The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The debut Pacific Coast Championships were held on a warm midsummer Sunday afternoon, at a time when the nation was feeling especially good about itself. The economy was still roaring along, and the cheerier side of early twentieth-century American culture—Hollywood and jazz, the Lindbergh flight and the Chrysler Building, Mae West, Buck Rogers, Gershwin and Valentino—was in its first and brightest bloom. Several hundred people turned out at Corona del Mar for the free one-day event, many no doubt attracted by a local newspaper ad promising “speed boats whizzing by,” a “clean sand beach,” and an “aerial bomb” to get things started. The “thrilling rough water surf board race” was slated as the afternoon’s final event.

  The competition was an odd hybrid of paddling and surfing. A dozen or so riders lined up on the sand berm facing the ocean, and at the sound of a starter’s gun, they picked up their boards, sprinted for the water, paddled five hundred yards out to a buoy, turned, and came back to the wave zone, where they had to ride, not paddle, for shore and the finish line. Tom Blake won with a clever bit of strategy. Just before the start, he placed his “riding board” on the beach next to his secret-weapon paddling board—a 15-footer, longer and faster by far than any other board in the event. When the gun went off, he manhandled the paddleboard into shallow water, then ran back for the smaller board; sandwiching the two together, he set out to catch the others, who now had a fifty-yard head start. Blake pulled into the lead before rounding the buoy. Approaching the surf zone a full minute ahead of the field, he discarded the paddleboard and rode to victory on his easy-handling small board.

  Each competitor evidently rode just a single wave (maybe two, if the first one bogged out). Performance on the wave counted for nothing. It’s not clear if standing up was even required. This was a paddling race, plain and simple, with a surfing component glued to one end. Nobody was complaining. But the event had little to do with everyday wave-riding.

  Surfing would always have an uneasy relationship to competition. The ocean is an unreliable, often uncooperative playing field. The sport itself has no natural objective criteria. Speed is essential, but not an end in itself. Racing other surfers never comes into play. There is no finish line—if the waves are any good at all, getting to the beach before the other guys is the last thing a surfer wants to do. Clearly, a subjective scoring system was the only way to go—but that means relying on the dark arts of judging, interpretation, and opinion. Competition has therefore always been a kind of surf-world add-on. True, championship events and titles help to give the sport an order and chronology, but competition would never become surfing’s beating heart, the way it is for swimming or tennis or virtually every other sport.

  TOM BLAKE’S HAWAIIAN SURFBOARD, 1935; THE SPORT’S FIRST BOOK-LENGTH TREATMENT.

  Ambivalence toward competition was apparent even in the 1920s. Despite being the advertised headliner, Duke Kahanamoku was a no-show for the first Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships. Tom Blake, the winner, didn’t bother defending his title the following year.

  Tom Blake Redesigns the Sport

  Wisconsin-born Tom Blake had been riding waves for less than five years when he won the Pacific Coast Championships, but he was already closing in on Duke Kahanamoku as the most influential early-modern surfer. While the gracious and sociable Kahanamoku provided surfing with its emotional center, Blake, restless and nearly humorless, became the sport’s great innovator. He redesigned the surfboard. He changed the way surfers looked. He transformed wave-riding into something broader and more consuming—what later generations would call the “surfing lifestyle.” For Blake, unlike the Waikiki beachboys, this meant living at a remove from most societal norms and standards, and doing so with a quiet outsider’s pride. Among all of Blake’s many surf-world inventions, this is the one that really counted. Surfers though the decades would think of themselves as different, and more clued-in, than nonsurfers.

  Blake traveled a long, grim road from the icy shores of the Great Lakes to the beaches of Southern California and Hawaii. His mother died in 1903, when Blake was still nursing; abandoned by his grief-stricken father, he was passed around for the next fifteen years to various relatives in various small towns along the southwest corner of Lake Superior. He may have suffered some kind of abuse; reviewing his past decades later, Blake said that “society had taken advantage of a well-meaning youth,” and that he’d “fallen from grace—or rather was pushed.” After dropping out of high school, he jumped a series of freight trains from Detroit to New York (where vagabond charges earned him an overnight stay in a crowded Tombs jail cell), and then to Chicago, never working more than a few days at a time. At age eighteen, Blake spotted Duke Kahanamoku in a Detroit movie theater lobby—the famous swimmer was on his way home from Belgium, where he’d just won another Olympic gold medal—and he walked over for a handshake. Afterward, Blake would view this moment as a first step on his beach-bound road to redemption. A few months later, in 1921, following a single day’s work on a Texas cattle ranch, he caught one more train to Southern California.

