The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The Torquay Boardriders Club, named after a modest farm town two miles down the road, sponsored the first Bells Beach surf contest in 1962. A juniors division was included the next year, and a women’s division was added in 1966. By this time “Easter Bells”—meaning the contest itself, the pilgrimage to and from Victoria, lots of extracurricular surfs sessions at nearby breaks like Winkipop and 13th Beach, and at least three big nights at the Torquay Pub, where the barkeep, as one surf journalist noted, “announces closing time with the aid of a fire hose”—had already become an Australian surfing tradition. Every three or four years, the contest itself would produce something extraordinary. Deep-blue twelve-footers rolled steadily into the bay for the final heats of the 1967 event; Nat Young, Queenslander Peter Drouyn, and Midget Farrelly were all in midseason form (finishing in that order). Bob McTavish wasn’t competing, but he made a stir by crossing the packed-dirt Bells parking lot with one of the first plastic machines tucked under his arm and hitting the water to catch the biggest wave of the week—a ripping fifteen-footer—thereby announcing last call on the longboard era. As much as it felt like an outpost, Bells always seemed to be at the center of things.

  That didn’t change, even at the height of the country soul era. Nat Young showed up every year, and won in 1970. Three years later, a new wetsuit company named Rip Curl agreed to a sponsorship deal and Bells became Australia’s first major professional event. The setting made the difference. Bells was still part of the commercial surf scene, but detached enough that it didn’t feel that way. Easter at Bells was an attractive proposition to trophy-hunters and soul monsters alike.

  Surf Industry Down Under

  In 1968, an unlikely surf-world industrial power was born in Torquay. That year a local goofyfooter named Doug Warbrick grew tired of waiting three or four months to take delivery on his McTavish-built plastic machine, and decided, along with grade-school teacher Brian Singer, to launch Rip Curl Surfboards. Warbrick and Singer quickly made the same discovery that Jack O’Neill had made ten years earlier in Santa Cruz: cold-water surfers will come around now and then to buy a locally made board, but they’ll swarm like honeybees for a well-cut, reasonably priced wetsuit. The Rip Curl wetsuit line was introduced in 1970, as the company moved from Singer’s garage to a defunct bakery on Torquay Road. Three years later, Rip Curl was Australia’s biggest wetsuit manufacturer.

  It was Melbourne surfer Alan Green, an accounting school dropout, who first suggested to Warbrick and Singer that they make wetsuits. They agreed, and Green coaxed $2,500 from his dad to become a partner. Other new Rip Curl offerings included surf trunks (“boardshorts” in Australia; not a big seller in Victoria), and a high-top fleece-lined footwear generically known as “ug boots” (short for “ugly,” warm as toast, and a very big seller in Victoria). Green looked after the boardshort part of the business, which he immediately moved to a rented flat down the road. He also wanted to rename the line. His girlfriend—a fan of San Francisco acid-rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service—thought that Quicksilver sounded really cool. Looking to avoid any trademark infringement hassles, Green first proposed “Kwiksilver,” then settled for the “c”-less “Quiksilver.” He also registered Ug Manufacturing. Because the idea was to service both winter and summer trade—ug boots and boardshorts—Quiksilver’s new handdrawn company logo featured a wave curling over a snow-peaked mountain.

  By 1973, Rip Curl and its subsidiaries had put Torquay on the surf map as a small but growing industrial center—an astounding fact, given that the town had less than four thousand residents. Or maybe not so astounding. Years later, Queensland surf journalist Tim Baker proposed that Torquay was actually the perfect place to make wetsuits and boardshorts. “You can’t surf all day here, the way you can in Queensland,” Baker wrote, noting the cold Victorian weather, “and there weren’t enough surfers here to support large-scale board manufacturing, like in Sydney.” In other words, Torquay in the early seventies was home to fifty or so loyal surfers with plenty of time to work and an incentive to make exportable goods. Another factor in Torquay’s rise to power: Rip Curl and Quiksilver were able to move fast in the mid-seventies when the gargantuan American surf market all of a sudden went crazy for Australian products. In that respect, as Rip Curl’s Brian Singer later admitted, there was little or no business strategy. “We were just incredibly fuckin’ lucky.”

