While Leah's instinct about her brother-in-law's rambling ways may have been spot on, he was also the most highly-regarded man in their growing circle of friends, and in particular to her young son, that also carried his name. Young "Dickie" Keating would have an eager mentor in his uncle to teach him many things. There was so much great and near-great about his boy's uncle that it was as if Dickie's destiny lay coiled and ready.

Where would his path take him? Uncle Dick had been a heroic lifeguard. He'd been an Olympic trialist. He'd attended Stanford for a time. He'd rubbed elbows with Hollywood luminaries. But, perhaps more relevant than all of these were the skills Uncle Dick had developed as a waterman at Pedro Point. Of course he was a gifted swimmer, but he also became a superb abalone diver, a great fisherman, and the most elegantly stylish surfer on the North Coast. That he was taught bodysurfing by Hawaiians Cliff Kamaka and Eddie Ukini at Ocean Beach, and board surfing by the Kahanamokus in Waikiki, couldn't have hurt Uncle Dicks' pedigree either. But, even with all of these things going for him, the crucial element was still Uncle Dick's charisma, quick wit, and passion.

Considering where, when, and how the younger Keating grew up it may well have been a foregone conclusion that he was destined for surfing greatness. Such is not always the case in real life. Many of us have seen examples of hard-working parents who've struggled to make a better life for their children, only to have their hard-won wealth turn their offspring into lazy and ungrateful tyrants. Even in surfing, well-meaning parents sacrifice suburban security for a beachfront bungalow and endless amateur surfing events to try to give their kids an alternative path away from that of a mall rat. After the years of sacrifice, the parents realize that their now "contest drone" charges view surfing only as a job, are bored, and have completely missed out on the spiritual aspects of the lifestyle.

There was no chance that this man's nephew was going to end up a mall rat or a contest drone. It probably didn't matter much what was going on outside of their beach's high-ride line. Dickie Keating's world had its own heroes, rebels, interesting critters, and kid-sized waves galore. It also had its own regal keeper of the flame, Uncle Dick, who was working the dock and holding court with a wild bunch of Hawaiian and "Port-a-gee" surfers and fishermen. It seems they were all under the spell of his fun-loving ways and felt that belonging to this group was like being in an "island-style" extended family. Little Dickie Keating had plenty of "Calabash Uncles" to keep an eye on him, tell him stories, and encourage his watery adventures.

His very first surf adventure was at the age of two. With his uncle positioning him in a foot of water, the littlest Keating rode wave after wave for 50 feet to the sand, jumping off the finless paddleboard when it found the sand. By the age of five, the paddleboards were his boats to explore San Pedro Creek. A year or so later, the Van Dyke brothers -Fred, Peter, and Gene- began coming to Pedro to surf while in college in the late '40s. Dick's mom let her son hand out with the young men who camped out in the field next to his house behind the levee.

Each encounter encouraged more adventurous steps, but Dickie was still a child surfing with adults. He was dependent upon their supervision and muscle, and though this was amazing for the time, there weren't any other kids surfing yet. He had no peers until 15-year-old Ted Pearson got his first paddleboard in 1950. When Ted got a fiberglass/balsa surfboard a while later, he gave 8-year-old Dickie his 9' paddleboard. Now Keating had his own board and a friend to surf with, but he had one other dilemma. How would a little kid haul this heavy, cumbersome "cigar-box" down to his favorite part of the beach? First he put on his tennis shoes for booties and lifted one end of the board in a half circle, until end over end he worked his way up the beach in 9-foot steps.

Eventually, Pearson sold his newer balsa board to Dickie for his life savings of $23, freeing the youngster from his cartwheel surfing safaris. As Keating improved his equipment and grew in size, his abilities came along, too. By the mid-'50s, he saved his money until he had what he considered to be an astronomical sum of $40, and bought on O'Neill balsa/fiberglass board with a wide tail. This board didn't go the way he wanted it to, and Jack O'Neill let him trade it in on a better one. That was probably the start of a friendship and business association that has lasted for 45 years.

Up until that point, O'Neill, who had the only real surfing business in the area, saw "this skinny little kid and his uncle come and cherry pick my very lightest balsa wood for their own boards - and go off to Pedro with it, " and that was it. Now O'Neill had in inkling that something special was starting to happen. It was.

