The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Sidewalk Surfing: The Skateboard Craze

  Skateboarding was the boom within the boom. By the numbers, in fact, it blew surfing right out of the water, with 50 million skateboards reportedly sold worldwide during the first half of the 1960s. Here was a sport that arrived with every possible teen-market advantage. The board itself was cheap, and could be ridden anywhere, in any kind of dry-weather conditions. It was functional—skateboarding got you there a lot faster than walking. As a bonus, adults thought it was noisy and risky.

  Strap-on rollerskates were a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic during the early 1900s, and a primordial form of skateboarding took shape not long afterward, as enterprising kids learned to hammer a pair of steel skate wheels on either end of a short hardwood plank, which in turn was attached to a vegetable crate to make a kind of push-scooter. The idea, minus the crate, was picked up again in the 1950s. By the early sixties, after steel wheels were replaced by smoother-riding clay composite wheels, skateboarding proudly came to view itself as a land version of surfing, and it fell in behind the older sport like an excitable kid brother. A Jan and Dean song called “Sidewalk Surfing” encouraged newcomers to “do the tricks the surfers do,” and by 1964 the nation’s streets, driveways, sidewalks, and parking lots were filled with teens and preteens cranking out one surf-invented hotdog move after another: spinners and coffins, noserides, drop-knee turns, and head-dips. Skateboarders wore the exact same Levis, logo T-shirts, and Pendletons as surfers. Pushing authenticity to the limit, they even rode shoeless—the gnarled black-soled feet of the dedicated skater were a bane of suburban mothers coast to coast.

  The craze peaked in 1965. A Life magazine cover in May of that year showed a pretty Capri-pants-wearing blonde named Pat McGee doing a handstand on her skateboard, and a short film called Skater Dater was nominated for an Academy Award. Skateboarder magazine was up and running. Hobie Surfboards had put together an exhibition team of hot middle-school skaters to tour the country and give demonstrations, and sales of the mahogany-birch laminate Hobie Super Surfer skateboard were through the roof. The first International Skateboard Championships were featured on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, with color commentator Skip Newell pointing out to a nationwide audience that the sport had also caught on in France, Australia, and South Africa.

  Skateboarding’s popularity then took a complete header. The American Medical Association labeled the sport “a new menace,” the Los Angeles Times reported that the skateboard had “overtaken the bicycle as the chief cause of childhood injury,” and safety-minded parents were soon laying down restrictions or confiscating boards outright. A decade later, the sport would recover. In fact, it became the rootstalk for all boardsport “aerial” moves—where the rider launches himself and his board into the air—including surfing and snowboarding. But none of this was apparent in 1966, when the skateboard very much looked to be going the way of the coonskin cap.

  Surf Magazines: Praying for the New Issue to Arrive

  Surfers didn’t trust the media as a rule. Hollywood movies, Sports Illustrated articles, Beach Boys singles—these were created by nonsurfers, and they almost never got it right. What surfers really craved was in-house news and entertainment. Surf movies were a blast. Surf magazines were even better—or at least more versatile. They could be taken home, studied, collected, and referenced; they offered advice, opinion, and instruction. All those religious comparisons the sport grew so fond of—that began with surf publishing: Surfer was known from its early years as the “Bible of the Sport.” As one of the magazine’s editors explained, “There’s the Koran, the Book of Tao, the Bible, and surf mags. All are used to reconfirm belief in a faith, a way of life. Ours just comes out monthly, that’s all.”

  SANTA CRUZ, 1960.

  Surf magazines bloomed and died like hothouse flowers during the 1960s. No fewer than fifteen titles had come and gone worldwide by 1966, and in some cases the debut issue was also the final issue. In America, International Surfing (the title was later shortened to Surfing) outlasted the competition and became Surfer’s only rival. The quarterly era was finished, and by 1962, surf magazines everywhere were published monthly or bimonthly. Color was introduced, first on the cover, then on select interior pages. Issues got bigger. In five years, Surfer’s average page count went from 38 to 98. Over a thousand photos were spread across 226 pages of the 1965 edition of Petersen’s Surfing Yearbook.

