Stab Magazine

Two years ago he was overweight,
heartbroken and heading for the slammer.

Now he’s back in shape, married and shaking
up the WQS.  Stab flew to California to find Sunny Garcia in the
middle of an unlikely comeback.

The night before he was due to start a three-month stretch for tax evasion, on January 11 2007, Sunny Garcia got a call from his wife Raina, suggesting they go out to dinner. The couple had already separated, and had even discussed the prospect of divorce, but Sunny still hoped they could work things out. Sunny drove the 200 kays from Newport, where he was living, to her place in San Diego. On the way out to dinner, Raina said she wanted to stop at an office to pick something up, and asked Sunny to accompany her. He did. It was a lawyer’s office. Sunny was served with divorce papers.

Sunny, already spun out about going to prison, initially rolled with it.Then the reality hit him. He exchanged a few heated words with Raina, jumped in his car and started driving back to Newport. Raina called him back to San Diego, and they spent the night at her place, having one of those long sleepless nights discussing a relationship that was already doomed. Raina had originally said she would drive him to prison, but changed her mind. So at 4am, Sunny called an old friend, Garth Tarlow, asking for a ride to prison. He had to be there by mid morning, and the prison was 300 kays away in a desert on the other side of Los Angeles.

“He was broken that day, man,” Garth says. “His spirit was hammered.”

Sunny was fatalistic about Raina. “He knew shit had gone down between them, and what he got he might have had coming,” Garth recalls. Sunny’s main focus was getting the sentence behind him and starting over again, which meant getting back on tour in 2008 (he was at the time a shoe-in for a wildcard).

They pulled up at the prison. It was mid winter,one of the coldest days of the year, and there was ice on the ground. Garth says Sunny was both angry and apprehensive. “He seemed like he was ready to do his time but not ready to be fucked with either. His look was not afraid of prison, it was pissed that his life was being used as an example for not fucking with the Internal Revenue Service. He was also thinking that one slip-up or scrap on the prison yard could easily get his sentence extended.”

Sunny simply recalls his state as “fucking shattered”.

The prison was minimum security, but thanks to a bureaucratic technicality, Sunny spent his entire first week in a single cell four metres long and less than three metres wide. He did push-ups, punched the walls, got mad and thought he might lose his mind. He kept asking himself, “Why am I here?”

On the third day, the guards asked him if he would like to have a walk in the exercise yard. “Fuck yeah,” he said, thinking he’d finally get to talk to some other inmates. When the guards ushered him to the yard, it was six in the morning, and there were only four other prisoners out: a couple of Mexicans huddling together and two other inmates running in circles to keep the cold off. Sunny had nothing but a cotton jumpsuit, flimsy prison-issue undies, old socks and kung fu shoes. He asked to go back to his cell instead, but the guards said he had to stay. He joined the other two running in circles.

The guards gave him a thin plastic spray jacket, which was still no match for the pre-dawn chill. “I’ve never been so cold in my life,” he says. The date was January 14. His 37th birthday.
When he was eventually released into the normal prison, he immediately fell in with the other Hawaiians. There were 24 of them (from 600 inmates), and Sunny knew most of them, including Johnny Johnson, a roommate of his from 2000, nearing the end of a six-year term for a drug bust. “They were the gnarliest guys in that prison,” Sunny says.

The Hawaiians weren’t impressed with Sunny’s shape. Throughout 2006, knowing this down-time was imminent, he had let himself go, ballooning out to 109 kilos (he stands only 177 centimetres).Whenever Sunny wasn’t working (his job was to keep the yard in front of the prison office neat), one of the Hawaiians would stop by and ask him what he was doing. “Ah, nothing,” Sunny would reply at first, to which he’d be told: “OK, then put on your shoes, we’re going for a run.”

The prison had a few exercise options - baseball and soccer fields, a racquetball court - but it was the running track that featured highest on the Garcia regime. Sunny wound up running 20 kays a day, as well as doing sit-ups, chin-ups, push-ups and dips.   If it sounds kind of pleasant, you’re right. “I could say it depressed me but now, looking back, it was good because I didn’t have to be nowhere, I didn’t have to do anything, didn’t have to answer the phone. And I trained every day.” It didn’t even disrupt his relationship with his three teenage kids (to his first wife, Angela, who all lived back in Hawaii) - he was allowed 300 minutes of phone calls a month, and called them almost daily.

