Evans gave up his job as an insurance salesman and devoted all his time to surfing. He shot film during exploratory trips up and down the coast and organized surfing competitions. When Australia made its first real push in Hawaii, with several boardmen sailing off to Honolulu on the SS Oriana in late 1961, the whole trip was arranged up by Evans—or “Mr. Surf,” as the local press called him. Two of the surfers Evans brought along, Dave Jackman and Bob Pike, were about to earn international distinction as big-wave surfers; Jackman had already done so in Australia, as the first man to charge the Queenscliff Bombora, a fearsome reef break on Sydney’s northside.
Surf Trek to Hawaii, the first of Evans’ twelve full-length movies, toured Australia beach towns in 1962, the same year he launched Surfing World, the country’s most successful first-generation surf magazine. Evans was a clumsy filmmaker and just marginally better as a magazine writer/editor—but nobody at the time was too concerned about technical merit. Australian riders were getting some well-deserved recognition, and the “new” surfing no longer had the look or feel of an import.
Then there were all those incredible Australian breaks. Sydney was home to a huge majority of Australia’s surfers, most of whom hadn’t yet ventured beyond the greater metropolitan area, much less out of state, and what Evans presented to them was overwhelming: the long aqua-blue point waves at Kirra, Burleigh, and Snapper Rocks on Queensland’s Gold Coast, and the Malibu-like perfection of Noosa, further to the north; the thick walls at Victoria’s Bells Beach; even a glimpse or two of the distant reef waves of Western Australia. Some of the best breaks were closer to home: Angourie, Lennox Head, Byron Bay, Crescent Head—A-grade pointbreaks, every one, strung together in fairly close proximity along the north coast of New South Wales.
All this and more was revealed in Evans’ movies and magazines. No wonder Surfing World was a newsstand hit. Of course Surf Trek played to screaming full-capacity houses. Aussie surf pride—celebrated and reviled in years to come—was another Evans achievement.
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Media, however, wasn’t Evans’ strong suit. Organization and salesmanship were. Having created a bigger, more unified domestic surfing population through film and publishing, he consolidated in 1963 by forming the Australian Surfriders Association—the first nationwide group of its kind—and by presenting the debut Australian National Titles. Then Evans went to work on what would be his signature triumph: the first World Surfing Championships, to be hosted by Sydney the following year.
Even though half of Australia was still prepared to write off the surfie as a layabout yobbo, the sport was clearly edging its way into the mainstream as it rolled toward the World Championships. Gas stations sold packaged surfboard wax. Bob Evans himself did morning and afternoon surf reports on a Catholic Church–owned radio station. Duke Kahanamoku, revered in this sports-mad country, arrived from Hawaii to hand out awards for the 1963 Australian Surfing Championships.
Then there was Midget Farrelly, Australia’s best surfer. Not only was Farrelly articulate and neatly groomed—short blond hair, tucked-in shirts, preppy V-neck sweaters—his view of the sport was hardline conservative. “We don’t regard ‘surfies’ as surfers,” Farrelly explained to the Sydney Morning Herald six months before the World Championships, describing the former as a “cult that has rubbed off on us.” The goal of any right-thinking surfer, he said, was to “develop [our] public image, and prove that surfboard riding is a youthful, healthy activity.”
Farrelly became a surf hero in Australia when he won the Makaha International in 1962 at the age of eighteen—the only non-Hawaiian male to do so between 1954 and 1970—thus bringing home to a grateful nation yet another international sporting crown. He’d picked up the “Midget” nickname as a Sydney preteen; on the beach at Makaha in 1962, posing next to his board and new trophy, Farrelly didn’t look old enough to shave. No surfer alive, though, was his match for resolve and diligence. Having determined early on that Phil Edwards was the world’s best surfer, Farrelly became a student from afar. He mastered the better part of Edwards’ gestures and body language, except where the older California surfer was spontaneous and quirky, Farrelly was precise, calculating, and hypnotically smooth.
