Wordsmith Wayne Patrick Murphy is a former WA surf journo and co-author of Ian ‘Kanga’ Cairns pro surfing history books 1 & 2. He now lives and surfs in Ireland.
Intro Nev Hyman book
This could be an Intro for a book…a long read. It is about a surfboard maker who rose from obscurity to acquire fame and fortune before losing it all, a cautionary tale about an ambitious designer who made improbable dreams come true, then painfully watched some of them turn into living nightmares. Like Icarus, he ignored the warnings and flew too high before plummeting back to earth with an awful thud. But this is more than just another sad crash and burn story. Our shattered surfer is picking up the pieces and reassembling. He is determinedly fighting for his life and reputation. He is renewed and ready to launch into the surf industry again with another brilliant idea. He has gone full circle and returned to humble beginnings. Yes, a redemption story. It is about a skinny freckle-faced ginger, a harmless eccentric with a comically derisive name who became a human surf brand known around the world. This man’s life-affirming journey is part of surf tribe mythology. Neville Charles Hyman is a most unlikely surf legend. Bad enough he was given an insipid Anglo-Norman first name to introduce himself with. But when Neville was added to a surname that refers directly to the thin fleshy tissue at the central opening of female sexual anatomy…well…for cheeky young blokes like me back in the day, this was plain asking for ridicule. Nev, as he more wisely became known, copped it sweet. He listened to all our jokes and absorbed the jibes while laughing with us. Then he’d retaliate in kind with his own sharp observations delivered in quick-fire humour that could sting. Yeah, typical rights-of-passage banter that thickens the skin with time. Over five decades I have seen Nev getting on with life as he steadfastly followed his dream to make a decent living as a surfboard builder. I watched as he busily promoted his name and constructed a reputable international brand, making a pile of money, much to the amazement of many onlookers. But I never doubted Nev would succeed in the surf industry. I knew his background and origins…Early surfing memories are often our best ones. Many of us can vividly recall that mind-blowing feeling from our first tube ride, the body-shaking thrill of riding a big wave to its end, the pure stoke from properly executing a radical turn after numerous attempts. Mental images of joyful surfing recollections can remain with us forever. So can some of the friends we begin our life-long amphibious adventures with. I have known Nev Hyman as a genuine friend for nearly 50 years. In 1968, aged 10, I was an innocent young bodysurfer learning the rhythms of wind and waves in Western Australia. I graduated to “Coolite” foamies the following year, and my sinful surfing life truly began. Coolite, for the uninitiated, is a generic Aussie term for those small and inexpensive polystyrene beaded-foam surfboards that many of us grommets ‘back in the day’ learned to surf on. These were the introductory boards for thousands of pre-teen surfers in the 1960s and 70s. Parents of pestering kids could buy a Coolite for a fraction of the price of polyurethane foam and fiberglass boards. The average Coolite was about five feet long, 20 or so inches wide, and nearly four inches thick. They featured one, sometimes two, long keel-like runners on the bottom. Most importantly, because they were lighter and softer than conventional surfboards, they were deemed by municipal authorities as not being dangerous. Coolites were allowed inside the clubby Lifesaver patrolled “No Surfboards” zones. In crowded summer months at urban beaches these flagged off areas were often where the best shaped waves broke. As enthusiastic grommets in Perth we looked up to and learned to surf better by copying our best Coolite riders, guys like State schoolboy champion Ashley Jones at Cottesloe, the Bettenay brothers Craig and Stewart from City Beach, Jim King at Trigg and Australian Iron Man champion Fred Annesley at Scarborough, who became Margaret River’s first life guard. In 1971 my Coolite-riding days changed dramatically when a mate at school gave me a fiberglass fin to stick into the tail of my foamy. An amateur attempt to reshape my Coolite and stick a proper fin in it ended in disaster. The styrene foam reacted badly to polyester surfboard resin. My mate and I watched in shock as our work smoked then dissolved into an awful white gunk paste. Not long after I was riding my first fibre-glassed board, a 4’10” twin fin, hacked out by a friend from an old Mal then re-glassed. With that board I rode the reef breaks at Rottnest Island and thumping sandbars around Scarborough Beach. My best surf mates then were Dick Van Lieven and Radical Rod Hernaman, two knee-boarders devotedly following George Greenough’s different wave-riding path. Dick was a sensitive piano player with a fabulous record collection, and Rod, a fearless extrovert, shaving at 14, well capable of buying booze with our pocket money from bottle shop attendants none the