  Publishing stars were created. Life magazine’s flattering 1966 profile of Surfer founder John Severson introduced him as “the most respected spokesman for the booming sport of surfing.” The article noted his casual three-hour workday, and illustrated the point with a photo of Severson reclined in his office chair with a rubber-thonged foot resting on his desktop. Another celebrity was surf-doodler Rick Griffin, who as a teenager launched a Surfer cartoon strip featuring a cheerful half-pint grem named Murphy. The storylines couldn’t have been simpler, but Griffin’s draftsmanship was first-rate, and he loaded his Murphy panels with Mad magazine–like detail and energy. The strip was an international hit. Severson put Murphy on the cover of Surfer, thousands of Murphy stickers were placed on car windows, Murphy T-shirts and coffee mugs were available in better surf shops, and Murphy cartoon-strip imitators popped up by the month. (Griffin lost an eye in a near-fatal car accident in 1963, recovered and did another year’s worth of Murphy strips, then moved to San Francisco. There, he became one of psychedelia’s fabled Big Five artists and put his shimmering acid-influenced hand to Fillmore concert handbills, Grateful Dead album covers, and Zap Comix.)

  A handful of photographers also enjoyed their share of surf-world fame, thanks to the magazines. Most readers had at least some interest in the articles and columns. But everyone devoured the images. “It’s a dream magazine, thanks to the photographers,” as John Severson put it.

  Surfing has always made things easy for the amateur lensman: the field is made up of shifting blues and greens, is decorated with water-reflected sunlight, and has kinetic elements—a dropping curl, bouncing whitewater, the surfer and board in motion—that play off each other in dozens of ways. Anyone with basic camera sense can fire off a roll or two and get a few interesting shots.

  Advanced surf photography, however, has always been difficult. Because the surfer moves on two axes (forward and side to side), the photographer in the pre-automated age had to master the double-handed “follow focus” technique, moving the camera body left or right to keep the surfer framed, while constantly adjusting the focus ring to keep things sharp. Motordrives were available, but the Kodak film everybody used cost enough that surf photographers mostly shot just one frame at a time, trusting their ability to lead the surfer like a clay target and fire away at the moment of peak action. There were other challenges: introducing non-blue colors (not easy while facing the ocean), and covering all the auxiliary angles—overviews and sideviews, pier shots, candids, and portraits. Finally, the well-rounded surf photographer also had to shoot from the water, which was a discipline unto itself, with separate cameras and lenses, a much lower yield, a work space that often put them in dangerously close proximity to breaking waves, and the added difficulty of having to do the whole thing in what amounted to a zero-gravity environment.

  Tom Blake and John “Doc” Ball handled most of the early surf photography spadework; National Geographic published a portfolio of Blake’s work in 1935 and did the same for Ball in 1944. But there was no real market for surf photography until the early 1960s, when the surf press was established, and it was another two or three years before a low pedestal of celebrity was built under the feet of California-born photographers Don James, LeRoy Grannis, and Ron Stoner.

  James and Grannis were unlikely boom-era pioneers, for no other reason than their age. Collectively, the surf world would never be younger than it was in 1966, but at that year’s black-tie International Surfing Hall of Fame awards it was forty-five-year-old James who finished runner-up in the Still Photographer division, and forty-nine-y
ear-old Grannis taking top honors. Both were part-timers. James was a Beverly Hills dentist, with a patient list that included Clark Gable and Cary Grant, and Grannis was a switchboard installer for Pacific Telephone. Both were also well-credentialed surfers. Grannis, a charter member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, was one of the plank-riding surfers featured in Doc Ball’s 1946 book California Surfriders. He didn’t begin taking photos himself until 1959, but within a few months he was a weekend fixture at the hot local surf breaks and making photo contributions to all the new California-published surf magazines; in 1962 he became the general manager of Surfing Illustrated, and two years later he cofounded International Surfing.

  PHOTOGRAPHER DON JAMES, SUNSET BEACH, HAWAII.

  James started riding waves and taking photographs in the mid-1930s, and he was there on the beach in 1957, camera poised, the day Waimea Bay was first surfed. Water photography was James’ strong suit; on the North Shore, he’d paddle out with a Plexiglas-housed Leica draped around his neck, straddle his board just off the impact zone, frame and shoot, and sprint for deeper water as necessary. Surf magazines began running James’ work in the early sixties; Life, Time, the Saturday Evening Post, and Sports Illustrated soon followed; and a shot he took of California surfer Rusty Miller barreling down a ferocious Sunset Beach peak was a prizewinner at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Grannis also shot from the water, but usually stayed on the beach, hunched behind a wicked tripod-mounted Century 1,000mm lens that weighed seventeen pounds and looked like a bazooka aimed at the lineup.

