Fishman

He is a Pipeline specialist who doesn’t need a board to get barreled and noticed. Mark Cunningham is the human torpedo and probably the most admired bodysurfer on the planet.

He uses his body like a surfboard and has been “The Transformer.”

Mark Cunningham was born in 1955 in Milton, Massachusetts, to an Irish air traffic controller father and a Lithuanian mother.

After World War II, Mark’s father was stationed in Hawaii, so a few months after he was born, the family moved to the archipelago so they could also look after his two older sisters.

Mark rode his first waves at Waikiki in Honolulu, Oahu, at age nine.

But at home, things weren’t easy. The adults struggled with alcohol abuse.

“It wasn’t like I was getting any physical or even mental abuse,” Cunningham revealed in a 1994 interview with Bruce Jenkins for The Surfer’s Journal.

“I’ve never complained about those days. But no, there wasn’t a lot of support. It was never, ‘Let’s pack the picnic basket and go watch Mark compete.'”

However, MC felt good in the water and was soon taking on Makapuu and Sandy Beach before graduating at the North Shore of Oahu.

This was before surf leashes were invented.