The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Indonesia reshaped surf travel. Surfers now wanted to maximize their wave haul. There would always be an honored place at the table for Naughton-Peterson-style adventurers, where the journey, more than the destination, is the thing. But those detouring, backpack-and-bedroll, On the Road–type of surf trips were falling out of favor. Most surfers wanted to do it like Gerry Lopez—and who better to model yourself after than the coolest tuberider alive? Jet off to Dempasar and points beyond, then roost for two or three weeks directly in front of a dream wave. Sure, pick up a bit of culture when and if the surf goes flat. But the object now, as Grajagan pioneer Bill Boyum himself had put it, was to “surf your brains out.”

  Indonesia also had a softening effect on the Australian surfing character. G-Land aside, much of the surf pioneering in this corner of the world was done by Aussies, and as Sydney surf journalist Nick Carroll pointed out, they were getting more out of the experience than long, hot, empty waves. “There’s the small matter of our Soul,” Carroll wrote.

  Australian surfers have always defined themselves by competition; it’s an area of the sport in which we’ve always felt comfortable and relaxed, and competition successes, from Midget Farrelly on down the line, have been our way of stamping our presence on the wider surfing world. But there was another side to our surfing culture; some part of us that in order to survive needed the sunsets of Grajagan, the croaking of geckos, the malaria tablets and ulcered reef cuts . . . needed the mad tales of adventurers who returned from God knows where up the island chain with scars bigger than any tattoo and diseases they never quite got over and no boards left because they’d broken and washed away. This was the road less traveled. This is where Australia’s surfing soul was nurtured and grown to something more.

  No single surfer embodied this better than Jim Banks, a friendly blond goofyfooter from Cronulla who turned pro as a teenager in 1978, and three years later won a major world tour event at Uluwatu. The next season, still holding down a top-20 ranking but tired of the “dismal waves” featured at most pro contests, Banks dropped off the tour and began spending months at a time searching out the longest, hollowest Indonesian waves. By doing so, he went from respected world circuit journeyman to tuberiding legend and soul-surfing icon—the Australian version, more or less, of Gerry Lopez. Banks did yoga and talked often about higher consciousness, like Lopez, but he also had the common touch. Recalling the après-surf mood after his best-ever day of surf, at Desert Point with two friends and a boat, Banks said, “We were all fucked, totally exhausted, completely stuffed. We actually could not surf any longer. So we lay there on the deck and smoked a bunch of hash, ate rum-laced chocolate cake, and just watched these perfect, pumping, mindless twenty-wave sets roll in with nobody in the water.”

  * * *

  Just as Indonesia changed surfing, so too did surfing change Indonesia. By the mid-1970s, surf tourism was big enough to support a small Uluwatu-based service economy of board-carriers, food vendors, and masseuses. More wave-riders also meant new restaurants and hostels in Kuta Beach; by 1974, there was even a surf shop. A village with dirt roads and no electricity when Alby Falzon and his crew showed up to film Morning of the Earth, Kuta grew to become what one surf journalist described as the “Asian Tijuana”—a loud, international, neon-lit, traffic-choked, Bintang-sticky grid of bars, restaurants, nightclubs, souvenir shops, and massage parlors, with surfers booked in by the thousands. Bali, in addition to remaining a popular surf destination itself, also became a staging and supply zone for journeys along the island chain. Either way, the local economy profited.

  For their part, the Balinese slowly but steadily embraced surfing and integrated it into their culture, which was a remarkable shift in itself. Unlike the island-hopping Polynesians, the Balinese—all Indonesians, for that matter—had no real taste for voyaging. The ocean in general was regarded as a fearsome place, alive with demons and monsters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the first surfers paddled into the spirit-plagued waters off the Bukit and returned for the most part unharmed, it was assumed that the visitors had a different arrangement with the gods. For the Balinese themselves, as surf writer Leonard Lueras put it, the idea of recreation in the sea was “a bit like playing soccer in a cemetery.”

