Larry Bertlemann spent the 1970s showing surfers that a wave could be ridden in ways they had barely imagined.
He crouched low over his board, twisted through tight turns, and threw his weight into maneuvers that seemed to defy the rules of the sport.
On land, skateboarders were watching closely, and soon they were borrowing his movements for the streets and concrete pools of California.
Known as the Rubberman, the Hawaiian surfer became one of the defining figures of the shortboard revolution. His competitive record was impressive, but his real influence was harder to measure.
Bertlemann helped change the way surfers moved on a wave, encouraged skateboarders to develop new techniques, and showed professional athletes how commercial sponsorship could support a career.
Bertlemann died on October 10, 2026, at the age of 71, following complications from a heart attack at The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
His death marked the passing of a surfer whose influence extended well beyond the contests he entered.
A quick search for his name on SurferToday.com's search engine shows how influential he was in both surfing and skateboarding.
From Hilo to Honolulu
Larry Kaaua Mehau Bertlemann was born on August 7, 1955, in Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
His father was a military man who later worked as an auto mechanic. Larry grew up with four sisters and spent his early years fishing and hunting pigs.
Surfing came later, after his parents separated and his mother moved the family to Oahu when he was around 11 years old.
His first surfing experiences came at Queens, a Waikiki break where he rented a longboard.
In a later interview, Bertlemann recalled his first session: "I rented a board for an hour and stayed out all day."
The young surfer was so reluctant to leave the water that other surfers had to chase him in.
Bertlemann soon began surfing at Ala Moana Bowls, one of Honolulu's important surf spots.
He developed his skills during a period when shorter boards were changing the sport, allowing surfers to turn more quickly and attack the wave face in new ways.
Shaper Ben Aipa recognized his potential and helped him find equipment suited to his unusual approach.
Bertlemann became a regular presence around Aipa's shaping operation, studying the boards and testing designs in the water.
He also learned by skateboarding, an activity that would become central to his surfing style. Bertlemann turned professional at just 13, despite Aipa's advice against it.
A local rust-proofing company provided early sponsorship, giving the young surfer a taste of the commercial opportunities that would later define his career.
The Rubberman revolution
By the early 1970s, Bertlemann had become one of the most distinctive surfers in Hawaii.
At 5' 9'' (175 centimeters) and approximately 160 pounds (73 kilograms), he had a compact build that suited his low, flexible stance.
His knees bent deeply, his hips stayed loose, and his body seemed to twist around the board as he changed direction.
The nickname Rubberman captured the unusual flexibility of his surfing.
Where many surfers of the period relied on straighter lines and more upright turns, Bertlemann constantly shifted his weight, redirecting his board through tight arcs and rapid changes of direction.
His movements could look frantic, but the best turns combined speed, balance, and remarkable control.
His signature cutback, which became known as the Bert, was a particularly influential example.
He would drop low, sometimes reaching down toward the wave face, and pivot sharply back toward the breaking section.
The movement became a model for surfers who wanted to keep their boards moving dynamically across the wave rather than simply following its open face.
Bertlemann's approach was well suited to the evolving shortboard.
As boards became shorter and more maneuverable, he explored their potential with a freedom that challenged conventional ideas about how a surfer should stand and turn.
He was among the surfers who helped establish the low, aggressive body position associated with modern high-performance surfing.
Ben Aipa's boards and a new way of surfing
Bertlemann's surfing developed alongside the innovations of Ben Aipa, one of Hawaii's most influential surfboard shapers.
Aipa's swallowtails and stinger designs helped surfers generate speed and turn more sharply, making them a natural match for Bertlemann's experimental style.
Their collaboration became one of the defining partnerships of the shortboard era.
Bertlemann was a demanding test rider because he wanted his boards to do things that conventional designs did not easily allow.
He experimented with different fin arrangements and board shapes, including small twin-fin swallowtails and multi-fin configurations.
In a later interview, he described the thinking behind his approach: "It was so easy to go straight, and I didn't like that."
He explained the difference by comparing the lines he wanted to draw with those of another Hawaiian surfing star, Gerry Lopez.
"I wanted to make figure 8s, and he was making capital Ls," Bertlemann recalled.
He called himself "the anti-Gerry," a playful description of his determination to take a different route through a wave.
The result was a style that opened up new possibilities for turns, transitions and changes of direction.
