The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  In the midseventies, surfers began responding to apartheid with what might be described a bit of moral apartheid: that sports and politics should be kept apart. The high-minded variation on this, as expressed by South African Shaun Tomson, was that sports “could rise above the politics of individual nations [and] bring people together.” There was some truth to this idea on a personal level. Mostly, though, it was used by surfers as a justification to do what they wanted to do—ride Jeffreys, compete in Durban—not because they believed they were surfing to make the world a better place.

  Ignoring apartheid wasn’t always easy for visiting surfers. In 1972, big-wave specialist Eddie Aikau was one of the invited contestants to the Gunston 500. Aikau was pure Hawaiian, with full lips, a broad nose, and skin dark enough to earn a polite but firm turnaround from the concierge at Durban’s Malibu Hotel, where he was supposed to meet Bill Hamilton and Jeff Hakman, two haole-Hawaiian pros who’d already checked in. Gunston officials rushed in and did the necessary damage control. Aikau ended up staying in a beachfront apartment with Ernie Tomson, and seventeen-year-old Shaun, already a nationally recognized sports figure, surfed often with Aikau over the next few days. The Tomsons’ effort on Aikau’s behalf was laudable—or at least civil. But it hardly proved that surfing could indeed “rise above politics.” Aikau flew home after giving an interview with a black-owned South African newspaper in which he said, “The color problem in South Africa, man, is really heavy . . . I fear to walk in the streets.” Meanwhile, the Aikau incident didn’t seem to affect Bill Hamilton in the least. “The situation among the dark-skinned people [here] is accepted,” Hamilton reported in his 1972 Gunston 500 article for Surfer. “They are content with their working positions and the roles they play in society.”

  This was pretty much what everyone in the sport wanted to hear. The political stink from the 1972 Gunston contest blew over quickly, and another thirteen years would pass before apartheid once again caught the surf world’s attention.

  Move in the Groove: A New Way to Ride the Tube

  Ten months after winning the 1975 Hang Ten American Pro, Shaun Tomson was back in Hawaii with a new set of boards, and some new ideas about how to attack the powerful North Shore waves. Michael Tomson was there, too. Wayne Bartholomew, Mark Richards, Ian Cairns, Peter Townend, and another dozen or so young and fired-up Aussie pros soon arrived, just in time for a incredible run of North Pacific groundswell and clear, windless weather. Bill Delaney had flow in with a hundred pounds of camera gear—the Free Ride winter was about to begin.

  This was the final North Shore season without a world tour. It was the last time a surfer’s reputation was measured primarily in heavy waves rather than contest results. “You had to charge in Hawaii,” Bartholomew remembered. “For Shaun and myself, for everybody else, the North Shore was everything. There was no pro tour, no world title, the contest money was peanuts, and nobody outside of the sport was really paying any attention to us. What mattered, the only thing that mattered, was who ripped on the North Shore.”

  The Free Ride surfers all ripped, as did the top Hawaiians. But the twenty-year-old Tomson surfed on a different, higher plane. At Rocky Point and Off-the-Wall—a temperamental break located a hundred yards west of Pipeline—he did slashing 270-degree cutbacks. At Pipeline, along with cousin Michael and Wayne Bartholomew, he led what the surf press immediately called the “Backside Attack,” taking off farther up the reef and riding deeper inside the tube than any of the regularfooters before them. Nobody batted an eye when Tomson beat Gerry Lopez and Rory Russell to win the 1975 Pipeline Masters.

  The Backside Attack was a huge shot of adrenaline, but it wasn’t conjured out of thin air: regularfooters Sam Hawk and Owl Chapman fearlessly attacked Pipeline earlier in the decade, and they in turn were inspired by longboard-era surfer John Peck. What hit the surf world like spontaneous creation was Shaun Tomson’s redesign of frontside tube-riding. This was his signature achievement, engineered mostly at Backdoor and Off-the-Wall, and it was wave-riding like no one had seen before.

  Up to that point, Gerry Lopez was the ultimate tuberider. His board flew straight as a spear through the hollows, while Lopez stood in motionless repose. Nothing in the sport was as beautiful, and Tomson himself was happy to do the point-and-shoot. But it was an approach that worked best in big, wide-open, well-shaped tubes. To ride deep inside a less-than-perfect tube—or to ride deeper inside a perfect one, for that matter—meant the surfer had to be more active.

