The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Tudor was a child prodigy longboarder in the early 1990s. Freckled and thin, with a helium-pitched voice, by age fifteen he had the smoothest longboarding touch of anyone since David Nuuhiwa. He won two longboard championships (in 1998 and 2004) but resisted being categorized. By the late 1990s he was devoting half of his water time to shortboards—all carefully replicated from the late sixties and seventies. As the sport’s first and coolest proponent of retro-chic—“Joel, what’s it like to have more soul in your little finger than most people will have in their entire life?” gushed a Surfing magazine editor during in 1998 interview, too excited to keep his metaphor pointed in one direction—Tudor decorated his whole life with artifacts from the past: he drove a ’64 Chevy Bel Air with period surf racks bolted to the roof, listened to Charlie Parker, wore bell-bottoms, burned incense, and cut his hair in a Wayne Lynch Evolution shag. He had a sharp tongue and was a dependable surf-industry critic. He was also an echo-chamber for any Age of Aquarius cliché. “I’m just trying to pass along a message,” he said a few months after his Surfing interview. “Expand your mind.”

  Cynics happily gnawed away at the Tudor image, starting with the mind-expanding fact that the average retail price for a Joel Tudor Surfboards “Diamon T” model noserider—with soulful hand-lettered decals and backyard-style abstract finish—was a cool $1,050. Yet Tudor made no bones about being a professional. If he could ride a trend as well as he could ride a First Point Malibu peeler—well, that’s how the game was played.

  Business aside, Tuder genuinely seemed to be pulling more from the surfing experience than just about anybody. He rode a lot of different boards and rode them all extraordinarily well. All that rooting around in the past, furthermore, had provided him not just with an excellent jazz LP collection and enough vintage clothes to fill a Salvation Army storefront, but with some worthwhile and mostly-forgotten ideas about what it meant to be a surfer. It was Tudor who reminded everybody just how much better a surfboard looks without a lot of labels and stickers. Most of his boards, long and short, had one small logo on the deck and none on the bottom. By word and example, Tudor also did a better job than any surfer his age at expanding the criteria for high-performance surfing. “It’s not just how much you can do on a wave, or how crazy you can get,” he said in 1999. “It’s also, How much cleaner can you make it? How much more beauty and style can you put into it?”

  Greater variety in surfboard equipment, and more attention to riding style—neither of these ideas should have been “retro” to begin with. But they were, and it’s much to Tudor’s credit that both were back in vogue—along with paisley-covered boards and the Nixon-era beavertail wetsuit—as surfing glided into the 21st century.

  Blank Monday and the Postmodern Surfboard

  Futurism was just as trendy as the retro movement during the 1990s and early 2000s. Two throw-ahead scenarios in particular—both of which had been around for decades—fired people’s imaginations. One was high-quality engineered surf. The other was the post-polyurethane surfboard.

  Design work has always been the sexy part of surfboard manufacturing. The hot curl, Malibu chip, plastic machine, Thruster, fish—these were the boards, and the breakthroughs, that people remembered. Surfboard construction methods? Not so exciting. Tom Blake’s hollow board was a dead end. Balsa was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t much to get excited about. It was just . . . wood. Even polyurethane foam, the sport’s original space-age material, was developed out of supply-and-demand necessity, not to make a better piece of equipment. Hobie, Weber, and every other board-maker would have gladly stayed with balsa if the lumberyards could have filled their orders.

  Things on the construction front began to heat up during the Third Boom. If programmable shaping machines weren’t a breakthrough, exactly, that was only because it took two decades to get them working right. Frenchman Michel Barland developed a prototype in 1979, yet not until the early 2000s did later-generation machines, operated by 3D-image CAD drafting software, become standard equipment among major board manufacturers. The new computer-shaped boards didn’t look any different. But a machine could tool one out in minutes instead of an hour. Even better, a board’s specs could be stored and replicated. The greatest shapers in the world had never been able to copy a board exactly—now it could be done with a few keystrokes. Also, working from a given baseline set of numbers, it was now possible to make single-variable design changes. If, say, a customer walked in with his favorite 6-foot 1-inch and said it was just right volume-wise but needed a tiny bit more drive, the shaper could make an identical board with a quarter-inch less tail lift.