Bertlemann's influence could be seen in younger Hawaiian surfers such as Dane Kealoha, Buttons Kaluhiokalani and Mark Liddell, who developed their own versions of the loose, powerful approach he had helped popularize.
A champion who did not need the judges
Bertlemann's reputation grew rapidly, although his competitive record never fully reflected the excitement he generated in the water.
He was often described as erratic in contests, and his willingness to experiment did not always translate into high scores from judges.
Yet he could produce performances that made the result seem secondary. In 1971, he won the junior division of the Makaha International.
The following year, he finished fourth at the World Surfing Championships and third at the Pipeline Masters, establishing himself as one of Hawaii's rising talents.
In 1973, he won both the Hawaii state championship and the United States Surfing Championships.
He won the prestigious Duke Kahanamoku Surfing Championship at Sunset Beach in 1974 and finished second at the 1975 Lightning Bolt Pro.
In 1978, he won the Katin Team Challenge.
His world rankings reached No. 13 in 1976 and No. 12 in 1979, respectable results for a surfer whose reputation rested as much on his free surfing as on his competitive performances.
Phil Jarratt, who profiled Bertlemann for Surfer magazine in 1979, captured the contradiction in his character.
He called him "a truly gifted surfer" with "an outrageously overblown ego," noting that his unpredictable performances could generate more excitement than the contests themselves.
The description became one of the most memorable assessments of a surfer who was both a sporting talent and a larger-than-life personality.
Surfing's first corporate showman
Bertlemann understood early that a professional surfer could make a living beyond prize money.
At a time when many surfers remained suspicious of commercial sponsorship, he embraced companies outside the surf industry and turned himself into one of the sport's most recognizable personalities.
Pepsi, Toyota and United Airlines were among his corporate sponsors. He placed large logos on his boards, sometimes incorporating Pepsi's familiar swirl into their designs.
He even surfed Pipeline in a custom blue-and-red bell-bottom wetsuit.
His carefully maintained Afro hairstyle and brightly coordinated outfits made him instantly recognizable in photographs.
"I get off on promoting things," he once said. "I keep my sponsors happy, and they keep me in business."
In a 1979 profile, Jarratt reported that Bertlemann claimed to be earning $80,000 a year, a substantial sum for a surfer at the time.
Whether every dollar of that figure was accurate was another question. Jarratt openly doubted the claim, but Bertlemann was clearly doing well commercially.
His willingness to sell his image helped establish a model for professional surfers seeking sponsorship beyond surfboard manufacturers and clothing brands.
His fame was also visible in print.
Bertlemann appeared on the covers of Surfer and Surfing magazines eight times during the 1970s, more than fellow stars Gerry Lopez, Shaun Tomson and Mark Richards, according to the Surfing Walk of Fame.
He also appeared in more than 25 surf films, including "Going Surfin'" (1973), "Fluid Drive" (1974), "Super Session" (1975), "Free Ride" (1977), and "Tales from the Seven Seas" (1981).
Bertlemann was a showman, and he knew it. His confidence could come across as arrogance, and his enthusiasm for self-promotion irritated some surfing purists.
At one point, he reportedly began signing autographs with a rubber stamp. Yet the cameras kept returning to him because his surfing was difficult to ignore.
The Bert travels to skateboarding
Bertlemann's influence did not stop at the shoreline.
He had been skateboarding since childhood, when boards with metal wheels were common, and he regularly practiced his turns on asphalt and concrete.
The same low stance and sharp pivots that made his surfing distinctive became the basis for a maneuver that would find a second life in skateboarding.
In the 1970s, California's Zephyr skateboarding crew, associated with Venice Beach and the Dogtown scene, began translating surfing movements onto pavement.
Skaters such as Jay Adams and Tony Alva drew inspiration from surfers who could carve a tight turn and use their bodies to control the board through a transition.
Bertlemann's hand-planted cutback became known as the Bert or Bert slide. The skater places a hand on the ground while pivoting the board through a sliding turn.
The technique became an important part of skateboarding's developing vocabulary, linking the movement of a surfboard on a wave with the movement of a skateboard across concrete.
The relationship worked both ways.
Bertlemann borrowed ideas from skateboarding to experiment with aerial surfing, attempting to take his board above the lip of a wave and return to the face.
He called these maneuvers "Larryials," a name that fitted his personality.
His experiments came years before aerial surfing became a defining feature of the sport during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Bertlemann did not invent every element of modern aerial surfing, but he was among the early surfers exploring what was possible above the wave.
