The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Ads for Greg Noll’s “Da Cat” model, featuring Mickey Dora, were high-concept anarchy disguised as promotion. One ad featured Dora stretched Christ-like on a cross made of surfboards. Another had him dressed as a leather-helmeted World War I German flying ace, complete with flying goggles and a Maltese Cross hanging from his neck. When Dora himself wasn’t featured, the images still zinged along at the same velocity; a Pop Art cartoon ad showed a grim-faced military official beneath a thought bubble that reads, “Da Cat is the greatest threat to our pure white virgin sport . . . NOW is the time for the CIA to crush him!!”

  The signature board was part of the model craze. All the top boardmakers sponsored surf teams—which, for most team riders, meant nothing more than shop discounts on boards, some free surfwear, and a bit of beachfront prestige. Decked out in matching trunks, shirts, and jackets, company surf teams hit the beach for weekend surf contests looking like the local high school basketball squad. The very best riders got their own signature-approved model board—surfing’s answer to the Brooks Robinson glove or the Jack Nicklaus putter. This, in turn, created a small and short-lived class of professional surfers. Ten dollars was the standard payment for each signature board sold, and while most “pros” never earned a royalty check bigger than three figures, a handful of top-earners cleared $25,000 in 1966 and 1967.

  Dora’s “Da Cat” campaign aside, surfboard makers were still looking for—begging for—mainstream acceptance. Dewey Weber’s ads for the Performer were as slick and inoffensive as anything published in Life or Time. All of the “Big Five” boardmakers (Hobie Alter, Bing Copeland, Dewey Weber, Don Hansen, and Larry Gordon), photographed for a 1966 Surfing magazine cover story, wore suits, ties, and dress shoes. Competition trophies, for that matter, were the same marble-bottomed tin-plate confections handed out at tennis meets and bowling tournaments—but with a miniature surfer on top.

  Girl in the Curl

  A smooth-surfing Honolulu tomboy named Joey Hamasaki had her own signature board, as did Joyce Hoffman—both models were marketplace failures. Still, women’s surfing posted a few gains during the boom. San Diego high school sophomore Linda Benson won the Makaha International in 1959, doing spinners and cutbacks like a wind-up toy, and later that year she was featured in Cat on a Hot Foam Board. In 1964, Orange County surfer Linda Merrill became the first woman to make the cover of Surfer, just a few months before Surf Guide ran a cover portrait of the Calhoun family—mother Marge and daughters Candy and Robin, all knockouts, and all capable of outsurfing most of the guys.

  Joyce Hoffman was on a different level altogether. She was blond and attractive, with a radiant smile and the deadliest competitive drive in all of surfing: “My idea of having fun,” she once said, “is being the best at something and winning all the time.” From 1964 to 1967, Hoffman claimed four straight USSA ratings’ titles, two world championships, two Makaha events, and four Surfer Poll titles—all before her twentieth birthday. She was named Miss Capistrano Beach. She was profiled in Seventeen, Vogue, and Teen. Triumph gave her a free TR4 roadster and used her in full-page ads. While Hoffman came off as arrogant and petty in a 1965 Sports Illustrated feature, just a few months later the Los Angeles Times named her Woman of the Year. As the Times reported, Hoffman was a straight-A student who didn’t smoke or drink, liked Andy Williams records, and preferred (in Hoffman’s words), “nice, clean movies . . . not the new trash they’re putting out.” There was plenty of eye-rolling among surfers at Hoffman’s sanitized presentation of herself and the sport, but nobody gainsaid the fact that she was a kick-ass surfer who had made a big impression on middle America.

  BEACH BUNNY AND SURFER GIRL, SYDNEY, 1966.

  If the sport made an exception for Hoffman and a few others, women for the most part were still treated as decorative: not selling their own boards, but rubbing up against someone else’s model in an advertisement; handing out trophies at an awards ceremony; or just watching the towels and valuables while the guys hit the waves. Sexism probably wasn’t worse in surfing than it was in the culture at large. There were even moments when it appeared as if surfing might doing more than other sports to drain the sexism swamp—Surf Guide’s 1963 cover shot of Linda Benson, for example, with its exclamatory “World’s Greatest” blurb. But then there was Surfing magazine’s “International Foxes” cheesecake, and the inevitable, gratuitous zoom-lens bikini sequence in every surf movie.