  Nobody but Tomson could have invented the “pump” style of riding the tube, for the simple reason that he had the widest stance in the business. Straight-line tuberiding, for all its aesthetic merit, had developed out of necessity: the rider turned while standing over the back half of his board, then while setting his line he moved up a foot or so to the board’s sweet spot—where it was just about impossible to change course. Tomson didn’t have to toggle back and forth; his turning stance wasn’t much different from his tuberiding stance. With this advantage he worked out a number of ways to extend his time inside the barrel. He could afford to delay his bottom turn because he didn’t have to take a moment to adjust his feet. Exiting a tube with his eye on the next hollow section, he could quickly go to his heels for a speed-checking fade into the trough, then lean to the right and climb back into trim position just as the curl again pitched out overhead. Or if the wave was going to shut down completely, he could jam a quick left turn and evacuate just ahead of the whitewater. Best of all, when heading into an especially long, fast tube, Tomson learned how to weave his board a few degrees up and down the wave face—that was the “pumping” part—which gave him access to gears that weren’t available to the straight-line tuberider.

  Tomson was the only person who could do these things in the winter of 1975–76. He later admitted that his equipment gave him a huge advantage over the other pros. His new boards had extra lift in the nose and tail—one was nicknamed “the banana,” and Tomson was heckled when he first walked down the beach holding it—which made them extra maneuverable. The low-rocker boards everybody else was using couldn’t be finessed from inside the tube. More than equipment, though, it was Tomson’s imagination, audacity, and prodigious talent. It was good luck, too—being in that time and place, before the world tour and with a seemingly endless run of fine winter surf.

  In one of Free Ride’s best clips, Tomson glides out of an amazing Backdoor tube in slow motion and aims for shore with a radiant and slightly disbelieving smile. “You remember the long ones,” he said not long afterward. “When you’re actually breathing inside the tube, turning and carving, and these sections are exploding over in front of you—you’re perceiving so many things so fast that reality actually seems to slow down. It’s perfect control of mind and body. These are the moments that I see as my reason for surfing.”

  When the IPS pro circuit was launched the following year, Tomson finished in sixth place—mostly because he’d missed a lot of the events that tour officials decided, after the fact, to count. Competing full-time in 1977, he won the title. It wasn’t a walk in the park, exactly; Wayne Bartholomew led the ratings up until Hawaii. But Tomson was already the world’s best surfer—the championship only rubber-stamped this fact.

  Mark Richards, the Polite Killer

  Bartholomew and Tomson maintained their pro tour credentials well into the next decade. By the late 1970s, however, both were riding in the wake of Newcastle regularfooter Mark Richards, who reinvented the twin-fin surfboard and proceeded to win an astounding four consecutive pro tour titles. Never before had an IPS surfer been so dominant. Richards won a third of all events he entered (Tomson and Bartholomew’s winning ratio was less than half that); in 1981, midway through his four-year championship run, Surfer put him on the cover with the blurb: “Is Richards Unstoppable?”

  He didn’t look like a surf hero. Richards was long in the torso, had the same unimpressive muscle tone as NBA star Larry Bird, and his face twisted into an open-mouth grimac
e when he surfed. He was sweet, friendly, soft-spoken, and artless—Richards didn’t just avoid trouble during the pressurized 1976–77 North Shore winter season, he was singled out by the Hawaiians as an example of a “good Australian.” Nobody in the sport was more popular. Nobody was drawing bigger paychecks. Yet throughout his world-championship run, Richards lived at home with his adored parents, limited his vices to Coke and Caramello bars, and remained faithful to his hometown schoolteacher girlfriend. He was famous for his bright color choices, but even that had a disarming quality. A favorite 1980 ensemble consisted of a silver-and-red wetsuit and an orange, lime-green, and baby blue surfboard. Richards, going for New Wave Surf Star, looked more like a preschooler who insisted on dressing himself. The innocence had limits. Richards swore, tacked up Penthouse centerfolds in his shaping room, and liked a bit of dirty talk with the boys after surfing. But even when he was trying to rough things up a bit, the sweetness came through. “Sometimes you feel like you can crush brick walls,” he told an interviewer in 1978. “Other days you feel like a pussy, kind of.”