  It was the beginning of the end for the grungy, dust-covered, hands-on shaping artisan. “I couldn’t even use a microwave oven before I got into computer shaping,” leading Hawaiian boardmaker John Carper said in 2001. “And young kids like my son—they’ll be the best shapers in the world without knowing a thing about planers.”

  Shaping machines aside, the boardbuilding process had been passed along, Amish-like, from decade to decade. Finished blanks were delivered to one end of a “glassing” factory lined with fifty-five-gallon resin drums and industrial-sized rolls of fiberglass. A crew of local non-union surfer-tradesmen then went about the messy and modest-paying business of laminating, airbrushing, sanding, glossing, and polishing. The scale of production grew through the years. Materials were upgraded. But in 2000, the whole operation remained amazingly similar to what it had been in 1950.

  BLANK MONDAY AFTERMATH: CLARK FOAM MOLDS AT A CONCRETE RECYCLING PLANT.

  Then, on December 5, 2005, without warning, Clark Foam went out of business—“Blank Monday,” as it was dubbed by the surf press. Suddenly it looked as if boardmaking was going to be reinvented top to bottom, post haste.

  Nothing like this had ever happened to the sport. Gordon “Grubby” Clark, one of the co-creators of the polyurethane foam surfboard blank, had been the biggest supplier of blanks since he opened Clark Foam in 1961. By the turn of the century—having constantly upgraded his product and earned a reputation as a merciless, even vindictive businessman—Clark had a 90 percent U.S. market share, and 60 percent worldwide. It was the closest thing surfing had to a monopoly, and the company was thought to be worth $40 million. In 2002, Surfer named Clark the sport’s second-most powerful figure, behind Quiksilver CEO Bob McKnight. At the time, Clark was a seventy-year-old semi-recluse who hadn’t given a magazine interview for three decades. Surfer dug out a shot of him taken in the 1980s: in the photo, he’s balding and middle-aged, in sunglasses, grinning from behind his two fists, each with a raised middle finger.

  Nobody knew exactly why Clark Foam closed. In a rambling seven-page fax sent to dealers, Clark wrote about a toxic foam-making chemical commonly known as TDI, and said his company had been targeted for environmental violations—“I may be looking at very large fines, civil lawsuits and even time in prison”—but the EPA and other regulatory agencies said Clark wasn’t under investigation. Three former Clark Foam workers were on full-pay disability leave, and a wrongful death suit was in the pipeline (alleging, among other things, that employees occasionally heated their lunch in the same microwave oven used to heat foam-mixing chemicals), and some believed that Clark simply pulled the plug before litigators did it for him. Or it may have been plain meanness. One month after closing, Clark destroyed his concrete master molds, and locked away his proprietary formulas—none of the vast boardmaking knowledge he’d accumulated over the past half century would be passed on.

  The fallout was immediate. What little foam was left doubled in price almost overnight. Non-Clark blanks—mostly from Brazil, Australia, and South Africa—were hard to find, couldn’t be purchased in bulk or shipped quickly, and were almost all of inferior quality. Two weeks after Blank Monday, American surfboard production was off by more than half, custom orders were suspended, and new board prices were jacked up by as much as $250.

  * * *

  The “postmodern surfboard” had lon
g been a topic of discussion among boardmakers. With Clark Foam blowing a hole through the middle of the industry, it looked as if the time was at hand. “This Changes Everything,” one magazine cover blurb put it, with a subhead reading: “Why the Surfboard Will Never Be the Same.”

  True enough. Within eighteen months, manufacturers had introduced a range of new materials and new building methods: you could buy a hollow carbon-fiber board engineered like a jet-fighter wing, or an injection-molded board with a multilayer vacuum-sealed “sandwich” covering, or a composite-core board with parabolic balsa rails. New types of blanks were available, and surfers had to learn the difference between extruded polystyrene foam and expanded polystyrene foam. Flex, a subject that never came up in the Clark era, was a hot new design topic; boardmakers now talked about “flex patterns” and “contortional flex” and “flex fatigue.” Compared to polyurethane-core boards, the latest boards were all lighter and stronger.

