NAT YOUNG AT THE 1966 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS, SAN DIEGO.
In the months before the World Championships in San Diego, the spotlight in Australia fell directly on Young, McTavish, and Greenough. Surfing World’s July issue had two photographs on the cover, one of Young, the other of Greenough, and a single blurb reading, “A New Era for Australian Surfing?” The hyperbole gushed forth. As Young explained in an article, surfing in “the old era”—meaning about two or three months earlier—“was when you went out in the water. Now surfing is living.” Careful distinctions were made between the tame-sounding “functional” school of riding and the new, aggressive “power” style. The idea, McTavish said, was to “take what the wave has to offer and use the hell out of it.”
While Surfing World made a national wave-riding hero out of Nat Young, the American surf press did the same thing for eighteen-year-old noseriding phenomenon David Nuuhiwa. In the last feverish days before the World Championships—as journalists for Life, Newsweek, and Wide World of Sports were issued press credentials; as Duke Kahanamoku flew in from Honolulu to serve as honorary chairman; as U.S. President Lyndon Johnson telexed over his White House “greetings and best wishes to all participants”—the event was cast as a two-man battle: Young vs. Nuuhiwa, the bruising Aussie against the velvet-smooth American.
Finally, after all the anticipation, the 1966 World Surfing Championships got underway. As expected, tens of thousands of spectators flooded the two San Diego competition sites—first Mission Beach, then Ocean Beach. The waves were small but well-shaped. Joyce Hoffman easily won her second world title, and fifty-two-year-old legend Pete Peterson won the tandem competition with a sixteen-year-old nonsurfing kewpie named Barrie Algaw.
But the Young-Nuuhiwa matchup was a bust.
Previous World Surfing Championships events had used a single-event format. In San Diego, organizers for the first time tried a three-contest series. Nuuhiwa thrilled fans by noseriding to victory in the opening round—Young took second—but faltered badly over the next two rounds and finished twelfth overall. Young, after fine-tuning Sam’s fin, charged back to win round two with a faultless display of power turns, leaving him so far ahead on combined points that he didn’t even need to show up for round three. He did anyway, and took that one as well.
At the Worlds in 1964 and 1965, there had been some grumbling about who really won—about how politics, or luck, or favoritism had skewed the results. Nothing like that happened in San Diego. Young overwhelmed the field. He fired off one torquing move after another, on wave after wave—and threw in some noseriding, too—and simply made the competition vanish.
Young reveled in his achievement even before it was officially completed. Halfway through the final heat on the final day, he rode a wave all the way in, stepped off his board, turned beachward with his fingertips on his hips, and looked out with satisfied defiance at the gathered crowd and judges. The first place trophy probably should have been rushed down and placed at his huge wet feet. Instead, Young paddled out to rip another wave or two before the horn sounded.
“We’re Tops Now”—Let the Feuding Begin
Not everybody was happy with Young’s victory—or with Young himself, for that matter. He wasn’t a particularly gracious winner. In a post-contest interview with Surfing magazine, Young started off by taking a jab at David Nuuhiwa (“Every wave, up front he walks, and stands there . . . I don’t think this is good surfing”), insulted women (“Girls shouldn’t surf, they make fools of themselves”), complained about some early-round judging decisions (“a lot of people screwed up”), and again blew his own New Era horn (“if McTavish and I ever get over here together, we’ll show so much good surfing to these California boys they won’t even believe it”). Young then climbed into a new Chevy Camaro V8 convertible—his world title grand prize—raced off to Las Vegas for a weekend of partying, flew back to Sydney, and took a four-month vacation from surfing.
As clear as Young’s win in San Diego had been, the American surf media’s first response was to play it down. Way down. Surfer announced that David Nuuhiwa had taken the top spot in the magazine’s annual reader poll awards. Then Surfing, just two months after the Worlds, identified Fred Hemmings, after his win at the 1966 Makaha International, as the sport’s new “International Champion.” Surf writer Bill Cleary wrote not only that the noseride was still the sport’s ultimate expression, but that “the Australians might be a little more conservative” than the Americans in their riding.
Sydney’s John Witzig, an Australian editor and New Era provocateur, was furious at this denial of what happened in San Diego and wrote a firebombing article titled “We’re Tops Now” for the May 1967 issue of Surfer. “Has everyone [in California] forgotten that David was beaten? Thrashed? How much a shock has it been to see the idols, the graven images, fall so unceremoniously to the ranks of also-rans. Everything the pedestal of California surfing is built upon means—nothing!”
