He Lost Everything to Gambling. Now He Gives Strangers Their First Wave.

Buddy Wiggins did not have a plan. What he had was a moment of clarity that arrived at his lowest point — on his hands and knees, having lost nearly everything to a years-long sports gambling addiction. “I finally came to a point where I lost pretty much everything,” Wiggins told CBS News. “And I’m on my hands and knees, and I’m crying.” What came next was not a program or a sponsor. It was a beach.

Wiggins, a 32-year-old pool cleaner from Honolulu, Hawaii, felt what he describes as a calling — to walk down to Waikiki Beach, approach total strangers, and offer them something for free: their first surfing lesson. No charge. No strings. Just a wave and someone willing to help them catch it.

The First Wave Project

He calls it the First Wave Project. Twice a week, Wiggins and a small group of friends scan the beach for the most unlikely first-timers they can find — people who have never surfed before and might never have thought to try. They introduce themselves, extend the offer, and head into the water.

The response has been consistent. “The energy that they had made you feel like you could do exactly what he was saying,” one student, Quest Douglass, told CBS News. Another participant, Manny Fernandez, put it simply: “They gave me a confidence that I haven’t had since I was in my 30s.” The lessons are short. The impact, by many accounts, is not.

What a First Wave Can Do

Wiggins does not frame the project as recovery, exactly — though it clearly functions that way. For him, the act of giving has become its own form of healing. Watching someone catch a wave for the first time, someone who walked onto the beach with no expectation of doing so, produces a feeling he did not find in years of gambling. “I think when you overcome things that you never thought was possible,” he reflected, “you start thinking, ‘OK, what’s next?’”

CBS News covered the First Wave Project in early March 2026, bringing national attention to what had been quietly growing on the shores of Waikiki. By that point, Wiggins and his team had introduced approximately 100 strangers to surfing — 100 people who arrived at the beach as one thing and left as something slightly different.

A Reminder About Generosity

There is something worth noting about what Wiggins built: it costs nothing to receive and costs him only time. No organization funds it. No application is required. The only qualification for a free lesson is showing up on the right stretch of beach at the right time and saying yes when a stranger asks if you want to try something new.

For the people who have taken him up on the offer, the experience tends to linger. Not because surfing is easy — it is not — but because being offered something freely, by someone with no expectation of return, carries its own kind of weight. It is a reminder, as Wiggins himself seems to understand, that the way out of a hard place is not always inward. Sometimes it is toward the person standing next to you on the sand, wondering what the ocean feels like from the inside.

Still Going

Wiggins has not stopped. The sessions continue twice a week on Waikiki, the same opening, the same offer, the same patient push into the water for whoever says yes. The First Wave Project has no finish line, no goal number, no endpoint. It just keeps going — one stranger, one wave at a time.

References: Hawaii man tackles sports gambling addiction by offering free surf lessons to strangers | The Uplift: Free Surfing Lessons | Hawaii Man Copes With Gambling Addiction by Giving Free Surf Lessons