Initially, things looked similarly rosy when he started the second part of his sentence, seven months of house detention. A huge south swell arrived on the day he was released, on April 12, and Trestles was pumping. He hadn’t been fitted with his electronic anklet yet, so he dived straight in. “I was like, oh my god, I was so happy to be surfing again,” he says. But that all changed a few days later when he was fitted with his accoutrement. He was told to stay in the house, and certainly out of the water.

There was some confusion about whether surf contests could be deemed legitimate work for someone on house arrest. He was tentatively allowed to enter the US Open at Huntington. But his government-issued electronic accoutrement attracted a lot of media coverage, and his parole officer responded in the only way an authoritarian offical knows how. Sunny was at Huntington for the second day of the event when the PO rang and told him to get back in the house.

Compared to the expansive prison, house arrest was claustrophobic. Plus, he learned that parole officers are not usually nice people. Sunny went through three POs in three months. The last one introduced herself to him by saying, “I won’t treat you any differently to how I would treat a murderer or rapist.”

“She was a fucking cunt,” Sunny says, looking at me sideways as if to apologise for the language. “She just didn’t like me. I can’t believe how anyone like that could be working in the judicial system. I’m not like some gnarly criminal. But she made me want to be, like, crazy. The last thing I wanted to do was to get in any kind of trouble, but she went out of her way to press my buttons.”

Sunny’s sentence included 80 hours of community service, which the judge advised be spent helping troubled kids who might look up to him. It was suggested that he coach the Huntington Beach High School surf team, but the PO would have none of that. “She said, ‘I don’t care what the judge says, you’re not doing it’,” Sunny says. “So she made me work at Goodwill instead.”

Goodwill is the equivalent of St Vinnies. Sunny’s job was to sort through the donated clothes and decide which were good enough to sell, and which were good for nothing but the trash. But if the PO was trying to break Sunny’s spirit, she hadn’t done her homework. For a start, working at Goodwill meant he was finally getting out of the house, and he at least got to check the surf at Huntington on his way to work.

But Sunny wasn’t rattled by being amid poverty either. He grew up in a house on Oahu’s dingy west side with a single mum and three siblings, “as close to dirt poor as you can get”. There were times when the electricity or water was cut off. Meals were invariably rice, pork and beans. “I know what it’s like to have nothing,” he says. And if you think the image of the 2000 world champ sorting through shitty discarded clothes at a charity shop is weird, don’t. In a small way, Sunny owes his career to Goodwill. It’s where, almost 30 years earlier, he bought his first ever surfboard.

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In July 2007, a friend with a big house in San Diego invited Sunny to come and do his house detention there. The judiciary approved, and Sunny acquired a new PO in the process. This one was, he says, a sweetheart. She agreed that if he was to start earning money again, he should be allowed to surf in contests. With her consent, he applied to a court. High-profile defence attorney Tom Warwick represented Sunny, free of charge.

“It wasn’t like we were asking for anything out of the ordinary,” Sunny says. “I was asking to work. They want me to pay back the taxes, why not allow me to do things that allow me to make money? It was kind of a formality, but they hadn’t had any professional surfers who had been to prison.” The judge granted Sunny permission to put his feet back on a surfboard just in tome for one of Sunny’s sponsors, Boost Mobile, to give him a wildcard to its WCT event at Trestles in August. He surfed only two heats (against an in-form Mick Fanning and reigning world champ Andy Irons), but spent the week in the water anyway. It wouldn’t be till this year that he started to get his contest head back on.

Meanwhile, Sunny had been putting in work in another department. He had known Colleen McCullough, 28, a single mum and freelance marketing consultant for finance companies, for two years, and had kept secret a crush on her while they became “super-close friends”. When he was under house arrest she often came over and took his kids, who were visiting from Hawaii, and her own daughter out. The kids got on like family. He kept his cards close, even when she told him about dating other dudes. Sometimes, after the move to San Diego, Colleen would sleep over. “I used to sleep on the couch, then next to him on the bed,” she says. “He’d move his ankle to touch mine, and I’d be like, OK… “Then he poured his heart out to me. The first time we kissed was on July 18. He proposed to me two weeks later. I was like, ‘are you serious?’, and he said yeah. I said, ‘well if you’re serious then I am too’.”