Australian beaches had generated other talented riders, including Jack “Bluey” Mayes of Bondi Beach, a puff-chested carryover from the racing sixteen days who flew across the quick-breaking Bondi surf with his arms and legs pumping like an accordion band. Another was Mayes’ protégé Mick Dooley, who didn’t have quite the same flair but was younger, quicker, and rode in the modern style. Still, even as late as 1961, the Aussie talent level remained raw enough, Bob Evans pointed out, that “an aggressive wipeout carried almost as much prestige as a well-ridden wave.”
MIDGET FARRELLY HAD SHORT HAIR AND WORE PREPPY V-NECK SWEATERS. HIS VIEW OF THE SPORT WAS CONSERVATIVE. THE GOAL OF ANY RIGHT-THINKING SURFER, HE TOLD THE SYDNEY MORNNIG HERALD, WAS TO “DEVELOP (OUR) PUBLIC IMAGE, AND PROVE THAT SURFBOARD RIDING IS A YOUTHFUL, HEALTHY ACTIVITY.”
That changed with Midget Farrelly. Surfing World and the rest of the Australian surf magazines, one journalist recalled, became “Midget Monthlies.” Bob Evans’ movies were loaded with Farrelly sequences, and a short film, Midget Goes Hawaiian, documented his big win at Makaha in 1962. Furthermore, Aussie surfers from Perth to Port Macquarie now had a star of their own to emulate, and it made a tremendous difference—an entire nation of wave-riders was now improving by the month.
Farrelly proved to be an atypical Australian champion. He was bright and at times wickedly funny, but never wallowed in mateship and all its attendant vices. Bob Cooper, the first American surfer to move permanently to Australia, recalled that for all the extreme partying his friends did back in California, the Aussies were a step ahead. “I couldn’t believe how decadent these people were. The cigarettes and the power drinking, [and] the casual, almost wanton sex . . . it was a big shock.” But Farrelly, Cooper noted, “was off on a different wavelength.” By the end of 1963, Farrelly, just twenty years old, was already removing himself from the beach-life swirl.
In part, this was no doubt a reaction to an unimaginable double-tragedy he suffered that year. His taxi-driving father was hit by a car and killed, and his mother, inconsolable, took her own life a week later. Farrelly was still living at home. He continued to surf and was elected founding president of the Australian Surfriders Association. But he didn’t enter the National Titles, or the Australian Invitational Championships, the year’s two biggest domestic events. Defending his crown at Makaha that December, he placed a disappointing eighth.
Meanwhile, two other Australian surfers had emerged who were performing nearly at Farrelly’s level. One was Nat Young, a lean curly-haired regularfooter from Collaroy. Young hadn’t yet turned sixteen when he powered his way to victory in the 1963 Australian Invitational Championships. First prize was a trip to Hawaii. Young and Farrelly flew over together, and pitched in $150 each to buy a used North Shore surf wagon. They were an odd pair—Young towered over the older surfer, and was as spontaneous as Farrelly was reserved—but they developed a casual mentor-student friendship. Further, Young was still a juniors’ division competitor, and so the two hadn’t yet faced off in competition.
With Bobby Brown of Cronulla it was a different story. In the 1964 New South Wales championships, Farrelly and Brown tied in the finals, and contest officials sent them back out for a twenty-minute surf-off—the sport’s first man-on-man heat. Farrelly had learned to shape boards and was riding a sleek new three-stringer model of his own design. Brown, a barely pubescent seventeen-year-old with a sweet disposition and an attacking surf style, owned a battered red board that looked as if he’d dragged it to the beach behind his car. When the contest-winning wave approached, Brown was in position and had right-of-way, but hesitated for a moment when he saw the great Farrelly, just a few feet to the right, turn and show interest. But Farrelly backed off, Brown caught the wave and rode it beautifully, signing off with a flashy
spinner, and won the contest.
A single defeat wasn’t enough to knock Farrelly from his throne, but he was no longer invincible. He remained the local favorite going into the 1964 World Championships. His edge, though, was now razor thin.