wiser. Both were getting deep inside West Oz tubes long before most stand-up surfers our age ever did. In the May school holidays of 1974 we adventured to a semi-secret left hand reef break away from city limits. Dick’s older brother told us about it and provided a map with crude directions. Their Mum was a nurse with a passion for music and drove a new VW bug. We loaded it with camping gear, a big water container and our surfboards. She dropped us off on a remote coastal road about 50km north of Perth. Parents thankfully were less worried then about their kids taking risks and being outdoors. We hiked down a dirt track through salt bush and beach spinifex, and found a sheltered place in the dunes to pitch our tent and build a fireplace. Radical Rod and I had been in the Scouts together and knew the basics of survival. We camped at ‘Secret Spot’ for a week living on flour damper we cooked with tinned rations of Spam, spaghetti and baked beans. For sweets it was rice cream or cling peaches. We surfed long hours then watched bright constellations moving through the night as the Earth turned. We shared stories and laughter by the camp fire, and didn’t see anybody for almost the entire week, probably because it was blowing onshore every day. We didn’t care, it was grommet surf heaven. On our second last day the wind turned cross-offshore and the swell picked up. We hooted at each other’s rides while imprinting our youthful brains with joyful memories. I can still see part of Dick’s bright green board and big single fin pivoting fast off the crest, then a little rainbow plume of spray dissolving over me like some liquid magic dust. Then watching Rod riding towards me on the very next wave, grinning like a hopeful cripple, as he playfully shuffled forward to try and hang two knee caps. Fun as surfing can be… After lunch we heard a vehicle at low gear in high revs churning through the soft sand towards us. It sounded like a VW, for sure. But it couldn’t be Dick’s mum? She wouldn’t dare drive off-road, and our scheduled pick-up wasn’t until the next day. Sun-frazzled and curious for human contact again, we gathered like stranded young colonists to greet these new arrivals. An old Kombi van pulled up and out stepped a couple of Perth surfers we’d never seen before. One of them had a conspicuous head of long frizzy red hair. It was Nev Hyman. That’s when I first met the ginger genius. The other bloke with him was his best mate Phil Usher. We introduced ourselves and talked about the waves. We showed them our dinged boards, no leashes then. Nev and Phil then proudly pulled out their own creations from the Kombi, two gleaming boards, colour tinted and pin-striped. Dick, Rod and I were rightly impressed. Nev duly informed us how they were planning on opening up a new factory in Perth under their own label, Odyssey Surfboards. We chatted some more and became friends. I recall thinking to myself how was it these two guys, around our age, had advanced way beyond their Coolite experiments than we had? Their surfboard know-how put us to shame. I could also see, quite clearly, they were as confident and ambitious as each other. This was a good thing, I thought, some fresh ideas and young blood to stir the older heads and backwaters of our local surf industry. Even better was when Nev kindly offered us a discount if we rode their boards. It wasn’t the last time I was a recipient of his generosity. In the mid-1970s Nev and Phil worked long hours Monday to Friday while honing multi-skills and growing their Odyssey business. Weekends were all about getting out of Perth and heading ‘Down South’ for proper waves. I enjoyed some memorable trips with them in their new super light Suzuki four-wheel drives that took us to surf spots where few vehicles could get to. Those parochial sandy tracks provided plenty more fun…but the bigger bitumen highway was calling me elsewhere. I headed to the Eastern States via the South Australian desert to enrich my surfing life with new experiences. I worked at Cactus awhile for legendary surf film maker Paul Witzig, helping him erect some fences and stone toilet blocks for a basic camping area. I was stoked when Nev unexpectedly passed through and stayed a couple of days while en-route to the Gold Coast. He was leaving Odyssey and West Oz for good. I wasn’t far behind him and was soon living in Queensland too. We were both following our dreams. I wanted to become a professional surfing judge and watch the world’s best surfers up close. Nev wanted to make surfboards for them. We achieved our goals and crossed paths a few more times during the next couple of decades. Our friendship has remained strong. Some know Nev as the eager young shaper who relocated to the Gold Coast and rebranded his business as Nev Future Shapes, a devoted surfer who travelled the globe in the 1980s and 90s, man on a mission chasing waves while making boards for elite professional surfers, a busy bloke whose fingers bled as he relentlessly mowed foam for countless others. Others may know him as the chatty promoter of Firewire Surfboards, a skilled designer and entrepreneur at the forefront creating high