The History of Surfing Read online

  The History of Surfing

  Matt Warshaw

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1:

  Out of the Blue: Pre-1900

  CHAPTER 2:

  Gliding Return: 1900–1945

  CHAPTER 3:

  Malibu Swing: 1945–late 1950s

  CHAPTER 4:

  Boom Years—A Massive Swelling: Late 1950s–1967

  CHAPTER 5:

  Barefoot Revolution: 1966–1974

  CHAPTER 6:

  The Fortune Seekers: Early 1970s–1980

  CHAPTER 7:

  The Long and the Short of It: 1981–1991

  CHAPTER 8:

  The Ride of Your Life: 1990–2009

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  PHOTO CREDITS

  INDEX

  Introduction

  By Matt Warshaw

  This was always going to be a big double-thick slab of surf book. By definition, it had to circle the world and move through the centuries. I wanted to clean and jerk the entire gorgeous sprawling mess of a sport—hoist it up where surfers and nonsurfers alike could see it anew and in full—and that wasn’t going to happen in any kind of abbreviated form.

  Nonetheless, the list of goals I set out with (and held to) was fairly short. First, I wanted to insert the bits and pieces of data that usually go missing from the sport’s historic record. This meant a lot of sifting through the archival alluvium, but the information was all there: sales records and board specs, production costs for a first-generation surf movie, the number of annual surf-boom-era “graduates” at a Sydney surf school. The sport’s history doesn’t live or die on these little pushpins of information. By fixing them into place, however, the story doesn’t flap around so much; it’s better grounded. Here’s what I mean. Remember those beautifully lacquered solid-wood Depression-age surfboards? For decades, received wisdom was that they weighed a knee-buckling one hundred pounds. Pick up a hundred pounds of anything and walk from one end of the block to the other. Now imagine doing the same thing before and after every surf session. Equipment that heavy might not have killed the sport outright, but it would have dragged things down considerably. As it turns out, the average board made in the 1930s weighed about fifty pounds. Does it change anything, or lessen the narrative zing, to deflate little surf-world myths like this? Maybe, sometimes, but it’s the truth. And even so—fifty pounds is still pretty damn heavy.

  Demythologizing the sport, in fact, was another goal of mine. I couldn’t wait to sledge away at the cheerleading and boosterism and perjured nobility layered onto most works of surf history. Pulling down shoddy historiographic handicraft is, by itself, I admit, pretty satisfying. But the real purpose—and the real pleasure—comes from the fact that the mortal, ground-level version of events is, almost without exception, more compelling than the legend or the myth. Surfing history has time and again been presented for two reasons: to convince nonsurfers that riding waves is an honest-to-goodness sport, rather than a beachfront novelty, and to reassure surfers themselves that their days and years spent chasing down swells is not only justified but virtuous—that their chosen recreation is in fact more of a calling. The rest of the world now thinks surfing is great. And that’s fine. No harm there. The second part, though, has done the sport a disservice. Let’s revel in surfing’s grace and beauty, and applaud the surfer’s bravery, innovation, and humor. Absolutely. But let’s also acknowledge the sexism, the pettiness, the hubris, and all the other messy human qualities that are stitched and glued into the sport’s fabric. Leave room for second thoughts. One of my favorite quotes about the surfing life comes from Hawaii’s Ken Bradshaw. Invariably portrayed as a brash, disciplined surf-warrior—and celebrated in the late 1990s as the man who’d ridden the biggest wave in the sport’s history up to that point—Bradshaw mused late in his career about “all the opportunities I missed because I’m so obsessively addicted to surfing.” He then added: “Don’t be me. I don’t have what most human beings want.”

  Not for a moment do I think that Bradshaw, if given the chance, would really change his life or career. His ride has been long and thrilling, and steeped in glory. Only when he reckons the cost of his all-encompassing pursuit, though, does he becomes a three-dimensional human being, rather than a two-dimensional stock character. What’s true for Bradshaw is true for the sport in general. Surf history is better when it’s not moonlighting as surf advocacy. Surfing is more clearly seen, and more authentically honorable, when it steps off its pedestal.