  “Girls do fine when it comes to housework, raising children, doing office work, doing the twist and even riding the small ankle-snappers at Malibu,” big-wave hardass Buzzy Trent allowed. The problem began, Trent continued, when they overreached. “One thing I can’t stand is girls riding, or attempting to ride, big waves. You see, girls are much more emotional than men and therefore have a greater tendency to panic . . . there is nothing in the world more ridiculous than a girl who dares to show off and then panics out.”

  Yet this kind of attention, too, was an exception. Women surfers—not the beach girls and bikini models, but actual female surfers—were mostly just ignored and overlooked. Entire surf movies passed by without a single clip of a woman riding a wave. It was boys-only membership for a lot of manufacturer’s surf teams. Surfer’s coverage of the 1965 World Championships ran to eight text-heavy pages, and listed the men’s winners from first to eighth place, with point totals for each rider. Twenty words, total, were given to the women’s event, and the magazine couldn’t be bothered to print the results.

  This was surfing sexism during the boom age. It only got worse in years to come.

  David Nuuhiwa and the Noseriding Phenomenon

  Surfer ran a feature in 1965 titled “Phil Edwards Picks the Top Ten Noseriders.” Heading the roster was a seventeen-year-old goofyfooter with a last name that most people were still stumbling over—David Nuuhiwa. The Hawaiian pronunciation was something close to “Newee-He-Wa.” To kids on the beach it was either “New-Way-Va” or “New-Whee-Va.”

  Edwards’ list was a who’s-who of high performance surfers in the midsixties. It included Corky Carroll, a junior division chatterbox who went on to become the winningest American surfer of the decade; a smooth and gentlemanly Hawaiian named Paul Strauch; and Malibu specialist Lance Carson—a noserider with superhuman balance and a roaring early-stage alcoholic—who once famously climbed up nude on the hood of a friend’s car and was conveyed across a Winchell’s parking lot with a honey-glazed donut wrapped like a tea cozy around his member. Not on Edwards’ list, but everyone’s favorite all-arounder, was Mike Doyle—a big, hatched-nosed regularfooter who won surf contests, paddleboard races, and tandem events, and rode the heavies at Sunset and Waimea.

  These were all big-name surfers. But they were all more or less regular guys, too—someone you might strike up a conversation with in the lineup during a lull. David Nuuhiwa was different: smooth enough in the water to make other top riders look as if they were riding over gravel, but also dark and quiet, with a Miles Davis level of cool. Nuuhiwa had star quality the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Duke Kahanamoku in his Jazz Age prime. By late 1965, he was all but levitating over the American surf scene.

  Wave-riding itself was simply an enormous natural gift that Nuuhiwa was smart enough to look after and polish—for awhile, at least. The cool was born in part out of hardship. Motherless since the age of four, Nuuhiwa was the runaway son of a Waikiki beachboy. He arrived in Hermosa Beach in 1962, a fourteen-year-old dropout, to live with eighteen-yearold Donald Takayama—another immensely talented Hawaiian runaway. Nuuhiwa earned his keep sweeping foam dust off the floors of the Weber Surfboards factory where Takayama shaped boards.

  Even as a schoolboy surfer Nuuhiwa was marked as someone to watch, not so much because he’d already mastered all the old beachboy tricks—spinners, switching stance, walking the deck—but because he went from one move to the next with the smoothness of a young panther. By 1965, Nuuhiwa’s style verged on the immaculate: arms resting low off the hips while trimming; face calm; hands,
legs, hips, and ankles all moving together as if they were coated in graphite. Where Phil Edwards made an art out of overreach and recovery, Nuuhiwa put his turns together like Rudolf Nureyev on a long pass across the floor at Lincoln Center. The two surfers were physically distinct as well: the slender and smooth-limbed Nuuhiwa, despite being just over six feet tall, looked almost waifish next to the hairy-shouldered Edwards. Big surf didn’t particularly interest Nuuhiwa, although he rode well during his occasional visits to the North Shore.

