Joe Surf: John Davis’ Hall of Fame path had some detours

The story of John Davis’ life in surfing has a nice beginning and a happy ending.

His story will be recognized at 10 a.m. Friday in front of Huntington Surf & Sport on the corner of Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway, when he is inducted into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame along with Gordon “Grubby” Clark and C.J. Hobgood.

But like with any good story, there is also a middle, and in Davis’ case, it was the middle that made the man. More about that in a minute. First, Davis is getting ready to put his hands and feet in wet cement in front of HSS.

“It’s really quite an honor,” said Davis, 64, who still surfs the north side of the Huntington Beach Pier almost every day. “It’s an honor because I basically turned my back on Huntington Beach some years ago and went on a different path.

“People have always said to me, ‘How come you’re not in the Hall of Fame?’ And I tell them I kind of turned my back on the place and I lived a pretty dark life for a long time, went to prison a couple times. I didn’t think I was worthy. When they called me up, I was totally caught off guard.”

Before he lived the “dark” life, Davis appeared to be on his way to being one of the golden boys of surfing. Born in 1951 in Lynwood, Davis moved with his family to Arizona and Nebraska before returning to Southern California in Long Beach in the mid-1960s, when he caught the surfing bug.

“Some family friends of my dad’s had two boys who lived in West Covina,” Davis recalled. “But their uncle owned the one house that was on the bluff at Doheny, overlooking all of Doheny and Dana Point. We used to go down there all the time when I was around 12, and that’s where I learned to surf.”

Davis moved to Huntington and was attending Huntington Beach High School when teacher Bill Garland wanted to start a surf team. Garland asked Davis, who already had some success in local contests, to be the team’s first captain.

From there, Davis took his talents to Hawaii, where he surprised more than a few of the island locals. Davis placed second in the 1969 Sea Spree at Haleiwa behind Fred Hemmings, and third in 1970 at Honolua Bay behind Gerry Lopez and Barry Kanaiapuna. Then he shocked the surfing world when he won the North Shore Trials of the Smirnoff Pro Am at Sunset Beach, beating out Australian Mark Warren in 1972.

He placed third in the U.S. Surfing Championships in Malibu in 1973, but the competitive success stopped there. Davis fell into alcoholism and drug addiction and, not surprisingly, his life took a detour.

“I had a lot of years in addiction, probably heavily for all the 1980s and all of the ‘90s,” Davis said. “In 1990, I ran away from reality, I had nothing to lose. I took off from Malibu, got a bus in downtown L.A., got on a Greyhound and went to the border at Tijuana. I got on another bus and ended up in Guatemala two weeks later with 50 bucks in my pocket.

“What I did to myself was put myself in that position to get back in the (drug) business again, and I did until I got busted in 1995 in Mazatlan, Mexico.”

It was Davis’ second prison term for drug smuggling, serving three years of a 10-year sentence. Davis was able to get out in three years because he understood that he could apply for a transfer to the U.S., and once in U.S. custody, U.S. law would determine the length of his sentence. And for his particular crime — attempting to smuggle 50 pounds of marijuana — the sentence in the U.S. was three years.

Back in the U.S. and a free man in 1998, Davis took the advice of his parole officer and entered a drug and alcohol treatment facility, and his new life began.

“I got married for the first time at 50,” he said. “My wife has three beautiful daughters, so I got to raise a family, and they’re doing wonderfully. And I started and sold my own business.”

That business — Akua Mind & Body — is a drug treatment center in Costa Mesa that combines modern medicine with Eastern practices like yoga, acupuncture and meditation. “Akua” is Hawaiian for “God.”

“I never had any idea that there was that kind of life going on, I had surrendered to drugs,” said Davis, now sober for 17 years. “I found a spiritual path there. I don’t want to preach but it led me to a life beyond my wildest dreams.”

JOE HAAKENSON is a Huntington Beach-based sports writer and editor. He may be reached at [email protected].