  * * *

  I turned in a final draft of this book in mid-2009, after four years of research and writing. Throughout, I was half-waiting for a surf-world epiphany or two to land on me. It never happened. My biases and preferences, though, all came through intact. The mechanics of surfboard design, and all the attendant hydrodynamics, still bore me just as much as the forces behind design change—the rivalries, the spark of an idea, trial and error, dumb luck—still fascinate me. It’s the same with surf competition. While I consider 90-some percent of surf contests to be silly distractions, the best events and the top competitors can distill a moment in the sport like nothing else. Nat Young’s amazing performance in the 1966 World Championships in San Diego was like hearing the thunder from the impending shortboard revolution almost a full year before it came into view. In the end, board design and competition were both given prominent roles in this book because, as often as not, they’re the quickest, most efficient route to the sport’s most interesting places.

  What really attracts me, though, is tracing and understanding the jagged fault line between surf culture and culture at large. It’s running down simple things like the etymology of “dude,” as well as following longer, episodic storylines: how Kathy “Gidget” Kohner went from an unknown fifteen-year-old Malibu mascot to the subject of a hit movie, which in turn put an entire generation of new surfers in the water—most of whom decided to hate Gidget as a surf-Eden destroyer until they later came to love it as a memento of their beachgoing youth. Almost every inch in this particular acre of surf history is deliciously fraught with morality plays, from the small and personal—Malibu antihero Mickey Dora selling out to the Beach Blanket Bingo franchise, for example—to the socially charged, like the pro surfing tour’s decision to hold contests in apartheid-era South Africa.

  The nonsurfing world has shaped and formed the sport more deeply than surfers care to admit. Surf culture, in turn, has traveled and settled over mountains, plains, and cities, from coast to coast, nation to nation. Watching these two forces react to each other, for me, never gets dull: the circling and grinding and ignoring and ridiculing—and, these days, more often than not, collaborating.

  Former world champion Fred Hemmings’ belief is that surfing, for the most part, is nothing more than “a clean, healthy S-P-O-R-T.” I wouldn’t argue the point. A version of surf history can in good faith be told mostly in terms of athletic achievement and the sport’s advances in equipment and technique. But that makes for a flat, narrow portrait. So many other narratives—equally important and a lot more colorful—have to be accounted for, most of them having little or nothing to do with sport. They involve Hollywood, politics, music, fashion, and the great digital vastness. (“Surf the fucking net indeed,” an Australian surfer wrote with righteous disdain in 1999, the nonsurfing world having gone one appropriation too far. “Give us back our verb!”) Mostly, though, athletic terms alone could never adequately explain the abiding fanaticism—from mild to deranged, ridiculous and sublime—that to such a large degree has defined the character and history of surfing. Hemmings is right. Surfing is a sport. But it’s not just a sport. To one degree or another, I can also be persuaded by all t
hose who cast their view of wave-riding into the near and far regions of art, religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. Hemmings’ sport is somebody else’s return to the briny comfort of the womb. Or their mortal imitation of Jesus’ walk on water. Or meditation. Or modern dance. At the very least, this rush to load a pretty straightforward recreational act with meaning puts a light on the towering level of devotion surfing inspires. Except it often feels like more than that. Veteran surf journalist Matt George, a friend of mine for over thirty years, once said that our drive to ride waves re-creates the amoebic sea-to-land dash through the Paleozoic shorebreak and allows us to “touch the elemental magma of our souls.” My response in the late eighties, when I first read that, was to laugh out loud. Now I smile and shrug and think it’s just an alternative (if slightly purple) way to express something I feel as well.

  The last and most important thing I hoped to accomplish with this book was to make room for all the different kinds of people who’ve been attracted to wave-riding through the decades; to let a full cast of characters each have their turn front and center. Stretch it out to comfortably include everyone from the diehard sportsman to the soul-magma proselytizer—and that pretty much gets you to five hundred pages, right there.

  A Note On Wave Measurement

  Purposely downplaying wave height became a common surf-world practice in the late 1960s. Before that, surfers generally tried to give an honest appraisal, measuring from crest to trough at the wave’s peak height. If anything, they exaggerated. Once the trendsetting Hawaiians began to reduce their estimates, however, particularly with regard to large waves—showing a dismissive cool toward an environment that was pretty much terrifying to everyone else, non-Hawaiian surfers included—it was just a matter of time before the rest of the sport fell in line. Soon, a wave described as eight feet on the “Hawaiian scale” was more than double the height of what surfers from 1959 would have called an eight-footer. You could still describe a wave’s actual size, but you had to preface the number with “face height” or “on the face” to signal that it wasn’t the real height. It was all pretty silly.