  JOYCE HOFFMAN, MAKAHA, 1966.

  DAVID NUUHIWA.

  Nuuhiwa was the USSA juniors champion for three years in a row, beginning in 1964, and in 1965 he was a division winner at the Makaha International and the U.S. Championships. The growing Nuuhiwa phenomenon had less to do with contest ratings, though, than with his polished turns, his elegant trim line, and above all—Nuuhiwa’s signature move—his long, time-suspending noserides.

  Riding the forward half of the board was an old trick. By the midforties, Hawaiian hot curl ace Rabbit Kekai had moved all the way up to the front quarter. But noseriding wasn’t identified as a maneuver unto itself until the early 1950s, after the surfboard fin had grown big enough to really anchor the tail. Dale Velzy is sometimes credited as the first surfer to hang five toes off the front end, and the obvious next move was to get all ten toes over—Velzy, again, probably got there first. Noseriding was a big enough deal by the end of the fifties that John Severson included a “Toes on the Nose” layout in the debut issue of Surfer, which turned into the magazine’s first regular feature.

  There were two great things about noseriding. First, it looked impossible. With all that weight on the tip of a thin, narrow, floating platform, how could the front end not sink? (Answer: water drawing up from the trough gets caught beneath the nose’s planing surface, making a fragile, weight-bearing platform.) There were plenty of subtleties and variations, and real noseriding mastery took years to achieve. Nevertheless, because it was generally performed at medium-slow speed, in waist-high-or-smaller waves, it was an easy trick to work on. You could practice cross-stepping—the elegant but much harder way of moving across the board, as distinct from the shuffle-up method—in the smallest, junkiest conditions. On a closeout, you could hustle forward for what better surfers dismissively referred to as a “kamikaze run” and perch briefly on the tip before wiping out. Cutting back was hard. Hanging five was easy.

  The other great thing about noseriding was that it made the surfer feel weightless. Because the board wasn’t visible, it felt as if it simply didn’t exist. “When you get up there, you kind of lose your mind,” one top noserider said. “There’s nothing in front of you; nothing but air. It’s just your feet gliding across the wave.”

  By 1963, noseriding had become a surf-world obsession—“a sport within the sport,” as surf journalist Bill Cleary put it. Surfer ran noseriding how-to columns and published an allnoseriding calendar. Board manufacturers produced special noseriding boards with an extra-wide front end for increased lift and stability—Con Surfboards’ “Ugly” model measured an elephantine twenty inches, rail to rail, one foot down from the tip. Judges thumbed their stopwatches and barked out times during noseriding-only competitions, in which each surfer’s score was determined by the total number of seconds spent on the nose over the course of the event. Five seconds was considered a medium-long noseride; anything over ten seconds was getting into record-breaking territory.

  David Nuuhiwa turned noseriding from a trick into an art form. His movements were so fluid that he seemed to materialize on the front end, where he might rest his fingertips lightly on his hips, or lift a foot antennae-like out into the airspace ahead, or gently pressure the inside rail so that his board sideslipped down the face—an incredibly difficult bit of maneuvering. But mostly, he would just stand in long, quiet, hypnotic repose. “He changed surfing,” one journalist wrote. “For awhile, in fact, David was surfing itself, a pharaoh, noseriding to the adoring masses.”

  While Nuuhiwa changed surfing, it changed him. Wary and shy during his midteens, at eighteen he displayed a growing imperiousness—and this, too, was something different in the sport. Surfing celebrity was still a new development, and famous surfers (Mickey Dora excepted) had for the most part offered themselves to the media as good-natured beach jocks. Nuuhiwa wanted to be a surfing rock star. In 1966 he had his thick black hair cut into a Mick Jagger-Aftermath shag, didn’t return phone calls, and used the royalties from his hot-selling David Nuuhiwa Noserider signature model to buy a purple Porsche 911, which he drove like hell to the Whisky-A-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip.

  As the adulation from Nuuhiwa’s “adoring masses” grew, a few surfing insiders wondered how long it would be before this fast young peacock would hit a bump in the road. Not long, as it turned out.