performance surfboards with minimal environmental impact. Only a few insiders though will know that Nev was one of the main men who helped deliver that groundbreaking leap forward in global surfboard design and production. Never underestimate Nev. Only a fool would undervalue or write him off. Nev was born in 1958 under lucky November stars, as evidenced by some of the big wins and rewards that have come his way. There have been some steep falls and soul-destroying losses too. The last few years have taken a toll. Just a few weeks ago this 63-yr-old father of three sought help from a psychiatrist. He was urged to do so by one of his adult daughters. Nev was medically diagnosed with high-functioning Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. For those who know him, this ADHD diagnosis explains a lot…yeah…fast rev Nev. His high levels of enthusiasm can get him over-excited and carried away with ideas. An eagerness to take risks in chasing his dreams has also gone hand-in-hand with an overly generous nature. Nev always tries to see the best in people and things. But this idealistic outlook sometimes means he hasn’t always seen the entire picture as clearly as others. He can misjudge certain situations by being too trusting of people. It’s a recurring pattern of behavior that’s cost him with the regrettable loss of some close relationships and ventures, such as his stalled Nev House business. Last year some disgruntled shareholders aired their grievances in the Australian Financial Review. The newspaper featured some scathing reports about the company having nothing to show for the $8 million in private funding it had received since 2013. The chief executive Nev had appointed to run the company opened windows of opportunity while cleverly concealing other facts behind the heavy curtains of his own shadowy financial past. Nev was taken for a long ride. He failed to see through a charlatan at the wheel. It has been a very painful lesson to learn from. The fallout from the savaging he copped in the AFR has been tough going for my old mate. Despite the bad press, Nev is a resilient character. He is bouncing back. The company has been restructured at Board level. He’s still talking to government representatives and community leaders about the virtues of recycling plastic waste into emergency housing units. Nev recently contacted me to inquire if I would help him write about this, perhaps as part of a biography? I knew there’d be plenty of other interesting yarns to fill a book. But I was apprehensive. Was this book idea just some sort of surf -washing exercise to help launder reputational damage, a PR spin job to deflect from the big gorilla in the room? Not at all, he told me. Nev House was back on track and would soon be announcing some good news for its share-holders. He said I could write about that, warts and all. In the meantime he was preparing to launch a website to promote his latest venture called ‘Mobius Surf’. “Isn’t that some sort of mathematical term?” I asked curiously. “Yeah, both sides of a continuous perfect curve. I have gone the full circle, I am hand-shaping boards again,” he said laughing. This was a big statement coming from the board builder who introduced the surfing world to computer aided shaping machines. Nev was loudest in singing the praises of shaping machines years ago. He was the person who really got things buzzing for everyone when this technology was in its infancy. For that he was publically criticized in the industry as being the bloke most responsible for the death of traditional custom shapers. Neville the Devil didn’t care. A practical visionary, he was too busy achieving that long-cherished dream. Nev wanted computer-aided machines to custom shape surfboard blanks, error free. Then he wouldn’t have to get dirty and dusty any more, simple. He’d be a designer only. He could make surfboards without ever touching them again. That was his big dream back then. I knew that. What I didn’t know were some of the cool stories that happened while he pursued that particular goal, like that special day in 2006, at a coffee shop in Helsinki. That’s when Nev realized he’d finally achieved it. He was under the pump. Tahitian pro surfer Michel Bourez needed some new surfboards for the next contest scheduled for the awesome reef-draining waves at Teahupo’o. While seated at a coffee shop in Finland’s capital city, Nev designed the required boards on his Mac Book Pro then pressed the send button. Thousands of miles away an AKU shaping machine instantly received the design details then whirred into action. Nev could now relax and enjoy his coffee. He knew when Michel Bourez arrived in Tahiti his custom boards would be there waiting for him. The Tahitian surfer would unwrap the new boards and be fully stoked. So was Nev. He had realized another of his dreams. He had not touched or laid eyes on those surfboards, yet they would be there in Tahiti as perfectly fulfilled custom orders. It was a sublime moment of realization he will never forget. Nev sat back with his coffee and screamed internally, “Oh my God, my dream has bloody well come true!” Nev has