15

The Family Biz

I suppose I have Isaiah to thank for pushing me towards the next phase of my career. And it’s not just because I finally realized I needed to step away from the tour and find a way to make a real living and a real difference at home, although that was definitely a part of it. More than that, it was through Isaiah and some of the special friendships he developed that I was introduced to new people, new ideas, new ways of building on whatever was left of my surfing career.

Specifically, it was through Isaiah’s best bud, Jacob Antoci, that we met our good friends Jeff and Natalie Antoci. (Or, I should say, the late, great Jeff Antoci, because our pal is no longer with us.)

You have to realize, to even be able to use a phrase like “best bud” in regard to Isaiah was itself a major blessing, because it’s not like he had any friends. He didn’t really connect with people. Even people in my own family. It still pisses me off to think how some of my brothers would react, the few times we’d visit; they’d trail Isaiah with a bottle of Windex, wiping down everything my kid touched; it’s like they thought they could somehow catch his autism.

This disconnect was especially true when it came to other kids, even other kids who were cut the same way. But for some reason Isaiah formed a real bond with Jakey. Their teacher called us in one day to talk about it, to suggest the boys get together outside of school. Apparently, Jakey would have the same kinds of meltdowns in school and then de-escalate and lapse into a kind of comatose zone, same as Isaiah. The teacher would look up, and Jakey would be laying on Isaiah’s lap, decompressing, and Isaiah would be stroking his hair or petting him, and I heard that and thought, Whoa. It was pretty heavy.

Danielle got together with Jakey’s mom, Natalie, first, and after a couple visits Jeff and I joined in. We all got along great. Jeff was a good, good guy, and soon as we got to talking the floodgates kind of opened for each of us. We’d been down the same road, carrying the same heartache, so we had a lot to talk about. That’s how it’s been over the years, when I meet families through Surfers Healing. You learn someone has an autistic child, you know exactly how they live their lives. You know their days. You know the kind of shit they have to deal with, the stares from strangers, the hassles, the meltdowns, the constant attention they need to devote to their kid. We have a different look about us, I think, a different way of seeing the world—because our world is nothing like everybody else’s world.

Isaiah and Jakey, they were simpatico. They’d follow each other around. Even when they were apart, they seemed to be on each other’s minds, to where Isaiah would sometimes say Jakey’s name, from out of nowhere. Or he’d hear one of us mention the Antocis and he’d brighten. So it was a great, full-on family friendship, and it really blossomed. Jeff and I got along so well we started taking the boys on trips. Eli came with us on one trip, Elah came on one trip, and Jakey’s brother, Joey, came, too. We always had a blast. We’d mix it up, depending on what was going on at home, on who was around. We’d hop into Jeff’s van and head to Palm Springs, or wherever, mostly just to give Danielle and Natalie a break.

After a while, Jeff and I got to talking. He had a great business mind. He worked in commercial real estate, and he’d managed to build this network of connections, all over the country. He knew how to work a situation to advantage—not in a shark-like, cutthroat way, but in a chill and decent way. People really responded to him. Whatever new business idea or venture we talked about, he knew someone connected to it, at some high level or other, so he became an important mentor to me. And he had my back. I had no background for this type of thing, so I was looking for someone I could trust who would talk me through these new twists and turns, maybe point me in the right direction—and Jeff emerged as that someone, before long.

In the water, I knew what I was doing; out of the water, I had no fucking clue.

*   *   *

Jeff was an incredible friend to the entire Paskowitz family, helping us navigate a landgrab that took place over control of the Paskowitz Surf Camp. Can’t think how else to explain the mess my brothers and I nearly made of what was essentially our only asset as a family; best way to tell it is to just tell it.

What started back in the early 1970s as an informal, thrown-together way to bring in some money and spread the joy of surfing had become an important part of our Paskowitz legacy. My father knew a good thing when he stumbled across it, but he also knew the power and poetry of the Hawaiian spirit. He knew what it meant for an islander to extend a warm welcome to any haole. It was considered an honor, even an obligation, to teach people to surf—like you were sharing a profound gift, so that was a big, big part of what he was up to here. He even came up with a line to express this thought, which we still use in our camp advertising—“Share the aloha!”

