The Big Juice: Epic Tales of Big Wave Surfing
Page 16
1966
In an interview for Sports Illustrated, Waimea regular Fred Van Dyke theorizes that most North Shore big wave riders are latent homosexuals. Van Dyke later claims he was quoted out of context, while everyone else is busy looking up the word latent.
1980
Steamer's Disco in Haleiwa establishes itself as the North Shore's only real night spot, where, during the height of New Wave, a pro surfer can still wear skin-tight Jordache jeans and not get beaten up. Or at least not on purpose. During one nocturnal foray into Steamer's pink and black zone, the ever-stylish Shaun Tomson, striding manfully across the dance floor, is caught in the middle of a catfight between a prominent Australian professional and her irate lover, the latter apparently incensed about the blond goofy foot's particularly charged performance with another wahine to A Taste of Honey's "Boogie-oogie-oogie." Tomson catches an elbow with nothing latent about it in the face, sustaining a black eye that would later require explaining.
1965
In a social climate previously lubricated with Primo Beer Mateus Rose, acid hits the North Shore, adding new significance to the term big drop. Younger generation stars like Jeff Hakman, Jock Sutherland, Herbie Fletcher, and Jackie Eberle turn on and drop in, but it's Old Guard member and Sunset superman Paul Grebauer who really establishes the Rainbow Bridge, passionately espousing LSD's mind-opening qualities a full two years before the Summer of Love. By that time Grebauer had already dropped out to seek further enlightenment in Up Country, Maui.
1982
With Hawaii's statewide, DEA-backed Operation Green Harvest eradication program in its second year, the North Shore's pakalolo supply withers considerably. Cocaine fills the gap, bringing with its flurry a significant increase in violence, theft, tension, and bottleblonde haole girls willing to do anything for blow. This influx of available, compliant women, the first in the North Shore's history, has a major social impact, bringing elements of Da City to Da Country in the form of a proliferation of shirts with collars and lowered Honda Accords.
1967
Jackie Eberle, the stand-out goofy foot of the season after ripping both Sunset Beach and Waimea Bay on clean, pretransitional-era Harbour guns shaped by Dick Brewer, is discovered one night by Jeff Hakman and Jock Sutherland in a catatonic acid trip from which he never returns. Even as MacGilivray-Freeman's newly released Free and Easy highlights his clean lines, Eberle remains institutionalized.
1986
Hawaii Kai s Tim "Taz" (as in "Tasmanian devil") Fretz, a standout in the Pipeline fray for both his buzz-cut, white-blond hair and penchant for riding Pipe on a 6'2" twin-fin, dies in what Honolulu police call a "drug-related suicide." In explanation of why Fretz was discovered with two bullet wounds to his head, police sources merely shake theirs. "He must have had considerable resolve," they admit. "Hey, it can happen."
1961
Former Mainland hot-rodder and model-plane designer Dick Brewer opens the North Shore's first surf shop. Located in Haleiwa and given the somewhat grandiose name Surfboards Hawaii, Brewer's shaping room becomes an epicenter for big wave gun production, including the construction of the prototypical Buzzy Trent Model, 11 feet of pure trim.
1969
Bill Stonebreaker, Mike Turkington, and Mike Hobak open the North Shore's second surf shop, Country Surfboards, located in the old 1935 M. Yoshida building on the west end of Haleiwa. While cultural scholars have difficulty pinpointing when the term country was first used to describe Oahu's North Shore, Country Surfboards, with its trippy peace symbol/pot leaf/palm tree logo, is the first to institutionalize the term.
1969
The biggest winter swell in recorded memory hits the North Shore, generated by a massive 960-millibar low-pressure system whose cyclonic winds cover almost a third of the entire North Pacific. Storm surf estimated in the range (60 to 80 feet by today's standards) batters the coast between Kaena Point and Kahuku. The National Guard closes down the Kam Highway in Haleiwa as during the swell's peak at midnight of December 2, a number of beachfront homes are swept off their foundations and back onto Ke Nui Ka Waena Roads.
1977
Kua Aina Burgers opens in Haleiwa and is an immediate hit with locals and visiting surfers alike, despite exorbitant prices that include $3.50 for a plain burger with lettuce, tomato, and grilled onions.
1969
Riding a series of bladed-out, wafer-thin pocket rockets, Hawaiian icon-to-be Barry Kanaiaupuni becomes the first surfer to successfully interpret the power-surfing capabilities of what are now being called "short boards," reinventing the bottom turn at Sunset and Haleiwa.
1994
Riding a series of bladed-out, wafer-thin pocket rockets, Floridian icon-to-be Kelly Slater becomes the first surfer to successfully interpret the power-surfing capabilities of what are now being called "glass slippers," reinventing both frontside and backside surfing Pipeline and Backdoor on his way to the first of three successive Pipeline Masters victories.
1941
At approximately 8:02 on the morning of Sunday, December 7, fifty-one Aichis Type 99 dive-bombers from the Japanese Imperial Navy carrier Akagi, led by Lt. Cmdr. Kakuichi Takahashi, fly in low over Haleiwa en route to their attack on the 6th Pursuit Squadron barracks at nearby Schofield Barracks, coordinating their bombing run on the North Shore with the more extensive strike on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, 20 miles to the southwest.
