Cover Story: Jack Johnson - The Dude Abides

Johnson also got his rocks off trekking to Honolulu to see bands like Fugazi, Devo and Nirvana, and by playing a handful of gigs in a cover band called Limber Chicken; sets consisted of Minor Threat, Bad Religion and the Fugazi staple "Waiting Room." People close to him remark about his even temperament, but Johnson admits he was a competitive kid, hungry for the biggest waves and eager to gross out his buddies: On a dare, Johnson once ate a crusty goldfish that had congealed on the hood of a car (he lost the forty-dollar prize by not keeping it down). Another time he ate a friend's elbow scab, which he proudly says was "about the size of a corn flake."

In 1992, at age seventeen, Johnson became the youngest competitor ever to reach the finals of the trials of the Pipeline Masters in Maui. "He made the finals against all of the guys we considered to be legends," says Slater, an eight-time world-champion surfer. "But I felt like that feat, in itself, changed Jack a little bit. He saw the competitiveness and the egos and the anger that is involved in competition, and I think that really turned him off." Johnson was eventually disqualified after failing to catch three waves in thirty minutes. "He stood up on two waves — he had the best tube in the heat — but these guys hassled him to death out there," says Slater. "They wouldn't let him catch anything. Guys were ready to kill each other to catch the next wave." Johnson almost feels guilty looking back on this period of his life, when he briefly lusted after the clothes and boards that he saw in surf magazines and fantasized about the money that may have come from sponsorship. (He did receive free gear from Quiksilver from age thirteen through college.)

The Pipeline Masters was Johnson's last surf tournament. A week later, Johnson was riding a wave after school one day when he fell and was driven into a coral reef, cracking his forehead and mangling his face. "I almost drowned," he says. "When I got myself up on the beach, there was blood down to my toes, and I felt my lips literally dangling off my face. I was missing teeth, and I looked like a cartoon character afterward." The prom was coming up — "Everybody knows how high school is, and I was really insecure. People looked at me like I was the Elephant Man.

"Sometimes that gets written up as the thing that made me stop surfing and start playing music," Johnson says, "but that's not true. As soon as I got back in the water a couple of months later, I surfed the exact same amount." He does admit that it had a psychological impact. "It was a personality changer," he says. "It humbled me, and it slowed me down. I like to joke that I hit my head so hard that that's why I'm so mellow, but I think it did mellow me out — in a positive way." Driving Jack to the hospital (where he took more than 150 stitches), Jeff told his son, "Chicks dig scars."

In 1993, days after arriving at UC-Santa Barbara, Johnson noticed a cute freshman in the dining commons. The night before, in his dorm, he'd been talking to another student from Hawaii, who gave Johnson a piece of advice: "He said, 'If you get eye contact with a girl, don't look away.'" So Johnson stared at the girl, and the girl stared back. "I didn't look away from her, and she didn't look away from me," he remembers. "Then it got awkward, how long we were looking at each other." Kim finally sat down next to him. "We both fell for each other," he says. Johnson is intensely guarded, and he is hesitant about revealing personal details. When I call Kim to ask her to expand on the story of how they met, I can hear Johnson in the background saying, "Don't tell him that story!" Kim finally says, laughing. "He was the best-looking guy in the cafeteria."