At about the time the next generation of Keatings were in high school in the later '50s, The North Coast Surf Club had begun. There were club contests, and soon little Dickie Keating was winning the whole show almost every time. By 1959, big changes were taking place in surfing. Everyone was on a foam board, and Gidget-dirven America was starting to show up at the beach clogging lineups from Windansea to Kelly's Cove. In that same year, O'Neill relocated his family and growing surf business to the beach at Cowell's, and the teenage Keating was undisputed "king" of the surfboard north of Santa Barbara. For the next 10 years, O'Neill would sponsor him with wetsuits and surfboards, even creating a D.K. model surfboard.

Had the younger Keating been doing his surfing in San Clemente or Malibu, there is no doubt he'd have been a big name with the media of the time. In an era before the slew of Santa Cruz-based video makers started pouring out proof of the prodigious talent of the area, most of the public would have viewed the vaunted NorCal as a backwater. The only homegrown Northern California talent to achieve any notoriety in the '60s, really, until Richard Schmidt came along in the '80s, was Fred Van Dyke. Fred had already been living in the Islands for many years when his fame came along, so his pioneering time in the big-wave scene of Northern California was just footnote.

While much of the rest of surfing's northern outpost was doing its best to become a clich? from a Jan & Dean tune, work on the boat dock at Pedro moved along much as it had since it began, as the very first commercial enterprise in the Pedro Point area. The town, now being called Pacifica, was growing quickly with subdivisions and malls moving right up against the little fishing village on the levee. Commuters whizzed off to the city, to ply occupations with technology that didn't even exist a generation earlier. Maybe the waves lapping against the shore were like one of those little trickle waterfalls that you buy for your office to reduce stress, but whatever the reason, the Keating clans chose the sea instead of the city.

Crabbing, fishing, and the work that went with these pursuits could occupy a sizable chunk of the playtime of a teenage boy in their respective seasons. The maintenance and repair of tackle, crab traps, skiffs, and the dock itself, however, were ongoing affairs that needed constant attention. Uncle Dick and other members of that crew taught the young Keating generation to work with their hands, imparting practical skills as well as the unique sense of self-reliance that comes with a seafaring life. In particular, one Hawaiian by the name of Quinten Traveres taught the eager Dickie to build and repair the Oregon-design, plywood/fiberglass fishing skiffs that were used on their docks. It wasn't long before the Hawaiian and the boy were also beginning to build some surfboards out of the new materials becoming available: foam and fiberglass.

At first, they used Styrofoam coated with Elmer's Glue and covered with fiberglass. The boards were seaworthy, but they lacked any sophistication in design, or even symmetry. The Keatings had a lot of Hawaiian friends, among them Chick Ho, who lived in San Bruno near the airport at the time. Now Chick had seen boards being shaped and knew about stuff like templates and how they were used. It was 1959, and on one of those days at the beach with his family, Chick showed Dick how to flip his template and create a true outline. Waiting with his mom, Joeine, on the dock, 2-year-old Michael Ho, in his diapers, couldn't have known his destiny as one of the greatest Hawaiian surfers of the modern era.

Keating apprenticed with Jim Foley and Joel Woods from O'Neill and became a sought-after shaper himself. Even while racking up all of these exceptional skills and reaching hero status to the local groms, it was the '60s and Dickie was a teenager. The "rat f**k" tradition of surfer pranks was alive and well at Pedro. People who know Dick Keating today still say that he is partly a self-disciplined family man like his dad, and yet he has the athletic ability and the senses of adventure and humor of Uncle Dick. Though no scandal clings to him today, after considerable poking around among friends, a story of misadventure did seem to come to light.

Rob "Birdlegs" Caughlan, friend of the Keating for four decades and former president of The Surfriders Foundation, after plying him with now unkept promises of anonymity, divulged that he thought there was a tale to tell. According to Birdlegs, the two boys, he and Dick, had been pumped full of lurid fables of a culturally-unique genre of live interspecies coupling (that mythical donkey show at Tijuana's Blue Fox), and women who could be made to think that teenage boys were charming in a particular way for a pittance. In this age, a couple of years before the Summer of Love, America was still, comparatively, a big prude. So for boys virtually bursting with testosterone, the visions of Latin romance, underage drinking, and the bragging rights that this supposed step-up to manhood implied, were simply irresistible. They told their friends that they were going to surf K38 and took off. The morning after their first night south of the border, they woke up hung over, completely broke, and without any way of getting home. Somehow they'd lost everything and couldn't remember how they'd ended up that way. So much for bragging rights.

