very well be the best one that’s ever existed. “Gotcha soared in the stratosphere, got too big so he started MCD,” Shaun said, “and with his brands he assembled the greatest, hippest, coolest, edgiest surf team on the planet: Martin Potter, Cheyne Horan, Gerry Lopez, Mike Stewart, Sunny Garcia, Brock Little, Rob Machado, the Ho brothers, Dino Andino, Matt Archbold and yes, Andy Irons too.
After the Gotcha/MCD party ended — he’d spent nearly two decades as a surf world cornerstone — Tomson ended up in San Clemente. He was the president of the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association throughout the 1990s, but Michael’s party stumbled on. In 2013, Tomson, then 58, was charged with two felony DUI counts, and suspicion of cocaine possession. Two years later, while still on probation, he was arrested on suspicion of cocaine trafficking. In the eyes of the law, perhaps Michael Tomson wasn’t a model citizen. But his influence on the sport, or pastime, or whatever it is we’re calling it, can’t be understated. Tomson played a leading role on surfing’s stage, and his life was a mirror for what attracted many to it: outside the boundaries, dancing on the edge of a precipice, a delicate balance, creative and physical, powerful yet gentle. A madness barely contained, never fully understood, and never fully figured out.
“Mike Tomson’s breadth of achievements is unparalleled,” Shaun wrote. “Only Kelly Slater comes close. Hell, even Kelly said when he was young, ‘All I wanted was to surf for Gotcha.'”
