WL Rating
For me, Wayne Rabbit Bartholomew has always been one of the most colorful, impressive surfers around. Like him, I was a skinny kid, so I found myself identifying with him more than just about any other surfer of that era. I thought, “Hey, look at that skinny guy in that huge Pipeline barrel. Crap, if he can do that, so can I.” Well, it turns out that I couldn’t, but Rabbit certainly did tear it up in huge surf. His 1996 biography, Bustin’ Down the Door, is gut wrenching, soul baring effort with Rabbit casually walking the reader through decades of his tumultuous surfing life. While there is a small amount of overlap with the content presented in the 2008 DVD and coffee table book by the same name, Rabbit’s biography is much deeper. Rabbit starts by recounting his early days in Australia, struggling to get by on no money while immersing himself into the sport and religion of surfing. He encounters a young PT, MR, and Ian Cairns, as well as the brilliant yet hopelessly ill Michael Peterson. Rabbit watches, works furiously hard, and begins to emerge as a force in Australian surfing. His early journeys to Hawaii are epic, as are the deeper forays into the dangerous and controversial years in the mid-70’s when the Aussies and Saffas pushed to dominate on the North Shore. While much of this of this information has been well travelled in the past, it’s Rabbit’s decline after the end of his touring life that I found particularly captivating. I imagine that writing this book was incredibly cathartic for Rabbit. It’s honest, brash and highly entertaining....just like Rabbit himself. If you enjoy surfing books with a historical bent, then this won’t disappoint. Given his role in establishing professional surfing, this one is a WL Essential (May 2010)
