It’s the morning after the year before but as the World Surf League lowers the flags on another, shall we say, entertaining year, the hardest working man within it ain’t loosening his own tie just yet.

“Actually, this week is ‘get everything ready for next year’ week,” reads the wonderfully compendious email penned by Al 'Fatty' Hunt.

“Today I had six events close that had to be seeded, credit cards that need to be charged and then there’s the 2019 rule book that needs updating.”

It’s hard to imagine professional surfing without Al Hunt and near on three decades after shoehorning his own hefty frame (we’ll get to that shortly) into it, there’s no sign he’s leaving.

“No idea how long,” comes the reply to my query about how long he’s planning on sticking around.

“I’m nearly 69 so they may put me out to pasture at 70, but I’m still enjoying it so why stop.”

Such succinct and oddly entertaining emails from Al have lit up my inbox at all hours over the years, often from parts unknown but not once has he never not responded, which, for anyone that has ever attempted to interact with surfing’s governing bodies, at any level, is really something.

And so it was, after reading a comment on Swellnet’s forum suggesting it should be done, I reached out to the man himself for a deep dive.

In a perfect world, a face-to-face sit down would have been the ticket, but given he’s good on email and I don’t like transcribing, an email exchange seemed fitting.

First on the list of questions, was that nickname. As someone who’s been blessed and cursed by a few over the years (Wog seems so quaint now!) I wondered if he’d ever tried to shake 'Fatty'.

Al, at far left, with Simon Anderson, Terry Day, and Mike Martin in 1985

“Fatty Al came after Sea Cow got dropped,” a response which prompted me to do that thing you do while simultaneously trying not laugh while containing a mouthful of coffee and attempting to protect your laptop from the liquid busy squirting out your nose.

“I was always fat, so Fatty was an obvious nickname which has never worried me.”

I’d long associated him with Sydney’s northern beaches, based on no other evidence than what I’d read in magazines over the years. Turns out, I was only just off.

“I started surfing on the Central Coast at North Avoca. Firstly on a surf-o-plane, then coolite before I got my first board in 1964,” says Al.

“We moved to Collaroy, then to the southern end of Narrabeen and I surfed there most of the time.”

And it was along those golden sands Al first dipped his toe into competitive surfing while simultaneously feeding one other talent that would serve him much better in the years ahead.

“Maths was the only thing I was good at…top 5% of the state in Year 12,” he says.

“But competitive wise, I compete a bit in the early seventies. I made the semis at Bells in 1973 and got beaten by Michael Peterson and Wicka [Tony Hardwick], who was a friend from North Narrabeen.

“Once I transitioned towards my role as tour manager for the ASP in 1983, my surfing slowed down, but until then I surfed as much as possible and notched up 37 trips to Bali between 1972 and 1983.”

Al says his enjoyment of judging grew concurrent to the realisation his competitive surfing ability was not going anywhere, leading to him serving as interim head judge in the ‘gap year’ between the cessation of the IPS circuit and formation of the ASP.

And with that, he was away. Sort of.

At this juncture a call to Graham 'Sid' Cassidy seemed in order and after a few false starts, I unsurprisingly find him surveying the lineup at Sandshoes, that oft-maligned Cronulla reef break which attracts as committed a breed of surfer as can possibly be.

“Oh, it's rideable but you wouldn't, not with the amount of guys out there at the moment” he reports.

“Geez, there’s at least sixteen sitting out on the reef. Looks alright though.”

Necktie and Sandshoes: 'Sid' Cassidy in 1988, dressed up at his beloved break

Surf report aside, Sid is as qualified as anyone to weigh in on a conversation about Al, given the pair were as thick as thieves throughout the ASP’s early years.

“We were joined at the hip in bringing in the two-tier for surfing, which was quite the breakthrough for surfing at the time,” says Sid.

“But we were dealing with a lot of pressure that came along with it. It wasn’t just the same old surfers showing up and getting points and money, but there was a huge development sector that came along with it. With that of course came results, figures, numbers and ratings and Al had that very, very strong involvement in ensuring the ratings were, you know, not just loyal to what was happening, but actually true.”

