On Saturday in Huntington Beach, a 16-year-old rescue dog took what was billed as her final wave. Sugar, a five-time World Dog Surf Champion and the first animal inducted into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame, has been battling cancer for months, yet continued to ride waves and comfort veterans at a local VA hospital. For Sugar’s owner, Ryan Rustan, Sugar has provided proof that two broken lives can add up to something far larger than their parts.
“She was a rescue dog from the streets of Oakland,” Rustan told Matador. “At one time she was a bait dog. No one loved her. She was running wild, missing all her bottom teeth.”
What began as a spur-of-the-moment rescue in Oakland became a partnership that, as he puts it, effectively saved his life.
“If you would have bet on this dog, it would have been nuts,” Rustan says. “I was only a couple years sober. When we met each other I can’t even explain what she means. She is the embodiment of limitless potential. It struck a chord with me and I fell in love with her. I grew up in and out of the mental hospital. She made me realize that I’m special.”
Sugar’s last wave in Surf City
Sugar’s last wave on the short board. Rustan found these words from Hunter S. Thompson to be a valid tribute to sugar. “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!” Photo: Laura Hapa Photography
On Saturday, Sugar’s friends and fans gathered on the sand and along the pier in Huntington Beach, known as Surf City, to watch Sugar ride to shore one final time.
The scene looked familiar: Sugar in her life jacket, Rustan guiding the board into the lineup, spectators cheering as the dog locked into a small reform and rode it cleanly toward the beach. It’s the tableau that has played out for years at dog-surf contests up and down the California coast, where Sugar stacked up 19 titles, including multiple Surf City Surf Dog wins and five world championships. Sugar, for her part, is wearing a Puffy Puppy life jacket, designed by Rustan himself.
But this session had an endpoint. After announcing Sugar’s diagnosis in early March, Rustan invited the community to a “last wave” day, saying she has “maybe a very short time” and he wanted friends, fans, and therapy clients to see her doing what she loved while she still could. A GoFundMe page created to offset her medical bills, which included surgery to remove a tumor, follow-up care, special food, and medications, has already raised more than $10,000.
From stray to hall of fame
Sugar and Rustan on a final wave. Photo: Laura Hapa Photography
Sugar’s résumé is the stuff that top-tier human athletes dream of. She’s the only dog allowed to surf by the Huntington Beach Pier, the first nonhuman inductee into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame, and a fixture at adaptive surf events and veterans’ programs from Carpinteria to Long Beach. Her paw prints sit in concrete outside Huntington Surf and Sport alongside legends such as Duke Kahanamoku and Kelly Slater. That arc has always mirrored Rustin’s. Profiles over the years have described him as a talented surfer who struggled with addiction and mental health issues before getting sober.
“We’re both negative 10s, you could never add two negative 10s and equal one billion, but that’s what Sugar and I made,” Rustan says.
For him, the competitions and media coverage were secondary to the daily discipline of caring for something fragile and persistent: a dog that trusted him unconditionally and wanted, always, to go back in the water.
Teaching service, not stoke
Photo: Laura Hapa Photography
Sugar’s public life has never been confined to podiums. She has spent years as a working therapy dog, volunteering at the VA hospital in Long Beach and at surf-therapy events where adaptive athletes and kids with disabilities catch tandem waves with her.
“She is so relaxed when she’s doing service work,” Rustan says. “That’s when she’s happy, that’s her mission in life.”
Those sessions shaped Rustan as much as the crowds did. The stillness required to load a child onto a board or to approach a nervous veteran demanded a version of himself he didn’t always recognize.
“Sugar taught me how to be gentle when I never had a gentle bone in Mexico,” Rustan says. “My dad had brain surgery, and I’m his caretaker, and I was so traumatized. Sugar was there.”
Finding meaning in the lineup
In 2018, Matador produced a short film about the pair, tracing Rustan’s past in Huntington Beach’s rough surf subculture and the way Sugar pulled him toward a different kind of life. The video shows him paddling into waist-high peaks with Sugar balanced on the nose, explaining that he “didn’t know how to love” until she arrived.
That theme has echoed through coverage since her Hall of Fame induction. Rustan regularly credits Sugar with keeping him sober, grounded, and engaged with his community, from running surf-therapy clinics to working at local surf shops and caring for his father.
“If you look at a picture of us, you would never know how broken we both were,” he says. The math problem he laid out — two “negative 10s” somehow equaling a billion — is his way of describing the compound interest of patience, routine, and shared purpose.
On Saturday, as Sugar’s final wave broke towards the warm sand, that equation played out in real time. Families who had watched her at contests, veterans who had surfed with her through hospital programs, and locals who simply knew her as the white dog in sunglasses on the north side of the pier all showed up to watch. Sugar did what she has always done. She stood, leaned into the section, and rode the wave to shore.
For Rustan, the ride was less a goodbye than a measure of what they built together, and a reminder that happiness happens not through a single dramatic turn, but through a lifetime of small ones, taken together on the same board.