The money was good, too. Not great, but good enough for him to keep at it, year after year.

As we got older, Doc put us to work. We’d hang with the campers who matched up with us in age, and eventually we learned how to be instructors, and as we left “home” and disappeared into our own, separate lives we kept coming back to San O on our own each summer to help out at camp. It was what we knew, who we were. And it was a way for us to keep tabs on each other, to reconnect as a family. Even when I was on the professional circuit and surfing out of my mind, I enjoyed being a part of it. I’d pass up certain tournaments, if it meant I’d miss a whole summer of camp … that’s how much the tradition had come to mean to me. And my brothers and sister all made their own sacrifices to be there, too, whenever they could.

At some point, my father couldn’t keep running it the way he always had. He and my mom wanted to move to Hawaii, where the water was warm and he could surf every day and stop moving around, from beach to beach. He was getting too old for this shit, he said. But he wanted the camp to continue, and to be a kind of anchor for our family, so he handed the reins over to Abraham. Don’t know how or why Abraham got the nod, but he was happy for the gig—and he did a good job with it, for a while. Basically, he ran it the way my father had always run it. He took out ads in all the surf magazines. He reached out to past campers. And that was that.

After a while Moses took a crack at it, and then David ran the show for a couple years, but towards the end of the millennium his focus seemed to be elsewhere. David had all these crazy ideas about Y2K and the end of the world as we knew it, and he seemed to check out on running the camp, so my father looked to me. I’d finally ended my surfing career, and I was kind of floundering, struggling to find something to do, so my father came to me one day and said, “Israel, I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. This is something you’ve earned. If you want it, it’s yours.”

I was touched that he put it just this way, but at the same time I wasn’t surprised. He was very particular about surfing, my old man. He placed great weight on what I’d been able to accomplish on the tour. He respected the kind of surfer I’d become, that I’d faced down the big waves he could never handle as a young man, that I’d almost drowned off Réunion Island, that I’d tamed all these monster waves and out-dueled all these surfing giants and helped to put a shine on the Paskowitz name throughout the sport. It’s like it meant more to him than anything my other siblings had done—and I don’t mean to suggest that I agreed with him on this, or that it was any kind of fair assessment, but this was how he’d always looked out at the world.

With him, surfing was all.

I grabbed at the opportunity like it was a lifeline, but I had no idea what I was doing. I had zero business skills. I’d never heard of a business plan—wouldn’t have recognized one if you rolled it up and hit me over the head with it. But I told myself I was the right guy for the job because I’d earned my chops as a surfer, so where David and Moses and Abraham hadn’t been able to make a go of it, I’d have a shot.

It’s like I was starting from scratch, though. David had done such a loose job of it, he didn’t even have a database. There were no files, no spreadsheets, just some handwritten notes on four or five pages of a legal pad, with the names and addresses of past campers. That was it.

(Don’t know that a spreadsheet would have been all that much help to me, back then, because I was completely computer illiterate. I could turn one on, but that was about the extent of my technical skills.)

This was where Jeff Antoci was incredibly helpful—at least, this was his first piece of incredible help. He had a lot of strong ideas. He told me to focus on what I had, not on what I was missing, and what I had was a lot of experience chasing sponsors. I knew that world, knew how to play that game, so I went at it hard. I started making a bunch of calls. I reached out to all these different surfboard makers and accessory companies, trying to create something out of nothing. Somehow, I managed to get the Roxy/Quiksilver folks interested in starting an all-girls camp with us; we’d had a ton of girls surf with us over the years, but we’d never run a dedicated all-girls session, and here we got Roxy to kick in some money and some product and support from their pros. It was a huge success, too. They cut a check to us for forty-five hundred dollars and on top of that they donated a neat gift bag for each camper, filled with about a hundred bucks’ worth of stuff—T-shirts, sunglasses, wax … whatever. They even helped convert one of our buses and dress it out with the Roxy logo. It was totally bad-ass, and they got a lot of nice coverage out of the deal, but then when I went to pitch them on the men’s side the following summer it was slow going. I was dealing with a bunch of different suits, but they worked in the same damn company; they saw what we were doing with Roxy and had a good idea what we were capable of doing for the Quiksilver line, at relatively little cost, but I couldn’t get them to buy in. And it’s not like I was asking for a ton of money.