They were in deep and 600 miles from home. After getting across the border, hungry and desperate, they began to hitchhike north. Along the way, someone suggested that they gather mistletoe into bunches and sell it, as they were in the middle of the holidays. At least they wouldn't starve. They were able to gather all they needed of the plentiful plant and tied it into bunches. Slowly, the two worked their way home, beginning to take on the appearance of choirboys selling holiday cheer, rather than accidental tourists who'd just escaped from Donkey Island.

Alas, even this tale failed to win the Keating seal of approval. With Birdlegs scratching his head, Dick just said, "Nah, if that had been me with Rob, I'd have been selling poison oak instead of mistletoe!" He added: "We went down there together a lot, but I don't remember that one."

Once back home, Dickie now became more and more responsible for the daily workings on the dock. At the same time, his surfing itself began to gain him broader notoriety, even beyond the West Coast. In 1964, there was a surf contest at Steamer Lane that had the kind of surf the planners of the current Cold Water Classic event just dream about. The waves were a solid 8-10' Hawaiian scale, with 12' sets in the finals. Most contestants, if they could handle it at all, were riding the mushy rights hoping for a reform on the inside. Keating, alone, paddled out to the main peak pretty much in uncharted territory and picked off on bomb after bomb going left facing the board-hungry cliffs and rocks. He worked these big beautiful hooking walls for hundreds of yards, kicked out in front of a cheering crowd, turned around, paddled back out, and did it again and again. Keep in mind there were no leashes or jet skis, the water and air were about 50°, and he was on a heavy, wide, hot-dog board that he'd never ridden before.

For Keating, surfing in conditions like that was no fluke. He'd been surfing the much heavier wave at Rockaway Beach, near Pedro Point, at a similar size for years. He had a whole list of secret big-wave spots up and down the coast the he surfed with a couple of friends like Stu Fredricks, Bud Crane, and the colorful Alex Diaz. Nobody surfed with composure and style like Dickie did, especially in waves of consequence. As the talent pool at Pedro deepened with great small-wave surfers like "flash" Gordon Guptil, and Aaron Wright, Keating would still be the leading light for years to come.

Several months after the Steamer Lane event, Peterson's International Surfing magazine published a full-page article on the contest in a story penned by the legendary waterman Sam Reid. In the article, Reid recounted Keating's triumph in what he called 15' surf and a stunning photo provided the proof. The word was definitely out that there were big waves and surfers with some pretty big cajones, too, in places outside of Hawaii.

It took a while, but in 1967, Fred Van Dyke was in charge of selecting invitees to the prestigious Duke Kahanamoku Invitational at Sunset Beach in Hawaii. Over the half-dozen years he did this, he always tried to invite the most competent big-wave surfers in the world. Fair enough. There was a bit of controversy with some of his selections it seems. Keating, it was pointed out, had never even been to Hawaii much less surfed Sunset Beach. Van Dyke, though, had the last say, and another Keating was headed back to Hawaii to meet the Duke once again.

Van Dyke's judgment about Dick Keating, the little boy from the house by the levee at Pedro Point, who grew to challenge the power of the North Coast, would not cause him to lose any sleep. Fred Van Dyke had been a lifeguard at Ocean Beach. He'd been surfing good-sized waves at The Lane only a decade earlier. He hadn't forgotten.

Those of us old enough to remember know Keating didn't win this year, Jock Sutherland did. Nobody wins at Sunset on their first trip to the Islands, on their first go-out at Sunset, and on an unfamiliar board. He did tie with Eddie Aikau for third place in their heat, just missing a shot at the finals. Mike Doyle and Jeff Hakman simply out-pointed him. Keating, to his credit, beat out some big names like Mickey Dora and Corky Carroll, and was right in there where Van Dyke thought he'd be. A strong third wave and it may have made it a different story. It was a great learning experience, reacquainting him with the aloha of the Islands and the newly discovered magic of the shortboard.