  Meanwhile, a lot of numbers were dropped from the wave-height measurement altogether. There was no such thing as a nine-foot wave. Or an eleven-, thirteen-, or fourteen-foot wave. Starting at twenty feet, the heights came only in five-foot increments. These were all surf-world traditions by the early 1970s.

  In the nineties, after big-wave riders began using Jet Skis to catch waves half-again bigger than anything previously ridden, the trough-to-crest measurement made a comeback. The idea now was to quantifiably dramatize the difference between old- and new-generation big-wave surfing, and estimates were once again made to the foot. After much deliberation, a panel of surfing experts declared Makua Rothman’s winning wave in the 2002 XXL Big Wave competition to be precisely sixty-six feet. Also, online surf reports and forecasts, hoping to standardize the metric, began reporting “face height.”

  Both systems are in use as of 2010, but most surfers—so far resisting the efforts of surf forecasters—still measure waves at somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of their face height. This book, too, defaults to the Hawaiian scale. When a trough-to-crest measurement is used, the change is noted. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to make the whole thing a little easier by skipping numbers altogether and using terms like “waist-high,” “head-high,” or “double-overhead,” and so on.

  Chapter 1: Out of the Blue Pre-1900

  SURFING IN 1000 B.C. THE PERUVIAN THEORY BUILDING AND RIDING THE CABALLITO THE KON-TIKI CONNECTION POLYNESIA BY CANOE SURFING IN ANCIENT HAWAII GODS, KINGS, PEASANTS: EVERY-ONE SURFS KONA COAST SURFING MYTHOLOGY COMPETITION: WIN OR DIE BOARDMAKING WITH WOOD AND STONE THE ROYAL OLO THE BELOVED ALAIA CAPTAIN COOK INTRODUCING “THE MOST SUPREME PLEASURE” MISSIONARY RULE COMES TO HAWAII REVEREND HIRAM BINGHAM MARK TWAIN GOES SURFING A SPORT IN DECLINE KING KAMEHAMEHA RIDING OUT THE PESTILENCE

  On a sunny fall morning in 1987, Felipe Pomar of Lima walked into the California offices of Surfer magazine, right on time for his scheduled meeting, ready to talk about a subject guaranteed to put a blank expression on just about any wave-rider’s face—surfing in ancient Peru. Hawaii, of course, has always been regarded as surfing’s birthplace, but Pomar wanted to propose an alternate theory of the sport’s origins. He was too smart to think he was going to waltz into Surfer and change surfing’s foundation story before lunch break. Still, the topic meant enough to him that he wanted to try. Smiling confidently, he shook hands with the editorial staff.

  Pomar had a unique kind of highbred surf celebrity. He was the gracious and urbane son of a plantation owner, knew his way around a polo field, and owned a tuxedo. Twenty-two years earlier he’d charged his way to a surprise win in the 1965 World Surfing Championships, held in the powerful waves just south of his hometown. Surfer labeled him the “Wild Bull of Punta Rocas,” but the tag didn’t stick—there was nothing wild or animal-like about a man who wore pressed chinos, kept an appointment book, and dined at his beachfront club with bankers, industrialists, and Latin American presidents. Anyway, “the Bull” was already taken by hulking California big-wave leatherneck Greg Noll, who with his penchant for bar-fighting and X-rated banter, really earned the nickname.

  For his Surfer meeting, Pomar carried with him a neatly crafted bundle of reeds, squared at one end, wickedly tapered and flipped-up at the other. This, he told the Surfer editors, was a scale-model caballito, or “little horse.” Villagers in Huanchaco, five hundred miles north of Lima, used the caballito for nearshore fishing and to ride waves for fun and sport. Pomar looked at the caballito for a moment. The Hawaiians, he asked with a little rhetorical tilt of the head, have been surfing for how long? One thousand years? Fifteen hundred? He nodded toward the caballito. Three thousand years, he said. That’s how long they’ve been riding waves in Huanchaco. Three thousand years—maybe longer.