My pitch was that we were bringing authenticity to their brand. We had some authentic surfers in the water with our campers, and we were creating dozens of new surfers each week, so I thought if a company like Quiksilver could start making an impression on these campers at the outset they’d be customers forever. That’s how it was with me, back when I started out. Whatever boards I surfed first, that’s what I reach for now. Whatever gear I wore as a kid, that’s what I wear now. For example, I’m big into Billabong; it’s such a great product, and they’ve made such a mark, it’s the only wet suit I’ll use. There might be other great wet suits out there, but Billabong has made me a customer for life, and that’s what I was selling here, with Quiksilver—a way to build customers for life.

But they weren’t buying. Even for the low, low price of fifteen thousand dollars, which would have bought them a full season of signage and sponsorship and prominent mention in all of our camp advertising, they weren’t buying.

So Jeff and I tried to think of other companies we could approach with the same pitch. At around this same time, I was talking with Kevin O’Malley, publisher of Men’s Journal, who’d just done a tremendous story on us, and through him I met a bunch of influential designers and fashion folks, who were just starting to operate on the fringes of the surf apparel industry. They were dipping their toes in our waters, guess you could say, so Jeff and I started to realize it made all kinds of sense to target some of these mainstream companies, where promotional budgets were beyond ridiculous. To a company like Quiksilver, for example, a fifteen-thousand-dollar sponsorship deal was a big item; to a company like Tommy Hilfiger, it was a speck, so I made a quick side trip with Danielle to the MAGIC men’s apparel show in Las Vegas, to chase down some high-end sponsors.

Now, it’s no accident that Jeff and I were thinking in Tommy Hilfiger terms, because Kevin O’Malley had introduced us to one of their Macy’s buyers, so we had an in. Ended up meeting with Andy Hilfiger, who was in charge of the jeans line, and we started talking about this new line of board shorts the company was introducing that year. Andy was all excited to show them to us, and completely bummed that we didn’t seem to share his excitement. I had to be honest. The shorts were total bullshit to a real surfer, completely lame, and I said as much to Andy. The colors, the styling, the functionality were all wrong. Told him how the whale net they’d sewn into the crotch—the mesh nut sack you see in department store swim trunks—had no place in a true board short. Told him how real surfers like to ride commando, but these guys didn’t know that. They knew fashion. They knew design. And here they were coming out with this nothing line that surfers and wannabe surfers just wouldn’t wear, so I figured I’d give it to him straight, figured I had nothing to lose. And to Andy’s great credit, he listened to me on this. He recognized that if he wanted to break from the mainstream and find a way to get hard-core surfers to wear his shorts and whatever else he was putting out, he’d need a little bit of cred; he’d have to throw in with someone who could lend some genuineness to the brand.

Out of all this we signed a fifteen-thousand-dollar one-year deal with Tommy Hilfiger, which was all the money in the world to us—enough to help us purchase some new equipment and enhance the camp in a bunch of ways. Wasn’t game-changing money, but it certainly got our year off to a nice start. Don’t know how we hit on that figure, because I imagine these guys wouldn’t have blinked if I’d asked for twenty or thirty thousand dollars, but I wanted to build a long-term relationship with the company; I didn’t want to scare them off, so I got them to make us a bunch of shorts without the whale net in the crotch, which we gave to our campers and instructors, and they cut us a check, and we were in business.

The following year, we went at them again, only this time we were operating from a position of real strength. There’d been a bunch of high-profile newspaper and magazine articles about me, about the Paskowitz family, about our camp … and in each case you could spot the Tommy Hilfiger logo on one of our boards or somewhere in the background. It was pretty prominent, so they’d definitely gotten a lot of bang for their few bucks. I knew what ads in these publications tended to run, so I was able to attach a value to the exposure—and at fifteen thousand dollars it was a huge bargain. My thinking, as we looked to roll over this first sponsorship deal into a second, was to ask for way more money this time around—maybe as much as one hundred thousand dollars—but at this level I was starting to feel like I was in over my head. I’d never been a good negotiator. I was never comfortable talking dollars and cents, so I thought about taking Jeff along to help me out, but then I had another idea; my brother Jonathan had started doing some work for us and he was a natural salesman, so I sent him to meet with the Hilfiger folks instead.