Sunny was envisaging a wedding even before he had made a move. “Before we were romantically involved, I was like, ‘oh my god, this is the girl I could spend the rest of my life with’. I had always admired the things she did and the way she takes care of business. She’s the perfect girl.” They were married in San Clemente on July 24, between the US Open and the Billabong QS event in Japan. This year she quit her job and became his manager. When I visited, she was even lording over his diet, putting him on a four-day fast to help keep his weight down (he was back to 83 kilograms at the time), which he isn’t too sure about. During the first interview I had with him, every now and again he’d walk over to the fridge, open it, stare at the food and say something like, “Man, even the salsa looks good.”

Sunny’s old-fashioned about marriage, even though his first two didn’t work out. “I’ve always wanted to have kids, be married and raise a family. There’s lots of beautiful women in the world, but there’s only one I want to spend my life with.” Later, he says he’s keen to increase the Garcia progeny. “I want a couple more sons – I want a couple of surfers,” he says.

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Sunny wound up in prison because of accountants. His first accountant understated his income, leaving him open to charges of tax evasion. So he hired another one, who tried to cut a deal with the IRS. But in the rush to present the case, he left out about $400,000 in winnings, which infuriated the IRS.

“I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” Sunny says. “I said, ‘well, my CPA fucked up, what can we do? How can we rectify this?’ “The IRS was like, ‘fuck that, we’re going to send you to jail. We’re going to make an example of you’. That’s what they told me, plain and simple. They said they wanna send the message out to the surfing community that if you don’t pay your taxes, you will go to jail.”

The fight isn’t over. Sunny is still indebted to the IRS. He won’t say how much, but admits it’s probably six figures. His contempt for the IRS is unrelenting. “I don’t give a fucking rat’s ass if they don’t get a fucking dime out of me,” he says. “I ultimately want to work something out and try to pay them off, but they put me in this fucking hole. I told them the story. The accountant took money, but rather than go after somebody who got the money, they went after me, stuck me in fucking prison, got me off tour, all my sponsors left, left me with zero; now I got this huge fucking bill, and they want me to pay for it.”

Could they send you back if you failed to pay up? “What, send me to jail? Oooh. That’s really gonna get them a lot of money. It’s not like I’m at the beginning of my career. They basically took two years off my career.”

But if Sunny was in a hurry to get back on tour, he went the wrong way about it. The anklet was cut off in October, the house arrest was suspended, and Sunny was allowed to go to Hawaii for the 2007 Triple Crown.

In the first round of the Pipe Masters, he got in a paddle battle with Neco Padaratz. Neco already had the heat sewn up; Sunny was looking to jump from third to second. Neco tried to block him, they both went over the falls and got a double interference. Sunny went for him in the water. Neco got picked up by the water patrol, and fled to the judges tower. Sunny paddled in and went after him, but Tripe Crown director Randy Rarick and ASP rules and discipline chairman Robert Gerard intervened, calming Sunny down.

“Sunny was frustrated, and wanted someone to blame,” Randy says. “And Neco was hysterical – hey, he had Sunny Garcia after him.” About 20 minutes later, after both had calmed down, Randy brought the two together behind the tower and they shook hands. Sunny called Neco that night and repeated that there were no hard feelings. Next day, they publicly shook hands on the beach.

Sunny was fined $5000, but he regrets nothing. The video of the incident has had 60,000 hits on Youtube. One of those views was by his parole officer, who fortunately saw nothing that breached his parole.

“If he hassled me in Brazil and I did the same thing, they would have fucking killed me. But we’re in Hawaii and I do that, and everybody’s in an uproar? Like, come on. He didn’t get hit. He got chased up the beach. Whoop-dee-doo. I coulda caught him. If I wanted him to get got he would have not left that fucking beach, and fucking everybody knows that.”

Was there a lecture from the ASP? “What are they gonna tell me? They can’t tell me shit. It’s my back yard, I can do what I want. Athletes push the limits. We walk that fine line between doing stuff that is reasonable and doing stuff that is unreasonable. And it’s easy to fall on either side. People know I have a short fuse. Neco knows what kind of person I am. He took the chance, and I snapped.

