Last week, on his excellent podcast, Kyle Thiermann interviewed Santa Cruz pro Adam Replogle. Replogle, for those who may not know, is one of the best surfers to ever come out of Santa Cruz, winning the Coldwater Classic, among other events, and qualifying for the WCT in 1997. Their conversation ran the gamut — how surf-stoked Replogle still is, the state of pro surfing in Santa Cruz, etc. About an hour into the podcast, Replogle paused and then, as he said, “threw a curveball.”

“I was molested as a 12-year-old kid,” Replogle said. “By a surf team manager in San Diego.”

Thiermann, for his part, was understandably floored, and the two talked through the story. We were also floored, and called Adam yesterday.

It was 1983. Replogle was flown down to San Diego for a surf contest, and was being hosted by a local surf team manager. “He was a former pro from Imperial Beach,” Replogle told Surfline. “I went down to stay at his house. I was 12 years old, but he bought beers and gave me a beer.”

By this point, Replogle had already traveled a bit as a young pro. “It wasn’t uncommon to sleep in the same bed as other men on the road, that’s just the way it is,” he said. “And we were gonna share a bed at his house. I went to lay down and sure enough, over the night he started touching me, f++king weird stuff. I freaked out. My heart was beating. I was a hip little kid at that point and I came up with an excuse that I needed to call my mom. As soon as he opened the door, I just ran.”

Replogle took off down the stairs of the two-story house and found a nearby Safeway, where he called his mom. Then he hid in the bushes. “Then I saw a Border Patrol car and I opened the door and hopped in the car and told them everything,” he said.

The cops got involved. “It was a pretty big ordeal,” Replogle said. “It turned out he’d done this stuff to other people. I was never called to testify against him, but they took my statement and I told them what he did. He went to court, I didn’t.”

Afterwards, “I don’t know what happened to him by law, I just know he was 86ed and moved to Mexico,” Replogle said. “I actually ran into him in the mid-90s in Baja and the guys I was with were gonna kill the guy, but he split town.”

As evidenced in other current news events involving predatory behavior in the sports world, it’s not uncommon for victims to reveal acts that happened years earlier, as is the case with Replogle. There was another catalyst as well.

“I’ve been talking to a therapist for a while,” Replogle said. “I wanted to see him recently, and he wasn’t able to make it to his office, so we met at his house. Once I started talking, I suddenly realized he lived on the same street I was f++king molested on when I was six. Up until that point, I hadn’t told him I was molested at all. Then I told him I was molested on this street, and he said, ‘what?’ Then I’m like, ‘when I was 12, too, I was molested.’”

Replogle then half-joked: “You think that’s why I’m f++ked up?”

He continued: “That opened up the box in the back of my brain. I had put this thing in a compartment and completely forgot about it or suppressed it. I’m able to talk about it now. It’s taken me almost 40 years to talk about it. Men are good at putting things in a box in the back of their brain and sealing it off. Then I realized the guy who molested me when I was six still lived in town. Part of me wants to confront him, but another part of me doesn’t want to ruin his life. But another part of me wants to lay it back on him, because it’s been burdening me forever. I had no choice in the matter.”

Also: “When Kyle asked me about mentoring kids, how good I was with kids, I started to think about it,” Replogle said. “Like, you see a documentary now, and they say like, ’20 years ago, this was going on.’ And I’m like, ‘I wish I would’ve known.’ But right now this shit’s happening again. Huge groups of young surfers hanging with older people. I guarantee it’s happening. When the market starts pushing the youth so far so hard you get these vultures that come in and say, ‘I’d like to help develop your kid.’ If there ever was a cover for anything, it’d be coach, mentor, teacher.”

Replogle’s advice? “Be f++king careful,” he said. “Know exactly who your kids are with and what’s going on. I don’t want it to be about me — I’m still dealing with it. It needs to be about that topic. Because that topic is not going anywhere. Like 20 years from now, they’re gonna go, ‘this was going on in 2018? You guys didn’t know about it?’ And people are messed up for the rest of their lives.”

“I am an overprotective parent, but it’s not just because I have 13 and 11 year old daughters,” Replogle said. “I’ve been so protective of kids since I was a young man because of what happened. I was taught what was right and wrong. And I knew that was wrong. You need to have good conversations with your kids about their personal space and private space and the force field around them and their body — if anyone intrudes into that part of their space, they need to say something. It’s not right.”

“For me, it’s being able to process it now,” he said. “To put it through my system and to feel OK about it. Now I feel free. I can move on.”