His approach helped prepare the ground for later generations of aerialists, including Christian Fletcher and Kelly Slater.
Slater would eventually describe Bertlemann as an important influence on the surfers who followed him.
Injury, absence and a difficult return
By the mid-1980s, Bertlemann had begun to disappear from the international surfing scene.
Years of powerful, twisting turns had taken a toll on his body, and serious back problems eventually made surfing increasingly difficult.
He underwent operations for damaged spinal discs and struggled with the consequences. He later described the severity of his condition in an interview with Juice magazine.
"The disc pinched my nerve between my C4 and C6 vertebrae," he said.
"So they had to cut my throat. I had to pay someone to cut my throat. How's that? Usually they pay me."
The dark humor was typical of Bertlemann, but his situation was serious. By the late 1990s, a series of back injuries and surgeries had left him unable to surf.
His prolonged absence meant that a generation of younger surfers knew his name and his maneuvers better than they knew the man himself.
In 2001, Bertlemann returned to public attention through a profile in The Surfer's Journal and an appearance in the Biographies television series produced with the Outdoor Life Network.
The renewed interest brought his pioneering surfing back into focus, although it also revealed how much he had struggled away from the spotlight.
That same year, Bertlemann was arrested on robbery and firearm charges.
The legal troubles added another difficult chapter to a life that had already moved well beyond the familiar image of a carefree professional surfer.
Later accounts reported that he served time for armed robbery.
Searching for something beyond surfing
Bertlemann eventually turned his attention to other pursuits, including martial arts, motorcycle racing and cars.
In his interview with Juice, he explained that he had wanted to rediscover his enjoyment of surfing after years of constant travel and attention.
"I got into martial arts so that I could enjoy surfing more," he said.
"Surfing had gotten kind of stale. I got tired of people chasing me all over the world. I had to have my own little privacy time."
"Then I started getting into motorcycle racing, cars, jumping out of airplanes… I did everything."
The comments offered a glimpse of the pressure that accompanied his early fame. Bertlemann had spent years being photographed, interviewed, and followed by fans.
He was among surfing's most marketable stars at a time when professional surfing was still finding its commercial footing.
Stepping away gave him room to explore interests that had little to do with waves or competition.
He also worked as a surfboard shaper and remained connected to the culture that had made him famous.
In later years, he appeared at surf gatherings and festivals, reconnecting with people who remembered his performances at their peak.
Jarratt, who had once written harshly about him, recalled meeting him again at a Noosa surf festival and finding that Bertlemann charmed everyone around him.
A legacy shared by surfers and skaters
Bertlemann's importance is easiest to see by looking at how surfing changed after the 1970s.
His low center of gravity, rapid changes of direction, and willingness to experiment helped expand the range of movements that surfers considered possible.
He was one of the figures who made high-performance shortboarding look different from the more upright styles that had preceded it.
His influence reached younger Hawaiians who developed the next generation of powerful surfing, as well as skateboarders who carried his movements into streets and empty swimming pools.
That crossover helped strengthen the connection between the two sports and gave skateboarding some of the physical language it would continue to develop.
In tributes following his death, fellow surfers recalled the effect he had on them as young fans.
Kelly Slater wrote, "You made dreams happen for a lot of us kids," remembering how much it meant to get Bertlemann's autograph.
Hawaiian surfer Johnny-Boy Gomes also praised his influence, describing him as an inspiration who had left a lasting mark on surfing and skateboarding.
Skateboarding magazine Thrasher paid tribute to him with the words, "Skateboarding grew from the roots of GIANTS. We owe you everything."
Joel Tudor wrote that Bertlemann had changed the direction of progression in surfing and helped shape technical advances in skateboarding.
Bertlemann was also remembered as a father, grandfather and great-grandfather.
The family statement announcing his death described him as a beloved son, brother and local artist, and said his legacy would live on through the people he touched.
He is survived by his mother, five sisters, three children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
Larry Bertlemann's life was complicated, and his career rarely followed a straight line. He could be difficult, flamboyant, and unpredictable, yet his imagination in the water was unmistakable.
The Rubberman helped surfers see new lines on a wave and gave skateboarders a turn they could make their own.
Decades later, both sports still carry traces of how he rode. And that is a sign of a life well lived.
Words by Luís MP | Founder of SurferToday.com
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