“I think it’s wrong to try to tame down surfers. The great thing about surfing is we are our own characters, and to suppress that is a fucking terrible thing. You know, people wanna see fucking people pissed. They wanna see a little bit of fighting. I understand getting fined and stuff, and sometimes it is a black eye on the sport, but people fucking watch it. People like to see drama. Unfortunately that’s the way it is. And if it’s gonna get people to watch, then why not?”

Why not? Well, for one, it killed his chance of getting a wildcard this year. Jake Paterson, of World Pro Surfers (one of three organisations that help decide who gets wildcards) thought, until that moment, Sunny had a great chance to walk back into the WCT. Sunny dropped off in 2006 because his court appearances forced him to miss events, which Jake equates with being injured. But the blue with Neco, which happened just as the various committees were discussing who would get the coveted walk-ups for 2008, left Jake shaking his head.

“I said to him, ‘what are you doing mate?’” Jake recalls. “He just said it didn’t matter. He said he’d do the WQS anyway. He was going through a tough time. He was just doing it his way. He was fine with it. He’s one of those realist people who face the consequences of their actions. There’s no ‘poor old me’. He was like, ‘do what you want. I’ll move on’.” Which he did.

If he pulls it off, his comeback would be up there with Occy’s in 1997 and Slater’s in 2002, both of whom were only 30 when they returned from self-imposed exile. Sunny dropped off to tend to a prison sentence. And he’s 38. If he makes the cut at the end of this year, he’ll be 39 when he paddles out at Snapper in 2009. His QS results have included a fifth in Scotland and a couple of ninths at the Maldives and Margaret River, all of them six-star events.

In Scotland, he played the role of seasoned enforcer when, in the first round, he came up against a provocative opponent. It was early in the heat. Sunny had already scored a couple of sevens. Tim Taplin from Australia, David Richards from South Africa and Shaun Burrell from California were fighting for second spot. Burrell turned up the aggression by snaking everyone, and Sunny snapped.

“He was being a fucking dick, fucking with everybody,” Sunny says. “The thing is, there were plenty of waves, and it was early in the heat. If it was two minutes to go, I’d understand. I said you wanna hassle that way, I’m gonna hassle you, you’re not gonna get any waves and the other guys are gonna get any waves they want.”

Shaun lost. Tim, who came third, says Sunny wasn’t being unreasonable. “Shaun didn’t have much respect,” he says. “There’s two sides to every story, but paddling inside Sunny is not a wise move.” I tried to get Shaun’s side of the story through his board sponsor, but got no reply.

Sunny says he’s surfing better than when he left, even if the repertoire remains the same. “I ain’t got any new moves. I surf like me. I’m a power surfer. I been around long enough to know I’m not a terrible surfer. I know I’m still competitive. I’m not out there thinking I’m better than anybody else, or that I’m gonna blow everybody out of the water. If they get beat, they just lost to the old guy. If I lose, I just lost to one of the up-and-coming guys. I got nothing to lose. I already got a world title and six triple Crowns.”

Does he think his intimidating presence spooks the judges into giving him higher scores? “I don’t expect them to give me scores that I don’t deserve,” he says. “If they’re intimidated by me, and they think I’ll be pissed if I don’t get a score, then yeah, they should be. But they should feel that way for every surfer. The last three events I lost by less than a point, so I don’t think they’re too worried about it. If they were, I’d be making all these close heats.”

The surf industry didn’t show any interest in signing Sunny up when he was released. But he’s found a much better fit outside surfing anyway. Affliction Clothing is an offshoot of a company in California that did design work for surf labels. Its attitude is metal and punk with a hint of goth style.

Affliction’s gear (tees, hoodies, trunks) immediately attracted the burgeoning mixed-martial-arts (ultimate fighting) crowd. After only three years, it’s already sold $US100 million worth of gear. It recently started its own entertainment department, which puts on MMA events, the first of which, held at Anaheim, California, in July, sold 100,000 hits on pay-per-views in the US. Donald Trump recently bought in, legitimising what was already a major, rapidly growing company.

