She Likes to Watch

I may be a dork of great magnitude. Because I recently became pretty excited when I learned that Jeff Bridges was a surfer.

I mean, it just seemed so right: The guy who played The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” – and a penguin named Big Z in “Surf’s Up” — just had to surf.

An avid surfer in high school, the Santa Barbara resident apparently dropped out of the sport for about 25 years before recently returning to the lineup.

“It’s a wonderful metaphor, catching a wave, for how you look at other challenges in life,” he told moviesonline.com.

Right on, Dude.

So that got me thinking about other celebrities who surf. Back in the 30s, Jackie Coogan – a famous child actor who later gained fame as Uncle Fester in “The Addams Family” – was frequently found surfing Malibu. More recently, celebs like Paris Hilton, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck and David Beckham have flirted with The Stoke. But Paris Hilton probably just wanted to be seen on a surf board. And Beckham’s insurance companies usually won’t permit him to play anything but soccer.

Still, there are plenty of celebrities who have really surfed. Here are a few:

• Chris Isaak. Isaak took up surfing later in life (his early 30s), but he got the fever in a big way. A friend of big wave surfer Doc Rennecker, he has often been spotted paddling out at the notoriously treacherous Nor-Cal spot, Maverick’s, on 15-foot days. “Surfing, if anything, helps me be relaxed enough so I can want to go back and write,” Isaak told the Tribune in 2003. “It just keeps you kind of mellow and balanced.”

• Ben Harper. Another surfing musician, Harper grew up a skater. But like Isaak, he gets musically inspired by the waves. “The ocean is extremely melodic,” he told Surfing Magazine. “Whenever I am in the ocean and paddling out, ideas come to me in a way that they don’t in other places. I think anybody who surfs will tell you, you hear music when you surf; it’s a weird phenomenon.”

• Adam Sandler. A regular in the Malibu line-up (when he’s not making gazillions on a movie), he’s known to be a decent surfer and a down-to-earth guy, even when guys in the lineup pitch movie ideas to him.

• Aaron Carter. The ‘tween heartthrob was hospitalized after a “minor surf accident” that required brief hospitalization in San Diego last year.

• Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen was known to surf the Jersey shores as a kid. I’m not sure if he still does surf, but in the book “Springsteen: Songs,” there’s a photo of an adult Springsteen sitting in front of three surfboards at his home.

• Cameron Diaz. (That’s her at the top in a still photo from “Charlie’s Angels”) A good friend of surf legend Kelly Slater, she told Self Magazine: “Surfing is a religious experience for me. You get to be a part of Mother Nature and experience its power. I have great respect for the ocean. It’s full of life and its energy is constant. When you ride a wave, it comes from across the ocean, from 1,500 miles away, and you get on it and ride it to shore, where its journey ends.”

• Jack Johnson. During my surf trip to San Onofre last summer, the campground was alive with the music of Jack Johnson, whose mellow tunes provide the soundtrack for many surfers. A former pro surfer, he frequently writes music on surf trips.

• Minnie Driver. According to various accounts, Driver, seen surfing in this video, once nearly got pounded by another surfer in the lineup. She was about to yell at the surfer when, upon a closer look, she saw it was Bruce Willis.

* Orlando Bloom. Well, I don’t know a whole lot about Bloom’s surfing abilities. But here’s a shot of him on a decent-looking wave in Hawaii.

• Eddie Vedder. With all his dark and moody Pearl Jam lyrics, you might be surprised to learn that Vedder is a ukulele-playing surfer. But he turned to the waves, in part, as a reaction to a tumultuous childhood. When asked the difference between performing for a packed house and riding big waves, he told Outside Magazine: “With a packed house, unless you say something incredibly offensive to God or country, a crowd of 15,000 people will not kill you. I guess they could if they wanted to, but they will not all jump on you at the same time and hold you down for two minutes. That’s the difference between a big crowd and a big wave. When Kelly (Slater) takes me to Waimea Bay, that wave does not give a sh– who I am.”
–Pat P.