The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The North Shore remained the center of the surfing universe, Sunset Beach was the center of the North Shore, and Sunset was ruled by Barry Kanaiaupuni and Jeff Hakman, the yin and yang of power surfing. Kanaiaupuni was the most unorthodox surfer of the age. He used a narrow, almost delicate stance, feet and legs positioned in a kind of demi-plié, but threw his board around like Ornette Coleman on a long free-jazz riff. The whiplashing bottom turn was Kanaiaupuni’s signature move, but much of what he did was unexpected and strange; launching into a big northwest peak at Sunset, for instance, he might straighten up to full height, tweak out a little pivot move toward the curl, then snap it back to center, drop to a crouch, fade slightly to the left, and lean into a furrowing turn a beat or two before actually reaching the trough. For anyone else, even the A-listers, in the same circumstances, it was squat, drop, and turn.

  Hakman was all balance, utility, and faultless construction. He rode low and centered, arms extended from his muscle-packed shoulders like glider wings, and his movements were as limited as they were fluid. He shared honors with Kanaiaupuni for having the most powerful bottom turn in surfing, but the Kanaiaupuni version was tighter-arced and set to his own weird tempo, while Hakman’s covered more ground and was almost metronomically timed. Not surprisingly, Kanaiaupuni surfed his way into a lot of dead ends and spent half of any given session chasing after his board. Hakman could ride for an entire afternoon—an entire week—without falling. There was a warmth to Hakman’s surfing that kept it from ever looking rote or overpracticed; he often looked like the happiest man in the water. A slow-motion clip from Five Summer Stories shows him gliding out in front of a closeout section, and as the whitewater churns and grinds around his shoulders, Hakman’s face unexpectedly breaks into a wide, elated smile—it’s surfing’s most joyous big-screen moment.

  * * *

  Jeff Hakman and Barry Kanaiaupuni were typical low-key Hawaiian surfers. Both rode plain white or single-color boards and were indifferent to fashion. Duly taking their turn under the surf media spotlight, each came off as friendly, earnest, and wholly inoffensive. This was standard operated procedure for the Hawaiians: play it cool, and let your surfing do the talking. Duke Kahanamoku never flaunted it. Neither did George Downing or Paul Strauch. But also, in the early seventies, Hawaii and its surfers were viewed as existing on a higher level than everyone else, so the question of status was moot. Being a first-rank Hawaiian was the equivalent of being an Apollo astronaut. You knew it. Everybody knew it. Nothing else needed to be said.

  NORTH SHORE SURF SHOP, HALEIWA, 1969.

  BARRY KANAIAUPUNI, NORTH SHORE, 1969.

  JEFF HAKMAN.

  Still, nowhere was it written that Hawaiians surfers had to be low-key. Fred Hemmings had always been a loudmouth; so was shaping guru Dick Brewer. Then there was Larry Bertlemann, a contemporary of Hakman and Kanaiaupuni, and a different kind of strutting Hawaiian surfer entirely. After a fourth-place finish in the 1972 World Championships, when he was as quiet as the next islander, Bertlemann seemed to pull back for a moment, as if trying to figure out what to do with his growing surf-world presence. Then he grabbed the media brass ring with both hands and swung for all he was worth. He rolled into 1974 like the wave-riding spawn of Julius Irving and Sly Stone, with a huge afro, mirrored shades, and a closet full of two-piece satin-finish sweatsuits. His boards looked like giant pieces of hard candy: lime green on yellow, pink on magenta, orange on yellow. Nobody put in more time with photographers and filmmakers, and with his oft-repeated “anything is possible” remark, he became the first surfer with a catchphrase.

  Bertlemann excelled in big surf, but didn’t have the same Mount Rushmore–like presence on the North Shore as Kanaiaupuni and Hakman. As with the top Australians, Bertlemann’s real achievement was to supercharge performance surfing in smaller waves. He was called the Rubberman, which was fitting; nobody in the sport had a better understanding of just how elastic all the performance parameters had become. Bertlemann rode low to the deck of his board, sometimes dropping his haunches nearly to his heels, and he was the first to plant his lead hand into the wave face as a pivot point for turns. Both techniques added turning leverage. Also, it was Bertlemann who figured out that in order to lay out a really good, tight, full-circuit turn, a surfer had to open up the torso and shoulders. Up to now, surfers basically kept their shoulders aligned with their feet. Bertlemann, turning to his left, first swiveled his chest toward the nose of his board, pulled his leading arm back, and swung his right arm forward. His lower body was now spring-loaded, and to bring his feet, hips, and shoulders back in line, his board snapped through the second half of the turn.

