Murphy had seen his share of fame and fortune. Born in Los Angeles in 1937, the young Jack Murphy traveled through the beach towns of Southern California during the Golden Age of surfing.
His father was an electrical contractor, so he was always on the move. Heattended 12 grammar schools and three high schools he was used to picking up and going.
When Jack was in fourth grade, the Murphys moved to Oceanside, just a few blocks from the sea. It didnít take long before the young Murphy made friends with local water rats down at the beach.
We were always in the ocean,î Murphy said. Everyone bodysurfed. When we could, we rode matsóthe inflatable rubber ones you still see at the beach today. If it floated, we would try to ride it. In the 40s, since we didnít have our own boards, we would even cut up our momsí ironing boards and ride them. They were kind of like boogie boards today.î
Like all of his friends, Murphy was a junior lifeguard. He and his buddies would hang around the guard shack, and occasionally, they would take out one of the old lifeguard paddleboards and ride it to the beach.
ìThere were surfboards back then, but they were made of mahogany or redwood and weighed a ton,î he said. ìIt would take three of us kids just to pick one up.íí
By the time Murphy was a teenager, the lighter balsa boards had become available, and he and his friends began to travel up and down the coast to surf. At Trestles, a die-hard group of local heroes like Miki ìThe Catî Dora and Phil Edwards lived on the beach in tents surrounded by piles of empty cans of pork and beans.
"Those guys were hardcore," Murphy said. "They lived to surf. It was the early days of space exploration, and these guys were like astronauts, boldly exploring new frontiers."
Unfortunately, Murphyís family was forced to move east, and he had to finish his last year of high school in Pennsylvania. After high school, he attended the University of Pittsburgh on a tennis scholarship and also played the violin. He played so well, he was invited to perform with the Pittsburgh Symphony, but his tenure at Pitt lasted only a semester. It was too cold and too far from the ocean. He had seen a movie about Miami Beach. The white sand, blue water, and palm trees looked appealing, so he headed south in 1955, long before the Sunshine State began producing world champion surfers.
In Miami Beach, Murphy found the waves nothing like California, but he liked the laid-back Florida lifestyle, and once again, he gravitated towards fellows with similar interests down at the lifeguard station.
"They had a few paddleboards, and occasionally, I would get out and ride one,"he said. "But there wasnít much surf to speak of."
Every now and then, however, a winter cold front or summer tropical system would roll through and kick up some waves. Murphy would hit the water, and it didnít take long before the lifeguards would give him the nickname the world still knows him by today.
ìWhenever the storms would come up and the lifeguards would close the beach, Iíd grab my surfboard and paddle out,î he said. ìThere was no surf scene in Florida when I got there. There were guys who had surfed up in Daytona on 16-foot paddleboards in the ë20s and ë30s. But in the ë50s, there was nobody really surfing in Florida, so the lifeguards called me ëMurf the Surf.íî
In Miami, Murphy introduced a friend to surfing, and this person would go on to become an East Coast legend himself.
ìThatís where I met Murf, working on the beach,î said Dick Catri. ìWe were both professional springboard divers.î Catri and Murphy teamed up for a comedy routine at hotel swimming pools. ìI was the straight man, and he was the clown,î Catri said. ìWe would do four or five shows an afternoon, up and down the beach, at all the fine hotels.î
At the time, Catri was also an avid freediver who would hunt the blue waters off Miami Beach armed with nothing more than a spear, mask, and set of fins.
"One day when it was too rough to dive, Murf showed up with a surfboard," Catri said. "I paddled out, gave it a try, and was hooked."
Six months later, Catri was in Hawaii, surfing seemingly unridable breaks with big wave legends like Greg Noll. About the same time, Murphy hitchhiked north to Cape Canaveral to see a friend.
"I stood on the beach, and there were lines of glassy waves coming in as far as the eye could see."he said. "And there was nobody surfing."
Murphy planted roots. He opened up a shop in Indialantic called Murf's Surf Shop. It was next to where Shaggís Surf Shop is today in the space where Bizzarros Pizza sits now. He also talked Hobie Alter into fronting him some blanks and started shaping boards. Murf had dreams of making a living at the sport like his friend Hobie in California.
"I didnít know anything about business," he said. "I was just a surfer. All I wanted to do was hang out on the beach and make a living. The boards we would shape are pretty much still the same today. Only the materials are much lighter and better."
The surf scene was starting to explode with Dick Dale, Gidget, the Beach Boys, and Bruce Brown. Murf traveled up and down the coast, surfing the different spots and entering the occasional contest. In 1966, Murf won the Menís division at the East Coast Surfing Championships in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Back in Florida, Murf and his buddies earned extra money by renting public halls to show surf flicks.
"Me and another guy would go find a place that we could rent cheap," he said. "Then we would get the latest surf movie and pack 'em in. I had this apartment above a hardware shop, and I always kept a couple of extra mats and blankets in the corner for the guys who would roll in from Hawaii or South Africa. We would just throw some more hot dogs and beans in the potóeverybody was welcome. We were all surfers."