  Gede Narmada, a fourteen-year-old farmer’s son, was nervous just standing on the beach at Kuta for the first time in 1969. Two years later a visiting Queenslander saw Narmada watching the surf and offered to push him into a wave, but Narmada refused. Another two years passed before he was able to screw up the courage to paddle out for the first time, then two more before he was confident enough to surf the Bukit. All of the early Balinese surfers went through the same drawn-out process. “When I first saw a surfboard,” Ketut Menda, another Balinese original, recalled, “I was scared, and asking myself, ‘What is this for?’ I followed the surfers to the beach, and saw them floating on the water, and to me it just looked crazy.” But Menda, like Narmada, couldn’t resist. He was a Uluwatu board-carrier and surfing novitiate under Gerry Lopez and Peter McCabe, and eventually became the godfather of Balinese surfing.

  Bali’s two-thousand-year-old belief system wasn’t going to be toppled by an imported form of play. But once it became clear that local surfers weren’t being pulled to their watery death by fanged creatures—that they were in fact running home babbling with excitement—some accommodation had to be made. Apparently surfers had some extra bit of magical power that kept them from harm. Or maybe they just amused Ratu Kidul, the shape-shifting Queen of the Southern Sea who controls the waves. In any event, once acclimated to the sport, the Balinese were quick to view surfing as a great art. By the mid-1970s, balletically posed wave-riders were turning up in “daily life” Batuan school ink paintings, along with the usual cast of merchants, farmers, animals, gods, and spirits. The sea monsters were all still there, too, popping up out of the silver-blue ocean with pulled-back lips and bulging eyes. Yet the surfers rode calmly on.

  MIDSEVENTIES BALINESE PAINTING.

  A balance in all things—but especially between good and evil—has long been a philosophical cornerstone in Bali and across Indonesia. Surfing performed a small but worthy service by helping to extend the idea of balance out to the nearshore waters.

  The Birth of Professional Surfing

  In early 1977, Southern California photographer Bill Delaney released Free Ride, and it quickly became the year’s runaway hit surf movie. The best part of the film was the knockout slow-motion camera work shot by Surfing staffer Dan Merkel, a bearded Santa Barbara hardass who cardio-trained by taping weights to his ankles and wrists and running through soft sand. Merkel figured out how to swim a twenty-pound camera into the lineup at Backdoor Pipeline, where he’d float in the impact zone, track a surfer’s approach and entry into the tube, and then hold the shot until he too was inside the vortexing wave, sometimes just a foot or two from his subject. Merkel’s shots had the same hypnotic beauty as George Greenough’s inside-looking-out POV camerawork from a few years earlier. Greenough actually went deeper inside, and completed the experience by riding back into daylight. But Merkel put a subject in the frame, which made a big difference. As the tube poured across the top of the screen with diamonded brilliance, there was world-champion-to-be Shaun Tomson, front and center, completely encased in the barrel, and traveling at a mesmerizing two-hundred-frames-per-second. By retreating into the wave’s interior as it passed by, Merkel was able to show, as Drew Kampion noted in a praiseful review, “the torqueing muscle of wave, the zipper-gash of the board’s track, the slicing fin, and, through the warp of water, the eerie silhouette of Shaun passing on down the line.”

  Another Free Ride highlight was Delaney’s profile of a young Queenslander named Wayne Bartholomew. At one point, Bartholomew is seen riding a new and unnamed jungle-fringed break in Bali. Later in the film, he rockets down the face of a twenty-footer at Waimea Bay during the finals of the 1975 Smirnoff Pro-Am. Immediately following, Bartholomew is seen on the beach, still in h
is nylon orange-and-black Smirnoff competition vest, picking up a $1,000 third-place check.

