Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of an ongoing series illuminating a number of pearls of wisdom from the great Gerry Lopez.
“I’ve really come to believe that, especially in this day and age, and the world we’re in, more yoga is definitely a good thing. It’s certainly helped me and everyone in my family and a whole lot of friends that are into it.”
Trite? Yes. Cryptic? Sure. Maybe you’ve been proselytized to death about yoga, perhaps even by Mr. Lopez himself, but yoga is about as proven as anything where longevity is concerned, and he’s a walking example of that. Take what you will from it.
“Yoga comes to a person, I believe, only when it’s supposed to. In this lifetime, for some people, maybe it’s not supposed to, so no matter how hard other people or even they, themselves try, it’s not going to take. I’ve experienced that over many years of trying to push it on my friends or instructing or just being around people that didn’t have a practice but all of a sudden had an interest.”
That’s the only way it will happen. In a way, surfing is much the same, too. That’s how it happened with my son…I had him on a surfboard when he was eight months old,” he says of his son, Alex. Decades later, after a successful career in snowboarding, Alex joined the family on a surf trip to Mexico– “a nice, long, peeling left, north of Mazatlan,” Gerry recalls, “and then it happened.” Now Alex is a surfer–and surfboard shaper–in his own right. So much so that his father noted that he hadn’t been on a snowboard all season.
Related: Gerry Lopez On the Value of Evolving Surf Shops
“I look back at that and go wow, well, that was when he was supposed to get into surfing. And the other side of that is that over the years as he was growing up, he watched me practice my yoga in the living room… He could sit on the floor and fold his legs into full lotus position without using his hands. The first time he did that in front of me, I was amazed. I go, ‘Do that again!’ And he could easily do it. I said, ‘How’d you learn how to do that?’ He goes, ‘I was just watching you.’”
“So in a way, he had a yoga practice long before he ever became a surfer. I started surfing when I was 10 years old, but I discovered yoga in 1968. That was really about the same time that I was thinking about maybe starting to get serious about my surfing. Looking back, the reason was that–aside from the fact that it was a good time, it was my time to embrace yoga–I thought it would make me a better surfer. That was the thing that made me grab it with a bear hug right from the very beginning. It really gave me a lot of answers.”
Those were the pre-yoga-mat days, Lopez recalls. “If you had a towel, you did it on the floor. If there was a carpet that was even better.” After so many years, he’s become something of a yoga instructor himself, and more recently, he’s even venturing into the business side of things, partnering with Manduka on his own signature line of yoga mats.
Related: Gerry Lopez On the Value of Evolving Surf Shops
More than four decades after walking away, largely in disgust, from a 10-year stint in the merch biz between 1970 and 1980 with Lightning Bolt Surfboards, why get back into business now? And why yoga? “Yoga’s a good thing, so I’d like to encourage it whenever and wherever I can. It seems like the western world has taken a good look at yoga. It’s really easy to get into these days because you’ve got so many studios with so many classes with great instruction–great instructors.”
As for getting into classes? That’s a whole other beast akin to paddling out to First Peak at Malibu, soft-top, backwards wetsuit and all. But the silver lining, at least for this inclined toward the female figure? “Most of those classes are probably 80 to 90 percent women and–come on guys! Let’s get with it,” extols Lopez.
In all seriousness, though, he likes to think his presence offers something to the tune of “Hey it’s okay. I know it’s hard, it’s frustrating, and that ego gets in the way because you go to the class and the girl next to you is super flexible and you can hardly even touch your toes. It can be defeating, but it’s not about you, it’s about you figuring out that this is a good thing for you. That for all the stuff that we like to do–presumably surfing, whatever athletics we like to do–yoga’s gonna help make you do it a lot longer than if you don’t do any yoga.”
And if you’re still afraid of yoga emasculating you, gents? Lopez has this little anecdote: “Even the NFL has been embracing yoga for a while now. A good friend of mine used to play with the 49ers and he said right at the end of his career they were starting to do some yoga training on the field. “The reason they did it,” he was told, “was because when they’d get injured, they’d recover a lot quicker.”
“I’m 75 years old now,” Lopez says, appraising himself, reflectively. “I still want to surf. I don’t know how much longer I got, but I think if I keep standing on my head, I can go a little more.”
And then some, Gerry.
Related: How To Be A Better Surfer In and Out of the Water According to Gerry Lopez