The Life and Times of Robbie Page would make for a rollicking read, and several chapters, one suspects, could be filled with the 1988 Pipe Master’s various transgressions. As it was Page went to jail just once, but the experience was a harrowing one, and the sequence of events to which it pertains neatly encapsulates the changing state of pro surfing in the early 90s.

It was 1992, and Rob, then 26, was heading on a trip to Japan following the Spanish leg of the world tour, which used to be a riot. Upon landing in Tokyo he was pulled aside by customs, who found several tabs of acid left over in Page’s wallet, Page having forgotten all about them. The punishment entailed 66 days in a Japanese jail, 30 of which he spent in solitary confinement.

Rob once asked his mother how he ended up in a Japanese prison, and she replied: “Oh, it’s simple. You lost appreciation for the fundamental values of life.” But if what she says is true, then Page was perhaps not the only one.

While Page was in prison the world tour was in Chiba, just a few hours’ drive away, for the Marui Pro, but not once was Page offered support or legal counsel by the ASP. Instead, upon his release, he was handed an eighteen-month ban from competition, voted for by his fellow tour surfers; according to Tim Baker, author of Australia’s Century Of Surf, many of those in favour of the ban were themselves partial to the occasional illicit substance.

“I just came out of a solitary box, and I sat there with tears in my eyes and said, Don’t try and throw me off the tour,” Rob later told Baker. “They looked me in the eyes and voted me off the tour – it blew me away.”

Four months later, in a surreal twist of fate, Page was living in the house of the French President Francois Mitterrand, whose granddaughter he’d recently started dating. “The contrasts were just absurd,” he said. “It was God playing a joke on me.”

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