  Photographed backstage at the 1966 Hall of Fame awards in their dinner jackets, holding their winner’s trophies, Grannis and James looked like a pair of kindly uncles standing next to third-place finisher Ron Stoner, a square-jawed twenty-one-year-old with a distant half smile. Nobody said as much, but the Hall of Fame results that year had more to do with seniority than merit. Stoner had been hired by Surfer just eighteen months earlier, and in that brief period he not only raised and reset all the creative boundaries of surf photography, he turned it into a profession.

  Grannis and James—with jobs and families, and two or three decades older than the surfers they photographed—operated to a degree from the sidelines. Stoner was of the moment. He was young and good-looking, a decent surfer in his own right, and in constant touch with America’s hottest riders. More importantly, he had a vision of surfing that was broader and more unified than that of Grannis or James. The smooth, glistening, color-saturated look of the boom’s final years—Stoner created it as much as he captured it.

  He took one or two photography classes in junior college, and John Severson was an informal mentor. But as Surfer art director John Van Hamersveld later put it, Stoner operated “completely on intuition.” (Van Hamersveld went further and wondered if Stoner was in fact an idiot savant. Another photographer, with no malice intended, said that on a technical level, “all Ron really knew how to do was open the film box and stick it in the camera.”) Like Grannis and James, much of Stoner’s work consisted of front-on, tight-frame action shots of cutbacks, bottom turns, noserides, and trimming—the surf magazines’ bread-and-butter images. But Stoner actually did his best work while meandering around the perimeter. He’d paddle twenty yards out beyond a group of surfers, turn, and shoot back toward shore during a quiet moment between sets. Or he’d climb a hill, work out a lineup shot, and squat down until the field of mustard grass at his knees was spread across the bottom two-thirds of the viewfinder. He picked up shades and hues that everyone else missed. He somehow buffed and polished the familiar surf-world greens and blues until they looked new again. Stoner did for Southern California surf breaks what artist David Hockney did a few years later for Southern California swimming pools, and to the same effect: you didn’t want to just look at their work, you longed to step inside it.

  Surfer paid Stoner $500 a month—more than enough for groceries and rent on a studio apartment. The magazine also gave him a gas card, travel expenses, and the use of the high-end company-owned camera equipment, plus all the film he could shoot. It was a great job. Then, quickly, it all came undone. Schizophrenia, drug use, and electroshock therapy undid Stoner’s life and career, and before the decade was over he was a ghost on surfing’s fringe; still taking photos now and then, but about to set the camera down for good. Nevertheless, much of what looked best in surfing at that time—for all time—was due to Stoner’s efforts.

  The Duke Kahanamoku Invitational

  Stoner, Grannis, and James were all at Sunset Beach in the winter of 1965 to photograph the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, the last and probably noblest commercial use to which the aging Olympian put his name. Honolulu promoter Kimo McVay had been Kahanamoku’s manager since 1961. McVay opened the popular Duke Kahanamoku’s nightclub in Waikiki—where Don Ho, five nights a week, brought down the house with “Tiny Bubbles” and “Pearly Shells”—and licensed his client’s name for use on skateboards, ukuleles, bellyboards, tennis shoes, and aloha shirts. In 1965, McVay had the idea of producing a new, elite, big-wave specialty event. Unlike the Makaha International, or the U.S. Surfing Championships, both of which began with huge starting fields, the Duke would feature just twenty-four surfers, selected by a panel headed by longtime North Shore favorite and newly hired competition director Fred Van Dyke. Sunset Beach was a no-brainer for the event site; it was Hawaii’s most dependable oversize wave. The whole contest was formatted to run in just six hours—McVay had his eye on TV coverage from the very beginning—and the event had a five-day window during the peak of the big-wave season.

  McVay laid on the swank. A red-and-gold embossed invitation was mailed to each competitor, along with a $50 appearance-fee checks. Overseas entrants got a round-trip plane ticket to Honolulu; everybody had a comped room at the upscale Surfrider Hotel. There were a few raised eyebrows at the invite list: former world champion and Makaha winner Midget Farrelly, for example, was left out. But in general, the surfers were grateful—thrilled, in fact—with all the high-end treatment.

