The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Greenough was the source and inspiration for the upcoming design change. Though his hands-on contribution was limited to the development of a much-improved fin, the original shortboards were built specifically so that stand-up surfers could ride in the same plunging, banking, high-low cursive style that Greenough had mastered while riding from his knees. Furthermore, Greenough swam out and photographed the tube from the inside looking out. This was a part of the wave that stand-up surfers almost never accessed, and to first-generation shortboarders, Greenough’s images were nothing less than visions of the promised land. Finally, Greenough, better than anybody in the sport, reflected the period’s best ideals: he was creative and open-minded, generous with his time, and glad to share his latest ideas on photography and board design with anybody who asked.

  Greenough was twenty-two when Brown filmed him at Sandspit; a thin-faced, narrow-shouldered scion of a wealthy Old California railroad family, a nephew by marriage to opera legend Beverly Sills, and a direct descendent of sculptor Horatio Greenough, whose oversized toga-draped marble of George Washington stood briefly in the Capitol rotunda. Like Bob Simmons before him, Greenough was an oddball of the first order. Open-heart surgery at age ten, and the long recovery period that followed, likely affected his social development. He seemed to enjoy meeting people, and, with only mild encouragement, could ramble on for twenty uninterrupted minutes about his latest project in a voice both enthusiastic and monotonous. But he didn’t tell jokes, or muse, or lament. He wasn’t political. Nobody, not even Simmons, could match Greenough for lack of grooming: always shoeless, often shirtless, resin-stained Levis clamped onto his nonexistent hips with a length of rope, stringy blonde hair cut straight across at eyebrow level and flapping down over his ears. He didn’t date and, like Simmons, never married. The original trust-fund surfer, Greenough never had to enter the job market; he lived at home and spent his days working on an endless series of garage-workshop projects, most of them involving surfcraft, boats, and heavy-duty waterproof cameras.

  GREENOUGH AT HONOLUA BAY.

  OTHER ATHLETES WERE GETTING HIGH, GROWING THEIR HAIR, AND LISTENING TO THE BEATIES’ WHITE ALBUM. BUT SURFERS VIRTUALLY MELTED INTO THE COUNTERCULTURE, IN WAYS BOTH ENGAGING AND ABSURD.

  Greenough was a stand-up surfer in the late 1950s, like everybody else, but by 1961 he began alternating between his kneeboard and an air-inflated surf mat; he liked the heightened sense of speed that came from a lowered body position. The smaller equipment was also easier to carry. In 1962 he made his first “spoon”—a blunt-nosed balsa kneeboard, 5 feet long and 23 inches wide, with a dished-out midsection and tail that slimmed down to a mere half-inch thickness. He replaced the standard fin—a boxy and rigid 10-inch-by-10-inch protuberance stuck like a flagstone to the end of the board—with a flexible swept-backed model he’d traced from the dorsal fin of a dolphin. Greenough’s new design reduced the fin area by roughly a third and greatly opened up the board’s handling. This “high aspect ratio fin”—to use the kind of engineer-speak Greenough favored—was the boom era’s most elegant and functional piece of equipment; amazingly, three years passed before it caught on.

  The flex fin was such a big improvement over its predecessor that Greenough, after a brief visit to Australia in late 1964, took what he felt was the next logical step and began working on a flexible board. “A fish moves when he swims,” Greenough explained, “so why not make a whole board that moves when it’s on a wave?” He sandwiched together a dozen layers of fiberglass in the shape of his old balsa kneeboard. Then he glued a U-shaped ridge of polyurethane foam to the deck, but only along the rails and nose; the back section of the board was fiberglass only. After attaching his latest narrow-based fin—this one in the shape of a tuna tail—Greenough sealed the whole thing in one last coat of fiberglass. The final product weighed just seven pounds, and the window-pane hull was thin enough to be transparent.

  His first trial runs were inconclusive. The board hardly floated—Greenough was only able to catch waves because, as a kneerider, he used swimfins—and it dragged horribly in small surf. But when the waves jumped up and Greenough could go fast enough to begin planing, the board worked like an expensive sports car—twitchy and high-strung but solid as a rock when handled correctly. As planned, the back section flexed under the compression of a good hard turn and propelled the board forward as it snapped back to true. The maneuverability was a thrill, as was the speed. “No matter how fast you were going,” Greenough said, “you could bury the forward rail and it would jump into the next gear.”

