Bali Echo Visitor's Guide

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February/March, 1998
No. 033/VI/98

cover story

Galleries Galore
The boom in
contemporary Balinese
art

A Matter of Taste
Why bourgeois Balinese
are collecting art

beyond
bali

From Toraja to the
Togians
Sulawesi's most seductive
parts

Treading Lightly in
Lombok
Tips to being a green
tourist

regular
features

Weekender
The Saltmakers of Amed

Home Grown
Legian's Legend,
Made Kasim

Health and Beauty
The Ubud-based
Bali Utama Spice

Books
The search for the Great
Bali Novel continues

Cuisine
Bumbu Bali cooking
school

Fiction
Marni's Ride by
K. Landras Syaelendra

Jungle Drums

advertising index for
Bali Echo web site

McCabe... hooked up with Kasim on his home break at Legian... and was seriously impressed by the Bal-o's wicked, goofy-footed style.

When Luke Egan won the G-Land Pro last year, he was asked by to contribute his signed surf board to the collection that hangs from the ceiling of Kuta's All Stars Surf Cafe. Egan granted the request, on one condition. His board was to be placed right next to that of a certain Balinese surf legend. When the crew of Endless Summer II - the surf classic that features in-action footage and interviews with top surfers in countries the world over - came to shoot the Indonesian section of the film, it was this same surf legend they chose to profile. When the likes of Tom Carrol, Gerry Lopez and Peter McCabe come to Bali, as they often do, they get off the plane and head straight for the surf legend's door.

Who is he?

Were Bali a surfer's utopia, and the beasts of the break presided over the entire island, then the secretary of state would most certainly be him: Made Kasim. Not that surfing is particularly suited to such analogies. It is one of the world's least nationalistic sports, gaining no support and little official recognition in most governments. Consequently, it tends to sail through national divides with much greater ease than any other. Not that Kasim is the type to be power hungry, either. True as ever to the stereotyped surfer - stripped-bear, rough, painfully modest - his lightly freckled nose, ear-to-ear gap-toothed grin, Chesty Bond jaw line and body to match it hint that he is a hedonist through and through. No blind ambition has made Made Kasim. It is, rather, a combination of understated charm, time done on the international circuit and strategically placed business interests that has earned him a place among the international surfing elite and made him a key link between local surfers and big surf labels.

"Check out Made Kasim!" was the only advice Warren Smith gave to his Bali-bound friend and renowned Australian surfer, Peter McCabe, when he dropped him off at the airport. McCabe indeed hooked up with Kasim on his home break at Legian as Smith had done, and was seriously impressed with the Bal-o's wicked, goofy-footed style. That was 1979, only two years after Kasim had first stood up on a board. In the months to come, McCabe and Kasim became close friends. So close, in fact, that McCabe urged Kasim to follow him back to Australia. Kasim didn't need a second invitation. By January 1980 he was at Ngurah Rai Airport, loading his board on a Qantas flight bound for Sydney. He was seventeen years old.

It was in coal-mining Newcastle, McCabe's home town, that Kasim eventually made his home, and where he learned ding repair and glassing at McCabe's self-named surfboard company. The years he spent in Newcastle gave him access to the Australian circuit, most memorably claims Kasim, to the icy waters of Bells Beach, south of Melbourne, which he braved four times in a row to compete in the annual Rip Curl Classic.

If depicted as a list of the contests in which he has taken part, Kasim's surfing career reflects a wealth of experience which he has paid for almost entirely out of his own pocket. "I never got to be in the Top 16 or anything, which in my day was where you had to be in my day to get automatic preselection to the major contests," he explains. "I mostly had to pay my own way to be part of the international circuit." As Kasim is quick to point out, his legendary status derives not from prestigious trophies -the highest he has ever been rated in a contest was when he won Bali's Asian Championship, which plays Indonesian surfers off against Japanese. His fame, rather, is rooted in the fact that he was the first Balinese surfer to compete on the international circuit.

Above:
I Made Kasim

continued