  The debut Duke contest was an smash hit: twelve-foot surf, rave-up articles in the surf press, and a CBS Sports Spectacular prime-time special. Back at the nightclub a few hours after the finals, a rheumy-eyed but still elegant Duke Kahanamoku presented the winner’s medallion to a bantam-weight high school senior named Jeff Hakman, the hottest teenage surfer in the islands. In 1966, the waves for the Duke were even bigger and gnarlier, the CBS crew was back, and Sunset Beach vet Ricky Grigg won it for the old guys.

  For a lot of surfers, the Duke contest moved ahead of both the Makaha International and the World Championships to become the sport’s most prestigious event. It was held on the North Shore, at the best high-performance big-wave break in the world. No small-wave grubbing here. You didn’t win at Sunset with head-dips, or spinners, or any other tricks. Also, because the Duke was elite (unlike the Makaha event), and not attached to a year-long series of qualifying events (like the World Championships), it felt different somehow; not so much a surf contest as a command performance. The Duke Invitational—later known as the Duke Classic—would have its own ups and downs in the years to come; the surf was occasionally poor, and the organizational quality tapered off a bit. But the event lasted until 1984, and it was never thought of as anything less than a first-rate surf contest.

  How to Sell a Surfboard

  Board design was the quiet part of the boom. There were no real breakthroughs between the late fifties and the mid-sixties; refinement was the rule. Dale Velzy’s wide-backed “pig,” first made in the mid-1950s and still popular at the turn of the decade, was replaced by a more uniformly curved silhouette—less hips, more nose. The “roundpin” tail outline was introduced as a hybrid between the traditional squaretail and the big-wave pintail. Fin area came down, and fin position moved a little further up from the tail; both changes gave the board a “looser” feel. By 1966, a slot-and-pin “fin box” was offered on some models, so the fin could be changed or replaced, allowing the board owner his one
and only performance-customizing option.

  The boom-era design shift that mattered most was also the hardest one for the untrained eye to spot: two or three inches of much-needed lift in both the nose and tail section. “Rocker” wasn’t a new concept; Bob Simmons and Joe Quigg had both incorporated some degree of lift in their boards during the postwar years. But midsixties boardmakers found that a well-rockered piece of equipment could sneak into places on a wave that were off limits to boards with a flatter profile.

  As boards became incrementally better from year to year, each new worthwhile design update was incorporated by the industry as a whole, so that boards were more or less indistinguishable from brand to brand. Specs were adjusted a little, according to a rider’s size and preferences. Still, just about everybody’s board was 9 feet 6 inches long, 22.5 inches wide, and weighed a little over 25 pounds.

  The construction process remained essentially unchanged as well, except the factories got bigger and turnaround times faster. Boardmaking was the sport’s least-glamorous trade. Foam supplier Gordon Clark called it “dirty, messy, and smelly,” and even that didn’t go far enough. Shop owners and factory workers vaguely understood that most of the materials they handled were unhealthy, but state and county workplace codes were routinely ignored anyway, and employees often carried on as if they were still in the family garage hand-sawing through wood. Hobie coworkers shook their heads indulgently when sander Ronald Patterson pulled down his dust mask to chain-smoke Marlboros while powering through a stack of new boards, the airborne resin particulate mixing into his nicotine hit. Patterson actually made it to sixty before dying of lung cancer.

  But there was a boom to service, and if surfboard design itself was moving along at a slow crawl, well, that just meant there was more time, money, and energy to spend on marketing. The “model” craze swept the sport in the midsixties, and board shoppers were left to scratch their heads over the relative merits of the Hustler, the Master, the Cheater, the Flexer, the Banana, the Improviser, the Performer, the Aggressor, the Rapier, and two or three dozen other choices—all of which looked identical at thirty paces. Some companies took their campaigns less seriously than others. Morey-Pope’s latest offering was called the Penetrator, and red-hot team rider John Peck, in a straight-faced Surfer-published testimonial, swore that his Penetrator was “an effortlessly responsive tool” that allowed him to get in and out of “positions which I had previously thought impossible.”