Una Baker, the wife of former SIMA President Dick Baker, and sons Ryan and Jack chose Fernando Aguerre as the recipient of this year’s Dick Baker Memorial Award.
In his acceptance speech, Fernando paid tribute to Dick and offered some advice to the industry, which he said is at a critical crossroads.
Fernando, the co-founder of Reef, led SIMA’s humanitarian committee for years and opened up his home in La Jolla to help raise money for humanitarian causes around the world. He is currently president of the International Surfing Association, which is leading the charge to grow surfing globally and get the sport into the Olympics.
Here are some excepts from Fernando’s speech.
On Dick and the award
“This award touches my heart. This is not an award about material success. It’s nice to be materially successful but you are very poor if that’s all you have. It’s an award that pushes me to be a better person for the rest of my life because I have Dick in my heart everyday.”
“Dick loved to call me at 8 a.m. in the morning and say ‘Hey Juan! I’ve got an idea.’ His idea was probably crazier than mine but he had a way of convincing people about pretty much anything he wanted to. He was very, very smart, very patient and he walked through life with his heart in his hand and that’s just the way we all should walk. That was the biggest lesson for me about Dick.”
“The only thing we need to do to be like Dick is to be nice to other people, to be candid and to guide and offer advice, to offer a shoulder, offer a moment of listening.”
“Not one day goes by that I have a problem or a situation and I think, he left us too soon. What would he think about this situation, how would he deal with it?”
Industry crossroads
“I think we are at an industry crossroads. Stacy Peralta said it the other day. We’ve had a really nice time for 15 years it was a gravy train guys. …Then when the world was hit really hard, we were also hit really hard.”
“I am very optimistic. Our creativity is going to save us if we are gutsy enough to take the bull by the horns with our creativity and do what we feel we need to do.”
“It’s challenging. A lot of surf industry members are now part of large corporate companies with the problem (of dealing with) the bean counters deciding what is good and what is cool. It’s a challenge for people that work for the bigger companies. But coming up we have a lot of smaller companies and emerging brands and SIMA is now looking to support the emerging brands.”
“For the big guys, one advice – act like you are small or otherwise you are going to die big.”
“For the small guys, smile and be happy because you are small. Play the contrarian please. If you do that, it’s okay. If we don’t do that, we are going to eat sh** and nobody wants to eat sh**. Nobody wants to work in a bank or a corporation or somewhere else. We’ve got to defend this. This is the best thing – we are the minority of the minority of the minority of the world that we are here guys.”
“We must focus – the guys that made it – we need to focus on facilitating the success of the smaller companies. Because we know if we don’t do that, we are going to risk extinction. We don’t want to kill this. I don’t want to sound too grave, but it’s a crossroads and it’s up to us. There’s nobody else who is going to do that for us.”
