Part One

Darren Handley has a secret formula. 

It is not a conscious one, but it is one that allows him to shape the most high performance surfboards in the world for the world’s best high performance surfers. Both male and female. 

This secret formula has lot to do with what Darren learned growing up in the backstreets of Coolangatta, a neighborhood that Rabbit Bartholomew once nicknamed “The Gaza Strip of the Gold Coast”. 

Darren Handley grew up poor. Very poor. And he grew up disliking wealthy people because of it. Even though he was to become wealthy himself one day. Considering his childhood background, a tangle of divorces and living with Aunts and Uncles and orphans and half-brothers and drugged out strangers that slept on the floor and partied with his parents…it is a miracle that Darren survived at all. 

Early on, he learned two of his greatest fears. 

Drowning and jail.

A surfer, the drowning part is easy to figure out. The jail thing is a little more complex. It seems Darren was born with a very deep, introspective intellect. He could see things in the future. He had a gift of being able to see where things were going. He had to in order to survive. Teachers couldn’t figure him out until later, much later, he was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. 

He has never read a book in his life. Can’t remember a single one. 

So as a kid, helping to support his family, he stole things to help make ends meet. Like milk money off the neighbors porches on the way to school, shit like that. But being around a lot of the grown ups drugs back in Coolangatta, it wasn’t long before his crafty ways drew the attention of the small underworld scene there. 

Darren took a look at it. But mostly looked at the older fellas. Studied them. How strung out and fucked their lives were. The stories: cops, beatings, blood, Jail, knives, guns, homosexual rapes, time in the pen, scary tattoos, the stink of booze and mull and coke and losing at life. This would instill a lifetime fear of Jail and petty crime that Darren still sweats out to this day. So he stopped stealing and he looked ahead, like he always did, and bailed on the whole scene.

Pretty heavy decision for a 12-year-old. 

But, having never had any real guidance from any conventional parents, Darren Handley continued to raise himself like a wild animal. The family was always hungry. But after his brush with crime, Darren, a keen surfer at this point, walked into Master Shaper Murray Bourton’s surf shop and started sweeping floors for two dollar coins. It was with pride that Darren was able to put some food on the table. Even though sometimes it was just a loaf of Tip Top bread, and scrapings from the butter tub. 

It always made his Mother cry. 

But that bread was really something.

Because Darren Handley was looking ahead. 

Looking ahead at the empire he swore to himself he would build without getting anywhere near a Jail.

Serangan, Bali, 2015

Darren Handley is now 53-years-old. 

He shapes for World Champions Mick Fanning and Stephanie Gilmore. Has for a long time. His boards are champion’s boards. Darren is now wealthy. Famous. Recognised. A family man. A father. A home owner. A surfer. A traveler. And is the fastest 53-year-old in Australia, having held the Masters 50 metre sprint title three years running now. He has collected his trophy each year at the big, national banquet by running at full speed up onto the stage…nude.

Which makes Darren Handley a bit of a badass. 

Not worried about opinions others have of him, having raised himself, he doesn’t have to. 

I looked him over during his latest visit to Bali. We were hanging out at Serangan during one of Pete Matthew’s Rip Curl surfboard’s test drive events. Darren had been flown over as the guest shaper and his boards were being featured and the crowd loved them. How could they not? Who’s going to argue with Darren Handley and Mick Fanning and Stephanie Gilmore when they hold nine World Championships between them? 

Darren was sitting in front of his computer with Garut Widiarta making some inputs after watching Garut’s session. Looking at Darren, you see a man fit for life. With mischievous, leprechaun eyes and, though happily married, the remnants of a real, lady killing charm. Every woman, from the Ibu’s to the Warung staff to the Euro surf chicks, even Diah Rahayu Dewi, Rip Curl's top woman surfer, all found themselves glancing at the square shouldered, deeply tanned, shaven headed man. Darren sits quietly mostly, offering little. But ask him a question and that dyslexic mind of his runs with the ball. Honestly and openly on just about any subject. Including some incredibly personal ones. 

Good surfing is not about data…it’s about determination.

The lucky guy is not the guy with a lot of boards, it’s the guy with a lot of waves.

Yeah, I went through a pretty heavy drug phase when I became a millionaire, but I saw the end of the tunnel and walked out alive.

I think Mick Fanning should come out with an evening wear line. Fanning after dark, something like that. 

Mick Fanning knows how to switch his game heat to heat, that’s how he buries people. Mick isn’t boring, he F1. Precision, performance, power. It’s always what real surfing has been about since the dawn of mankind.

Stephanie Gilmore is just one of the boys. I love her like a daughter.

Yeah, we had a punk band. Rat Scabies and the Social Disease. Could I hold a tune? When you’re that drunk, you can hold anything.

Without the Coolangatta test track, without those perfect waves, Kelly Slater would be World Champion 40 times by now. 

At one point, you watch Darren Handley get up and walk a bit to stretch his legs and get away from the crowd and the questions. He wanders down the beach a bit. Finds an old, ratted out, abandoned Warung. He picks through it. Sighting things. Then sits in its shade and looks up at the clouds. 

Photographer Mick Curley is sitting next to you. Mick, always the astute observer of the human condition, looks over at Darren too. 

“You ever wonder” Says Mick privately, “If shaping were ever Darren’s choice? Or do you think it chose him?”

And suddenly, down the beach in the abandoned Warung, you see the little boy with the crazy childhood, and the stolen milk money clutched in his palm, and the dyslexia and the loneliness of raising oneself all alone.

Part Two

It is physically painful for Darren to see a good surfer on the wrong board. That is why he is working with Australian wunderkind Jack Freestone. “Surfing the wrong board is really a reflection that something is wrong with your head,” says Darren. And then he goes on to tell you that Jack Freestone’s main competitive issue is that the boy needs a Father. And that he needs to stop flirting with hipsters and to stop being influenced so much by his girlfriend Alana Blanchard and to start surfing hard and to start realising his full potential on the World tour.

Because it makes Darren ache to see surfers not reaching for what he calls the “stars within themselves”. It makes Darren ache to see people with God given talent piss it away on the confusion of youth. This is the ache that drives Darren to be the fastest Masters sprinter in the southern hemisphere. To put his body where his mouth is.

Because Darren Handley is around so many champions that he needs to remind himself of the champion within himself. The star within himself. He needs his own pats on the back. He needs his own medals. And he needs to be able to look Champions straight in the eye and be able to relate to being a champion and be able to tell them that he knows exactly what they should do.  

And therein lies the secret formula of Darren Handley’s magical shaping for the best surfers in the world. For anyone who cares enough about their talents to become world class. For anyone that wants to be somebody to themselves. 

To anyone who knows what it’s like to steal milk money for a loaf of bread.

The big secret is that Darren Handley doesn’t care about the boards.

He cares about the person who is riding them. //MATT GEORGE

(Photos Matt George)