  Growing up, Blake often swam in Lake Superior during the summer months, and he kept swimming wherever he could during his two years on the road. Able to give the sport more attention in Southern California, he soon earned a place on the prestigious Los Angeles Athletic Club swim team. Within two years he became one of America’s best all-around swimmers, winning events in distances ranging from one-hundred yards to ten miles. He tried acting and picked up a few bit roles—Blake had leading-man looks, with his tousled hair and bulletproof jaw, but no real talent—then took a Santa Monica lifeguarding job and began to surf. In 1924, still a novice wave-rider but consumed by the sport, he caught a steamer for Hawaii.

  The Waikiki surfers knew a little about Blake and his swimming records, and they treated him well, but the twenty-three-year-old newcomer soon earned a reputation in Hawaii as an oddity—he was a well-dressed teetotaling vegetarian who ate handfuls of dry oatmeal straight from the bag, and was ready at all times to strike a solemn and manful pose whenever a camera was pointed in his direction. He knew almost everybody on the beach, but very much kept to himself. Blake was also inquisitive about the sport’s history in a way that set him apart. Not long after arriving in Hawaii he visited Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, the great repository of Hawaiian art and artifacts, and studied the museum’s collection of premodern surfboards. Fascinated by a pair of enormous olos, Blake wondered if some valuable design features had perhaps been lost during the sport’s nineteenth-century dark ages.

  “THE OBJECT IS TO GET A CLEAN RIDE ON THE SHOULDER OF THE WAVE. YOU MUST STEER THE BOARD TO ACCOMPLISH THIS. STAND UPRIGHT. TURN THE BOARD AWAY FORM THE BREAK AND RIDE THE WAVE AT AN ANGLE–THIS IS CALLED THE SLIDE.”

  —Tom Blake

  Surfboard design hadn’t dramatically changed over the previous twenty-five years, although the average adult-size board, in keeping with a trend started by Duke Kahanamoku, was now longer, thicker, and wider. Duke’s favorite board was 10 feet by 23 inches and a little over 3 inches thick. The nose was blunt, the deck was tabletop-flat, and the bottom surface had a slight convexity. The edges (“rails,” in surfer-speak) were rounded off and tapered gradually down to a squared back end.

  A single backbreaking slab of kiln-dried California redwood was the boardmaker’s preferred material. Redwood was cheap and plentiful, but lumberyards didn’t always stock planks with board-appropriate specs, which meant that several smaller pieces sometimes had to be joined together lengthwise, using dowels or lag bolts. If the local redwood slabs were too “wet” and heavy, cedar or white pine could be substituted, but both were prone to denting and gouging.

  Boardmaking was essentially a DIY job performed in the garage or backyard; the process usually took three days to a week. A template was pencil-drawn onto the slab, which rested on a pair of sawhorses; a handsaw was used to make the “rail cuts,” and the rest of the shaping work was done mostly with block planes, a drawknife, and sandpaper. A mark o
f some kind—the board owner’s name, nickname, initials, club affiliation, or any personalized identifier—was painted, inlaid, or burned onto the deck near the nose. Layers of marine varnish sealed the wood and added a shine. The finished product generally weighed between 40 and 70 pounds. In general, surfers made their own equipment, or they had a better-skilled friend do it. The adventuresome Waikiki tourist looking to buy his own board was often directed to the Outrigger Canoe Club, where in 1915 the going rate for a custom job was $5. After World War I, prices shot up; not long after arriving in Hawaii, Tom Blake paid $25 for a secondhand solid-body redwood plank.

  Without a stabilizing fin, the plank allowed for only the most gradual and rudimentary changes of direction. By dipping a foot into the water streaming past the tail section, or just by leaning slightly to the left or right, you could coax the board into an angled “slide” across the wave face, away from the whitewater. As the slide got hotter—as the angle veered further from perpendicular—ride length and board speed both increased. If the angle became too acute, or if the wave suddenly grew steeper, the tail would lose traction and swing around toward shore; Waikiki beachboys called it “sliding ass,” and nine times out of ten it brought the ride to a sprawling end.