Best-case scenario, I thought, was we’d re-up at some number in between the previous year’s fifteen thousand and our pie-in-the-sky figure of one hundred thousand, so I wasn’t prepared for the deal Jonathan brought back—three years, one million dollars. I heard those numbers and had to sit down. Then I had to scream. One million dollars! It was so far off the map of my thinking, I had no frame of reference for it. Take all of us Paskowitz kids, add up everything we’d earned on our own since we left the camper, all the prize money we’d won, the sponsorship deals we’d signed, the record deals, the sunglass deals … and I don’t think we’d have gotten anywhere close to one million dollars.

It’s not like the Hilfiger folks were planning to cut us a check and leave it at that. It was a complicated deal, with all kinds of bonuses and out clauses and the formation of a sub-division of our own line of Paskowitz-branded apparel, but I didn’t pay attention to any of that stuff at first. I just saw those seven figures. In my head, it’s like the numbers were lit with neon, like a sign on the Vegas Strip. Like a fantasy. I’d never even considered that kind of money, but there it was. Not yet, mind you … but still.

*   *   *

The initial check was for $115,000, but we couldn’t cash it. This was the first I knew that our deal was going off the rails, the first whiff of the mess I mentioned earlier. The news of our sponsorship and licensing deal made such a splash in the industry, it almost derailed our partnership with Tommy Hilfiger before it got going; it also caused a rift in my own family, and for a while it appeared it might even cost me the camp.

On the industry front, the deal created a stir among traditional surf companies, because they knew they couldn’t compete with the big-name designers. The Tommy Hilfigers of the fashion industry were making billions, while the Quiksilvers and Hurleys and Billabongs were making only millions, so the little guys started to think the big guys would swallow up their sliver of the surf market. They worried that if Tommy Hilfiger got any kind of traction with its Paskowitz Apparel line, they’d be followed by Nike and Adidas and any number of giant action sportswear companies and they’d be squeezed out. And the thing of it is, I’d come to know a lot of these guys over the years, guys like Bob Hurley and Dick Baker of Ocean Pacific. They were talking shit about our deal; a bunch of them had thrown in together and formed a group called SIMA—the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association—just to get a firmer toehold in the marketplace. I was broken up about this, but not too, too broken up, because these guys had all had their shot with us. I went to them first, but they laughed at me; they didn’t want anything to do with Paskowitz Surf Camp. They didn’t want to sponsor us for five, or ten, or fifteen thousand … so they certainly didn’t want to sponsor us for one million dollars.

What this meant, for us Paskowitzes, was that for the first time in our lives our name had a bit of a stain on it in some parts of the surf world. For forty years, whenever a surfer came across my dad, or his name came up in connection to the sport, it was always attached to a positive vibe. Same for the rest of us, as we made our own way, on our own waves. Folks would hear the Paskowitz name and spark to it, but now there were some influential people within the surf industry—guys who’d sponsored me or Jonathan over the years, guys who used to surf with Doc—who were probably thinking, Aw, that Paskowitz kid is such a greedy motherfucker!

It would all shake out to the good, over time, but for a while there wasn’t a whole lot of aloha spirit coming our way.

The Hilfiger folks, they took us in with open arms. Sent us a whole bunch of gear. Had us looking like a real professional outfit, instead of the ragtag group we’d always been. They sent a box of promotional goodies for each instructor, filled with gear and swag worth about one thousand dollars. And they overloaded us with banners and stickers and signage, which we plastered all over camp, all over the beach, wherever we went. We ended up getting so much attention for Hilfiger, and becoming so closely associated with their brand, that my brother David couldn’t help but notice. He hadn’t been a part of Surf Camp since he handed over those few scraps of legal pad paper and I guess he started thinking he was missing out, so he started maneuvering to claw his way back in.

