The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  At Malibu, the Simmons gang on their wide straight-railed boards could make it from the top of the point all the way to the cove. But the young pig-riders were now covering half-again as much ground by riding up into the pocket, blasting back down, swinging around through the trough, then back up the face and down again—five or six times in a row before the wave finally gurgled up onto the beach. For good measure, while in trim, they also learned how to shuffle up to the front end, where they’d pose near the tip for a moment or two before retreating back to the sweet spot. Les Williams and a few other chip pioneers had already sketched out the new lines. The pig allowed for an even tighter turning radius. At the dawn of the performance era, this was pretty much all that mattered.

  By the summer of 1955, the pig was the hottest board on the coast, and the Velzy-Jacobs shop in Venice was taking thirty orders a week. The Simmons board was officially obsolete. The chip was on its way out. Pig boards were about to become so commonplace that the name itself would disappear; by 1957, an American surfboard was a pig by default.

  Dewey Weber and the Open-Throttle Art of Hotdogging

  The sport’s performance standard was now being set and reset almost month to month at Malibu, and the person doing the most to push things along was a flashy half-pint peroxide-blond high school wrestling star named Dewey Weber. Like Velzy, Weber came from a blue-collar Hermosa Beach family; his father drove a truck, and his mother was a factory worker. By the time he finished his first year of high school, Weber was famous three times over—first as a pageboy-coiffed model for Buster Brown Shoes, then as a national yo-yo champion (earning himself a spot on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life TV show), then as South Bay’s first freshman all-state wrestler. He was a natural in the water—three of his toes on each foot were webbed together—and began surfing at age nine. After getting his driver’s license at fifteen, Weber all but lived at Malibu during the summer months and was one of Velzy’s top test pilots; two years later, when Velzy handed him a pig prototype, Weber was set to become First Point’s flashiest surfer.

  As Kivlin had done a few years earlier, Weber viewed the Malibu beachgoers as an audience in want of entertainment. But where Kivlin got attention by riding the point like Sinatra finger-popping his way through Witchcraft, Weber pounded it out like Jerry Lee Lewis—hands and elbows chopping the air, feet blurred as he ran for the nose, stopped, and just as quickly backpedaled. There was a kind of grim overcompensation to Weber’s surfing. At five foot three, he was small, pale, and humorless, with a tight little mouth that pulled into a grimace during a hard turn. But there also was a manic pleasure in the way Weber surfed, a showmanship that recalled the physicality of Waikiki’s Scooter Boy Kaopuiki, who used to run and leap across his big hollow board at Canoe’s like a hoppedup vaudevillian. Weber was also the first surfer to fully understand the value of costuming: his mother made him a pair of bright red surf trunks, and Weber bleached his shock of already-blond hair to a radiant yellow-white.

  When he was seventeen, and Velzy handed him a pig prototype—colored red to match—Weber became the show. Surfers got out of the water to watch him ride, and he knew it. “People stood on the beach and pointed,” Weber once said. “You could actually see them pointing.”

  The term “hotdog” originated on the ski slopes, but Weber embodied the word so thoroughly that he came to own it—for better and worse. By the end of the decade, he was far and away the sport’s most camera-ready star, and as a dedicated surf media emerged, Weber became the celebrated “little man on wheels.” But there were plenty of unimpressed surfers who thought he’d done nothing but burn rubber across the finer points of style and form. “A mature man,” pioneering Malibu surfer and smooth-riding advocate Sam Reid said, his mind’s eye no doubt fixed on an image of Weber punching through a double-time reverse-shoulder cutback, “will never remain a hotdogger.”

  Weber didn’t care. He loved the theatrics of surfing Malibu on a hot summer afternoon; the control he had over his board and the beach audience. For the rest of the fifties Weber’s turns got sharper and his feet moved faster.

  Malibu Kahuna: Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy

  There were limits to what Dale Velzy and Dewey Weber could do in the name of surf-inspired nonconformity. Velzy was older than the growing ranks of teenage beachgoers, and his abiding interests in hot rods, motorcycles, and horses meant he wasn’t always in the water. Weber would soon launch his Dewey Weber Surfboards empire, which pulled him into a looping routine of staff meetings, inventory checks, and marketing plans. He walked, talked, and dressed like a surfer, and still rode Malibu like a dervish. But he increasingly thought like a businessman.