  Good surfers rode with their feet close together, almost touching, and tried to square off so that the hips and chest were facing shoreward. The best surfers did a lot of preening. Biceps were flexed. Chests where thrown. One 1930s Waikiki visitor recalled a local surfer named George, “a dapper, thin-mustached man, who would always slick the sides of his hair back as soon as he stood up on his board.” Following the lead of Sam Kahanamoku, Duke’s magnificently built younger brother, the Waikiki beachboys shed the top half of their woolen tank suits and were now riding bare-chested.

  TOM BLAKE, WAIKIKI.

  Trick riding on small nearshore waves was popular, and on a hot afternoon in front of the Royal Hawaiian the lineup had a distinct circus atmosphere, as surfers pushed up into headstands, or rode backward, or nimbly stepped from their board to ride tandem with the guy riding alongside. Duke Kahanamoku occasionally rode tandem and liked to hoist his partner into a trapeze-style standing position on his shoulders. Surfers often launched in tight clusters. Because everybody was riding more or less in a straight line, each surfer needed just the barest cushion of space; in a group ride, the fun came mostly from the shouting and bantering. Women were often brought into the trick rider’s repertoire. There were a few solo-riding female surfers, but most rode in tandem with the beachboys, to be lifted, propped up, cradled, or piggybacked. (Blake, the purist, didn’t think much of tricks, saying they were “performed for tourists or as a novelty.”) Bigger surf wasn’t really on anyone’s agenda. A plank surfboard became harder to control in direct proportion to wave height, and while each break had a masochist or two ready to bomb into waves that everybody else scrambled over, six or eight feet was about the limit; anything bigger was like trying to ride a door down an icy hillside.

  * * *

  Tom Blake built himself a 15-foot solid-redwood olo replica in 1926, during his second visit to Hawaii. Finding it too heavy, he drilled hundreds of holes from deck to bottom, then covered both sides with wood veneer—this was the paddleboard that he used two years later to outpace the field during the first Pacific Coast Championships. Blake began spending the better part of each year in Hawaii, dividing his water time between surfing and paddleboarding. Paddle meets in Hawaii and Southern California were more popular than surfing competitions; thousands of spectators turned out to watch, and records were kept for more than two dozen distances and classes.

  Blake’s hollow paddleboards quickly evolved into lethal-looking “cigar” models, first chambered, then rib-braced like an airplane wing. In the early 1930s, a solid-wood paddleboard could weigh up to 120 pounds. Blake got his rib-braced hollows down to just over 60 pounds. With these, he posted record-breaking winning times for both the half-mile and the 100-yard sprint in the 1930 Hawaiian Surfboard Paddling Championships. But the success only further removed Blake from Waikiki surf society. “I got interested in their sports, surfing and paddling, and beat them in their contests,” Blake said, years later. “I discovered too late that beating the locals at their own game, in front of their families, could sour relations. It was the end of the real good days.”

  Accustomed to being an outsider, Blake simply put even more time and energy into surfing, and there were periods in the 1930s when he almost singlehandedly drove the sport. He developed “riding” boards in line with his longer paddleboards, reducing the weight of a 10-footer to an airy 40 pounds. For the first time, surfers had a choice between two board construction styles. Experienced riders for the most part held on to their solid-wood planks. The new Blake-style boards were tippy and harder to control, and vulnerable to any hole or crack—throughout the 1930s and 1940s, popular surfing beaches were often littered with upside-down hollow boards, each with its small brass nose plug unscrewed so that the trapped water could dribble out onto the sand.

  Beach lifeguards, however, loved Blake’s design and were early adopters. The hollow board got them to distressed swimmers quickly, then served as a flotation device after a rescue was made; lifeguard outfits worldwide soon had two or three hollows on the beach at the ready. But it was rookie surfers who put the Blake-style board over the top. A hollow was easier than a plank to store and transport. It paddled faster and caught waves like a breeze. Because it was lighter, it was marginally safer. California surfing’s first real population spike came during the Depression, when the number of surfers doubled, then doubled again, and the main reason for this was the hollow board. Not everybody was happy with the surf population boomlet. Overcrowding wasn’t yet a problem, but plank riders tweaked the novices anyway by nicknaming the hollow board a “kook-box.”