  Pomar’s visit to Surfer coincided with a new period of archaeological discovery in Peru that moved the country into the first rank of ancient civilizations. An irrigation canal in the north was estimated to be over six thousand years old. An unearthed 150-acre desert metropolis named Caral, with artifacts dating back to 2600 B.C., was filled with plazas and canals, amphitheaters, fitted-stone multifloor buildings, musical instruments, and pyramids older than those of Egypt—a few outré anthropologists had begun referring to Caral as “The Mother of All Civilizations.” Many of these finds underscore ancient Peru’s close relationship with the ocean: wave motifs decorate bowls and fabrics and are stamped into the gold crowns of warrior-priest headgear. Towering bas-relief courtyard walls feature the unmistakable horizontal lines of an incoming swell. Wave-riding, or the suggestion of wave-riding, appears as well. A two-thousand-year-old frieze shows a deity charging across the night sky on a crescent moon in the shape of a caballito. In a matched ceramic set, two Peruvians straddle their reed boats, heads low, hands and eyes forward, in a pose suggesting a fast ride toward shore. Both figures grin broadly.

  Surfer let Pomar write a feature story on ancient Peruvian wave-riding. A fine bit of avocational scholarship, “Surfing in 1000 B.C.” (appearing in the April 1988 issue) was informed, serious, and well-researched. Launched into the vast Day-Glo-hued expanse of late-eighties surfing, however, it vanished almost without a trace. A subscriber from Florida wrote in to cite a zoological paper on the wave-utilizing properties of clams, and noted that prehistoric mollusks “were undoubtedly ‘hanging valves’ long before man first dragged a tree branch into the shorebreak.” Nobody else bothered to comment.

  Surfing in Ancient Peru

  For years afterward, Felipe Pomar continued to promote this new overture to surfing’s established history. He appeared on TV, gave newspaper interviews, and personally arranged visits to northern Peru with history-inclined surfers, showing them dig sites, museums, and the beach at Huanchaco. Three thousand years, he’d repeat, a polite urgency behind the words. Maybe longer.

  Pomar was right. It’s a
huge span of time. Before the slaughtering Spanish Conquest and the vast Inca Empire; before the Chimu and Moche and a few other aboriginal pre-Peruvian epochs. Wrestling is an older recreational activity than wave-riding. Same with gymnastics, archery, and swimming. But not much else. Skiing, golf, tennis, handball, team sports—all were invented centuries, even millennia, after man began riding waves.

  This new surf-history prologue begins in the coastal salt marshes west of Trujillo, among the tall chlorophyll-green stalks of Schoenoplectus californicus—California bulrush to English-speakers, totora to Peruvians. The caballito reed boat was probably invented around 3000 B.C., as tiny coastal enclaves of northern Peru coalesced into larger, more complex villages and communities. Traders used the caballito to move goods short distances along the coast, while fisherman used it as a roving nearshore platform. Peru’s coastline is essentially barren, but the chilly eastern edge of the Humboldt Current—a massive nutrient-rich gyre moving counterclockwise through the South Pacific—is more or less a solid wriggling mass of anchovy and sardines. Fishing was, and remains, a Peruvian necessity.

  The caballito is organic and decomposes quickly, so there are no examples from even fifty years ago, much less any from antiquity. Used daily, a caballito remains seaworthy for just two months, at which point the reeds turn mushy. The outer layers are then replaced, or the entire craft is thrown away. Nonetheless, today’s caballito is thought to be built along much the same lines, using the same techniques, as those made thousands of years ago. Fresh-cut totora bunches are spread out to dry for three or four weeks, during which time the reeds stiffen and change color from green to brown-speckled beige. Hundreds of reed pieces are lashed together into component parts, which form the long front-tapered “mother” pieces, two of which are then placed side-by-side and bound together. As the final set of girdling ropes are installed, the prow is given its familiar dagger-like lift, which allows the caballito to navigate through the surf without nosing under. A rectangular storage area for nets, floats, and the catch itself is hollowed out near the back. The paddle is made from a single thick piece of horizontally-cut bamboo. An average caballito is 12 feet long by 2 feet wide and weighs 90 pounds, and it has the same awkward portability of a full-sized canoe. The ancient Egyptian papyrus raft, which predates the caballito by a thousand years, was a surprisingly similar craft, with its multi-bundle reed construction and raised prow.