HISTORY | Terry Fitzgerald Handshapes 
"Surfing is art.... Such was the driving theme of Hot Buttered Surfboards as it exploded through the closing decades of the 20th century. While founder Terry Fitzgerald took to the world’s most challenging waves and used their feedback to change the course of how a surfboard could feel, Martyn Worthington’s amazing airbrushes rearranged our vision of how a surfboard could look. The two artists together made perhaps the strongest single surfboard statement in the history of the sport. The story of Hot Buttered's ascent as surfing's Style King board label starts before the label itself was actually born. Partly it dates back to 1969 and the tutelage of a bunch of young Aussies under the great surfboard shaper Brian "Furry" Austen at Joe Larkin's legendary factory in Kirra, Queensland. Later this crew of kids would bowl off down all sorts of surprising alleys; Michael Peterson to extraordinary competitive success and shattering burnout, Peter Townend to a world championship and a career in bigtime US surf publishing ... yet to one surfer who'd thrown caution to the four winds and chased his 20-year-old tail up from Sydney to surf Kirra and learn the trade, the combination of surfboard design and highspeed wave lines would prove a lifelong allure. Terry Fitzgerald came back to Sydney in the last half of 1970, ready for the next step. In March 1971, Terry and bride Pauline went on their honeymoon to Hawaii, and another vital piece of the HB foundation was laid. The North Shore of Oahu is in prime form each year during this most uncrowded of months; the ultra modern speed lines Terry wanted to draw were ideally suited to all that clean juice. Here he began an association with some of the greatest surfers of the era - Owl Chapman, Reno Abellira, Sam Hawk and Gerry Lopez - along with master surfboard shaper Richard Brewer, whom Terry would later acclaim as the finest of designers. Terry and Pauline spent time at Brewer's house on Kauai before eventually decamping to the Jacobs factory in California for a shaping stint, then making their way back to Hawaii and then to Sydney, where on December 21 that year Hot Buttered was born. Despite their undeniably glamorous appearance, Hot Buttered boards were being born in one of the filthiest environments imaginable. Terry had rented a cottage in Mitchell Road, Brookvale, the heart of Australia's by-now thriving surfboard industry - Barry Bennett and Midget Farrelly were a couple of stones' throws away churning out blanks and drums of resin, and you couldn't throw one of the aforesaid stones into one of the local sandwich shops without hitting at least two white-dusted board sanders. Hardcore surfboard manufacturing master Frank Williams - who would later provide the inspiration for Simon Anderson's Thruster design - worked on the appearance of the boards, until suddenly HB got a letter from a recent artschool graduate named Martyn Worthington. "I'd like to paint your boards," Martyn informed Terry, "I think there is the scope to blow minds." Between 1971 and 1973, Terry was one of the few Australian surfers to conduct a true exchange of ideas with the Hawaiian Valhalla, and the only surfboard designer to actually bring ideas to that most exacting of tables. The technical detail behind the designs would not be fully realised by boardmakers worldwide for well over a decade, yet in Terry's hands (and under his feet) ideas like concaves, wings, and "spiral" vee - a subtle form of double concave - took flight in ways that still seem quite extraordinary. Just how to break turns under a pitching lip and extend bottom turns to their full potential were challenges still being wrestled with by the New School in the late 1990s; nobody has dominated the harsh surfing environment of Sunset Beach, Hawaii the way Terry did since Gary Elkerton and Tom Carroll in the late 1980s. Back in the Hot Buttered work space, Terry brought his Hawaiiantuned ideas back into shorter equipment which could be surfed aggressively in Aussie conditions. Double wing swallows, concaves, and the super radical Screwdriver were vigorously tested at Narrabeen, Dee Why Point, Bronte and Maroubra Beach by an increasing number of young HB team riders - the likes of Greg Day, Steve Wilson, Stuart Campbell, Iain Buchanan and Simon Law among them. These kids, part of the suddenly overflowing Aussie junior talent pool, kept the designs' feet firmly on the ground while Terry took it all to extreme new levels on his travels to Jeffreys Bay, Uluwatu, Grajagan, Brazil, Japan, Europe, Tahiti and Europe. 1977 stands out as a year in which incredible test runs at Honolua Bay on Maui were followed by equally classic J-Bay sessions. As the decade shifted gears, Terry found one of his biggest design challenges in the shape of rising professional star Derek Hynd. Here was a surfer who drew lines unlike anyone else, and who had strong ideas of his own on the boards he wanted to ride. The pair clicked almost instantly, working on single concave twin-fin wing swallows and chopped squares which Derek took into the rarefied heights of the world's top ten. Elements of these designs - particularly the single concave multi-fin tails - are clearly visible in cutting edge surfboards worldwide today. Apart from anything else, they demonstrated the fruits of intelligence at work; there was no luck involved in the development of the DH quiver. To paraphrase one of Terry's favourite sayings, it was revolution and evolution all in one. Terry experienced another major design challenge with the onset of thruster technology in early '80s. In a play on the three-fin theme, he came up with a creation he named the Drifta: a single-fin-focused concave to deep double concave with smaller outriding fins and grooved wings. Small-wave Driftas - cut way back to at least four inches shorter than the regular shortboards of the day - were crazily fun boards, alternately slithering and skating across anything and oddly reminiscent of the Fish of an earlier time; but its fun side didn't comp romise its higher performance levels, as team rider Nick Carroll proved by winning the Australian title that year against twin-fin, single, and thruster opposition. The gun version became legend during the Big Bells sessions of '81, with Terry's giant bottom turns and speed tracks being some of the day's highlights. .... art is surfing." BACK TO TERRY FITZGERALD HANDSHAPES |