  By the end of 1965, Greenough was riding like a visitor from ten years in surfing’s future. He cranked out bottom turns where his board tilted up almost 90 degrees, and his hip and thigh skimmed flat along the water surface. Midway into a figure-eight cutback, he would cross his own still-simmering track before caroming off the whitewater. As a kneeboarder, he could grab the edges of his board with one or both hands, which greatly increased his stability; because his board was so small, and because Greenough’s riding profile was so low, it was much easier for him to get inside the tube—until the early 1970s, he spent more time traveling through “the green room” than all of the world’s top stand-up surfers combined.

  Greenough built a second fiberglass spoon in 1966, narrower and a bit lighter, trimmed out with bright-red rails. As a final touch, he hand-lettered the word “Velo”—short for velocity—near the nose. Later that year he eagerly packed up his new board, booked a first-class ticket with Qantas, and again flew off to Sydney.

  Greenough already thought of Australia as a second home. The California surf scene hadn’t wronged him in any way. But the sport there was going in one direction—clubs, competition, noseriding—while Greenough was going in another. Also, he refused to surf in a crowd. All those highdensity surf breaks in Los Angeles County—Greenough avoided them completely. He rode alone, or with a small group of friends, mostly on the privately held Hollister Ranch, just north of Santa Barbara. Occasionally he’d throw himself into the pack at Rincon, California’s best point wave. If Rincon was really firing, he liked to paddle out after the sun went down, let his eyes to adjust to the dark, and have the entire point to himself. Few people outside of the Santa Barbara area had ever seen Greenough surf.

  In Australia, Greenough reveled in the uncrowded point waves of Queensland and northern New South Wales—much of it as good as Rincon. He also got along well with the local surfers. The Aussies seemed to push a little harder and were more open to new ideas. California surfing, after two decades as the sport’s dominate power, had grown somewhat indolent and entitled. Even after Midget Farrelly won the 1964 World Championships, few Americans accepted the fact that Australia was now another major surf-world player. Fewer still understood the level of momentum that had built since then among Australia surfers and boardmakers. Greenough understood perfectly. The shortboard design seed was his to plant, and he chose to plant it Down Under.

  Bob Mctavish, Thinking Shorter

  Greenough’s greatest admirer was a barrel-chested twenty-two-year-old Queenslander named Bob McTavish. Introduced by a mutual friend, Greenough stayed with McTavish for a few weeks during his 1964 visit to Australia, and they’d surfed together almost daily at Noosa and Point Cartwright, among other gorgeous, uncrowded Sunshine Coast breaks. Still on his original balsa spoon, Greenough was already riding circles—almost literally—around everybody else. “The first wave I saw Greenough ride,” McTavish recalled, “I had a mental picture of a guy standing on a short surfboard, doing swooping turns, pushing into the curl—all sort of slippery and unencumbered.” It had always struck McTavish as odd that a surfboard’s control areas were separate: to go fast, you rode from the middle of the board, while any kind of real turning had to be done from the tail. It was like having to slide back and forth across the front seat to get from the steering wheel to the accelerator. Greenough had solved the problem—for kneeriders, anyway.

  “THE VISION HIT ME. FAST DROP, SLA
M INTO A BOTTOM TURN, CARVE OFF THE TOP, DRIVE DOWN THE FACE, REPEAT. THAT’S IT!”

  —Bob McTavish

  McTavish and Greenough were an unlikely pair. Greenough would return each year like a migratory bird to his family manor in Santa Barbara, while McTavish, an accountant’s son, left home for good at age sixteen, spending years bouncing from guestroom to couch to beachfront campsite. People loved having him around. McTavish was bright, funny, and enthusiastic—an arm-waving storyteller with a rubbery voice and a big laugh. He’d shave his head for kicks, or eat a bug if someone bought his next shout at the pub. He’d worked at a Brisbane radio station during his midteens, and still maintained a record collection filled with Detroit soul, Chicago blues, and the latest from the British Invasion. Maybe he wasn’t the original Aussie dope smoker—but he was probably up there among the first ten.