  Blake’s real gift to the surfboard was the introduction of a stabilizing fin in 1935—the design advance upon which virtually all future advances were built. The original surfboard fin was salvaged from an abandoned speedboat Blake found in Honolulu Harbor. It was keel-shaped, 4 inches high and a foot long, and made of steel. Blake screwed it into the bottom of a 14-foot hollow used for paddling and riding; the fin was sharp enough that he added a wood sheath along the edge.

  “Never before had I experienced such control and stability,” Blake said, recalling his first wave using a finned board. “[The board] didn’t spin out, it steered easy, and it turned any way you wanted it.” With this breakthrough, all the traction and bite a surfer needed was now available. Yet for reasons that can only be guessed at—the sport’s innate reluctance to try new designs; Blake’s faded popularity among Waikiki’s surf gentry; the fear that a keel, even sheathed, would somehow turn a surfboard into a huge floating knife—the fin was mostly ignored for the next five years. Not until the early 1940s did it become a standard feature, and many of the best Hawaiian surfers continued using finless boards until the late 1940s.

  Blake’s second big accomplishment of 1935 was the publication of his ninety-five-page photo-illustrated Hawaiian Surfboard, the sport’s first full-length book. With chapters on surf history, the current Waikiki wave-riding scene, and a detailed how-to section, Surfboard earned good reviews in the Honolulu press, but it failed to sell through its initial five-hundred-copy press run, until Blake repackaged the book, at his own expense, covering the original plain red cover with an attractive tapa-print dust jacket. Blake was an earnest and deeply knowledgeable surfing source, but a flat-toned writer; what impressed reviewers the most was the book’s photography.

  Surfboard contained nearly fifty black-and-white images, most taken by Blake. To get water-level shots of surfers whizzing past, Blake made a huge ten-pound waterproof wooden housing for his Graflex camera (bought from Duke Kahanamoku in 1929), which he then placed on his surfboard and paddled into the lineup. Many of the images were stunning. Blake framed and composed like a pro, and the Graflex’s large-format film pulled in lots of sparkle and detai
l. An early Blake surfing photo ran full-page in a 1931 edition of the Los Angeles Times. National Geographic rejected a seven-thousand-word manuscript Blake submitted on spec, but held onto some of his prints; in 1935 the images were arranged into an eight-page duotone photo feature called “Waves and Thrills at Waikiki.” Blake wasn’t the first person to photograph the sport. Because he treated it as a separate and specialized form, however, he’s rightly noted as the first surfing photographer.

  While Blake stayed busy with board design, photography, research, and writing, his real lifework, unstated but fundamental to all his other accomplishments, was creating a prototype for the dedicated all-in surfer. Blake labored mightily to demystify surfing and make it accessible to all, yet he proudly lived his own life at a distant remove from society at large. He dressed “for comfort—usually it’s a pair of canvas sneakers, light trousers and a sleeveless polo shirt, or swimming trunks all day.” He served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and was a lifeguard on and off for decades, and a board-making entrepreneur, but he never held a regular forty-hour-a-week job and spoke with mild disdain of the “not-so-idle rich” who vacationed in Honolulu. Bananas, mangos, and avocados grew free for the taking, and after pulling fruit off the trees for lunch, he took long afternoon naps in the Hawaiian sun. Finally, Blake’s pantheistic religious beliefs were shaped completely by his life outdoors, usually in the water, in the shelter of what he called the “blessed church of the open sky.”

  Blake’s surf-based life was original, even noble. It probably wasn’t all that happy. In the court of wave-riding greats, Blake stands out as the loneliest and most damaged. He came to the sport as a runaway, and had a brief sham marriage at age twenty-three. For the remaining seventy years of his life, he seemed to have formed not a single deep, committed, intimate relationship. In Hawaii during the 1930s, he rented a house in a valley three miles inland from the coast, so he could “live simple and quietly . . . without the social life”; later he moved into a tiny houseboat made for fifty dollars that he kept permanently docked on a mudflat in Honolulu’s Ali Wai yacht harbor.