“It isn’t over yet… there could be consequences later”
The name may not ring any bells if you’ve come into surfing late, but tour surfer Roy Powers, who was active in the early two thousands, sure knew how to steer a surfboard, winning at Haleiwa (beating Joel Parkinson) and Steamer Lane.
In 2007, ESPN ran a glittery profile on the kid.
“He is quick to smile, just as quick to laugh; the sort of engaging, good-humored optimist given to saying such things as, ‘All those pissed-off terrorists? They have to laugh too, don’t they?’
“And Powers has reason to laugh. As a top professional surfer he has sponsorship deals that pay him well into six figures. He has a travel fund that covers his trips to surfing contests all over the world, including Australia, Tahiti, France and South America. He owns a home about a mile from here plus a house on the Big Island he’s never seen. He recently fulfilled a lifelong dream by winning the Reef Hawaiian Pro competition, guaranteeing himself a spot on the World Championship Tour next season. And on this beautiful December day, he golfed in the morning, will surf a bit in the afternoon and has prime tickets for the next evening’s Hawaii Warriors football game with his father. He is 26, tan, lean, muscled and has never had to worry about his weight.
“If you really want to appreciate how large Powers lives, consider this story he tells. When he finally secured a date with a girl he had a crush on for years, he took her to a strip club in Honolulu, where he gave her 500 $1 bills and had her make it rain. ‘It’s not classy,’ he says, ‘but it worked.’”
But while his career might’ve ended up a little lacklustre, Powers was a close friend of Andy Irons and drifted off the tour after his pal’s death in 2010, what was happening behind the scenes sure wasn’t dull.
In an extraordinarily candid interview with the The QuiverCast’s Mike Steele, Powers, now forty-two, tells of a double life as a pro surfer and a drug dealer, working in a dark world where drug kingpins offered to kneecap his competitors and who wouldn’t think twice, says Powers, “about blowing your car up with you in it.”
Thing is, says Powers, where there’s excitement happening, ie at a surf contest, “there’s drugs and the way those things get there is by criminals and gangsters and organised crime. It’s everywhere.”
Powers is forced to talk in generalisations, naturally, like, what’s he gonna do, name names, but the candour is wild.
“The real fuckers that are collectng the big money, they’re mellow, normal people, mellow guys… they don’t commit petty crime, they don’t get involve bed in bullshit they smile at you and shake your hand, but they don’t have a problem with blowing your car up with you in it”
“I saw some things that…fuck…I followed orders.”
“The last years on tour I wasn’t really into it, especially the year after Andy died. I’m really going to the dark side, but I’m thriving in that… I got a lot of respect. I was able to build connections to help people I knew who really wanted to be that world…for people to get certain things…a level of quantity or quality they could never get. I was in that position and had done business and spread blood for them.”
“I was doing some of the product. It fucks with your mind. Anybody who says you can control things, you can’t brother. The shit grabs ahold of you. If you’re around heavy negative things, you’re going to start thinking heavy psychotic things.”
“Being locked in a cage and realising you have no choice of what you’re doing, if you can eat, what’s going to happen in the next ten seconds. That really hit me but it was also refreshing. I was out of that world. I would hit the restart button.”
“(In prison) everyone’s starving, everyone’s trying not to get stabbed, there’s the gang politics, the predators… every single moment of the day. Being a white guy in a Hawaiian prison system is fucked. You’re a minority but I knew how to operate. The gang I was operating with inside was top notch. We were like a military unit in there.”
“Fred Pattachia wrote me a letter. It hit me so hard. His passionate words from twenty-five years of friendship. He cared! I read it all the time.”
“I’ve done some heavy heavy shit.”
“It isn’t over yet. There could be consequences later.”
Gets real good around the thirty-six minute mark.