The 1964 World Surfing Championships
Surfers had long viewed the Makaha International as the sport’s unofficial world championships, but complaints had grown louder that the Makaha format was outdated and that the judging panel was in the tank for Hawaiians. Creating a successful World Championships event in Australia, as Bob Evans and a lot of other people saw it, could help bring an end to Makaha’s surf contest domination. Evans’ efforts may have also been fueled by a bit of vindictiveness. Evans had shuttled a team to Makaha in 1963, and just before the contest started, all of the Aussies’ boards were stolen. Contest officials didn’t seem too concerned. Writing for Surfing World, Evans angrily described the event as a “complete farce.”
Evans’ wheeling and dealing on behalf of the World Championships was unlike anything yet seen in the sport. Surfing had already tied into some mainstream trade ventures, but the business interests had always approached first. Columbia Pictures, Jantzen, Capitol Records—they made the decision to pair up with surfing, not the other way around. In a new suit and tie, Evans presented himself to national oil giant Ampol Petroleum, explained how a high-profile surfing competition would serve their marketing interests, and within four months had the deal signed—largely on his terms. Ampol’s stake in the 1964 World Championships was 30,000 Australian pounds (about $500,000 in 2009 dollars), which covered all operating costs, including room and board for visiting competitors. Qantas kicked in two dozen free airline tickets. ABC would present highlights of the two-day event on the evening news, and the Australian TV station ATN-7 agreed to broadcast the final heats as they took place—the first time a surfing contest would be shown live. Phil Edwards of California declined an invitation to compete, but he agreed to serve as head judge, which helped convince the Americans that there would be no Makaha-style favoritism extended to local surfers.
A short, tidy, well-managed event, the 1964 World Surfing Championships were held on a warm fall weekend in Sydney, with a Manly Beach sandbar providing a steady feed of chest-high waves—nothing spectacular, but plenty of surf for everybody. Prelims were held on Saturday. For the big show on Sunday, according to the front page Morning Herald coverage, over sixty thousand spectators crowded onto the beach and promenade, with late arrivals forced to park more than a mile from the contest site. The actual number was probably closer to twenty thousand, but the enthusiastic reporting showed just how ready Australia was to embrace the sport.
Only thirteen of the two hundred entrants were nonAustralians, but it was a “world” contest nonetheless—the national champions from France, Peru, New Zealand, South Africa, and Great Britain were all seeded directly into the men’s division quarterfinals, as were a half dozen Californians, plus newly crowned Makaha International champion Joey Cabell of Hawaii. California’s Linda Benson, the only international competitor in the women’s division, was also given a high seed.
Event organizer Bob Evans had fine-tuned the judging format, in part as a way to further distinguish his event from the Makaha contest. Each thirty-minute heat featured six surfers, with three advancing to the next round, and each rider’s heat score was tallied from his or her best three rides. This was standard operating procedure. The new wrinkle, apart from using an international judging panel to avoid charges of home-country bias, was the introduction of a coyly named “sportsmanship” rule—later this would be known, more accurately, as the “interference” rule—whereby a surfer taking off on a wave already being ridden by another competitor could, at the head judge’s discretion, have his score docked. At Makaha, multiple competitors often rode the same wave with no consequences for jamming another rider.
The night before the finals, Evans was also present at a hotel room meeting called by Eduardo Arena of Peru. Arena proposed the creation of what he called the International Surfing Federation, which would serve as the coordinating body for future World Championships events. Evans and everyone agreed. Arena—high-caste and handsome, in his midthirties, with a master’s degree in engineering from UCLA, and a deep, authoritative voice that served him well as an international surf-world mediator—was elected as ISF president. Lima was picked to be the host city for the 1965 World Championships. It was a busy weekend at Manly.
Finals day at Manly was a great success. An all-Aussie juniors’ event was held as a kind of undercard attraction, with Robert Conneeley waxing Nat Young for first, and both proving that the Australian surfing talent pool was very deep indeed. The women’s final was a showdown between Linda Benson of California and Australian national champion Phyllis O’Donell. Benson, a Dewey Weber protégé with her red bikini, white-blond hair, and flashy moves, had long been the darling of American surfing. O’Donell had dropped out of high school at age fifteen to take care of the family, spent years working in her father’s auto shop in Sydney’s landlocked western suburbs, and didn’t begin surfing until 1960; at twenty-seven, she was by far the oldest female surfer in the contest. But it was O’Donell’s final all the way, as she trimmed through sections with her heels together and her back arched, then neatly cut back when the wave flattened. Benson hotdogged with her usual flair, but came up two or three spinners short.