  Terry Tracy and Mickey Dora went further than anybody in defining the Malibu rebel; for putting surfers in general at a louder, bawdier, more creative remove from society at large. Culturally, the time was ripe. In 1950s America, conformity was the rule—but it was a big, rich, freedom-worshipping nation, confident to a fault, and there was a new cachet in not doing what everybody was doing. As a bit player, the midcentury surfer took his place on a stage already bowing under the gathered iconoclastic weight of Pollack and Presley, Ginsberg and Brando, Charlie Parker, Holden Caulfied, and Alfred E. Neuman.

  Nonconformity had been a hallmark of modern surfing ever since Tom Blake, who sailed as far off the shores of convention as Dora or Tracy. Blake, though, was a surfing proselytizer who wanted everyone to enjoy what he enjoyed. From their Malibu vantage point, Dora and Tracy viewed the rest of the world—nonsurfers, beginning and intermediate surfers, nearly all visiting surfers—as real or potential invaders, there to be ignored, mocked, hustled, and repelled. The Malibu lineup was getting crowded. A more aggressive rebel stance, above all, was a simple matter of resource hoarding. But establishing rank and position had a lot to do with it, too. First Point was nearly clouded over in the anti-authoritarian charisma that wafted off both Tracy and Dora, and anyone on the beach at Malibu who wanted to be cool—which meant just about everyone—copied their mannerisms, their phrasing, their outlook. “I ruled the beach,” Tracy later explained with a shrug, “Mickey ruled the water.” And because Malibu set the tone for the sport up and down the coast, surfers elsewhere also began to view the rest of the world as something to be dodged or pranked, and to line up behind their own rebel surf leaders.

  Tracy and Dora both arrived at Malibu in the early 1950s as teenagers from broken homes. They were sharp-tongued and quick with a putdown for newcomers, but Tracy didn’t have Dora’s taste for genuine verbal cruelty. Tracy, in fact, liked people—or he liked the two dozen or so Malibu regulars who gathered around him like courtiers in an area near the base of the point called “the Pit”—and he went to Malibu more to socialize than to ride waves. Dora didn’t hang out on the beach after surfing, unless he was resting up for another session; then, to kill time, he might wander over to the Pit and chat with Tracy’s group. “When there’s surf, I’m totally committed,” Dora explained, years later. “When there’s none, it doesn’t exist.”

  Tracy had blond curls and a beer gut, wore Ray-Ban sunglasses, and while on the beach kept a lit cigarette wedged between the first two fingers of his right hand. He was bright and funny, louche without being gross, and an excellent storyteller. Nobody at Malibu used his given name. He was “Tubesteak”—a nickname of such pitch-perfect raunchiness that it defined the sport’s midfifties departure from respectability all by itself. In the summer of 1956, using driftwood and palm fronds, Tracy built a twelve-by-twelve-foot shack halfway up First Point, just to have a shaded place to drink beer in the afternoon. Not long after it was completed, he installed a cot, decorated the interior with empty wine bottles and pennants, and began spending the night.

  After living in his shack for two summers in a row (taking an apartment in Santa Monica during the winter months), Tracy became a demigod to any Malibu visitor who wished they too could spend more time on the beach. For the pleasure of his company, surfers brought Tracy food and beer, a
rranged themselves in a casual semicircle around wherever he happened to be sitting, laughed appreciatively at his sidearmed bon mots, and riffed on his stories. Tracy was a decent surfer, although he devised his own performance standard. In the morning he’d ride with Dora and a few others before the crowds arrived. In the afternoon he’d paddle into a now-congested lineup, wait patiently, and take just one single long wave, first setting his board on an angle and then striking one exaggerated pose after another, beginning with a stiff-legged, arms-spread crucifixion move he called the Royal Hawaiian, then a windmilling back-arch, a stinkbug, a head-dip, and finishing with a drop-knee Royal Hawaiian—all performed to a chorus of approving shouts and whistles from the beach. Stepping from his board to the sand, grinning like Falstaff, sunlight reflecting off his great suntanned belly, Tracy would stop and look up at his still-cheering audience, lift his chin, and grandly raise a hand in acknowledgment.

