Larry Bertlemann didn’t surf so much as contort himself around a wave. Knees bent, hips low, one hand skimming the face, he’d crank his board through turns so tight and sudden they seemed to violate the basic geometry of surfing. Then he might spin around, change direction, or launch into something that the sport’s prevailing sensibilities hadn’t yet caught up with. He looked less like a surfer following a line than a cartoon character inventing one.
They called him the Rubberman. On October 10, Bertlemann died in Honolulu at 71, following complications from a heart attack, his family confirmed to Hawaii News Now. He leaves behind three children, eight grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren, as well as a legacy that extends far beyond his competitive results.
Bertlemann was one of the great originals of modern surfing: an athlete whose influence is easier to see in the generations that followed him than in any trophy cabinet. You might say he was too off the wall to truly compete—and moreover be judged—or be particularly marketable. Maybe that is in part why so many others tried to surf like him and couldn’t. Bertlemann’s surfing was expressionism with caution to the wind, not afraid to fall flat on its face in the process.
Martin Potter called him the godfather of high-performance surfing. Kelly Slater called him the first New Schooler. Long before aerial surfing became a defining feature of the professional game, Bertlemann was experimenting with the possibilities, even giving his own airborne maneuvers a name: “Larryials.” His importance wasn’t simply that he surfed differently. It was that he made different seem possible.
Born in Hilo, Hawaii, in 1955, Bertlemann didn’t grow up in the center of the surfing universe. As a boy, he fished and hunted pigs on the Big Island. When he was 11, his mother moved with him to Oahu, where he discovered surfing at Waikiki’s Queens break, initially on rented longboards. According to a story he later told Tracks magazine, he rented a board for an hour and stayed in the water all day, until someone had to chase him in.
He had found his element. Within a few years, the progressive Hawaiian shaper Ben Aipa had recognized his talent and begun helping him develop it. As surfboards grew shorter and more maneuverable, Bertlemann found a way to exploit their new possibilities, riding with a loose, low center of gravity and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for turning. He turned professional at 13, against Aipa’s advice, and was already a star before he was old enough to understand the limits the sport might impose on him.
By 17, he had finished fourth at the 1972 World Surfing Championships and third at Pipe Masters. The following year, he won the U.S. championship. But Bertlemann’s significance was never adequately captured by the results. He could be erratic in competition, sometimes inconsistent, and not always inclined to play by the rules. His surfing, meanwhile, could make an entire event feel secondary.
In a 1979 SURFER profile, journalist Phil Jarratt described him as a man with an “outrageously overblown ego” and an equally extraordinary ability to push performance forward. The contradiction was central to Bertlemann’s appeal. He was brash, flamboyant, and unapologetically convinced of his own importance. He was also capable of maneuvers that left even the most accomplished surfers wondering what they had just witnessed.
At a moment when surfing was still wrestling with its identity after the upheaval of the shortboard revolution, Bertlemann offered a different answer to the question of what a surfer should look like. The upright, relatively linear turns associated with many of his contemporaries gave way to tight arcs, abrupt changes of direction, and a restless, almost improvisational approach. He wanted to draw figure eights where others drew capital Ls, and he didn’t mind going overboard and/or flat-out failing.
Related: The Sting: How Ben Aipa’s Radical Design Changed Surfing Forever
But above all, Bertlemann’s surfing had an irreverence that was as important as its technical innovation. He didn’t appear to be honoring tradition or trying to make the sport look dignified. He was having fun, and he wanted everyone to know it.
That sensibility traveled. Bertlemann’s low, hand-planted turns helped inspire the Dogtown skateboarders of Southern California, including Jay Adams and Tony Alva, who translated the movement onto concrete and empty swimming pools. The resulting maneuver became known as the “Bert,” a lasting reminder of how porous the boundaries between surfing and skateboarding had become. The influence ran both ways: Bertlemann was drawing on skateboarding as he began experimenting with aerial maneuvers in the late 1970s, years before surfing’s competitive establishment fully embraced the air game.
He was also an early architect of the professional surfer as a marketable personality. He cultivated sponsorships beyond the conventional surf-industry orbit, striking deals with airlines, soft-drink companies, and automakers. His fame was such that he reportedly signed autographs with a rubber stamp. The Rubberman had become a brand before surfing had fully figured out what a surf brand could be.
But Bertlemann’s life was never a neat progression from prodigy to elder statesman. His early fame brought friction, and his later years included serious personal and legal troubles. After back problems forced him out of the surfing limelight in the mid-1980s, a gradual fall from grace ensued, culminating in his 2001 arrest on robbery and firearm charges.
He continued to suffer from chronic, debilitating problems with his back and neck that, at one point, left him unable to surf or walk properly. The body that had seemed almost elastic in the water exacted a price.
In a 2006 interview with Juice magazine, he described the surgery required to address a pinched nerve in his neck with the dark humor that had long been part of his persona. Surfing itself, he said, had begun to feel stale. He explored martial arts, motorcycle racing, cars, and skydiving. He had spent years being pursued by fans and photographers; eventually, he wanted some privacy.
Yet those who encountered him later in life found a man capable of disarming charm. In a 2025 retrospective for Tracks, Jarratt revisited his own early, sometimes uncharitable encounters with the young Bertlemann, admitting that he had been too hard on a surfer whose talent and humor were undeniable. When they crossed paths again decades later at a Noosa surf festival, Bertlemann charmed everyone he met.
It is tempting, in retrospect, to treat his surfing as a preview of the sport’s future. The low stance, the compressed turns, the improvisation, the aerial ambition: all became familiar features of high-performance surfing. But that framing risks making Bertlemann sound like a rough draft of the surfers who came after him. He was not merely anticipating the future. He was an original, working without a clear template and without any guarantee that the sport would recognize what he was doing.
The modern game can be measured in contest points, rankings, and technical difficulty. Bertlemann’s contribution is harder to quantify. He expanded the imagination of surfing, making it seem less like a prescribed set of maneuvers and more like a form of personal expression. He showed that a surfer could be unconventional, entertaining, even unruly—and still change the sport.
For all the mythology surrounding the Rubberman, the most enduring image may be a simple one: a young Hawaiian with his knees bent, his center of gravity almost impossibly low, his hand trailing across the face of a wave, grinning as he draws another line nobody else thought to make.
He made it look easy. It never was.
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