Sid attributes Hunt’s longevity in the at times tumultuous world of professional surfing to that devotion to accuracy.

“What Al has always done best is gather data and that data from the early years is gold, if not emerald,” says Sid.

“He always set a high standard for himself, even from the earliest years and has been able to sustain a career because of that. I mean people have come and gone, myself included but Al, jeez, he’s just always been there.”

I suspected one of Sandshoes’ non-confrontational, wobbly waves had momentarily captured my subject’s attention, but prodded as to what really lay beneath Hunt’s ability to keep on keeping on, Sid offered an insight that only could have been gathered after years serving in the trenches together.

“He’s been very smart in not getting too involved in the politics of it all and he’s always kept a reasonably low profile at that corporate level where everyone’s trying to figure out who’s who in the zoo,” says Sid.

“You have to remember, surfing went from a pretty amateurish sort of...just a stock standard adding up of numbers really. But when pro surfing really got going throughout the mid-eighties and especially into the nineties, where there was lots of money and careers on the line, you could really count on one hand how many people were running the show and a lot of Al’s record keeping was crucial to that.

“He’s done extremely well in positioning himself as that go-to person but he’s a stickler for honesty. People have to trust those ratings, trust those points and that honesty that surrounds Al has stood him in good stead. It lead to people believing that the system was fully professional and not just an idea that sounded professional.”

It's an interesting notion, the idea of not only Surfer X’s entire future, financial and professional largely hinging on the record-keeping of a man once called 'Sea Cow' by his mates but also the reputation of the sport itself along the way.

“Let’s just remember, we're talking about decades here of surfing morphing from just a laid-back sport that grew from a small amount of competitors to now being you know, it's a full-blown professional sport-and everyone wants to know how they are travelling,” says Sid.

“And if those scores don’t add up, or it's out of kilter, then I mean straight away that's putting the sport, or a particular event under the microscope in a negative way, rather than a positive way. There was a lot riding on his shoulders in those early days in particular.”

I leave Sid to his surveillance and fire off a couple more questions to Hunt, specifically how each year’s ratings are tallied given it is traditionally this time of year I, and countless others pepper him with questions about such matters.

Surely, there was more to it than running a ruler under a name come late December?

“I’m always updating results and creating ranks,’’ he responds.

“We now have a couple of hundred events that all need to be set up, recorded and ranked after finish. So I guess doing it continuously all year and not getting [or perhaps taking] a break keeps me on top of them. For example, going into Hawaii, I predicted for this year 17,000 to be the cutoff but it could go have gone down as far as 14,500. It ended up being correct.”

Although seemingly a bit player to the bigger, more glamourous world of professional surfing, it’s clear Hunt’s contribution to the sport is immense, but what if he was to disappear tomorrow? What of all those notebooks and floppy disks filled with wonderous facts and figures gathered over a lifetime of scoring?

“All the old records are in the hands of the World Surf League in a warehouse, he says.

“Some have been digitized already and some others are still getting done. There is talk of getting interns to enter all that data, but for now at least we have them.”

And what of the bit players he’s seen come and go? Is Al Hunt just like the rest of us, bemoaning the ever-increasingly squeaky-clean image of the modern-day pro?

“I agree the older days were more enjoyable,” he says.

“Everyone used to travel around like a family whereas these days other than the Brazilian crew most travel with their families. This year we had the Masters event in the Azores and it was great to see everyone staying in the same hotel, eating breakfast together, hanging out with each other at the beach then the bar pre dinner. Those guys have not changed.”

Given his proximity to such historical moments over the years, I also wondered if he had in his possession much in the way of memorabilia.

“I have thousands of posters, t shirts, rash vests, anything, any event I went to that had anything with a surf logo on I collected,” he replied.

More clothes than the Kardashians: Al with some of his contest shirts

“That is also in WSL hands in warehouse in Santa Monica. I still collect surfing mags and currently have 19,000 different editions, which is by far the biggest collection in the world by miles. I actually have a pile of a couple hundred on the floor behind me waiting for the covers to be scanned. Hopefully by end of the year now events have quietened down a bit.”

You reckon?

Visit Al's website: www.allsurfmagazines.com