Thus provoked, the West Coasters went on the attack. David Nuuhiwa called Witzig’s article a “bunch of garbage,” and Endless Summer’s Mike Hynson dismissed Young as a “sellout” with a “big ego.” Young’s idea of good surfing, Hynson continued, meant “crawling over the wave, while ours is blending with it . . . we’ve always been ahead of the Australians.”
It was the grinding sound of one surf nation overtaking another. Australia passed California in 1966 to become the world leader in progressive surfing, just as California had passed Hawaii after the war. And it wasn’t just Young’s doing. Midget Farrelly and Rod Sumpter (British-born, but a Sydney resident his entire surfing life) were also both finalists in San Diego, meaning that Australians filled out half of the men’s division finalist positions. George Greenough, nominally American, had all but defected to the Sunshine Coast. And Australia’s junior division surfers were even further ahead of their American counterparts.
An even bigger gap between the two nations was about to open up in board design. The shortboard revolution was launched on Sydney’s northern beaches, not long after the World Championships. It was eight months after that before the Americans even heard about it.
Enter the Plastic Machine
Bob McTavish missed the 1966 World Championships—the U.S. Department of State had correctly red-flagged McTavish as a former deportee and wouldn’t issue him a visa—then steered clear of the whole blustering Aussie vs. Yank postscript. In February 1967, McTavish moved from Queensland back to Sydney. He got a job shaping for Keyo Surfboards in Brookvale, and took a room with surf moviemaker Paul Witzig—John’s older brother—in the quiet shorefront suburb of Palm Beach. Four months earlier he’d made an experimental board for a friend: a 9-footer with a flat longitudinal middle section on the bottom, flanked by 6-inch-wide bevels along the back and center rails—a configuration that divided the planing surface into three panels. The report was that the board was a little unstable, but easy to turn.
McTavish went a step further in March, shaping himself a 9-footer in which he tossed out the flat middle section so the two bevel surfaces met in a V-shape along the back third of the board’s spine. It was a bizarre-looking piece of surfcraft: thicker in the rear than the middle, with a sloping squared-off tail that looked as if it belonged on the back of a yacht. McTavish called it the “deep-vee,” and the idea behind it was simple: it was going to tip over onto one panel or the other, so you had to keep turning the thing. Paul saw the board right after it was shaped, and trying his hand at the new counterculture argot, said, “Wow! It looks like a plastic machine!” McTavish said “Wow!” back, and rushed off to hand-letter the phrase in huge psychedelic longhand across the bottom; from then on, he referred to all his deep-vees as “plastic machines.”
McTavish launched his new board at daybreak the following Saturday and rode for nine hours without a break—it was, he said, “the most enlightening day of surfing I’d ever experienced.” Maneuverability was off the charts compared to what he’d been riding. Even better, the acceleratio
n sweet spot had moved back a foot or so closer to the turning area, which put McTavish a big step closer to his Greenough-inspired vision, where speed and handling were both controlled from the same place.
BOB MCTAVISH AND HIS 1967 “PLASTIC MACHINE,” SUNSET BEACH.
Everything he liked about the plastic machine, in fact, came from the tail section. McTavish understood right away that noseriding was about to fall out of the picture entirely. The nose itself, for that matter, was mostly expendable. Two weeks later McTavish made himself an 8-foot 6-inch board, and two weeks after that he dropped down to an 8-footer. He thinned out the rails, especially in the front end, and used a single-layer of glass on each side, instead of two. The boards were less sturdy, but they weighed just 12 pounds, which did nearly as much to loosen up the handling as the V-shape itself.
McTavish did most of his test-piloting in the mediocre but convenient surf at Palm Beach near his house. He often saw Midget Farrelly a hundred yards down the beach, on equipment that appeared to be just as light and loose as his own. It was an inspiring and vaguely uncomfortable little pas de deux. The two surfers had been good friends a few years earlier. They’d double-dated (Farrelly married one of McTavish’s ex-girlfriends), and in 1963 McTavish had even moved in briefly with Farrelly and his parents. But in 1966, just before Nat Young won the World Championship, John Witzig had written an article for Surfing World on Midget Farrelly not-so-subtly entitled, “The End of an Era?” This marked the beginning of a lifelong feud between Farrelly and Young, and anybody associated with what Farrelly bitterly referred to as “the Nat camp.” In 1967, McTavish’s association with Young made him an enemy combatant.