  Many of the “new” materials and techniques had been around the sport for years, but on the fringes. Some of the “postmodern” companies, for that matter, had been up and running since the Clinton era. A Santa Cruz–based outfit called Surftech—the biggest of the non-polyurethane manufacturers—had actually become the world’s biggest board-maker by 2004, the year before Clark shut down. Surftech didn’t publicize its numbers, but it was estimated it sold forty thousand units that year; mostly entry-level boards and long-boards. But Blank Monday brought all the new technology to the forefront. “In the past week,” California surf journalist Chris Mauro said, not long after Clark shut down, “I’ve been debriefed on more new boardmaking ideas than I have in my entire 30 years as a surfer.”

  Some of these ideas had to do with the environment. For decades, modern surfboard manufacturing has lived at the dirty end of the environmental spectrum. Polyester resin, used properly, isn’t especially toxic. But fiberglass has been described as “the asbestos of the twenty-first century,” and polyurethane foam is made from at least one carcinogen. After foam replaced wood as the core material, surfboards were close to nonbiodegradable. Green (or least greener) equipment had been in the works since the late 1990s, and when Clark Foam shut down—and did so at least in part because of suspected health and environmental violations—the process was kicked into a higher gear. Within two years, thanks mostly to the efforts of garage-lab DIY industrialists—the surfworld descendants, fifty years down the line, to Gordon Clark—the list of eco-minded board materials included plant-based “biofoam” blanks, a fiberglass substitute made from hemp, and a laminating resin so nontoxic, according to its young surfer-chemist-inventor, “you can almost eat the stuff.”

  Offshore manufacturing was another issue. Costco began selling Chinese-made boards in 2001, for a third less than what the local surfshop was charging, and Surftech jobbed its entire line out to Cobra International, a 180,000-square-foot factory in Bangkok responsible for more than half of the world’s annual sailboard production. Then there was a Sydney-based company with the vaguely sinister name of Global Surf Industries. Launched in 2002, GSI’s objective was to service what its promo department described as “the everyday surfer”—that huge, nonsexy midrange market between the Costco bargain hunter and the custom-board epicure. GSI started with five separate brands (three polyurethane lines and two Surftech-style lines, all made by Cobra), which retailed to a huge international network of surf shops, where they sold for about $100 less than the average stock board.

  After Clark Foam imploded, Surftech quickly increased its market share, and imports in general looked ready to spread into the high-performance market. Globalization up to this point had been a minor issue. Now, in some quarters at least, it turned into a full-blown surf culture menace. Boardmakers, retailers, and the surfing press spoke out against lost American jobs, exploited Third World labor, and a flood of inferior product. Since most of the import lines were “popouts”—built to spec, like skis or tennis rackets—it was also claimed that the new equipment would be the ruin of custom boardmaking. Some of this was valid. Domestic surf industry jobs were indeed shrinking, along with the custom market. But there was no shortage of propagandizing, too. Australian journalist Tim Baker discovered this when he flew to Thailand and visited Cobra International, and came upon what he described as “altogether the cleanest, most efficient, well-run, surfboard factory I have ever seen,” with fully insured employees making above-average laborer’s play.

  Moral qualms weren’t the real issue, anyway. Wetsuits and surfwear had been made in Asia for decades, and surfers never gave it a second thought. No, the underlying problem with imported boards had to do with the notion—the romance—of locally made, handcrafted surfboards. “We feel strongly about this stuff,” California surf journalist Nathan Myers wrote in 2006. “Surfboards are magic. Surfboards are sacred. We have a near-spiritual communion with these blocks of foam and resin.” American boardmaker Dave Parmenter went further. “Just watch, is all I can say,” he wrote in Surfer’s Journal. “Our little industry totters at the brink of black-hole globalization, [and] once sucked over the event horizon, some of the best things about our unique culture and lifestyle will be gone forever.” The refrain went up again and again: surfing’s soul was crafted within the dusty painted-plywood walls of the local shaping room. “It’s something we’ve always kept in the family, and now we’ve been sold out,” one Los Angeles–area boardmaker warned. “Asian-made boards have no soul at all.”

