From the New Yorker.  

"Flynn grew up in a large Irish-American household, in Middletown, Rhode Island. He was one of nine children. His father was a soldier, a veteran of the Second World War and Korea, who retired as a sergeant first class in the Army; his mother, a high-school valedictorian, worked at a secretarial school and was heavily involved in Democratic politics, before going back to school to get undergraduate and law degrees. A headstrong teen-ager, Flynn skateboarded in drained swimming pools and surfed through hurricanes and winter storms. "Mike was a charger," Sid Abruzzi, a surf-shop owner in nearby Newport, who knew Flynn as a teen-ager, said." 

Should have stayed a surfer then.