  Bartholomew was actually surfing for a living. During the midseventies, all the loose filaments of professional surfing gathered into a series of events known collectively as the International Professional Surfers world tour. In its own way, this was as astonishing as those empty mile-long waves pouring across the reef at G-Land. Prize money was still minuscule—even five years later, most pros were doing well if they covered travel expenses. Also, there were still some lingering surf-world animosity toward, not just prize-money events, but competition of any kind. Yet the attitudes of top surfers underwent a sea-change from the early 1970s, and there was now a strong desire to see pro surfing take root and grow. Bartholomew and his peers were openly supportive of prize-money competition and of commercialized surfing in general. Riding for a paycheck and riding for personal satisfaction would increasingly be viewed as both compatible and complimentary. The relationship between the two wasn’t hard to grasp: you paid for a July visit to Bali by winning $1,000 on the North Shore in December.

  How to convince fence-sitting non-pros that that was in their best interest, too? One often-made point was that high-level competition spurred the development of new equipment and better wave-riding techniques. True, hot new boards and radical moves had come down the pike regularly for the past thirty years without the benefit of a paid class of surfers. But the pros liked the sound of their argument and stuck with it.

  As it turned out, the rank and file didn’t need all that much convincing. For young surfers in particular—many of whom had mouthed the anticontest bromides handed down by their local beachfront grandees without quite understanding exactly why competition was such a terrible thing—nothing was as exciting as the idea of a global pro tour, with top surfers battling it out for money, ratings points, and a year-end world title.

  * * *

  Bartholomew and the rest of the IPS originals would later refer to the midseventies as the “birth of professional surfing,” but that claim was a bit overstated. What, after all, was the definition of a professional? George Freeth, the “Hawaiian Wonder” who introduced wave-riding to Southern California in 1907, was paid for his twice-daily Redondo Beach surfing exhibitions. Ricky Grigg made $2,000 a year during the midsixties to wear Jantzen beachwear, and Midget Farrelly earned $8,000 in 1965, mostly from a sponsorship deal with Phillips cordless shavers. Phil Edwards, David Nuuhiwa, Nat Young, Gary Propper, and another dozen or so top boom-era riders all got royalty checks for their signature model surfboards. Eighteen-year-old Corky Carroll, even before he’d won the first of three U.S. Surfing Championship titles, put “professional surfer” on his 1965 tax return. Two years later, thanks to board royalties, product endorsements, and a bonus check from Hobie Surfboards for his appearances on The Tonight Show and What’s My Line, Carroll earned something in the neighborhood of $40,000.

  JEFF HAKMAN, 1972 DUKE KAHANAMOKU INVITATIONAL.

  CORKY CARROLL (LEFT), 1965 LAGUNA MASTERS.

  For some reason, royalty checks and sponsorship deals alone didn’t seem to make a surfer, or the sport, “professional”—most likely because the payments weren’t on display where everybody could see them. On the other hand, contest spoils, prize-money checks included, were very much front and center. By that standard the whole professional enterprise was launched in Southern California during the spring and summer of 1965. Awards for the Laguna Sportswear Masters at Redondo Beach, that May, included a Honda trail bike, a color TV, a $450 wardrobe, and a pair of his-and-her Timex wristwatches for the tandem event winners. A month later, the KHJ-TV Open at Hermosa Beach gave an MG 1100 sedan to the winner of the “all divisions” heat. Fifteen-year-old junior’s champ Denny Tompkins of Palos Verdes took the event; he jumped behind the wheel for a few promo photos, but was too young to drive the car home.

  Held over 1965’s Fourth of July weekend, the Tom Morey Invitational—run by the same Tom Morey who would later invent the bodyboard—presented cash money to the winners instead of prizes, and thus went on record as the first professional surfing contest. In fact, it was actually less “professional” than the Masters and the KHJ contests, since the $1,500 purse was drawn almost entirely from the $50 entry fees each of the twenty-five contestants had to put up. At Morey’s contest, in other words, the surfers paid themselves.