completed thousands of such orders in similar fashion since that defining moment in 2006. He hadn’t touched any of his old tools or hand shaped a board since then, until a just few months ago. Two of his adult surfer children, Jayden and Renee, said to him one day how they’d never actually seen Dad shape a board. Nev was surprised to hear this. So he asked his kids what sort of boards they wanted. He listened carefully then got out his tools and showed them how shaping boards was done, old school. The result was two lovely shooters and another epiphany. Nev realized then, even with the advent of computer aided designs and shaping machines, there still should always be a place for custom orders to support local surfboard industries around the world. Mobius Surf is the interactive platform Nev has been putting together for fellow shapers and board designers to use so they can share and chat better with customers all around the globe while fulfilling orders. Looking back I can see how it serendipitous it was that Nev named his first company Odyssey. Anyone a little familiar with the Greek Classics will recognize the name as one of Homer’s epic adventure stories. The book is named after the central hero Odysseus, who wasn’t the best warrior, or the strongest. Odysseus was still a hero though, because he was one of the smartest and most innovative people from that mythological era. He came up with the idea for the Trojan horse in the Battle of Troy. Odysseus was cursed though to travel many long years. He faced various challenges before finally completing a full circle to make it back home. I love that Nev has the courage to admit his mistakes, to express his vulnerability while overcoming his challenges and complete his own full circle. He has lived a busy and eventful life venturing to all parts of the surfing world. Through his odyssey we can learn things about surfboard design, methods and materials. We can also hear from some of the cleverest industry people who have helped drive board design forward to new levels of performance. I would like to learn and write more. I hope to have finished such a book this time next year. Hopefully Nev House shareholders will have a good story to be glad with too…
Photos
Nev Hyman with surf judge Wayne Murphy and Hawaiian pro surfer James ‘Bird’ Mahelona (from Makaha west side of Oahu) discussing board design, Gold Coast, early 1980s.Nev with one of his latest creations.Nev House proto-type, recycling plastic waste into emergency kit homes has won design awards for good ideas.Champion West Oz surfer, Craig Bettenay from City Beach with his Coolite foamy, aged 10, 1967. Note the supplemented fin.
Thanks Wayne, for sharing your Nev Hyman material. Looking forward to reading your new book.
About the author
Wordsmith Wayne Patrick Murphy is a former WA surf journo and co-author of Ian ‘Kanga’ Cairns pro surfing history books 1 & 2. He now lives and surfs in Ireland.
Intro Nev Hyman book
This could be an Intro for a book…a long read. It is about a surfboard maker who rose from obscurity to acquire fame and fortune before losing it all, a cautionary tale about an ambitious designer who made improbable dreams come true, then painfully watched some of them turn into living nightmares. Like Icarus, he ignored the warnings and flew too high before plummeting back to earth with an awful thud. But this is more than just another sad crash and burn story. Our shattered surfer is picking up the pieces and reassembling. He is determinedly fighting for his life and reputation. He is renewed and ready to launch into the surf industry again with another brilliant idea. He has gone full circle and returned to humble beginnings. Yes, a redemption story. It is about a skinny freckle-faced ginger, a harmless eccentric with a comically derisive name who became a human surf brand known around the world. This man’s life-affirming journey is part of surf tribe mythology. Neville Charles Hyman is a most unlikely surf legend. Bad enough he was given an insipid Anglo-Norman first name to introduce himself with. But when Neville was added to a surname that refers directly to the thin fleshy tissue at the central opening of female sexual anatomy…well…for cheeky young blokes like me back in the day, this was plain asking for ridicule. Nev, as he more wisely became known, copped it sweet. He listened to all our jokes and absorbed the jibes while laughing with us. Then he’d retaliate in kind with his own sharp observations delivered in quick-fire humour that could sting. Yeah, typical rights-of-passage banter that thickens the skin with time. Over five decades I have seen Nev getting on with life as he steadfastly followed his dream to make a decent living as a surfboard builder. I watched as he busily promoted his name and constructed a reputable international brand, making a pile of money, much to the amazement of many onlookers. But I never doubted Nev would succeed in the surf industry. I knew his background and origins…Early surfing memories are often our best ones. Many of us can vividly recall that mind-blowing feeling from our first tube ride, the body-shaking thrill of