  TERRY “TUBESTEAK” TRACY (ARM RAISED) AND FRIENDS, MALIBU.

  “THE FIRST ONE HAD A HANGMAN’S NOOSE SWINGING OUT FRONT, A POSTER OF MANOLETE THE BULL-FIGHTER INSIDE, AND A SIGN OUT FRONT THAT SAID ‘UPTOWN SURF CLUB. MEMBERS ONLY.’ SOMEBODY BURNED IT DOWN. MAYBE THE COPS, MAYBE THE LIFEGUARDS, I DON’T KNOW.”

  —Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy, on his original Malibu surf shack

  This was a new kind of surfing eminence. Wave-riding was great, Tracy thought, but the important thing was superabundant leisure, midlevel hedonism, and occasional displays of public showmanship that were intended to mock the squares. For his 1957 imitation of Father Junipero Serra—the eighteenth-century Spaniard who founded California’s chain of missions, as well as a Franciscan friars’ retreat next to Malibu Creek—Tracy dressed up in a burlap sack and rode slowly from the lagoon to First Point on an ancient swayback donkey. After distributing wine and bread and giving a short blessing, Tracy then retreated back to the hills.

  Getting something for nothing was a big part of all this. Past generations of West Coast surfers were proud of their ability to feed themselves by pulling lobster and abalone from nearby reefs. Tracy viewed this as way too much work. “No, no, no,” he recalled in 2004, still disdainful fifty years later. “We weren’t divers or fishermen. We were surfers.” Lifeguarding, the surfer’s default occupation, was also too strenuous for Tracy. To make a few extra bucks, he painted a “For Rent” sign on the nose of his board, propped it up against his shack where everyone could see, and rented it out by the hour to daytripping visitors. Surfing itself was a free ride. Tracy didn’t articulate it as such, but he embodied the idea that the ride should extend from the wave zone into the rest of your life.

  On the surface, there was a certain monk-like quality to Tracy’s life at Malibu. He gave up certain creature comforts to live what he felt was the purest possible surfing existence. Then again, it was temporary—more like a long camping trip—and Tracy certainly didn’t have any monkish interest in the loss of self. Style was in fact all-important; not just to Tracy, but to everyone at Malibu. Style trumped money, and in some cases even wave-riding skill, and it said a lot about how the sport was developing that an overweight and prematurely bald vagabond like Tracy, without a bank account or a bedroom closet or even fresh running water, equipped with little more than a sharp pair of Wayfarer shades and two pairs of Madras shorts, could by force of character alone become a style king at the world’s best surf break.

  It didn’t last. And Tracy, to his credit, didn’t overplay his hand. After two summers, he gave up the shack, and by 1959, he was married and the father of a newborn. That spring he lit a small fire on the beach at First Point, melted half a bar of paraffin wax in a coffee can, and was about to pour the wax onto the deck of a new board for traction, when, he said, “all of a sudden this lifeguard runs up out of nowhere, kicks my coffee can over and screams, ‘No fires on the beach!’”

  The Los Angeles County Lifeguards had arrived at Malibu. New rules were in place, and they would be enforced. Tracy used the lifeguard incident as a punctuation mark on his surfing career—he left the beach and got on with the rest of his life.

  Mickey Dora and the Creation of the Surfing Antihero

  Though a Malibu fixture, Tracy embodied the idea that surfing was a movable feast, a celebratory beachfront beggar’s banquet, and surfers from the 1950s forward never strayed too far from this notion. Mickey Dora wasn’t the opposite, exactly. He was just as theatrical as Tracy and equally comedic. For the Malibu morning surf check, he’d step out of his car in tennis whites, or a smoking jacket, or a black leather Nazi trench-coat. Finishing a ride, he’d walk back up the point holding his board by the fin, letting the nose drag over the sand and rocks. “Nobody did that,” fellow Malibu surfer Bob Cooper recalled. “You treated this weapon with respect. You put it under your arm or on your head.” Every surfer waxed the deck of his board with paraffin, which only came in white. When Dora turned up with a gaudy multicolor wax job one day, Cooper looked astounded and asked how he’d done it. Dora gave Cooper a pitying look and said one word: “Crayon.”