  Bertlemann was fairly described as a modern-day hotdogger, and the flash and jive could be blinding—he once paddled into a crowded North Shore lineup wearing a custom-made bell-bottom wetsuit. But his contribution to the sport was enormous. Bertlemann reinvented the turn, and his approach—the low center of gravity, a swiveling upper body—was the starting point for all high-performance surfing to follow.

  Disappearing Act: The Birth of Tuberiding

  Tuberiding became the ultimate surfing maneuver during the shortboard revolution, and it remains so today. Pulling inside the spinning chamber formed as the curl throws out ahead of the wave, racing through the hollows, and coming out clean—nothing in the sport can touch it.

  During the early and midsixties, tuberiding was a sports world rarity just slightly more common than hitting a hole in one. Before that, hollow waves were mostly avoided altogether. A big, finless surfboard was useless—dangerous, in fact—on what was then called a “plunger” or a “dumper.” Waikiki was the surf-world capital for fifty years because its gently sloped breaks were dependably un-hollow. Duke Kahanamoku wrote in 1911 that good surfing waves were “long in forming, and slow to break.” Hollow waves tend to jolt forward suddenly and are often short.

  The fin became a standard feature after World War II, and surfers learned to hold a tight angle across the wave face. Nobody spent any real time inside the tube, but a hollow wave became something to look forward to, as it meant the ride would be faster and more challenging. Bruce Brown made the point in his 1961 film Surfing Hollow Days, which opens with a voice-over homage to the tube: “Hollow waves are the best kind to ride. Doesn’t matter much what size it is, a hollow wave is the best.” But tuberiding on a longboard was so hard that few surfers even bothered to try. Getting a heavy 10-foot-by-2-foot polyurethane slab of foam tucked into a hollow wave was just a little easier than fitting a model ship into a bottle. Still, by accident more than design, surfers occasionally found themselves shooting into a tube section, at which point they usually defaulted to a bent-over, head-down position—the surfing equivalent of driving through a tunnel with eyes closed and arms locked.

  The Hawaiians were more comfortable in the tube than anybody else. Reef breaks as a rule provide the most consistent and predictable hollow waves—tuberiding is a lot easier when the surfer knows what’s coming and can set the ride up accordingly—and Hawaii is filled with such breaks. In the early 1960s, Joey Cabell, Wayne Miyata, Conrad Canha, and Sammy Lee, all from Honolulu, were more or less the only people who knew how to get through a tube section.

  At this time, tuberiding came to the fore. It was difficult, and rare, and the amount of time spent inside the tube was incredibly brief—just one or two seconds, usually. It was also deeply esoteric. Nobody felt obligated to explain why hanging ten was so great; it was obvious. Tuberiding, from the beginning, was constantly analyzed and described. “Once in a while you get locked so deep in the tube,” Cabell told a Time magazine reporter in 1963, “that nobody in the beach can see you. And when you come out in the end, why, you aren’t even wet.” But why exactly, magazine readers must have wondered, was that so great? Tuberiding descriptions would always fall short; Time did its best in 1963 by comparing a tuberide to “going on hashish,” but that wasn’t it. The surfers’ craving to ride inside a tunnel of water would always rem
ain as mysterious as it was strong.

  By the midsixties, a North Shore break called Pipeline had become one of Hawaii’s signature waves—although it was so incredibly hard to ride that it was regarded as a kind of novelty break. Outstanding surf spots are often notched into the coast in such a way that they maintain a presence even when the waves are down. Malibu and Waimea Bay both put out a thrumming surf vibe even during the off-season. Pipeline without waves is totally camouflaged as a surf break. The beachfront is lovely—a narrow corridor of sand fronting a row of houses with palm-studded frontyards—but nothing tips you off that the black-lava reef just offshore might produce any interesting waves.