riding a big wave to its end, the pure stoke from properly executing a radical turn after numerous attempts. Mental images of joyful surfing recollections can remain with us forever. So can some of the friends we begin our life-long amphibious adventures with. I have known Nev Hyman as a genuine friend for nearly 50 years. In 1968, aged 10, I was an innocent young bodysurfer learning the rhythms of wind and waves in Western Australia. I graduated to “Coolite” foamies the following year, and my sinful surfing life truly began. Coolite, for the uninitiated, is a generic Aussie term for those small and inexpensive polystyrene beaded-foam surfboards that many of us grommets ‘back in the day’ learned to surf on. These were the introductory boards for thousands of pre-teen surfers in the 1960s and 70s. Parents of pestering kids could buy a Coolite for a fraction of the price of polyurethane foam and fiberglass boards. The average Coolite was about five feet long, 20 or so inches wide, and nearly four inches thick. They featured one, sometimes two, long keel-like runners on the bottom. Most importantly, because they were lighter and softer than conventional surfboards, they were deemed by municipal authorities as not being dangerous. Coolites were allowed inside the clubby Lifesaver patrolled “No Surfboards” zones. In crowded summer months at urban beaches these flagged off areas were often where the best shaped waves broke. As enthusiastic grommets in Perth we looked up to and learned to surf better by copying our best Coolite riders, guys like State schoolboy champion Ashley Jones at Cottesloe, the Bettenay brothers Craig and Stewart from City Beach, Jim King at Trigg and Australian Iron Man champion Fred Annesley at Scarborough, who became Margaret River’s first life guard. In 1971 my Coolite-riding days changed dramatically when a mate at school gave me a fiberglass fin to stick into the tail of my foamy. An amateur attempt to reshape my Coolite and stick a proper fin in it ended in disaster. The styrene foam reacted badly to polyester surfboard resin. My mate and I watched in shock as our work smoked then dissolved into an awful white gunk paste. Not long after I was riding my first fibre-glassed board, a 4’10” twin fin, hacked out by a friend from an old Mal then re-glassed. With that board I rode the reef breaks at Rottnest Island and thumping sandbars around Scarborough Beach. My best surf mates then were Dick Van Lieven and Radical Rod Hernaman, two knee-boarders devotedly following George Greenough’s different wave-riding path. Dick was a sensitive piano player with a fabulous record collection, and Rod, a fearless extrovert, shaving at 14, well capable of buying booze with our pocket money from bottle shop attendants none the wiser. Both were getting deep inside West Oz tubes long before most stand-up surfers our age ever did. In the May school holidays of 1974 we adventured to a semi-secret left hand reef break away from city limits. Dick’s older brother told us about it and provided a map with crude directions. Their Mum was a nurse with a passion for music and drove a new VW bug. We loaded it with camping gear, a big water container and our surfboards. She dropped us off on a remote coastal road about 50km north of Perth. Parents thankfully were less worried then about their kids taking risks and being outdoors. We hiked down a dirt track through salt bush and beach spinifex, and found a sheltered place in the dunes to pitch our tent and build a fireplace. Radical Rod and I had been in the Scouts together and knew the basics of survival. We camped at ‘Secret Spot’ for a week living on flour damper we cooked with tinned rations of Spam, spaghetti and baked beans. For sweets it was rice cream or cling peaches. We surfed long hours then watched bright constellations moving through the night as the Earth turned. We shared stories and laughter by the camp fire, and didn’t see anybody for almost the entire week, probably because it was blowing onshore every day. We didn’t care, it was grommet surf heaven. On our second last day the wind turned cross-offshore and the swell picked up. We hooted at each other’s rides while imprinting our youthful brains with joyful memories. I can still see part of Dick’s bright green board and big single fin pivoting fast off the crest, then a little rainbow plume of spray dissolving over me like some liquid magic dust. Then watching Rod riding towards me on the very next wave, grinning like a hopeful cripple, as he playfully shuffled forward to try and hang two knee caps. Fun as surfing can be… After lunch we heard a vehicle at low gear in high revs churning through the soft sand towards us. It sounded like a VW, for sure. But it couldn’t be Dick’s mum? She wouldn’t dare drive off-road, and our scheduled pick-up wasn’t until the next day. Sun-frazzled and curious for human contact again, we gathered like stranded young colonists to greet these new arrivals. An old Kombi van pulled up and out stepped a couple of Perth surfers we’d never seen before. One of them had a conspicuous head of long frizzy red hair. It was Nev Hyman. That’s when I first