You could make the case that Tyler Callaway, the long-time head coach of the UC San Diego surf team, has had some bad luck.
In the U.S., about 40% of people will get cancer at some point. But just half of one percent will get diagnosed with three different cancers, as Callaway has.
And yet when Callaway talks about his life, the word he keeps using is “lucky.” Lucky that he and his girlfriend were watching the nightly news when it aired a segment about melanoma. His girlfriend spotted some similarities between the cases shown on TV and the mole on his back and bugged him about it until he went to the doctor. He was lucky to catch it early, while it was still operable.
A decade later, doctors at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health diagnosed Callaway with thyroid cancer. Luckily, he says, he came out of surgery with a healthy half of his thyroid, so he didn’t need chemo, radiation or thyroid pills. A few years after that, it was prostate cancer.
“That time, I was lucky in that I had great treatment,” Callaway says. He allows that the operation was “rough,” but his oncologist at Moores helped him make it through with “the minimal of adverse side effects.”
“Now I’m good,” Callaway says. “I’m surfing and I’m loving life and I’m grateful.”
Callaway isn’t one to keep his gratitude or his hard-won wisdom to himself. He passes some of it along to the athletes he coaches at America’s #1 surfing college. He shares some with members of a surf team he started called Thrivers, whose members are all fellow cancer survivors who’ve been treated at Moores.
After his final treatment for prostate cancer at Moores Cancer Center, "I walked out of there and I rang the hell out of that bell," said Tyler Callaway.
And for over 30 years, Callaway has helped run an annual benefit called Legends of Science and Surfing. For a weekend every August, pro surfers from all over the world converge on Scripps Beach in La Jolla to compete in a surf contest and mingle with scientists, doctors, survivors and donors. The event has raised over $15 million.
“That money goes into the treatments and cures and diagnoses that are saving lives every day,” Callaway says. “I was the beneficiary of that more than once."
Callaway had yet to face thyroid or prostate cancer when he was first approached by a team from the Moores Cancer Center about putting together a surf contest to benefit cancer research in the mid-1990s. “Having gone through melanoma, I was like, heck yeah, I'll help you. Let’s go,” Callaway says. He got to know oncologists through his involvement with the event — which is part of what led him to seek his own medical care at UC San Diego Health.
“I feel very lucky for the treatment that I've gotten here at Moores,” Callaway says. “My life has been like that a lot. It’s led me to the places that I've felt like I needed to be, and this is one of them. I’ve been very lucky.”
Read more about Legends of Science and Surfing 2026 from UC San Diego Today: Where Science Meets the Surf, the Legends Community Moves Cancer Research Forward