McTavish was as gregarious as ever, going to lots of parties, making boards for many of Sydney’s best riders, and keeping himself “fired up on the Stones, Hendrix, and LSD.” Farrelly, by contrast, was an antidrug crusader. Convinced that the Australian surf industry had turned on him, he became the most isolated of his country’s ranking surfers. Farrelly opened a small boardmaking factory in Palm Beach and independently came to the same realization as McTavish: shorter equipment was the next thing. His boards were progressive and beautifully made—Farrelly was perhaps the finest craftsman in all of Australian surfing at the time—and he was riding better than ever. Yet the two surfers barely exchanged a word through all of 1967. It didn’t really matter. “Midget was my pace-horse that entire year,” McTavish later recalled. “He was passionate and dedicated, and went inch-for-inch with me at Palm Beach. Pretty impressive, for a lone soldier.”
Young reentered the picture in mid-April. He’d been hired as a manager for White Stag wetsuits in Australia and spent much of early 1967 introducing the new line to department stores around the country. The national titles were held that year at Bells Beach, and Young had enough fire left to win the event. But he’d become frustrated with surfing, particularly with his equipment: Young had left Sam, his world title board, in San Diego, and now he couldn’t seem to make himself a good replacement. Meanwhile Young and McTavish hadn’t spoken since McTavish had built his first plastic machine.
Bored one afternoon with his White Stag office duties, Young drove his new Mercedes 220SE to Keyo Surfboards, just a day or so after the shop had taken delivery on a dozen factory-fresh McTavish plastic machines. He froze for a moment at the sight of all those weird-looking 8-footers. Then he figured out what was going on and half-shouted to no one in particular, “Why wasn’t I told?”—and stormed out the door. One week later Young was riding a plastic machine of his own design and turning harder than anybody.
American surfers had no idea what McTavish, Farrelly, and Young were up to in Sydney. Noseriding on 9-foot 6-inch signature model boards was still the hot thing. At a surf contest in April 1967, David Nuuhiwa introduced a new wrinkle as he paddled tail-first into a small wave, stood, deftly whipped the board around 180 degrees, and then began his elegant cross-stepping walk to the nose—a nifty little trick.
NAT YOUNG, BYRON BAY, 1967.
The shortboard had a quiet international debut in October 1967, when San Diego’s Windansea Surf Club flew to Sydney to compete against a team of Australians. The visitors, all on conventional longboards, were shocked to see what the Aussies were riding—the latest plastic machines were down to 7-feet 6-inches—and were duly routed in the competition. The event itself had been arranged by Los Angeles filmmakers Eric and Lowell Blum as a hook for what they hoped would be an Endless Summer–like travelogue about the Windansea gang. Instead of being fun-loving and likeable, though, the Windansea surfers did nothing but irritate the Blums. Meeting the dynamic Aussie characters behind the new shortboard was such a relief to the filmmakers that they devoted the second half of the movie to McTavish, Young, and Greenough—abandoning the Windansea plotline in Sydney, without explanation to the viewer—and titled their finished product The Fantastic Plastic Machine.
The American surf press mostly ignored the Windansea contest, and Plastic Machine didn’t arrive in theaters until 1969. The short surfboard’s real coming out party—the one everybody remembered, with the proper amount of noise and clamor—began at the start of the 1967–68 winter season in Hawaii.
The Shortboard in Hawaii
After the 1966 World Championships, Hawaii didn’t get involved in the verbal shoving match between California and Australia. Jock Sutherland of Haleiwa had placed runner-up to Nat Young in San Diego, and earned his fellow islanders a nice piece of competition glory. Except they didn’t really need or want it—at least not the way most Aussies and mainlanders did. Hawaii had a different ranking system. Outperforming the beachbreak whiz kids in San Diego or Sydney counted for something, no question. But not as much as how you handled yourself in triple-overhead Sunset Beach peaks, or spitting Pipeline tubes, or no-exit hundred-yard-long walls at Laniakea. Contest wins, as the Hawaiians viewed it, could enhance a surfer’s reputation but never build it outright. For proof, the Hawaiians offered Paul Strauch—a twenty-three-year-old University of Hawaii business student regarded by insiders as the smoothest, most refined surfer in the world—and Barry Kanaiaupuni, who turned harder than Nat Young and with twice the style. Neither surfer won a major contest in 1966, yet both, by consensus agreement, quietly outsurfed the international pack in Hawaii that winter.