Murphy's factory, where he made his signature model boards, was doing well, until the day he arrived at work to discover that his financial backers had decided to make fiberglass panels for the booming construction industry instead of surfboards. It was the early '60s, and the space race was heating up as NASA was growing bigger and bigger every day. These new workers needed homes not surfboards. Murphy felt the free enterprise system had failed him.
"I was devastated," he said. "I didnít know what to do. Contracts and city hall were foreign things to me. I grew up on John Wayne movies where a manís handshake was all that mattered.î
Handshakes didn't jive with the bottom line however, and this business failure led Murf down the path that would lead to crime and headlines that captured the world's attention.
The Star of India, a golfball-sized gem which legend says was formed in the earth by sparks from the Star of Bethlehem was the most famous star sapphire in the world. It was stolen from the American Museum of Natural History on a rainy October night in 1964. The boldness of the theft impressed even the police. Murphy, who was 27 at the time, and another man, Allen Kuhn, had just seen the Jules Dassin film "Topkapi" which detailed the theft of a priceless gem from an Istanbul museum.
According to published reports, the athletic Murf dangled from a 125-foot rope and swung onto a fifth floor window ledge that led to the gem room of the museum. Murphy waited until the night watchmanís flashlight disappeared then entered the museum through an unlocked window. He used the sound of a plane passing overhead to drown out the noise of breaking into the glass jewel case. After stuffing several gems in his pocket, he went down to Times Square and grabbed a drink at a local bar.
The next day, when museum officials discovered the 563-carat Star of India, the famous Eagle Diamond, the Midnight Sapphire, and the DeLong Ruby were missing, the New York Daily News called it, ìa chapter in criminal history that rivals anything in fiction.î Others said it was the American equivalent of Englandís Great Train Robbery, the jewel heist of the century. Two days later, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation kicked in the door of a Miami Beach penthouse, and Murphy and his associates were arrested.
The $410,000 burglary cost Murf 25 months at Rikers Island Penitentiary in New York. But the museum burglary was just one of several crimes Murf was linked to during that time period. Four months before the museum break-in, three men walked into the Algonquin Hotel, a plush Manhattan establishment, pistol whipped the night clerk, and made off with $250. The clerk later identified Murf as the man who beat him. Two months following the museum job, while free on bail, Murphy was arrested for burglarizing a Miami mansion.
"Some of my friends had gone over the edge, and they took me along with them," Murphy said. "They were messing with narcotics, a lot of bad things. I made some very bad decisions."
Having served his time in New York, Murf returned to South Florida and more trouble. This time it would be far more serious, and he would pay more dearly. In 1967, authorities discovered the bodies of two secretaries, stabbed and beaten, at the bottom of Whiskey Creek near Hollywood, Florida. The women had both been suspects in a $500,000 securities theft. Prosecutors said the secretaries were working with Murphy, and the women had stolen and turned over the securities to be fenced when Murf and another man killed them in an argument. Two years after his arrest, Murphy received a life sentence for his involvment in the death of one of the secretaries and was sent to Floridaís maximum-security prison at Starke. In 1970, when a judge handed down a second life sentence for the muder of the other secretary, Murphy was labeled an ìincorrigible enemyî of society.
In prison, Murphy painted and dreamt of clean, glassy waves. He studied philosophy, theology, and read letters from Christians concerned about his salvation. One day, a fellow inmate gave him a Bible and likened it to an "ownerís manual." The friend said it was the answer book, a road map for life. The Bible, he said, stood for "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth."
Then the former football player and prison evangelist Bill Glass came into Starke with his superstar cast of athletes and entertainers for a prison ministry conference. Glass and Murphy corresponded over the years, and it helped Murf get his priorities straight. In 1986, after nearly 20 years behind bars, Murphy convinced a parole board that religion had changed his life. The board agreed, and after his release, Murf went to work for Glass as a counselor. The born-again surfer began to travel to prisons throughout the country and eventually the world, spreading God's word to men who had also chosen the wrong path at one time or another.
"He underwent a remarkable change," said Catri, who kept in touch with his old friend during his stay in prison. "Murf is a brilliant individual... musically, artistically, socially... but he is truly born again. He is a man committed to his faith who now travels to prisons around the world spreading the word, but he never forgets where he came from or how he got there."
Murphy, who now lives in Crystal River on Floridaís West Coast, recently returned to California for a prison tour with Bill Yerkes, owner of Balsa Bill's Surf Shop in Satellite Beach.
"We struck up a friendship, and when he was released, I took up a collection with some friends and bought him a violin and a surfboard," Yerkes recalled.
Soon Yerkes began joining Murphy on his prison ministry visits, and the California trip stirred old memories of Murfís days as a boy riding the waves in Oceanside.
"Over the past year in our prison ministry, weíve gotten to surf Rincon in Puerto Rico and Malibu in California,"Yerkes said. "It is always good to go some place where we can both evangelize and surf, it's sort of a double blessing." The pair paddled out at Malibu where Murphy ran into an old chum from his Oceanside days, L.J. Richards. "I hadn't seen L.J. since 1954," Murphy said. "We surfed, sat on the beach and talked, then surfed some more just like the old days."
Today, Murphy spends the majority of his time traveling to jails and prisons around the world. He speaks mostly about faith and redemption, but when prompted, he can't help but talk about the sport that kept him alive during his darkest hours.
