Rizal Tandjung
As far as world renown Indonesian surfers go, Rizal Tandjung is about as O.G. as it gets. The youngest of 6 brothers, Rizal grew up in Kuta beach long before it was any sort of tourist destination. At that time Kuta was just a small fishing village with a little wave out front, sand dunes, and papaya and coconut trees galore. This was before the hotels, villas, and plastic came to this part of the island.
Of his five brothers, four of them surfed, so they didn’t hesitate to get Rizal on a surfboard by the time he was five. However, he is the only one who decided to pursue surfing as a professional career. Luckily, uncommonly for a lot of Indonesian families, Rizal’s family was completely supportive in his desire to make a life of surfing. They let him drop out of school, bought him new boards, and helped him get into competitions around Indonesia. For good reason too, when he was around 15 years old he had won the junior world surfing championship multiple times in a row, a contest in which upwards of 12 countries would send their best junior competitors.
This concept of a sort of distaste for a surfing life centered around competition is something that I’ve seen come up a lot while talking to the local surfers here in indo so I asked Rizal what he thinks about it. He said that in his opinion it’s a combination of a few different aspects. For starters, the obvious reason many refer to is the fact that Indonesia is so wave rich, why would you want to spend all that money to fly to the other side of the globe in order to surf two-foot crappy waves?
The other reason is an issue of conflicting waves of life. Life moves a lot slower in Bali. Anyone who has spent an extended period of time on an island can tell you that “island time” is a real thing and not just something mainland tourists say when they go to Hawaii for the first time. When you live in a place that has much slower pace of life than the constant training and flying all over the place to surf one heat and maybe lose, only to fly to the next place and try again; it is not a very enticing lifestyle.
Rizal’s first major sponsor was Quicksilver when he was __ and that allowed him to travel the world doing surf contests. It was during those travels that he became friends with some of the top surfers, as well as Taylor Steele, one of the most renown surf filmmakers back then and today. When they were at contests together and had some lay-days, they would often go off and surf better waves in the region around where the competition was and Taylor would come to film it.
Rizal quickly realized that he’d much rather spend his time surfing amazing waves with his friends and making films, instead of living the constant grind of competition life. Also, at this time, the world tour was limited to very poor waves, especially compared to where it’s held nowadays. But a career in free surfing at this time was a completely new thing and there were really only a few surfers that were able to make a career of it. Luckily, with some supportive sponsors, Rizal became one of them.
Of course there are people who genuinely enjoy the competition life and still see surfing as a passion. In fact, there are a few Indonesian surfers that are looking very promising for qualifying for the world tour in the coming years. But that wasn’t Rizal’s path, and he attributes his longevity in the industry to leaving that life for free surfing.
Nowadays you can usually find Rizal at his new restaurant/venue, Wishing Well. He opened Wishing Well just recently at the end of November 2020 in Uluwatu. Between that and his two sons, who are steady becoming some incredible surfers, Rizal has plenty to keep him busy these days. Regardless, you can still find him the water every other day or so, probably out surfing everyone else in the lineup.
The final aspect Rizal brought up as to why Indo surfers tend to stay away from the competition lifestyle is because of the culture of surfing in Bali. The majority of surfers here are extremely talented and choose not to complete on a large scale because often times they feel like it takes away from the essence of why they even surf anyway. Once surfing becomes more of a grind than a passion, some amount of the beauty is lost. Because of this, you tend to see great Indonesian surfers doing quite well in contests, and then just drop off and become free surfers. After all, that is exactly what Rizal did and it worked out pretty well for him.