  The Endless Summer and the Politics of the Perfect Wave

  Nothing better encapsulated the 1960s surf boom, nor more clearly marked its end, than The Endless Summer, Bruce Brown’s cheerful crossover documentary hit. Filmed in 1963 at the very height of the boom, The Endless Summer wasn’t released to general audiences until fall 1966, at which point the movie played like a coda for a memorable period in the sport that, rather than being endless, vanished almost instantly.

  Brown’s premise was simple—follow two California surfers around the world in search of the perfect wave—and the end result had a casualness that almost seemed offhand. To a lot of nonsurfers, Brown looked like a slightly aging gremmie who by some fluke had made a great first movie. Endless Summer was in fact Brown’s sixth full-length work, and while he did come off as the very embodiment of California beach cool—blond, tan, and grinning, with, as writer Tom Wolfe described, a “Tom Sawyer little-boy roughneck look about him, like Bobby Kennedy”—he was also a driven and meticulous filmmaker.

  Brown was a nineteen-year-old San Clemente surfer-lifeguard in 1957 when boardmaker Dale Velzy agreed to produce his debut movie, first buying him a new Bolex camera and editing equipment, then peeling off $5,000 in expense money—enough to get Brown and his “cast” (five hot California surfers) to Hawaii for the winter and to cover all production costs. Brown read a how-to book on filmmaking during the flight to Honolulu. Back in San Clemente two months later, unwilling to pay for a work print, Brown edited and spliced directly on the master.

  Brown’s first film, Slippery When Wet, toured Southern California beach cities in the second half of 1958, with a reel-to-reel soundtrack by jazzman Bud Shank, and Brown doing live narration. Greg Noll, John Severson, and Bud Browne also had movies out that season; Slippery wasn’t necessarily better than the others, but Brown was by far the best narrator, and his film got the most laughs. He did a good job with his set-up shots: guys walking with their boards, conferring alongside the highway, playing cards. Brown’s favorite portrait angle, lifted from old Olympic Games newsreels, was a frontlit head-and-shoulders shot taken from waist level, framing the surfer in a mildly worshipful upturned gaze.

  Brown made another four movies, then in 1962 he put all his savings—$50,000—into what he hoped would be an upscale general-audience version of his earlier films. At first, the idea was to simply fly two hot California surfers to South Africa and go exploring for new breaks. The global “perfect wave” quest wasn’t born until Brown’s travel agent told him that he’d actually save $50 per ticket if he continued flying east around the world. Brown then realized that by crossing the equator, the summer season was doubled—The Endless Summer was picked as a title before Brown began filming. (As a rule, summer waves don’t hold a candle to winter waves, and Brown knew this as well as anybody. He also knew that The Endless Winter wasn’t going to bring ’em out in Des Moines.)

  Brown picked his two surfers well. Robert August was Endless Summer’s calm, dark-haired goofyfooter. Mike Hynson was the grinning regularfooter with the permanently slicked-back blond hair. August had just graduated as student-body president of his high school and hoped to become a dentist; Hynson w
as a grass-smoking, Benzedrine-popping wiseass on the run from the U.S. Army draft board. None of this came out in the movie. Both were likeable and authentic—genuine surfers as compared to, say, Moondoggie or Steamer Lane—but they were two-dimensional. Endless Summer wasn’t about Robert August and Mike Hynson; it was Brown’s paean to surfing. The two stars were there only to move the action along from country to country, from one surf-related topic to the next.

  Brown, August, and Hynson arrived at Los Angeles International Airport wearing suits and ties, as airplane passengers did in 1963. They traveled light. August and Hynson had one board each; Brown’s entire arsenal of camera gear, cases included, weighed less than a hundred pounds. There was no film crew. From California, over a four-month period, they circumnavigated the globe from west to east. They came upon half-mile long waves in New Zealand, virgin reef surf in Senegal, and backwash swells in Tahiti. (Left on the cutting room floor: a two-day visit to the west coast of India, where the boards and camera gear were all impounded for the duration.) Hitting the most spectacular gusher in surf travel history, they also found what they went looking for—the perfect wave—at a place called Cape St. Francis in South Africa.