Sunny fits Affliction like a glove. “They’re my kinda guys, they’re all fighters,” he says. “They’re not frowning on me for being me. They know the person I am. They’re not trying to make me be somebody else. “I get to go all the fights, I get to hang out with all the fighters, the type of guys I get along with. I can fit into that group. I’ve never been taken care of so good, and made so at home at a company. Everything about Affliction, the people who work in the company, everybody is super cool. I know that money doesn’t make everything go round. So it’s best to be as comfortable as you can. I mean, if you’re having internal problems, that ultimately ends up showing in your performance.”

“He fits our demographic,” says Tom Atencio, vice president of Affliction’s entertainment wing. “He’s all tatted up, you know, and he doesn’t take shit from people. He fits us perfectly.”

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Three weeks before he was due to be released, Sunny learned that his best friend, Craig Vasper, had been killed riding dirt bikes. Craig had called Sunny that day, saying he’d be visiting tomorrow. “Sure,” Sunny said. “I’ll be here. I ain’t going anywhere.”

Craig went riding, stacked it at the bottom of a jump, and another rider came down on top of him. Sunny tried calling Craig a few times that night, but got no answer. Raina rushed up to the prison to tell Sunny herself the next day, and while she was telling him a call came through from Craig’s wife with the same news. “She (Craig’s wife) loved me but she hated me because I was a permanent fixture at their house,” Sunny says. “We were exactly the same. If we weren’t riding or surfing we were at the gym training, and if we weren’t training we were playing motocross video games.”

As he recalls this, he’s wearing an old baseball cap that had belonged to Craig. He takes it off and sniffs it. “I can still smell him on it,” he says. Sunny doesn’t get maudlin now, and he didn’t then. “I didn’t cry when I heard about it,” he says. “I just got frustrated, and trained harder.”

That’s not the only time death’s coming knocking on Sunny’s door lately. This year, Sunny lost four family members: two grandmothers, a four-year-old cousin (killed by malfunctioning equipment during a standard medical operation) and a stepsister (to cancer), who left four kids.

“This whole experience has made me look at life in a different way, that’s for sure,” he says. “But if people think that, when confronted with a problem I might stop and think is it worth getting into trouble, yeah, but I can tell you that if I decide that it is, they’re going to be in a fucking lot of trouble. The rage, I still have that. I keep telling myself that I’m too old for this young aggressive thing, but it hasn’t left me. And that will fucking never leave me. I know that people wanna hear that I’m a changed person. I’m sorry to disappoint you but I still fucking have that. I don’t want people to think that if they push buttons they’re not gonna get any repercussions.

“I’ve had so much shit happen to me in my life. I try and use it to better my life but I am only human. I get accused of being mean. I don’t think I’m a mean person. I just stand up for what is right. A lot of people hate that because they ain’t got their own two legs to stand on. I ain’t beating nobody up for no reason. You don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you.”

There’s more to that caveat than you might think. Don’t fuck with Sunny and you might just witness the man’s generosity and even gentleness. In 1992 and 1993, John Shimooka moved from Hawaii to California, started indulging in “certain recreational activities” and lost his sponsors, money, ASP ranking, competitive spirit and even desire to surf (Cali was too cold for him). He had become, in his own words, a “laughing stock” on tour. He was living off the kindness of friends, and his wife was working as a nanny to put food on the table. They were heading nowhere. Then Sunny called.

“He’d seen me in situations where most people would go, ‘whoa, he’s a dickhead’, but Sunny was like, ‘hey, he’s my buddy’,” Shmoo says. “He was keeping an eye on me, and waiting for the opportunity to call.” That call came through in October 1993. “He said, ‘what are you doing? You’re better than that. Get the fuck on a plane, bring your wife and get your ass over here to Hawaii and start over.’ I just looked at my wife and said, we’re going.”

Sunny and his young family were renovating a house in Honolulu at the time, and the Shimookas were squeezed in with them for four months. Shmoo straightened out, did the QS in 94 and requalified for 1995. “It was all because of one phone call from a friend. He didn’t need to make that call. He was a top ten surfer at the time. But people don’t see that side of Sunny. They only see the side of him wacking someone because they’re being a dickhead. The soft side of Sunny Garcia is one that few people have the opportunity or the honour to see. He’s an intimidating guy, but really he’s just a big teddy bear.”