  Unlike Greenough, McTavish very much wanted to test himself and his ideas in the broader surf marketplace. Greenough had always steered away from the surf manufacturing centers of Los Angeles and Orange County, while at eighteen McTavish had eagerly hitchhiked to Sydney, where he worked for most of Australia’s major boardbuilders. He also entered surf contests. Small and muscular, quick and attacking, McTavish pushed himself into the top ranks: he was a three-time Queensland state champion, and in 1965 he finished third in the Australian National Titles, right behind Midget Farrelly and Nat Young.

  What McTavish and Greenough had in common was a love of surfboard design and construction. They spent most of their waking hours sketching out new ideas on scrap paper, buying materials, and crafting the next project. Remarkably, each of them, in 1960, owned a short surfboard. Very short. McTavish bought a 6-foot 6-inch experimental model from Gordon Woods, while Greenough, a stand-up rider at that point, made himself a baby blue 6-footer. Shorter boards weren’t entirely unheard of at that time. Velzy offered the 7-11 Model—as in, 7-foot 11-inches—and Californians Jim Foley and Mickey Munoz both rode sub-seven-footers. But these were simply miniature longboards and regarded mostly as novelty items. When they met, Greenough was already kneeboarding, and McTavish was on a conventional 9-foot 6-inch board.

  McTavish and Greenough never had a formal partnership. They rode together, got stoned, and had surf raps that went on for hours—with McTavish still nursing his vision of a stand-up rider charging across a wave “all slippery and unencumbered.” But there were design problems. During a ride, Greenough’s two points of contact with his board—his knees—were side-by-side and fixed in place. The stand-up surfer had his feet positioned on a line and needed to be mobile. How to reconcile these two very different styles of riding? Greenough visited Australia once a year from 1964 to 1966, and the only equipment feature McTavish was able to borrow from any of Greenough’s spoons was the tuna-tail fin. Nothing else seemed to apply to a stand-up board.

  PETER DROUYN, NAT YOUNG, MIDGET FARRELLY.

  Meanwhile, as McTavish noted, the Aussies were just as infatuated with noseriding as the Californians. Designers already understood there was a point at which any gains made toward deeper, faster, harder turns came at the expense of noseriding. “The idea in the midsixties was to get up there and hang ‘em,” McTavish said. “We’d become good at it, and I just wasn’t quite ready to throw it away.”

  This was the state of play in Australia when Greenough returned in mid-1966—although he could see that McTavish had pared down the thickness and weight of his boards since last year’s visit. Meanwhile, the buzz on the beach was all about the upcoming World Championships in San Diego. Midget Farrelly had already lost his title, but under conditions that many Australians felt were suspect. The 1965 Worlds, in Lima, Peru, had used the retrograde Makaha-style judging format, and local champion Felipe Pomar, in chunky double-overhead surf at a break just south of Lima, put in a solid if workmanlike performance to win. But Nat Young was a close second, and had positioned himself as an early frontrunner for the 1966 title, along with David Nuuhiwa and Farrelly. The San Diego contest was scheduled for October. Unlike Peru, it was certain to be a high-performance affair.

  Nat Young and the 1966 World Surfing Championships

  Nat Young and Bob McTavish met in 1962, but they didn’t become close friends until after Young returned from Peru, and McTavish loaned him a stack of hardcore R&B albums—an exciting new sound for the still-callow surfer.

  Young also met George Greenough in 1965, and like McTavish, he soon came to view the peculiar little straw-haired Yank as a surfing savant. The three formed a loose alliance in the name of improved performance and with an eye toward the 1966 Championships. The Aussie surf press picked up on this and promoted Young, McTavish, and Greenough as the key figures in what was dubbed the “New Era.” This “era” didn’t last a year. It ended in San Diego: a short, well-hyped transition period that was both a coda to the longboard era and a prelude to the shortboard revolution.