  In fact, the death-of-soul alarm had been raised a decade earlier, with the arrival of shaping machines. At that time, Santa Barbara’s Al Merrick—boardmaker to Tom Curren, Lisa Andersen, and Kelly Slater—helped put an end to the discussion by crushing a Styrofoam cup in his fist while talking to a newspaper reporter. “There’s no soul in foam,” he said, opening his hand. “The soul of surfing is to get out into the waves and have a good time. Computer-made boards won’t change that.” Merrick, not surprisingly, was one of the first to have his boards made in Asia.

  But what was the average surfer to do? Strange materials, different construction methods, new riding characteristics, the “green” imperative, offshoring—buying a new board had all of sudden become incredibly complicated.

  Then, just a year or so later, it was less so. By 2009, Asian-made imports leveled out at about 30 percent of the market. Boardmaking materials and procedures became a notch or two greener, and surfing’s environmentalists shifted most of their attention to other, more immediate concerns, like a spate of new oil spills. Surftech got caught with a warehouse full of unsold boards during the global economic crisis—much as Hobie Surfboard did during the shortboard revolution—and the company no longer seemed to be the sport’s popout-pushing Godzilla, ready to eat the American surf industry.

  Most surprising of all, polyurethane foam remained the material of choice for high-performance surfers. Polyurethane manufacturing rebounded faster than anybody expected, and there were now two dozen new or newly expanded companies that together produced more foam blanks than Clark had at peak operation. Of the roughly four hundred thousand new boards produced worldwide in 2009, nearly four out of five were made with a polyurethane core. At about $600, they were cheaper than next-generation boards, which cost up to $1,100—a bit too postmodern for most surfers.

  Price, though, was really secondary to performance. After all the test-riding was done, most people decided they just liked the “feel” of polyurethane foam best. “I don’t know what it is exactly about traditional foam and fiberglass boards,” one surfer put it, “but they just go so freaking good.” So what if they broke now and then? That was part of the game, and relative to other sports like skiing and kiteboarding, surfing was still cheap.

  The shakeout from all these changes is ongoing, but so far it has been much less dramatic than early predictions anticipated, when boardmaking was said to be entering a “second revolution.” The original revolution, of course, was the development of the shortboard, and while there are some comparisons, t
he differences are most telling. First, the shortboard revolution was a giant do-it-yourself project, with hundreds of backyard shapers making it up as they went, and it hobbled or ruined the boardmaking industry’s biggest names. The new-tech equipment was corporatized to the hilt and led by a handful of major companies with all the investment, credit, and marketing muscle they could want.

  The other big difference is even more telling. In the late 1960s, Nat Young, David Nuuhiwa, Barry Kanaiaupuni, and the rest of the world’s best surfers were all on the front line, riding and designing the latest equipment. In the post-Clark age, no sector was less affected by new-tech boards than the top surfers. Among the ranking pros, only Taj Burrow of Australia made the switch. Kelly Slater, Andy Irons, Mick Fanning, Stephanie Gilmore—everyone else stayed with old-fashioned polyurethane.

  The market for the postmodern surfboard, in other words, turned out to be mostly beginners and intermediates—surfers who didn’t care if their board was custom, who appreciated the increased durability, and who had no interest in abstract discussions about the sport’s soul.

  So where does that leave boardmaking today? Up in the air. The recent advances in materials and construction will probably, eventually, be combined in such a way as to replace the polyurethane foam board. But not for awhile. Nobody was calling the post-Clark age of boardmaking a bust. By 2010, though, it wasn’t looking like much of a revolution.

  Brave New Wave: The Long, Bumpy Road to Manufactured Surf