Although the agile gecko, with its sticky toes, is surfing’s reigning mascot, Hawaii surfer Buzzy Kerbox is more of a chameleon, given the way he’s seamlessly blended into two different worlds.

To surf fans he’s known as a competitor on the world championship tour in the 1970s and ’80s who revolutionized the sport in the early 1990s, when Kerbox, Laird Hamilton and Darrick Doerner together pioneered the practice of towing surfers into monster Hawaii waves of a size previously thought unridable.

Fashionistas know Kerbox by sight, if not by name, as a clean-cut preppie in Ralph Lauren’s Polo ads in which he’s starred off and on for 40 years, evolving from collegiate jock to grizzled, still- handsome dad, football in hand, surrounded in a 2019 ad campaign by his sons Kody, Kasey and Kyler.

At 63, Kerbox has dropped into another scene as the author of “Making Waves,” a large-format autobiography he likens to a scrapbook stuffed with photographs, newspaper clippings, journal excerpts and interviews he conducted with Hamilton, fashion photographer Bruce Weber and Ralph Lauren because “they are important figures in my story,” he said, speaking by phone from his home on Oahu’s North Shore.

In the Polo ads shown in his book, Kerbox poses with a lion club, on sailboats, with a bicycle and snow skis but never a surfboard. He did, however, do surf-themed ads for the likes of Hobie, J.Crew and Honolua Surf Co.

“I asked Ralph how he thought I fitted into his ad campaigns: Did he think of me as a surfer or a preppie?” Kerbox said. “He said he thought it was nice I surfed, but he thought of me as Kennedyesque.”

Kerbox himself had never met a member of the famed political clan until a few years ago, when he found himself sitting and chatting with Robert Kennedy Jr. at a bar in Aspen, Colo.

“I said it was funny, I’d always been told I look like a Kennedy,” Kerbox said. “And Bobby said, ‘That’s funny, me and my brothers have always been told we look like Buzzy Kerbox.’”

ORIGIN OF TOW-IN SURFING

In addition to telling his life story, Kerbox said he wrote “Making Waves” to educate people about surf history over the past 50 years, in part to correct “a lot of misconceptions of different evolutionary stages in surfing and who was responsible.”

He wanted to clarify that while many assume tow-in surfing began on Maui at the blue-water break named Peahi, also known as Jaws, it actually started on Oahu’s North Shore five years earlier, in 1991 and 1992, initially using Kerbox’s 15-foot Zodiac inflatable motorboat, not the personal watercraft that later became standard tow-in vehicles.

Kerbox said he, Hamilton and North Shore lifeguard Doerner used to tow one another on flat water behind his Zodiac, “freeboarding in the wake,” when one day they gazed out at the immense waves breaking on the outer reefs of Phantoms and Backyards, “and we said, ‘Let’s take the Zodiac and try to tow ourselves onto those waves.’”

After five years, Kerbox said, the friends took tow-in surfing to Maui, where Kerbox lived for 20 years and his three sons were born. He still owns a house in Haiku, and two of his sons live on Maui, teaching surfing and attending college (the third son lives in Portland, Ore.).

In his interview in the book, Hamilton says he started out as a little brother to Kerbox, whom he credits with helping him financially and taking “good care of me before I had the means to take care of myself.”

But later, Hamilton claims in classic surf bro style, “if something was real heavy or real dangerous, I was the big brother.”

Kerbox said he also wanted to recognize Hamilton as a pioneer of surfing on stand-up paddleboards, which had been developed in Waikiki by John, Leroy and Mike Ah Choy but caught on worldwide after Hamilton executed it on giant waves.

Over the years, Kerbox, a dedicated stand-up paddleboarder who’s competed 14 times in the Molokai Channel race, moved from the solo division to the team division. But at age 60 he went back to complete the grueling, 32-mile challenge as a solo competitor.

Which illustrates his third reason for writing his book: “I want to educate people, motivate them to stay active and get off the couch and keep busy, keep going out there,” he said. “A body in motion tends to stay in motion, even as you get older.”

A ‘PHENOMENAL’ WILL

Born and raised in Indiana, Kerbox remembers crossing from San Francisco to Honolulu on the Lurline at age 10 with his parents and two older brothers in 1966; the family settled in Kailua, near the beach.

“I had my first surf lesson at Waikiki, then started going out at Kailua shorebreak,” he said. (The book has cute shots of him as a gung-ho blond grom.)

His readers can ride back to one of the most creative and powerful eras in surfing, captured in photographs of Kerbox’s fellow young stars Dane Kealoha, Becky Benson, Michael Ho, Lynn Boyer, Evie Black, Larry Bertleman, Keone Downing, Buttons Kaluhiokalani and Tony Moniz.

As a pro surfer, the Kailua High School graduate was ranked in the world’s top 10 in 1977, 1978 and 1980; he won the 1978 World Cup at Sunset Beach and the 1980 Surfabout in Sydney.

But Kerbox was never the most talented athlete, he writes in his book’s foreword, so he had to work extra hard.

For example, “Back then you had to get four waves in 20 minutes (in competition), so I became a world-class paddler.”

Noting his “average skill but phenomenal will,” he said he hoped readers young and old would feel motivated to keep pushing toward their goals.

Married at age 36 to fellow Kailuan Kirstin Delaunay, the mother of his children, Kerbox now lives on the North Shore with his second wife, photographer Barbara Kraft.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of “Making Waves” will benefit Love the Sea, a Maui-based nonprofit founded by his friend and fellow waterman Campbell Farrell with the mission of mitigating plastic pollution.

“We recently did a beach cleanup on a 5-mile stretch of the Maui shoreline,” Kerbox said. “For hard-to-reach sections we used Jet Skis and boats, and in four hours we collected 8,000 pounds of plastic, and anything that can be recycled will be.”

Kerbox said he appreciated people who are working hard to try and find solutions.