Before anybody in Santa Monica was dragging a hand across the wall of a drained pool, a skinny kid from Hilo was doing it on actual water.
Larry Bertlemann died in Honolulu on October 10 after complications from a heart attack. He was 71. If you skate, you’ve probably done a Bert. If you surf, you’ve definitely watched somebody do a move Larry tried first, back when the judges didn’t have a column for it.
The backstory is pure Hawaii. Big Island kid, fishing and chasing pigs, then shipped to Oahu at 11. He rents a longboard at Queens for an hour and basically never gives it back. Ben Aipa sees him and gets it immediately. Larry goes pro at 13, which Aipa told him not to do, which tells you everything. By 17 he’s fourth in the world and third at Pipe Masters. A year later he’s U.S. champ.
But the results were never the point. Larry surfed like his spine was optional. Knees jammed together, butt almost on the deck, palm planted on the face, whipping the board around in circles while everyone else was still drawing long, polite lines. They called him the Rubberman because there was no other word for it. He’d go for something wild, eat it, paddle back out, go for something wilder. Contest surfing wanted consistency. Larry wanted to see what happened.
That’s the part Dogtown understood. Tony Alva, Jay Adams, the whole crew were watching Larry and taking that low, hand-down carve onto concrete banks and backyard bowls. Skaters named it after him. Then the loop closed: Larry started pulling ideas off skateboards and launching what he called “Larryials” in the late ’70s, years before airs were anything but a sideshow in surfing. Kelly Slater called him the first New Schooler. Pottz called him the godfather. Neither was exaggerating.
He also figured out the money game before surfing had a game. Airline deals, soda deals, car deals. He supposedly stamped autographs with a rubber stamp because he couldn’t keep up. Cocky? Sure. But he was right about his own value before the industry was.
The ending wasn’t a highlight reel. His back gave out in the mid-’80s and things went sideways from there, all the way to a 2001 arrest on robbery and firearm charges. The same body that bent like nobody else’s spent decades punishing him for it. He drifted into motorcycles, martial arts, skydiving, and mostly wanted to be left alone.
Still, the people who ran into him later say the charm never left. And the influence sure didn’t. Every grom doing a frontside layback, every skater dropping a hand into a pool coping grind, is carrying a little Larry whether they know his name or not.
He leaves behind three kids, eight grandkids, nine great-grandkids, and two entire sports that move differently because of him.
Aloha, Rubberman.