He had some encouragement in this, we later learned. He’d been hanging with a group of aggressive MBA types, who kept filling his head with talk about turning Paskowitz Surf Camp into a thriving national entity, convincing David he’d been squeezed from his birthright as Doc’s oldest son, telling him they could make him rich if he’d throw in with them on a kind of hostile takeover—and even making the case that there’d be enough profits to spread among the other eight siblings, in such a way that all of us would be rich and fat and happy. These suits had David thinking he could take care of all of us, if only he’d step up and take control.

The first I heard of David’s renewed interest was when I went to deposit that first check. I took it to the bank and asked for seventy-five thousand dollars back in cash. My idea was to distribute a little something to my father and then to put the rest of it to work on equipment and various improvements we were hoping to make that summer. I even brought an empty briefcase with me, to help me carry all those bills. I was like Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners, counting the money in my head.

But then the teller came back and told me there was a stop payment on the check.

“Excuse me,” I said. Wasn’t sure I’d heard right.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Paskowitz,” the teller said, “but these funds are not available. There’s been a stop payment order placed on your check.”

Here I’d never seen that kind of money in my life, never even contemplated that kind of money, and it was gone before I had it in hand.

Apparently, David and his team of “advisors” had pulled an end-around move and gone to New York to meet with Tommy Hilfiger himself—presumably to demonstrate that he was the rightful owner of the Paskowitz Surf Camp and to show that he was the Paskowitz named under our current permit with San Onofre State Beach. This last was in fact true, because we were operating under a long-term permit David had signed while he was still running the camp. I guess it didn’t matter to David that he was no longer involved with the camp or that he’d stepped away from it on his own. It wasn’t even his deal; he hadn’t negotiated it; he hadn’t been a part of it in any way.

I was devastated, floored. And out-of-my-mind mad. I couldn’t believe that my own brother would be behind such a despicable act. And it wasn’t only an attack on me; I saw it as an attack on the whole family, so I switched into desperation mode. I rallied the troops, in what ways I could. I scrambled to secure space for the camp at Campland, an RV park and campgrounds where my family used to park the rig when we were kids, and to obtain permits with the City of San Diego to allow us to run the camp at Mission Beach. Then I flew to Hawaii and laid it all out for my father. He knew about the Hilfiger deal, of course, but he had no idea of the infighting going on with his sons, so I filled him in. Told him what David was trying to do. Told him how Jonathan and Abraham had been working with me and how Joshua and Salvador were on board to help with the designs. Told him there was even room in what we were doing for David in our apparel deal, if he wanted in, and if he backed off on this grubby-ass move to take back the camp. Spent a couple hours going through the whole sad ordeal, and at the other end Doc formally signed the camp over to me, and then I had those documents notarized.

What was mine on a handshake was now mine on paper.

Within two weeks, we were back in business—but not until Jeff and I attended a meeting with my siblings and our various advisors. David actually called the meeting, to explain his actions and to offer what he thought was an olive branch, to smooth things over. He wanted peace in the family, he said. He wanted all of us to do well. Then he showed us this slick document he’d prepared, which talked about his background as a world-renowned surfer and the standard-bearer of the Paskowitz family legacy as the oldest son; he’d made himself sound like he’d been touched by Tahitian royalty, and blessed by the Hawaiian surf gods, and somehow anointed as a kind of surf whisperer. It was total crap, and nobody was buying it.

Out of that meeting, our mess got even messier … and I came away thinking our entire Hilfiger deal was about to collapse. Going in, I’d thought we could somehow salvage that relationship, but there was so much poison in that room, I couldn’t see how these guys would want to stay in business with us, even if we could find a way to settle our differences. Plus, my other brothers had been running up all kinds of expenses, which they were charging to Hilfiger’s Paskowitz Apparel clothing line—limos, flights, bar tabs, hotel rooms … whatever they could justify in their own cockaroaching heads. Don’t know what the hell they were thinking, but this was how we were wired; this was what we knew. We’d read in the papers that Hilfiger stock was at an all-time high; we’d see the company’s urban line all over the place, the preppy line all over the place, the business casual line all over the place. The company was hot, hot, hot, so it must have seemed to my brothers that we’d tapped into this bottomless well of money.