  This shift was set in motion in 1974, when Quiksilver brought out a scallop-legged, snap-and-Velcro-fly boardshort with a color-contrast waistband. It didn’t reinvent the trunk, but it looked different, and that mattered. The “beach mom” trunk style, with stovepipe legs and lace-up front, made it through the shortboard revolution completely intact, and Kanvas by Katin was still the gold-standard surf trunk brand. But these new Quiksilvers—still two years away from making their American debut—were more comfortable than Katins and better-looking. And just cooler, in the way that Aussie surfers themselves were becoming cooler.

  An overdue but more or less amicable Rip Curl business split took place in 1976, as Green and new partner John Law became sole owners of Quiksilver and Ug Manufacturing, leaving Warbrick and Singer in charge of Rip Curl wetsuits. At the same time, a Queensland boardmaker named Gordon Merchant hustled his way into Australian surf shops with a new brightly colored boardshort line he called Billabong. Everybody figured that “Billabong” was an Aboriginal word, but what did it mean? A kind of dead-end river lagoon, Merchant confessed. There was no surf connection. He just liked how the word sounded. Billabong wasn’t part of the great 1970s export-to-America gold rush, like Quiksilver and Rip Curl. It caught up soon enough, though, and was a great success.

  Surfboard manufacturing in Australia was doing just as well. Most major boardmakers were involved to some degree with the development of the shortboard, and a few—Keyo Surfboards in particular—even managed to come out on the other side with improved sales. Midget Farrelly was still making fine high-performance equipment, as was Dick Van Straalan in Queensland, and Narrabeen whiz Terry Fitzgerald. Most popular of all was Geoff McCoy, an overweening boardmaker out of Sydney with a blonde Prince Valiant haircut, who more than anybody picked up the mantle from Bob McTavish and went in for serious—and successful—R&D work. His “stubby” design was a giant hit from the moment Brookvale-based McCoy Surfboards opened in 1970.

  Competition among Aussie shapers was fierce, and the pace of development was that much quicker for it. Boardmakers here also knew to keep an open mind—a legacy from the shortboard revolution. It made a big difference. Throughout the seventies, boards crafted by McCoy and the rest of the elite Down Under shapers made the American-made equipment look clunky and dated by comparison.

  The New Radicals: Terry Fitzgerald and Michael Peterson

  “Performance surfing” is a loosely defined term, but it generally means a fast, active, dynamic style of riding in waves smaller than eight or ten feet. By the early seventies the Aussies were taking ownership of the category. Under-eighteen junior division champions like Mark Richards, Wayne Bartholomew, and Peter Townend—years before their respective primes—were outsurfing all but the best from California and Hawaii. The Aussie seniors (eighteen and above) were even better. Perth’s Ian Cairns already had one or two North Shore seasons under his belt and was set to become a power surfer for the ages. Narrabeen goofyfooter Col Smith replaced Wayne Lynch as the most explosive surfer in the country, and had come up with a U-turning move through the curl that he could bang out one after another. Gold Coaster Peter Drouyn couldn’t match Cairns or Smith for sheer firepower, but he combined his moves beautifully; after finishing second to Nat Young in the 1967 and 1969 National Titles, Drouyn won the event in 1970. And so it went. Paul Neilsen, Mark Warren, Ted Spencer, Russell Hughes, Keith Paull—the Australian talent pool was bottomless.

  By 1972, however, two surfers began separating from the rest. Terry Fitzgerald and Michael Peterson would each end up with roomfuls of trophies, but their real contribution was measured in t
erms of style and panache, most vividly embodied in Fitzgerald’s knifing fifty-yard-long bottom turns at Sunset Beach and Peterson’s rapacious all-directions attack at Kirra Point.

  They were a study in contrasts. Peterson, from Queensland’s Gold Coast, was poor and fatherless, dark, unsmiling, and nearly mute. Fitzgerald, the son of an Australian Navy diver, was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, with a giant halo of blonde curls and given to long rhetorical flights on whatever subject caught his attention. Fitzgerald spent a year at college, was married at twenty, and raising a family at twenty-two. Peterson dropped out of school at sixteen, and every relationship in his life was deeply dysfunctional. Surfing World published Fitzgerald’s 1970 antidrug manifesto, which read in part, “If you want to feel your own natural instincts in the water, or in a chick, don’t screw up your head with chemical abominations, man, don’t do it!” From his late teen years on, Peterson likely never once entered the water without a good pot buzz, and often supplemented with a hit of acid or mescaline. By 1974 he was a heroin user. (Strangely enough, Peterson rode plain white surfboards, while Fitzgerald favored cosmically multicolored intergalactic “space zappers.”) Michael Peterson Surfboards failed quickly and spectacularly, as Peterson often dipped into the till, and signed his name to dreadful apprentice-made equipment. Fitzgerald’s Hot Buttered Surfboards soon became one of Australia’s most popular brands and remained so for decades.