  Richards’ surfing style took some getting used to. Until the midseventies, his legs would often fuse together at the knee and his lead hand would bend up at right angles to the forearm, as if he were waving at someone on the beach. His wingspan was enormous, and his long arms frequently extended out behind his back. Australian surf journalist Phil Jarratt nicknamed him “Wounded Seagull” and said Richards’ unusual body language made him “surfing’s answer to Joe Cocker.” Nevertheless, Richards bullwhipped his surfboard from trough to crest, again and again, one water-shifting turn after the other, in waist-high shorebreak or triple-overhead Sunset Beach. Each turn was deeply set, then held for an extra beat, and he spent more time than anybody else tracking up and down—rather than across—the wave face. What Shaun Tomson did for performance surfing on the horizontal axis, with his deep tuberides and sweeping cutbacks, Richards did on the vertical. Furthermore, his unorthodox riding style quickly grew on people, even before the world titles began to pile up. “First he was ugly,” as Jarratt put it. “Then he was good but weird. Then he was graceful—superbly graceful.”

  Richards had his great trial-by-fire moment in late 1974, when he flew to Hawaii at age seventeen and unexpectedly got a start in that year’s Smirnoff Pro-Am. He wasn’t completely unprepared. He’d been surfing since kindergarten, with the cheerful encouragement of Ray Richards, his surf-shop-owning father, and had twice been an Australian National Titles juniors’ division finalist. Smirnoff contest organizers had him on the alternate list, and when one of the invited surfers didn’t show, they put him in. The contest began in clean eight-footers at Sunset Beach. Richards had been to the North Shore twice and was pretty comfortable at Sunset; riding just slightly above par, he gave one of day’s best performances and won his heat, just before the contest was postponed in hopes of better surf.

  Five days later, early in the morning, the Smirnoff competitors and officials were clustered on the beach at Waimea Bay, gaping out at beautiful, horrifying thirty-foot surf. Conditions were perfect: blue skies, light winds, clean swell. Never before had a contest been held in waves this big—and to underscore the point, a massive closeout set flooded the bay not long after the competitors had arrived, prompting the usually understated big-wave veteran Peter Cole to describe the conditions as “ridiculous.” Smirnoff director Fred Hemmings did the right thing and put the contest on hold for two hours. By 10:30 A.M., no more closeout sets had come through and—with a TV crew in position and thousands of spectators standing by—Hemmings was ready to roll. The only problem was that half of his contestants, some of whom had never ridden Waimea before, were ready to mutiny. Hemmings was thicker around the middle than when he’d won the 1968 World Surfing Championships, but still in big-wave shape. Angry at the thought of this potential surf-media bonanza slipping away, Hemmings faced the surfers, pointed to the lineup, and said he’d paddle out there first and catch one, if that would help convince everybody that the event had to go forward. Nobody called his bluff. The competitors in the first heat shuffled over to the ready area, picked up their colored jerseys, and the contest was on.

  “THE BEAUTY OF SURFING IS THAT YOU NEVER REALLY GET TO GO WHERE YOU WANT TO GO. NO MATTER HOW GOOD YOU ARE, OR HOW ADVANCED THE EQUIPMENT IS IT’S NEVER QUITE ENOUGH.”

  —Mark Richards

  Richards probably could have begged off with no harm done to his young career, but for any elite surfer, the ultimate goal was to make an impression in Hawaii. Furthermore, while he was the politest pro on the beach, he was also ambitious and ferociously competitive. Richards was in the second heat. Nauseous with fear and adrenaline, he picked up his jersey. Three seconds after the heat-starting horn went off, he spun around, paddled into an eighteen-footer—half-again bigger than anything he’d ever ridden—and carefully sledded off seventy-five yards to his right into deep water. None of his six rides that morning were spectacular, and when it was announced that he didn’t advance, he nearly wept with relief. As it turned out, he’d just cleared the biggest hurdle of his surfing life—nothing in Richards’ long and often dramatic career would be as hard as paddling out that day at Waimea.

  MARK RICHARDS, OFF-THE-WALL, 1975.