met the ginger genius. The other bloke with him was his best mate Phil Usher. We introduced ourselves and talked about the waves. We showed them our dinged boards, no leashes then. Nev and Phil then proudly pulled out their own creations from the Kombi, two gleaming boards, colour tinted and pin-striped. Dick, Rod and I were rightly impressed. Nev duly informed us how they were planning on opening up a new factory in Perth under their own label, Odyssey Surfboards. We chatted some more and became friends. I recall thinking to myself how was it these two guys, around our age, had advanced way beyond their Coolite experiments than we had? Their surfboard know-how put us to shame. I could also see, quite clearly, they were as confident and ambitious as each other. This was a good thing, I thought, some fresh ideas and young blood to stir the older heads and backwaters of our local surf industry. Even better was when Nev kindly offered us a discount if we rode their boards. It wasn’t the last time I was a recipient of his generosity. In the mid-1970s Nev and Phil worked long hours Monday to Friday while honing multi-skills and growing their Odyssey business. Weekends were all about getting out of Perth and heading ‘Down South’ for proper waves. I enjoyed some memorable trips with them in their new super light Suzuki four-wheel drives that took us to surf spots where few vehicles could get to. Those parochial sandy tracks provided plenty more fun…but the bigger bitumen highway was calling me elsewhere. I headed to the Eastern States via the South Australian desert to enrich my surfing life with new experiences. I worked at Cactus awhile for legendary surf film maker Paul Witzig, helping him erect some fences and stone toilet blocks for a basic camping area. I was stoked when Nev unexpectedly passed through and stayed a couple of days while en-route to the Gold Coast. He was leaving Odyssey and West Oz for good. I wasn’t far behind him and was soon living in Queensland too. We were both following our dreams. I wanted to become a professional surfing judge and watch the world’s best surfers up close. Nev wanted to make surfboards for them. We achieved our goals and crossed paths a few more times during the next couple of decades. Our friendship has remained strong. Some know Nev as the eager young shaper who relocated to the Gold Coast and rebranded his business as Nev Future Shapes, a devoted surfer who travelled the globe in the 1980s and 90s, man on a mission chasing waves while making boards for elite professional surfers, a busy bloke whose fingers bled as he relentlessly mowed foam for countless others. Others may know him as the chatty promoter of Firewire Surfboards, a skilled designer and entrepreneur at the forefront creating high performance surfboards with minimal environmental impact. Only a few insiders though will know that Nev was one of the main men who helped deliver that groundbreaking leap forward in global surfboard design and production. Never underestimate Nev. Only a fool would undervalue or write him off. Nev was born in 1958 under lucky November stars, as evidenced by some of the big wins and rewards that have come his way. There have been some steep falls and soul-destroying losses too. The last few years have taken a toll. Just a few weeks ago this 63-yr-old father of three sought help from a psychiatrist. He was urged to do so by one of his adult daughters. Nev was medically diagnosed with high-functioning Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. For those who know him, this ADHD diagnosis explains a lot…yeah…fast rev Nev. His high levels of enthusiasm can get him over-excited and carried away with ideas. An eagerness to take risks in chasing his dreams has also gone hand-in-hand with an overly generous nature. Nev always tries to see the best in people and things. But this idealistic outlook sometimes means he hasn’t always seen the entire picture as clearly as others. He can misjudge certain situations by being too trusting of people. It’s a recurring pattern of behavior that’s cost him with the regrettable loss of some close relationships and ventures, such as his stalled Nev House business. Last year some disgruntled shareholders aired their grievances in the Australian Financial Review. The newspaper featured some scathing reports about the company having nothing to show for the $8 million in private funding it had received since 2013. The chief executive Nev had appointed to run the company opened windows of opportunity while cleverly concealing other facts behind the heavy curtains of his own shadowy financial past. Nev was taken for a long ride. He failed to see through a charlatan at the wheel. It has been a very painful lesson to learn from. The fallout from the savaging he copped in the AFR has been tough going for my old mate. Despite the bad press, Nev is a resilient character. He is bouncing back. The company has been restructured at Board level. He’s still talking to government representatives and community leaders about the virtues of recycling plastic waste into emergency housing units. Nev recently contacted me to inquire