  Pipeline is a winter spot, like everywhere else on the North Shore. It works often, but only hits peak form a dozen or so times each year. The left-breaking wave here—Pipeline proper—requires a west swell, which is always in short supply. Swells from the north and northwest hit the same shallow reef and form a right-breaking wave called Backdoor. The shape at Backdoor is more irregular and less tapered; even on a good day, plenty of waves will close out. Pipeline is better organized. Both are terrifyingly powerful; waves here don’t seem to break as much as they blow up, and a curl touching down into the trough can produce an upblast of whitewater twice as big as the wave itself.

  LARRY BERTLEMANN, ALA MOANA, 1975.

  When conditions are right, a Pipeline wave will spin down-reef like a huge, hollow drill bit, the aperture narrowing as it moves shoreward, until it expires into flat water or closes out at a much-reduced size. Each wave, start to finish, lasts about seven seconds. Most will “spit”—which means that aerated flash-pressurized water gushes out suddenly from the mouth of the tube. Backdoor breaks with the same atom-smashing force as Pipeline, but shuts down at about eight foot. Pipeline holds double that size, although the takeoff zone moves out seventy-five yards to a deep-water section called Second Reef—which, oddly, provides a sloping, almost relaxed lead-in to the hollow part of the wave.

  Through the 1950s, it wasn’t the power, exactly, that kept surfers out of the water at Pipeline. It was the shallowness. North Shore surfers always worried about hitting the bottom, but it rarely happened, even at vicious breaks like Sunset and Waimea. Pipeline was a different story. A ten-foot wave here broke in as little as six feet of water—about half as much as the same wave at Sunset—and the thought of augering into that black-lava reef is what scared people off years after they’d taken on virtually every other North Shore break.

  In the late 1950s, Fred Van Dyke would occasionally wander down to what was then referred to as Banzai Beach with fellow big-wave rider Pat Curren. “I remember sitting there with Pat watching these super-radical perfect waves, and not being scared or nervous the way you’d get for a big day at Waimea—because this place was impossible. That’s what we thought. Pat turned to me and said, ‘Two thousand years from now, maybe they’ll be riding it.’”

  Into the Vortex at Pipeline

  Many years after the fact, Waikiki ace Rabbit Kekai made offhand claims that he rode Pipeline on a finless hot curl board in the 1940s. It’s hard to imagine, although perhaps on a smaller day. Future world champion Fred Hemmings paddled out in 1960, at age fifteen, and took a beating on the single wave he caught. Filmmaker Bud Browne and a few others sometimes bodysurfed there when conditions were just right.

  Phil Edwards, though, is justly credited as the first surfer to really conquer Pipeline. He paddled out on a December afternoon in 1961, when the surf was just shoulder-high, and he got two or three practice rides while Bruce Brown filmed from the beach. The next morning was sunny and clear, with a light offshore wind, and a juicy eight-foot swell pouring through. Edwards, Brown, and two or three other surfers stood on the beach for an hour or so and watched. Without saying anything, Brown started to unpack his camera gear. The surfers looked uncomfortable, made a few noncommittal remarks, and kept watching. It was almost noon. Edwards finally said, “Screw it,” and picked up his board. Nobody followed as he walked down the beach.

  “ANOTHER SET, ANOTHER IDIOT STROKING FOR A WAVE, BAD TIMING, ANOTHER BULL-MOUTH MONSTER EATING FLESH. PIPELINE–GOD, WHAT A WAVE!”

  —Bill Hamilton

  Edwards wasn’t the most daring surfer of the era, but he was the most skilled and one of the smartest. There were a lot of ways to go wrong at Banzai, Edwards understood, but the basic task was pretty simple: a quick start, to avoid getting pitched over the falls; a carefully angled drop (straight down and the board would pearl, too much angle and the tail would spin out); a smooth bottom turn; and a crouching dash to the finish. Nothing elaborate. Just one fluid motion.

  He did it before there was even time to be scared. Moments after hitting the lineup, without so much as a pause to get his bearings, Edwards wheeled his board around, stroked into a fast-building eight-footer, pushed to his feet, and hit every mark exactly as planned. Halfway through, the curl arced past Edwards’ right shoulder and landed inches from his tailblock, a moment later the spit rushed past him like a burst of confetti, then he was gliding onto the shoulder. That was enough. He straightened off and rode for shore.