  Fitzgerald did for performance surfing what Led Zeppelin did for the blues—he made the genre bigger, louder, heavier. He not only looked like Robert Plant, in fact, with his jutting chin and Viking mane of hair, he rode with the same lascivious hip-thrusting that Plant used on stage—the surf press called it “body torque,” but it looked more like a grinding seduction. Fitzgerald was also known as the “Sultan of Speed.” There was no real way to tell if he was actually going faster than anybody else, but it looked that way, as he snaked his arms, legs, torso, and head from one aerodynamic pose to the next, while his board carved out a long, well-drafted set of turns.

  This was the Australian way of surfing: aggressive, flamboyant, even exaggerated, but backed to the hilt with mastery of the fundamentals—a style essentially invented by Nat Young. Michael Peterson covered his bedroom walls floor to ceiling with cut-out magazine photos of Young, and he spent hours sitting on his bed, staring, quietly pulling every bit of information he could from the images. Peterson had the same lanky, wide-shouldered physique as Young, and paddled even faster through the lineup, with an even greater sense of entitlement.

  TERRY FITZGERALD WITH NORTH SHORE QUIVER, 1975.

  MICHAEL PETERSON AT THE 1977 STUBBIES SURF CLASSIC.

  “He was a nightmare in the water,” Tommy Peterson, Michael’s younger brother, recalled. “Forty guys out at Kirra, and ten of the best surfers in the world among them, and Mick would paddle around ’em like they were buoys. He wanted every wave, and if you dropped in on him, you’d get a board between the ears.”

  Nat Young’s hands and arms always fluttered before a big turn, as if the extra energy in his body was sparking out through his fingertips. Here again, Peterson outdid the master; his hands and arms jumped around like severed powerlines. Occasionally it was distracting. Mostly it just accentuated his incredible balance. Like Phil Edwards, Peterson would often push his turns to just past the breaking point and trust his reflexes to produce a quick recovery.

  * * *

  Michael Peterson came to epitomize the disturbed surfing loner, but he also represented a geographic shift of power within Australia, from Sydney’s northern beaches to the Gold Coast in Queensland. Surfers on the Gold Coast flashed the peace sign and ate their share of muesli, but country soul didn’t much infiltrate this corner of Australia, which was just then beginning to remodel itself as a Miami-style tourist destination. Peterson and another two-dozen hot Gold Coasters sparred constantly in the water, loved competition—club, regional, state, national, international, anything—and gorged themselves at local pointbreaks that were now being recognized as among the best high-performance waves in the world. When Burleigh boy Peter Drouyn won the 1970 National Titles, a younger set of Queensland surfers, with Peterson out in front, were just about ready to break away from the rest of the nation. Gold Coasters took three of the top four spots in the 1972, 1973, and 1974 National Titles. Two years later, Peter Townend, a Peterson rival at Kirra for nearly a decade, won the debut world pro tour. “We were untouchable for a few years there,” Townend later said. “The other guys were good. We were better.”

  Peterson and Fitzgerald by that time were both approaching the end of their peak surfing years. Already losing weight to heroin addiction and paranoid enough to hide in his car between heats, Michael Peterson nonetheless scored the biggest win of his career at the 1977 Stubbies Surf Classic, in perfect clear-blue Burleigh Head tubes, before a hometown Gold Coast crowd. A few months later, Terry Fitzgerald hit a career-topping run of surf at a South African pointbreak called Jeffries Bay. Not long after, Fitzgerald matriculated into a full life of business, family, and surfing, while Peterson became a full-blown junkie. He was arrested following a high-speed chase from Beenleigh to Brisbane, and in a prison hospital he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and then released to the care of his mother. He never surfed again.

