When Peter Townend, best known as PT, sees how professional surfing has evolved in the four decades since he was the sport’s first world champion, he is both stoked and amazed.

Today, professional surf stars are millionaire celebrities. They fly first class; stay in beachfront manses. They’re pampered by an entourage of trainers, coaches, videographers.

Surfing, once counterculture, is a shockingly healthy career path.

And surf contests?

They’re actual events with actual money. The nine-day U.S. Open of Surfing, which Townend helped established in 1994 in his adopted hometown of Huntington Beach, is expected to attract about 500,000 fans.

None of it would have been recognizable to Townend when he was champion of the sport.

In 1976, Townend and about 20 other well-known surfers spent most of the year scrapping their way around the world to compete against each other in ragtag competitions. By year’s end, Townend was on Oahu’s North Shore, chasing big waves, when he got a call from Fred Hemmings, one of the co-founders of what eventually became the World Surf League.

Hemmings and Randy Rarick had been counting up the points of the surfers who had competed in those contests and, by their reckoning, Townend had the most points. Hemmings, on the phone, explained that they wanted Townend to drive to the Outrigger Canoe Club in Waikiki to take a photo for the newspaper.

But as PT explains it, when he met Hemmings at the club something was missing.

“He doesn’t even have a trophy!”

“We wanted to get some promotional value for PT as world champ,” Rarick explains. “But there were no sponsors, so we didn’t even have enough money for a trophy.”

Townend improvised. He got a key to the club’s trophy cabinet and pulled out an important-looking trophy. He turned it backward so the photographer couldn’t see the inscription, held it aloft, and stood for the picture. It ran the next day in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

“And that’s the birth of pro surfing right there!” Townend says, with his characteristic explosive laugh.

Townend’s final payout as champion?

Lunch. The trophy, he gave back; it’s still in the Canoe Club’s case. And his income for 1976 was $26,000, mostly from shaping surfboards.

Townend reckons he spent more money chasing the world title than he made winning it.

“Back then, nobody was making any money,” Rarick says.

“I remember PT saying, ‘By 1980, we’ll be millionaires.’ That was optimistic thinking. It took about 15 years longer than that.”

Of course, anyone who knows Townend knows the payout is stoke – something he absolutely, positively exudes. Whether Townend is talking about his life as a pro surfer or working as a surf announcer or coach, or as publisher of Surfing magazine, Townend’s entire existence remains dominated with riding waves – and and the buzz that still brings him.

Townend, who was born in Coolangatta, Queensland, got his first surfboard as a Christmas present in 1966, the year he turned 12. Soon, he was surfing his local break, Rainbow Bay, every day.

“Because of the consistent waves, the nice weather and the warm water, if you had any kind of athleticism, you got pretty good, pretty quick.”

Within two years, he was Queensland champ.

But Townend was anything but the stereotypical surf bum. He was a good student and his grades earned him a scholarship to architecture school.

He turned it down to try to make a life from surfing – at a time when there was no such thing as a professional surfer.

“My grandmother didn’t talk to me for 10 years.”

Townend’s parents were a tad more supportive, even occasionally lending him money to get to the next contest. To pay for his dream, Townend shaped boards and wrote a column for his local newspaper: “In the Tube with Peter Townend.”

By 1972, Townend was a member of arguably the greatest Australian national team ever assembled, which included five eventual world championships.

They traveled the globe to gain respect as watermen and pursue a dream of becoming pro surfers. To have any shot at either goal, they needed exposure. And the best place to get surfing cred was in the winter waves of Oahu’s North Shore.

Townend and crew arrived in Hawaii in September and stayed till February. If you had a mattress and a sheet – and a magic board – you were happy.

“We didn’t have trainers and travel accounts and entourages. If you got hurt, you lied on the couch, drank a few beers and got up the next day and hit the surf again.”

And in those years leading up to Townend becoming the first pro champ, there was danger in and out of the water.

In fact, Townend and others of the era – Ian Cairns and Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew, along with South African Shaun Tomson and his brother, Michael – surfed Hawaii in the early ’70s with a “look at me” attitude that native Hawaiians found offensive.

They claimed to be the best surfers on the planet.

“The Hawaiians had a more laid-back, let-your-surfing-speak-for-you attitude,” Rarick says. “Well, these guys were letting their mouths speak for their surfing.”

Townend admits they went about it badly. And even though Cairns and Bartholomew were the most flamboyant, Townend cringes when he recalls his own brashness. There were death threats and beatings and even rumors of a contract being taken out on Townend, Cairns and Bartholomew.

“We clearly felt threatened,” says Townend, who needed a police escort to his heat at that year’s Pipeline Masters.

“I got punched at Off the Wall and had to go hide out in Kauai before the Duke contest one year.

“It was all eventually resolved,” he says.

Yet a long pro surfing career on the tour he helped establish was not to be. Shortly after winning the ’76 title, Townend got a call to act as Jan-Michael Vincent’s stunt double in the film “Big Wednesday.”

Townend and the actor had become friends a couple years earlier, when Townend was living in Malibu, and the movie pay was $1,000 a week.

He took the part and briefly turned away from the tour.

In 1977, he moved to Huntington Beach to be with the woman who would soon become his wife and mother to his three kids.

In 1979, after only a few more years on the pro surfing tour, he became coach for the U.S. national team. He also became publisher and advertising manager for Surfing Magazine.

Over the years he’s produced a TV show on surfing, worked as color commentator on Prime Ticket and ESPN, and established an action sports consulting company, ActivEmpire, which he still runs.

He may never have gotten wealthy off surfing, but he’s been immortalized in the Surfing Hall of Fame and remains respected by today’s surfers and surf industry leaders as one of the reasons they are getting wealthy.

At age 61, Townend still surfs almost daily.

He’s also pulled off one of the toughest feats in professional sports – a squeaky clean image.

“I was really self-promotion conscious,” Townend says. “But this was … before Internet, social media, cellphones … I don’t know if I could pull that off today,” he says, laughing.

“I did run with Jan-Michael Vincent that year in Malibu!”

Terence Loose wrote this for Coast Magazine.