if I would help him write about this, perhaps as part of a biography? I knew there’d be plenty of other interesting yarns to fill a book. But I was apprehensive. Was this book idea just some sort of surf -washing exercise to help launder reputational damage, a PR spin job to deflect from the big gorilla in the room? Not at all, he told me. Nev House was back on track and would soon be announcing some good news for its share-holders. He said I could write about that, warts and all. In the meantime he was preparing to launch a website to promote his latest venture called ‘Mobius Surf’. “Isn’t that some sort of mathematical term?” I asked curiously. “Yeah, both sides of a continuous perfect curve. I have gone the full circle, I am hand-shaping boards again,” he said laughing. This was a big statement coming from the board builder who introduced the surfing world to computer aided shaping machines. Nev was loudest in singing the praises of shaping machines years ago. He was the person who really got things buzzing for everyone when this technology was in its infancy. For that he was publically criticized in the industry as being the bloke most responsible for the death of traditional custom shapers. Neville the Devil didn’t care. A practical visionary, he was too busy achieving that long-cherished dream. Nev wanted computer-aided machines to custom shape surfboard blanks, error free. Then he wouldn’t have to get dirty and dusty any more, simple. He’d be a designer only. He could make surfboards without ever touching them again. That was his big dream back then. I knew that. What I didn’t know were some of the cool stories that happened while he pursued that particular goal, like that special day in 2006, at a coffee shop in Helsinki. That’s when Nev realized he’d finally achieved it. He was under the pump. Tahitian pro surfer Michel Bourez needed some new surfboards for the next contest scheduled for the awesome reef-draining waves at Teahupo’o. While seated at a coffee shop in Finland’s capital city, Nev designed the required boards on his Mac Book Pro then pressed the send button. Thousands of miles away an AKU shaping machine instantly received the design details then whirred into action. Nev could now relax and enjoy his coffee. He knew when Michel Bourez arrived in Tahiti his custom boards would be there waiting for him. The Tahitian surfer would unwrap the new boards and be fully stoked. So was Nev. He had realized another of his dreams. He had not touched or laid eyes on those surfboards, yet they would be there in Tahiti as perfectly fulfilled custom orders. It was a sublime moment of realization he will never forget. Nev sat back with his coffee and screamed internally, “Oh my God, my dream has bloody well come true!” Nev has completed thousands of such orders in similar fashion since that defining moment in 2006. He hadn’t touched any of his old tools or hand shaped a board since then, until a just few months ago. Two of his adult surfer children, Jayden and Renee, said to him one day how they’d never actually seen Dad shape a board. Nev was surprised to hear this. So he asked his kids what sort of boards they wanted. He listened carefully then got out his tools and showed them how shaping boards was done, old school. The result was two lovely shooters and another epiphany. Nev realized then, even with the advent of computer aided designs and shaping machines, there still should always be a place for custom orders to support local surfboard industries around the world. Mobius Surf is the interactive platform Nev has been putting together for fellow shapers and board designers to use so they can share and chat better with customers all around the globe while fulfilling orders. Looking back I can see how it serendipitous it was that Nev named his first company Odyssey. Anyone a little familiar with the Greek Classics will recognize the name as one of Homer’s epic adventure stories. The book is named after the central hero Odysseus, who wasn’t the best warrior, or the strongest. Odysseus was still a hero though, because he was one of the smartest and most innovative people from that mythological era. He came up with the idea for the Trojan horse in the Battle of Troy. Odysseus was cursed though to travel many long years. He faced various challenges before finally completing a full circle to make it back home. I love that Nev has the courage to admit his mistakes, to express his vulnerability while overcoming his challenges and complete his own full circle. He has lived a busy and eventful life venturing to all parts of the surfing world. Through his odyssey we can learn things about surfboard design, methods and materials. We can also hear from some of the cleverest industry people who have helped drive board design forward to new levels of performance. I would like to learn and write more. I hope to have finished such a book this time next year. Hopefully Nev House shareholders will have a good story to be glad with too…
Photos
Thanks Wayne, for sharing your Nev Hyman material. Looking forward to reading your new book.
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