  The two surfers’ stock would change over time. Fitzgerald, at first, was the international favorite; after Nat Young’s often-belligerent run as a surfing leader, he made it okay for the rest of the surfing world to embrace Australians. But it was Peterson’s style of riding the next generation picked up on, and his short, brilliant, toxic career made him a rebel surfing legend second only to Mickey Dora. Fitzgerald got the surf magazine cover shots. Peterson got the 340-page Harper-Collins biography. Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of the combined Fitzgerald-Peterson legacy were Australian surfers themselves. Reasonably enough, Aussies now took their own high achievement in the sport as a birthright—and they were just warming up.

  Powerhouse: Hawaii in the Early Seventies

  Through every change in board design and riding style, and every shift in surfing’s global balance of power, Hawaii never lost its luster. It remained the sport’s great final challenge, the ultimate destination. The shortboard revolution did nothing but underscore this fact, and from 1969 to 1976, very little happened in the sport that wasn’t somehow aligned with respect to Hawaii.

  Fred Hemmings had called short surfboards “absurd for Hawaiian surf,” but in fact they were a godsend. Riding a long-board at a place like Sunset Beach was the surfing equivalent of extreme tobogganing. You leaned forward, held on, and took your chances. With the shortboard, it was like downhill skiing—fast and difficult, but with a lot more handling, turning, and control. Hawaiian surf also stripped away a lot of the stylistic clutter that emerged with shortboards—all the twisting and gyrating as riders tested the limits of maneuverability. In big waves, you had to stay focused on basics; shortboard riding was smoother and more refined here than anywhere else.

  Other surf-world forces worked in Hawaii’s favor. Commercialism was out (or at least the appearance of commercialism), and the islands were viewed as an Edenic alternative to the overdeveloped “plastic trip” of Southern California and Sydney. Hawaii had no indigenous surf media, and very little exportable surf-related manufacturing. Haleiwa, the only town on Oahu’s North Shore, had less than 1,500 residents in 1970, and the coast between Keana Point and Kawela Bay was known as “country” years before the Australia’s Byron Bay project came to represent the country soul ideal.

  There was also a rising demand for color surf photography, and nowhere looked as good through a viewfinder as Hawaii. The seven-mile-long North Shore functioned like an outdoor studio, and surfers and photographers, after years of annual winter gatherings, had developed a symbiotic relationship. Everybody understood lighting conditions and which breaks looked best at certain times of the day. Surfers did rudimentary color-coordinating with an eye toward publication. Cameras had an almost
pheromonal effect on the lineup: turns were jammed a little harder, tube rides taken a little deeper, so that photos would be that much more publishable. This wasn’t exclusive to Hawaii, but only here did the process go on for weeks in consistently big, dramatic, color-saturated waves.

  Meanwhile, despite the era’s anticontest, anticommercial mood, Hawaii became the world’s capital for international surf competition. In 1970, the then-five-year-old Duke Kahanamoku Invitational was a surf-world institution, and from 1971 forward there were never less than three big winter events held on the North Shore. (California and Australia, in 1971, didn’t have a single international surf contest between them.) Sure, you came to Hawaii to put yourself “inside the lacey filigree, beyond the pastel skies,” as Drew Kampion wrote. Increasingly, you also came to do battle with your fellow surfers, in hopes of nabbing a big trophy and some prize money.

  Yet it wasn’t the contests, or the photographers, or the “country” idealization, or even the big waves that gave Hawaii its authority during the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. What put Hawaii over the top was its surfers.

  There wasn’t a bottomless supply of talent, as there seemed to be in Australia. But the Hawaiian elite were so much better than everyone else on the North Shore, and so relentlessly filmed and photographed, that the rest of world’s surfers often seemed massed together in the background like movie-set extras. California transplant Sam Hawk rode spear-like across vast, vertical walls at Pipeline. Teenager Michael Ho, not much over five feet tall, zapped up and down at Velzyland as if he were riding on a thin cushion of air. Pureblood Hawaiian Eddie Aikau handled gigantic Waimea Bay better than anyone before him. Reno Abellira crouched over his board like Bruce Lee facing down a gang of Hong Kong toughs, and carved turns with Euclidean precision. Margo Oberg, another West Coast migrant, kept Hawaii on top of women’s surfing throughout the decade, along with Sharron Weber, Laura Blears, Rell Sunn, Becky Benson, and a red-haired dynamo named Lynn Boyer.