  The Morey Invitational took place at the height of the noseriding craze and featured an entirely new competition format. Instead of the standard 20-point subjective judging system, competitors would be scored on the amount of time spent on the nose over the course of twenty-one rides. The “nose” was defined as the front-quarter of the board; each entrant’s board was measured off and spray-painted accordingly before the contest started. The surfers were sent into the water in groups of three. Each was assigned a “judging team,” who closely followed every ride, and with the aid of binoculars and a stopwatch noted the precise amount of time spent on the nose. Mickey Munoz won the regularfoot division, with a total time of 67 seconds; Corky Carroll was the top goofyfooter at 62.2 seconds. Each surfer got a check for $750.

  A few more stopwatch-timed noseriding events were held over the next two years, but objective scoring formats (including a “points-per-maneuver” system that was briefly popular in the midseventies) were doomed to fail. Surfing artistry was hard to define, and even harder to judge—but it was too much a part of the sport to ignore. The old-fashioned subjective judging format was used for the 1968 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, newly professionalized with a $1,000 winner-take-all purse, and subjective judging was the rule from then on.

  The Duke event was a turning point. Like just about every other boom-era surf development, professional contests were invented and marketed in Southern California. By 1968, the region was being portrayed as the evil empire of surfing commercialism, and pro events needed a change of venue. The Duke event allowed the whole movement to quietly shift its base of operation to Hawaii. Everybody benefited. The West Coast pro contests—there were three more in 1966, and one in 1967—had nearly all been held in garden-variety beachbreak surf, which made for dull spectating. The competitors themselves strongly believed that money events should be held in the best waves possible—and in the late 1960s, that meant Hawaii. Crowds had filled the beachfront bleachers during the KHJ-TV Open and the Laguna Masters, and event sponsors in Hawaii were going to have to give up that live audience. But holding a contest in the big stuff on the North Shore raised the possibility of serious mainstream media coverage. ABC’s Wide World of Sports had televised the Laguna Masters, but in 1968 the network dropped all California surfing events and rushed off to the North Shore to tape the Duke contest.

  The Pipeline Masters and Beyond: Pro Surfing On the Cheap

  Fred Hemmings of Honolulu placed third in the 1968 Duke event, less than two months after his surprise victory in that year’s World Surfing Championships in Puerto Rico. For keeping his hair short and speaking out against drug use, Hemmings had been deemed terminally uncool by surfing’s tastemakers. Yet he would nimbly perform the rarest move in sports: after one last successful competitive campaign—his 1969 record: second at Makaha, second in Peru, fifth in the Duke—Hemmings bowed out while still at the top of his game. At age twenty-four, he decided to put all of his time and attention into the development of professional surfing.

  FRED HEMMINGS (RIGHT) AND ABC’S JIM MCKAY, COVERING THE 1974 PIPELINE MASTERS.

  Hemmings was an on-camera announcer for Wide World of Sports’ coverage of the 1970 Duke contest. With anticontest sentiment at its peak, he loudly and proudly defended the idea of professional surfing in a Surfer magazine column, saying he looked forward to a day in the near future when “pro contests will be seen by millions on television, and at the end of the tour, like golf and Grand Prix [racing], there will be a proclaimed world champion.” He convinced Smirnoff to move its annual Pro-Am event from Santa Cruz to Hawaii, and produced the contest himself for the next five years
; in 1971, further expanding the North Shore pro contest franchise, he created the Pipeline Masters.

  The Masters concept, Hemmings once said in typically blunt fashion, came out of his desire to bring surfing to “the average schmuck watching TV in Middle America.” He wanted dramatic tuberides and equally dramatic wipeouts, knowing the ratings would spike if there was any chance that a competitor might be carried off the beach on a stretcher. The Masters was the first contest designed specifically for television (Wide World of Sports picked it up the following year). To simplify the viewing experience, and to be able to say that he’d put together the most elite starting field in the sport’s history, Hemmings did away with the preliminary rounds altogether and instead hand-picked six contestants for a one-hour, one-heat shootout.