  Rip, Tear, and Lacerate: The Return of the Twin-Fin

  Before the IPS world tour, the top shortboard-era surfers—Nat Young, Midget Farrelly, Gerry Lopez, Reno Abellira, and Terry Fitzgerald among them—earned a living by shaping surfboards. Once the tour was established, aspiring pro surfers had more incentive to focus entirely on wave-riding, and boardmaking fell by the wayside. Wayne Bartholomew, Shaun Tomson, Cheyne Horan, Dane Kealoha, and nearly all the other IPS pros had no interest in shaping.

  Mark Richards bucked this trend partly because, unlike Bartholomew, he wasn’t convinced that pro surfing was going to become a career-worthy occupation. He also just loved designing and crafting surfboards. Sydney boardmaker Geoff McCoy gave Richards some informal training in 1974. Following the 1976–77 North Shore season, he stayed in Hawaii and hired master boardmaker Dick Brewer for an intensive two-month shaping workshop. For the rest of his time on tour, in-between events, Richards was often in the shaping bay, covered in foam dust.

  At first, his contest results suffered. Richards placed third in 1976, dropped to fifth the next year, then finished a dismal tenth in 1978. It wasn’t just that he was learning a trade. Too many contests were held in small waves, and as one of the tour’s biggest surfers, he found himself bogging down more often than the smaller, lighter pros. (Richards was six foot one, 180 pounds; Bartholomew was five foot ten, 150 pounds, which was closer to the average.) Apart from Hawaii, which required special equipment, the pros were all using some variation on the same single-fin double-ender design that had been popular since the early seventies. Most of the boards were 6 foot 6 inches long and 20 inches wide. Hoping to put a bit of snap and fizz into his small-wave act, Richards, alone among the top Aussie pros, made the switch in 1975 to the “stinger” design, introduced a year earlier by Ben Aipa of Hawaii.

  Aipa weighed 250 pounds and had the stone-faced look of a Honolulu hit man—he scared a lot of people. He was also Hawaii’s second-best boardmaker after Brewer. Like Richards, Aipa had struggled to find a small-wave board that would get him over the flat spots. In 1972, he introduced a split-backed design called the swallowtail, which allowed the board to pivot a bit more freely. But flotation was still a problem. With the stinger, Aipa essentially took the front two-thirds of a wider small-wave board and joined it to a narrower swallowtail rear section—there was actually a one-inch cut in the rail line. The added width in the center allowed the board to sit higher in the water than a conventional board, which increased the planing speed. The tapered back end gave it bite. Aipa further boosted maneuverability by moving the fin—and therefore the board’s pivot point—about six inches toward the nose. By late 1974, Hawaii’s best small-wave surfers, including Larry Bertlemann, Buttons Kaluhiokalani, Mark
Liddell, and Aipa himself, were all zapping around the Waikiki reefs on their new stingers, most of them decorated with airbrushed hotrod flames.

  Tomson and Bartholomew and the rest of the soon-tobe IPS pros thought Aipa’s design was a bit too skittery and held on to their conventional boards. Richards, with some extra cash from winning the 1975 Smirnoff Pro-Am, bought a half dozen stingers from Aipa, as well as some knockoffs from Dick Brewer. For two years he used these exclusively in smaller waves. Other board-design wheels were in motion, and Richards paid attention to these as well. At the 1976 Coke event in Sydney, Reno Abellira showed up with a pudgy round-nosed twin-fin, modeled after the “fish” design created a few years earlier by San Diego kneeboarder Steve Lis. Abellira’s board wasn’t especially maneuverable, but it had plenty of flat-bottomed surface area and absolutely skimmed over the water in tiny waves. Richards made himself a copy, and between contests he rode it for kicks at his home break in Newcastle.

  In mid-1977, still looking for a magic bullet in smaller waves, Richards built himself a 6-foot 2-inch stinger-fish hybrid. The nose wasn’t round, like Abellira’s board, and he lost the stinger-style cuts in the rail. He kept the swallowtail, and put a lot of vee in the back end—not like the old plastic machines, but more than anybody else at the time. Most significantly, Richards finished the board off with a pair of modified fish-style fins, both angled slightly toward the nose. As a finishing touch, he ordered a new oversized surfboard label, with the initials “MR” airbrushed inside the familiar diamond-shaped yellow-and-red Superman logo.