  Young was nearly a foot taller than McTavish, outweighed Greenough by more than forty pounds, and had the lean-jawed, curly-haired good looks of a matinee idol. By early 1966, he was also one of the best high-performance surfers in the world. Ambitious and smart, fully aware of his own talent, happy to wield his considerable presence to gain advantage, Young at age eighteen was just a step away from becoming the sport’s most dominant and domineering presence.

  Young grew up in Collaroy, a northeast Sydney suburb. His real name was Robert; local clubbies, laughing at the miniscule ten-year-old balanced atop his huge balsa-and-redwood log, nicknamed him “the Gnat.” He didn’t get along with his truck-driver father, and things got worse when Young dropped out of school at sixteen. Midget Farrelly was a close friend, and the two traveled together to Queensland, Victoria, and Hawaii, usually accompanied by filmmaker and surf magazine publisher Bob Evans. By 1964, Evans had become Young’s mentor and surrogate father, taking him on surf-related business lunches and advising him to dress well, never show up late, and shake hands firmly.

  A teenage growth spurt took Young nearly all the way to his full adult height of six-foot-three (at which point the “G” was conveniently dropped from his nickname), and left him with a flapping pair of size 13E feet. All that additional body mass transformed Young’s surfing. In 1963, he and Farrelly were both doing their best to copy California surfer Phil Edwards. Farrelly ended up with a beautifully polished variation on Edwards’ style. Young was more interested in matching the Californian’s fabled power. Early on, this meant direct forgery—Young would throw his arms overhead during a turn, just like the photos he’d seen of Edwards. The bigger Young got, however, the more original his style became. His stance was wider and more stable than Edwards’, giving him a faster recovery time after a big maneuver. Also, because Young rode with his lead foot at near right-angles to the centerline of his board—Edwards’ toes pointed more toward the nose—he was better able to leverage his weight from rail to rail. Both surfers combined strength with finesse, and liked to trim their performance with little flourishes—hand motions, head-fakes, a back arch. But power was the common denominator, and by 1965, riding a dark-maroon 10-foot 6-inch battleship of a surfboard, Young was already loading as much force into his turns and cutbacks as the old master. To his credit, Edwards recognized immediately what was happening. “Nat beat me at my own game. He was everything I was, only more.”

  Each gouging turn inflated Young’s sense of authority and self-regard. “The kid could do anything!” Bob McTavish once said. “He’d paddle back out faster than was humanly possible, stop, let out a string of obscenities, keep paddling past everyone, take any wave he wanted, swear again, laugh, paddle back out, swear a few more times, take the very next wave. And he could do it all day.” Young was “Australia’s answer to Bismarck,” one surf journalist wrote, and he was talented enough, big enough, and charismatic enough that nobody—or nobody Down Under, at least—ever called him to task. As Young himself phrased it in the cudgeling five-word epigraph he used when signing autographs: “Nat’s Nat and that’s that.” />
  * * *

  Young, McTavish, and Greenough surfed together for the first time as a group at Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast, in late 1965. Young was the celebrity of the three. He had his own signature model through Gordon Woods Surfboards—Young had been shaping boards for eighteen months and made each signed board personally—and was getting small, helpful monthly retainer checks from Woods and surfwear manufacturer Hang Ten. He was about to launch a weekly surf column for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. But hanging out with McTavish and Greenough on the Sunshine Coast, it was Young who did most of the watching and listening. He quickly switched over to a flexible, swept-back, Greenough-designed fin. He also saw that McTavish, on a thinner board, was getting more bite out of his turns. Greenough, meanwhile, did things in the water that had the other two almost gibbering in admiration.

  In early 1966, Young built himself a McTavish-style board, with a long, narrow Greenough fin. Nothing about the board’s template was out of the ordinary, except that at 9-feet 4-inches, and 22 inches wide, it was a half-foot shorter than what someone Young’s size would normally ride. The big difference with “Sam”—Young named the board before it was even finished—was how thin it was: just two and a half inches at the midpoint. Three and a half inches was the standard thickness, and this translated into about a 25 percent reduction in volume. It paddled terribly, compared to his old 10-foot 6-inch. But it was quicker and more responsive than any board he’d ever ridden. That April Young took Sam to the prestigious Bells Beach Easter contest and won—the first in what would be an unbroken run of victories that year.