Jack Johnson

Before Jack Johnson perfected his rockstar ways, he was a champion surfer on the professional route. The sport was second nature to the young Hawaiian native, who began chasing waves as a toddler and, by the age of 17, had become an outstanding athlete on the Pipeline. However, Johnson was also testing other creative outlets -- specifically film and music -- and a serious surfing accident convinced him to devote more time to those landlocked hobbies.



It was during his college years in America that Johnson began writing the relaxed, acoustic-based songs that would later turn him into a chart-topping star. While studying film at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he also paired up with old friends Chris Malloy and Emmett Malloy to produced a surf cinema documentary entitled Thicker Than Water, which spotlighted Johnson as a talented cinematographer as well as a burgeoning singer/songwriter. His peers from the surf circuit praised his work, and Thicker Than Water received props in Surfer magazine for Video of the Year during 2000. The follow-up surf flick The September Sessions also earned the Adobe Highlight Award at the ESPN Film Festival that same year.