Ah, but that’s not exactly how it shook out.

How it shook out was this: David attempted to operate his own version of the Paskowitz Surf Camp. He took out ads in Surfer magazine, but hardly anybody responded to them. Nobody cared, I guess. I was eventually able to win back the camp name with the help of a camper who just happened to be a trademark attorney, and after that David had to call his operation the David Paskowitz Surf Camp, which made it even tougher for him to generate any business. We went from an average of sixty or seventy student weeks each summer when David was running the camp to over three hundred student weeks once we got going, so we were really able to invigorate the business in just a few years, while David’s camp fizzled.

The bank finally released that $115,000 check, but by the time I paid off all of our legal bills and reimbursed the Hilfiger folks for the bogus expenses they identified on our account there wasn’t a whole lot left—just enough to give my brothers and sister a few thousand dollars apiece, as a kind of goodwill gesture, and to throw a few thousand more at my parents, to help set them up for the next while.

That was the end of our sponsorship deal, but by some miracle of blind faith the Paskowitz Apparel line lived on for another couple months. The way the contracts were written, it was treated as a separate entity from our Surf Camp deal, and I guess the company wasn’t entirely put off by our backstabbing nonsense. Yeah, they were put off enough to pay good and close attention to our expenses, but they must have had a lot invested in their surf line and wanted to see it through, so we installed Jeff Antoci as CEO of Paskowitz Apparel and got Hilfiger to hire Jonathan to lead the sales effort, and Abraham, Salvador, and Joshua were put on salary, too. We really wanted to make this thing work, and ended up producing a sweet line of merchandise—beautiful stuff, really, made with high-end, vintage fabrics. But that was as far as it ever went. Most of the line sat in a warehouse and was never distributed, although some of it was dumped into the discount bins at low-end outlets like Ross and Filene’s.

Guess us Paskowitzes were a little more trouble than we were worth, after all.

*   *   *

A final few words on the Paskowitz Surf Camp—which, after all, was at the heart of this heartless landgrab that nearly tore my family apart. After forty years, we still run it the way my father imagined it in 1972: good surf, good folks, good food, good times. We remain a small, family-run operation, totally committed to capturing the warmth and good feeling that seem to find us on the beach, in the water, at the campsite at the end of a long, magical day.

It’s the longest-running surf camp in the United States and the first of its kind, and what sets us apart from other surf schools and clinics is that we live with our campers for the full week and help them soak up the whole of surf culture. Any experienced surfer can teach a beginner how to get up on a board, how to paddle out, how to time a wave, but our goal is a bit bigger. We’re out for something more. We’re out to create surfers. It’s like our version of that old give a man a fish adage. You know, Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for one day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime. That’s how we look at surfing. Get a student up on a board, put him into a wave, and he’ll ride it into shore. But create a true surfer, expose him to the rich history of the sport, share the aloha spirit that attaches to it, and he’ll surf for a lifetime.

That’s our thing, and folks seem to respond to it—some have been coming back for years and years. Hey, we’ve been at it so long, we’re seeing the second and third generations of the same family come back each summer, giving these next generations a chance to build on what we started with their parents and grandparents.

It doesn’t hurt that we bring in some of the world’s best surfers as instructors and that each one seems to find a piece of joy in passing on the sport. And it doesn’t suck that we’ve created a welcoming, nourishing camp environment, where we can sit around the campfire at night and swap surf stories and strum our ukuleles and look ahead to the next day’s adventures.

Learning to surf can be an intimidating, daunting experience for a lot of folks, but our instructors keep this in mind. They consider it a profound gift, to be able to share what they know, to invite our campers into their world.

In a way, it’s like a mini-, weeklong version of the way we lived in the family camper, for most of our growing up. We spill out of our sleeping bags and hit the beach. We break for lunch. We surf until the sun hangs low and we can hardly move, we’re so sore from all that paddling. We light a great bonfire and sing and eat and drink our fill. Some nights, maybe Doc Paskowitz himself will stop by for a visit, to share some insight or other. Then we wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

No, it doesn’t suck. Not at all.