  Despite these lighter moments, Dora’s outlook was relentlessly, even apocalyptically grim. He wouldn’t come into full bloom for another few years, when he perfectly rode surf media’s opening wave to become the sport’s first and greatest antihero. But by the late fifties it was already an article of faith with Dora that surfing, and Southern California, and the world in general, were all being dismantled by a vast and conspiratorial range of forces, and that Malibu—“my perfect wave,” site of “my cherished days,” as Dora put it in a rare noncombative moment of reflection—had been the first place to fall. In response, he became a scammer and a thief. Either that, or his world-in-decay viewpoint was his justification for all the scamming and thieving. Meanwhile, he rode waves with surpassing grace and elegance, and radiated a kind of tense, dangerous cool that would have done Marlon Brando proud.

  Mickey Dora was shaped by two diametrically opposed men: his birth-father Miklos Dora Sr., a refined and educated Hungarian national who later became a representative for Rothschild wines; and his stepfather Gard Chapin, a snarling Santa Monica woodworker considered by many to be California’s most talented and least-liked Depression-era surfer. Born in Budapest, Mickey was six months old in 1935 when the family moved to Los Angeles. Miklos Sr. became a dilettante surfer, and by 1938 he was bringing his young son with him on surf trips to Palos Verdes and San Onofre. The elder Dora wasn’t an especially hands-on father—he enrolled Mickey in boarding schools and military academies, and left the country altogether from 1948 to 1953—but he passed on to his son a love of culture. Dora would become the best-dressed surfer of his generation, and was singular in his interest and appreciation for art, wine, food, and tennis. Both men were aloof and quiet-voiced. Both could be charming. But where Miklos was gracious, his son invariably deployed graciousness only in satirical form.

  Dora was six when his mother, a nascent alcoholic, left the family and married Chapin, who became the boy’s surfing mentor and took Dora to Malibu for the first time. The youngster occasionally helped Chapin and Bob Simmons make surfboards. Meanwhile, just as Dora picked up on Miklos Sr.’s urbanity, so too was he imprinted by Chapin’s anger and aggression. Late one night, Chapin got Dora out of bed in a fit of rage and drove him to the corner of Sunset and Vine, where he pulled a baseball bat from the trunk and smashed the heads off of a block’s worth of newly installed parking meters. “Mickey,” he said, “these bastards want to control everything. Now they want to make us pay money to park on the street.” Disintegration in the name of progress, and lawlessness as the appropriate response—Dora’s belief system in a nutshell—were ideas passed on from his stepfather.

  Dora didn’t become a full-time surfer until 1950, at age fifteen, but he was strong and agile and quickly picked up all the moves. He arrived at Malibu just as Matt Kivlin and Joe Quigg rolled out their maneuverable Malibu chips. (Dora bought his first Quigg in 1953 and always claimed it was the best board he ever owned.) Kivlin was
Dora’s favorite surfer, and he copied the older surfer’s stance directly: lowered arms, back knee bent in toward the front, a casual slouch while trimming. Dora eventually became a far more active surfer than Kivlin. At the right moment he’d straighten his torso, arch his back, and lead with the hips; his hands would rise to make odd little swirls in the air; and his right arm occasionally curled up behind his head like a plume. He was nicknamed “da Cat,” mostly for his untouchable footwork, which was soft and quick as he pedaled the length of his board, then rooted in place as he negotiated long sections with tiny ankle-driven adjustments to his trim line. Dora could be showy. From the middle of his board, he’d pivot and ride backward, or he’d drop into a parallel-stance crouch with a foot on either rail. But function and artistry always came first. Other surfers of Dora’s era would be best known for a specific move: Phil Edwards and his big water-shifting turns, or Lance Carson and his noseriding. Dora’s surfing consisted mostly of bright staccato grace notes, strung together as quickly and unexpectedly as a John Coltrane solo, with move-to-move transitions so smooth as to be invisible.