Surfing legend Callahan’s descent
We never fully know the reasons for anyone’s downward spiral. We know where they started, where they ended, maybe the speed of the descent. We guess at the why.
In the case of surfing legend Kevin Callahan, 58, who went by Kevin Reed for most of his life, we know he was arrested, and then released, in the death of another homeless man on the Santa Cruz beach last weekend.
We know that Callahan’s life is very different than it was in the days when he was a surfing champion who did the first aerial — a surfboard fully into the air — in the 1970s.
A pair of pictures yields the dimensions of his decline: In 1987, he was an impish young man, smiling upward at the camera. Thirty years later, his complexion looked like an egg fried in the sun.
I don’t pretend to know the details of the death of the other homeless man, 52-yearold Steven Lee. The police say Callahan told them that he had choked Lee.
But the district attorney’s office concluded that there was inconclusive evidence to charge Callahan. The cops say he remains a “person of interest” in Lee’s death.
To me, Callahan remains a person of interest for reasons that have little to do with Steven Lee, or what happened last weekend near the volleyball courts off Beach Street.
You could get a grasp of his spiral downward in a 17-minute outtake video shot by Josh Pomer for his 2010 documentary, “The Westsiders.’’ It was an interview with Callahan at his workshop.
That video left me with three main impressions: The first is that Callahan appeared to be ailing in spirit even then, his words punctuated by non
sequiturs and accompanied by a sweet and sheepish smile. “I’m an old fart,’’ he said.
The second is that he was self-aware. He knew the dangers of drugs and ugly behavior that afflicted the surfing community. He had lived it.
“With all the drugs and everything else, I did tell ’em (his friends) that I never wanted to see them living in the gutters, ’cause surfing will not support you,’’ he said. “You need to have a real job.’’
The last piece of it was that surfing remained Callahan’s passion, the core of his achievement, the foundation of the respect that mattered to him.
“It’s sad for me to see how it’s become, after all these years,” he said. “And I surfed in places that you guys wouldn’t go. I threw a 2,000-foot rope off a cliff, and surfed from places (by) myself.’’
His friends say that Callahan had not surfed for years: Instead, he slept near the Main Beach volleyball courts, homeless. It was there that witnesses say he apparently got into an argument Saturday night with Lee, whose body was found early Sunday morning by the cops.
Bob Pearson, the owner of Pearson Arrow Surfboards, had insightful words about Callahan: “You drive by homeless, you hear it a bunch of times: Don’t judge the people, you don’t know who he is, who she is, where they’re from, what happened to them and what’s going on,” he told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “I’m sure he has been judged wrong by a lot, a lot of people.”
We never know the full reasons for any one’s downward spiral. And Pearson is right. We should withhold judgment.
But you cannot help but feel that Callahan’s descent was linked with his ascent. The man who had achieved air — getting free of the wave — was ensnared by demons who dragged him back down.
In the video, Callahan talked again and again about the problems of his surfing friends. “They learned to do air, they learned to become the best, then all of sudden, it’s all taken away,” he said. “That is the hard part to see for me.’’
The saddest thing about this story is that Callahan was not just a witness to the failures of others. He could have been describing himself.