SURFING WORLD COVERS THE 1964 CHAMPIONSHIPS.
The six men’s finalists lined up on the beach just before the match started. Midget Farrelly, Joey Cabell, and Mike Doyle of California were the three favorites, and next to the other two Farrelly looked more like a teenaged autographseeker than a competitor: Cabell was four inches taller, thirty pounds heavier, and seven years older; Doyle had him by six inches, forty-five pounds, and four years.
They hit the water. Doyle shifted back and forth between power and finesse, and Cabell—ignoring the new sportsmanship rule and fading the rest of the field at every opportunity—rode with signature precision and elegance. Farrelly wasn’t as sharp in the final as he’d been in the quarters and semis, but he kept the other two in range, and with just three seconds left on the clock he picked up the last wave of the event, a clean shoulder-high right. The ride looked almost as if it had been diagrammed. Farrelly snapped to his feet, cross-stepped to the nose and hung-five, backpedaled for a tricky bit through the whitewater, returned to the open face, zipped up to the nose and back, grimaced his way through an exaggerated arms-up cutback—really playing to the back rows now—then finished with a long bow-legged cruise all the way up to the wet sand. The standing ovation began about halfway through the ride and continued as Farrelly walked up the beach, the corners of his mouth pulled up into a tight little smile.
Officials set up a three-tiered podium on the beach in front of the judges stand, and a few minutes later the winners were announced. Cabell and Doyle tied for second, but Cabell was knocked down to third for what Surfing World charitably described as a “tendency to become over-aggressive.” Farrelly got the win with a few points to spare. Photographers formed a semicircle around the podium, shooting up at the three trophy-holding champions. The surfing world had just realigned itself. Up to this point, everything of significance in the sport had flowed from Hawaii or California. Not only was Australia now a fully vested surf-world partner, it was more energized than the other two. A pair of world championship titles in a single afternoon—that was just a start.
Booming On the East Coast
The surf boom can be parsed in a lot of different ways. The West Coast got busy inventing the surf industry, Australia was springloaded to become the most progressive wave-riding nation on earth, and surf fever went airborne and touched down on beaches from Sao Paulo to Christchurch. But based on demographics alone, the boom exploded loudest on the American East Coast. In 1959, there were less than 250 dedicated riders between Miami and Cape Cod. By 1966, the East and West Coast surfing populations were nearly equal, a
t about 200,000 each. More than ten thousand spectators attended that year’s East Coast Surfing Championships, and out of every ten boards Hobie made, seven were shipped out to Atlantic seaboard dealers.
Geography had a bigger impact on the sport’s development in the East than it did in the West. America’s Atlantic coast is half-again longer than it is on the Pacific side, and Eastern surfers were pretty evenly distributed from north to south. By comparison, roughly 95 percent of West Coast surfers in the mid-1960s lived in a compact two-hundred-mile beachfront corridor between Santa Barbara and San Diego. There were cultural differences, too. Santa Cruz had a different feel than San Diego, but California was pretty much California. Georgia’s humid sandbar peaks and the lobsterencrusted coves of Rhode Island, on the other hand, seemingly belonged to different planets—as did the local surfers.
By the same token, West Coast surf history could be traced back almost exclusively to one surfer, George Freeth. The East Coast has no singular surf history as such; rather, it’s a bundle of histories. Locals often got things started. The pencil-thin Whitman brothers of Miami, Bill and Dudley, rode homemade wooden bellyboards in the early 1930s. Twenty years earlier, the Virginia Beach summer resort crowd lined the boardwalk and applauded as “Big Jim” Jordan cruised shoreward on his imported Waikiki plank. (On the Gulf Coast, a deaf lifeguard named LeRoy Columbo—later cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the “World’s Greatest Lifeguard”—took on the muddy brown rollers of Galveston in the early 1930s, and earned a few bucks on the side by renting out a pair of special Firestone-made surfboards built from inflated rubber tubes wrapped in heavy canvas.)
The History of Surfing Page 32