In the nearly four decades since Jeff Hakman first rocketed down the face of a 20-foot wave at Oahu's Waimea Bay, he's been on a dazzling and harrowing journey. There were his golden years as the sport's premier competitive superstar. He went on to make millions as cofounder of the surfwear juggernaut Quiksilver USA. And then he almost lost everything to heroin addiction—not once, but twice. Hop on for a tale of glory, spectacular wipeouts, and the resurrection of surfing's soul.

By Rob Buchanan

Jeff Hornbaker

Life force: Hakman back on board at Cloudbreak, Fiji

In 1956, the novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Peter Viertel traveled to the Basque country of southwestern France to watch location shooting for director Henry King's The Sun Also Rises. Viertel, a friend of Hemingway's, had written the screenplay, but it wasn't long before his attention started to wander. Standing on the promenade in Biarritz, watching the perfect rollers churn past the Villa Belza, he decided to send home for his surfboard and, as legend has it, became the first man ever to surf France.

Viertel might not recognize La Côte Basque today. There are McDonald's now, and shopping malls as hideous as any in Orange County, and an autoroute, the A63, that rumbles with trucks headed north from Spain. And of course there are surfers, so many that in the summertime you can forget about finding an uncrowded break.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap, and all that.

And yet in the fall, if you drive just south of Biarritz on the old Route Nationale, it is sometimes still possible to stumble upon the swells of yesteryear. At least that's the way it feels when I pull into the parking lot at Lafitenia, a woodsy, secluded cove with a long, hollow, right-handed point break. Back in the midseventies, Lafitenia was a mandatory stop for American and Australian surfers on the Endless Summer circuit, a hard-partying band who eventually morphed their vagabond act into today's World Championship Tour. A quarter-century later the place is, fittingly, the site of the Silver Edition Masters World Championships, a ten-day-long blowout that's part surf contest—it's the official world championships of seniors surfing—and part class reunion.

Sponsored by Quiksilver Europe, whose headquarters is nearby, the early-October event features 32 of the biggest names from surfing's storied past. The two favorites, for instance, in the 35-to-40-year-old "grommet" category ("grommet" being a mildly derisive term for an adolescent surfer) are Aussies Tom Carroll and Cheyne Horan, who not so long ago were starring on the regular circuit. (Carroll, 36, won the world title twice; Horan, 39, was a four-time runner-up.) But the real royalty here are the men competing in the over-40 division, the ones who launched pro surfing as a viable sport in the late 1960s and 1970s. They're a mostly Australian bunch that includes Wayne Lynch, the 47-year-old mystical guru whose preference for surfing on unorthodox board designs back in 1968 helped kick off the shortboard revolution; Peter Townend, 46, whose methodical compilation of contest outcomes from around the globe resulted in the crowning of the sport's first world champion (himself, by sly coincidence) in 1976; and Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew, 45, the brash loudmouth who led the Australian Invasion of Oahu's North Shore in the midseventies, and got most of his teeth knocked out in the process.

But if you had to pick one über-kahuna out of this august lineup, it would probably be a diminutive 51-year-old American named Jeff Hakman, otherwise known as Mr. Sunset. As a teenage surf prodigy on Oahu's North Shore in the mid-1960s, Hakman mastered the fearsome break at Sunset Beach. He eventually became one of the premier big-wave riders and a tireless competitor who pushed the sport into a new, contest-oriented era. His real legacy, though, began after he retired from professional surfing in 1977 and founded Quiksilver USA, an offshoot of the surfwear brand that originated in Australia, thereby blazing the path for the marketing juggernaut that is today's surf industry. Hakman might have ridden that wave forever, all the way to tens of millions of dollars and a big house in Del Mar. But the need for an intense physical rush stayed with him after he'd left pro surfing behind, and when heroin and the high life replaced big waves as his ride of choice, the result was a 15-year off-and-on struggle with addiction, during which he nearly lost everything, including his life. It's a very different kind of legacy—with many semipublic wipeouts—and one that is still unfolding.