Published October 31, 2026
NEWPORT BEACH | AROUND NEWPORT | OCTOBER 31, 2026
Andrew Doheny grew up close enough to Newport’s 54th Street break that surfing wasn’t something he had to travel to find. He started young, entered contests as a child and quickly became one of the area’s most visible junior surfers. By his early teens, he was traveling internationally and attracting sponsors. A 2008 Los Angeles Times profile described a Newport teenager balancing school-age life with surf trips to places including Indonesia, Fiji and Australia.
For a while, Doheny seemed headed toward the standard route for a gifted young surfer: keep winning, climb the rankings and make a run at the top level of professional competition. But contest results weren’t the only thing he wanted from surfing. As a teenager, he began spending more time on music, drawing and filming. He eventually turned more of his attention toward freesurfing—surfing outside the pressure of a scored heat—and toward building boards himself.
That change didn’t mean he had stopped caring about performance. It meant he was finding other ways to pursue it. Doheny shaped boards under the Slob Craft name and rode his own designs in contests, even when people around him advised against it. He also helped make surf films and web videos through Metal Neck, a project focused on trips and friends as much as trophies. In his account to The Surfer’s Journal, shaping gave him a way to approach a heat on his own terms: he was testing a board he had made, not just trying to satisfy the judges.
Doheny’s Newport story is less about a hometown champion collecting titles than about a local prodigy changing the definition of success. He came up in a place where competitive surfing and the surf industry were close at hand, then built a career around the parts of surfing he wanted to keep: creativity, experimentation and time in the water.
Sources: The Surfer’s Journal: Andrew Doheny; The Surfer’s Journal interview; Los Angeles Times, 2008
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