So did Honolulu’s Fred Hemmings, but he was in many ways a different kind of Hawaii surfer—loud, attention-seeking, and fiercely competitive. Polio-stricken as a child, Hemmings willed himself into becoming both an all-league high school football player and a surprisingly graceful surfer. Hemmings had none of Nat Young’s voguish surf-world charisma—he always came off like a jock moonlighting as a surfer—but was every bit the Aussie’s match in terms of confidence and willfulness, and nearly as quick with inflammatory on-the-record comments. Young’s 1966 world title win, Hemmings told Surfing magazine, “was a big publicity stunt more than anything else.” In another article, he said that Hawaii had “the best surf in the world and the best surfers in the world,” and that he was tired of visiting Australians who liked to “knock our islands and rape our waves.” Hemmings backed up his boasting: he’d already won three Makaha titles, and in 1966, at age twenty, he won another. (Young placed a distant fourth.)
One year later, Young and McTavish brought their plastic machines to the North Shore for the 1967 Duke Invitational. Hemmings took one look at the new V-bottom boards, smirked, and got ready for another of his entertaining blowhard rants. In fact, Young didn’t compete; he gave his contest invitation to Bob McTavish, then decided to go with his friend to Hawaii anyway, just to see how the new equipment would perform in bigger surf. McTavish got off to a bad start on the North Shore. Qantas lost his board, and he didn’t get it until the morning of the Duke contest. With no warmup, and Sunset throwing out some nasty twelve-footers, McTavish bungled his two best waves and failed to advance. He managed to squeeze in a few good turns in-between the wipeouts, though, and caught the eye of Surfer reporter Patrick McNulty, who said McTavish�
�s Duke performance proved that he was “one of the most creative surfers in the sport.” Naturally, Hemmings disagreed, calling McTavish the “spin-out king of the Duke contest” and dismissing the V-bottom design as “absurd for Hawaiian surf.” One week later, McTavish and Young proved Hemmings wrong—and did so in spectacular fashion.
After the Duke contest, McTavish flew to Maui, where he met Young, the Witzig brothers—Paul was there shooting Hot Generation, his first surf movie—two or three other Australian surfers, and George Greenough. Everybody was counting on a swell big enough to hit Honolua Bay, a point wave located on Maui’s northwest corner and considered by many to be Hawaii’s finest break. Incoming waves here are filtered through a pair of offshore islands, then attenuated as they wrap into the bay itself; the Honolua surf is usually half the size of the North Shore, but twice as groomed. Late-sixties surfers loved Honolua because it was long, hollow, and finely tapered, and because the setting was a Tolkien version of surfing paradise: densely canopied hills and valleys, red-dirt roads, and the bay itself filled with dramatic cliffs and boulders and translucent jade-green water. For the past year or so, adventurous surfers had been gravitating from Oahu to Maui to take advantage of the still-uncrowded Honolua lineup, dirt-cheap rent, and the world’s best pot.
One of the Maui newcomers was Dick Brewer, a former machinist and hot-rodder from Long Beach. Brewer moved to Hawaii in 1960, and within three years had earned a reputation for making the sport’s finest big-wave guns. He worked for one manufacturer after another, and in 1967, while with Bing Surfboards, he developed a series of models—the Pipeliner, the Lightweight, the Pintail—that were the favorites of some of Hawaii’s top riders. If Brewer was a boardmaking craftsman without equal, he was also volatile, difficult to work with, and egotistical—he was the first surfer to make a habit out of referring to himself in the third person. Before signing with Bing, Brewer doubled his shaping rate (from $25 to $50 per board) and demanded an air-conditioned shaping room. The job fell apart later in 1967, and in a departing hissy-fit Brewer night-raided the Bing factory and sawed apart all the wooden boardbuilding racks. He then flew back to Maui to open a tiny operation called Lahaina Surf Design—or LSD. Brewer was one of the first surfers to go deep into psychedelics, and he was the first to tap drug culture as a marketing tool.
The History of Surfing Page 38