  Strapping his board to the car a few minutes later, Edwards looked back and saw three surfers sitting in the lineup; each one in turn picked off a wave and got annihilated. What didn’t happen next mattered as much as Edwards’ great ride. “We all thought that if you ate it out there, you’d either die or get pretty banged up,” Bruce Brown later recalled. “And instead these guys just swam in, grabbed their boards, and paddled out to try again.” Nobody thought the wave was safe. At least one of the surfers that day hit bottom, and eventually there would be fatalities. But most wipeouts were apparently survivable, and that made all the difference.

  PIPELINE WIPEOUT, 1966.

  Driving back to their North Shore rental, Brown’s friend Mike Diffenderfer announced that the wave should be called Pipeline. “The name kind of sealed it,” Brown recalled. “That morning, it was a place nobody surfed. By that afternoon it was a full-on spot.”

  * * *

  Edwards rode Pipeline a few more times, but never with any great distinction. He cheerfully admitted that he was “chicken” and that Pipeline was never really his thing. John Peck and Butch Van Artsdalen, two more Southern Californians, both younger than Edwards, were the ones who set the early Pipeline standard.

  Peck was the more innovative surfer. Tuberiding is easier to do while riding frontside (facing the wave), and Pipeline is a left-breaking spot, which meant that a right-foot-forward “goofyfooter” had a big advantage over a left-foot-forward “regularfooter.” Peck, a gangly teenage regularfooter, not only figured out how to reduce the backsider’s handicap, he did it pretty much all at once, on New Year’s Day, 1963, with a vicious hangover. Two basic techniques were involved. First, Peck dropped his back knee toward the deck of the board on takeoff, almost like a sprinter in the blocks, which gave him added stability during the ride’s first few crucial moments. Then, while in trim, he swung his right hand forward and clamped onto the outside rail. This low “rail-grab” stance reduced Peck’s exposure. If the curl did whip down onto his head and shoulders, he might still hunker down into an even tighter ball and ride it out.

  Peck was a finesse man. Butch Van Artsdalen, a goofy-footer from San Diego, was surfing’s own Raging Bull. He’d already proven himself fearless in La Jolla’s hard-breaking reef waves, and was virtually immune to pain; his back and shoulders would be raked and bleeding after a wipeout at a shallow break called Big Rock, and Van Artsdalen would crane his head around for a quick look, curse, pick his board off the sand, and paddle back out. He was chatty and friendly as a rule, but a street-fighting terror when drunk, which was often. Friends and foes alike called him “Black Butch,” and the surf world in general gave him a lot of room.

  Van Artsdalen flew to the North Shore in October 1962 and moved into a dry-docked boat just west of Pipeline. He’d been there the year before—his first visit to Hawaii—but left a few days befor
e Phil Edwards rode Pipeline for the first time. Van Artsdalen heard the stories and saw the photos, and knew Pipeline was his break even before he rode it. That November he paddled out for the first time, on a new fire-engine red Hobie; before the month was out he was the break’s dominant surfer. He matched power with power. Nobody charged into waves with as much speed and force, and the advantage from this running start alone was enormous. Beyond that, Van Artsdalen had a genuinely intuitive feel for the break. He knew which waves to ride and which to let go—the line between a perfect Pipeline tube and a malformed closeout is nearly invisible—and he had a jeweler’s eye for picking out the narrow vertical seam that would get him from crest to trough in one piece. The drop was the hard part. Tuberiding itself, for Van Artsdalen, was comparatively easy—turn, crouch, extend the arms, and floor it.

  PIPELINE.

  That December he late-dropped into a cavernous ten-footer, found his line, and vanished behind the curl, with just a foot or two of his bright red Hobie board sticking out from the mouth of the tube like a toothpick. Two seconds passed. Three seconds. Then Van Artsdalen shot back into daylight, while cheers went up from the beach gallery. Someone shouted out, “Nobody does that!” Another surfer fell dramatically to the sand, as if he’d been shot, and rolled around muttering, “Oh my god.” It was the ride of the year, and Van Artsdalen, improvising as the wave fizzled out, sat back on his board, grinned, and rubbed his hands together.