1972
Burleigh Head local Paul Neilson muscles his way to first place at the Smirnoff Pro, surfing in sizeable Haleiwa against the cream of the new North Shore regime, including Jeff Hakman, the Aikaus, James Jones, and Barry Kanaiaupuni. Narrabeen hot grom Grant "Dappa" Oliver places fourth in a show of force that predates the more traditionally accepted Aussie North Shore "invasion" by almost four years.
1971
Laguna Beach goofy foot Mike Armstrong is out surfing a windy, day at Pipeline. Groomed in the Brooks Street shorebreak, the eighteen-year-old "Army" has the weighted-front-foot, hunched-back tube stance down. On this otherwise unremarkable afternoon, a man with a clipboard and a bullhorn who looks surprisingly like 1968 world champ Fred Hemmings Jr. flags him in and ask him if he'd like to compete in a new, ABC-televised surf contest called the Pipeline Masters. Armstrong is apparently to replace Gerry Lopez, who, thinking the contest was called off for the day, is home in Niu Valley watching TV. Army says, "Sure!" and paddles back out with Jeff Hakman, Corky Carroll, Jim Blears, Bill Hamilton, and Jock Sutherland. Jeff Hakman wins and takes home $500, while Army, signed up on the beach, places second. Lopez, the undisputed Pipeline master, hears the results on the evening news. Livid, he wins the next two Masters contests in succession.
2002
At the $250,000 X-Box/Gerry Lopez Pipeline Masters, Andy Irons beats Shane Dorian, Kelly Slater, and Australian Mick Fanning in shifty, Backdoor barrels, taking home $30,000 for his first-place finish. Irons's earnings represent a 6,000-percent increase over Jeff Hakman's haul thirty years earlier. One needs to compute both inflation and cost-of-living increases to appreciate how much progress this amount truly represents.
1971
Two well-known California/North Shore surfers-one of them a primary, if seldom-acknowledged, architect of the minigun movement-flee the island when felony arrest warrants are issued after a girlfriend is caught passing counterfeit $20 bills at the Ala Moana Shopping Center and names them as the source.
1974
At the Hang Ten American Pro at Sunset Beach, contest director George Downing's innovative new objective scoring system represents a brave attempt to improve over the "biggest wave, longest ride" format that had been the standard in Hawaiian surf competition for over twenty years. Sadly, however, a serious flaw is later revealed. In the semifinals, maneuver-spotter Jack McCoy, whose job is to call out completed maneuvers, each assigned a certain number of points, is apparently very liberal with his zigs and zags in the case of South African Michael Tomson. Tomson, his score padded with six extra zigs and at least fou
r superfluous zags, advances to the final. McCoy, never suspected of passing the counterfeit zigs, eventually moves to Australia and becomes one of the sport's greatest cinematographers. Tomson, ironically, goes on to form a successful surfwear label called "Gotcha."
1980
Foodland supermarket opens across the street from Three Tables in Pupukea. Built on the site formerly occupied by renowned glasser/ airbrusher Kelly Main's Waimea Bay Surf Shop and the Canaday family's feed-and-grain store, Foodland, with a swoosh of automatic doors, provides North Shore residents living north of Waimea Bay instant access to meat, produce, dairy products, and cold beer. Previous alternatives were restricted to a trip through the claustrophobic aisles of Kammie's Market at Sunset Beach or the long haul to Fujioka s or Haleiwa Superette in Haleiwa proper. This sudden abundance provides an unforeseen challenge in the shape of increased calories, both solid and liquid, as more than a few prominent surfers' waistlines expand uncomfortably beyond the confines of sponsors' trunks. The trend is especially noticeable after Foodland begins selling Haagen Dazs ice cream.
1990
The state of Hawaii's Department of Transportation, responding to increased traffic congestion on the two-lane Kam Highway wandering through Haleiwa Town, begins construction of a 1.8-mile bypass that will completely skirt behind the site of Chief Kaanui s old village, emerging on the north end of town. To complete, it would eventually take a year for each of the seven minutes that North Shore commuters would save, including long delays when it is discovered that the new freeway runs through both an ancient heiau (temple) and nesting sites for an endangered species of plover. When completed, it introduces the North Shore's first traffic light, the very first between Wahiawa and Kailua.
1970-2002
Relatively unknown North Shore shapers, with proximity to both some of the most powerful waves on Earth and the equally powerful surfers who ride them, design and build some of the best surfboards in history. Some of these foamsmiths are Larry Felker, Ryan Dotson, Buddy Dumphy, John Mobley, Bosco Burns, Rick Irons, Harold Iggy, Don Koplien, James Turnbull, Jim Turner, Randy Rarick, Tom Nellis, Chuck Andrus, Dennis Pang, Bill Barnfield, Mark Angell, Charlie Smith, Jim Richardson, Gerry Smith, Cort Gion, Jeff and Don Johnson, and Kirk Bjerke.
1977
The ride of the decade, or at least the second half, comes down on a big day at Off-the-Wall when all-around nice guy Aussie Mark Richards uncharacteristically drops in on '77 world champion-tobe Shaun Tomson. MR, feeling very involved himself, industriously weaves and poses through the curl of one of the heaviest waves to be ridden that season at this photogenic stone/coral-bottom beachbreak just a flying kick-out away from Pipeline's notorious Backdoor. Unbeknownst to Richards, however, is the fact that Tomson survives the rather brutal stuff job, pulling up into the barrel behind him, successfully negotiating both MR's twin-fin wake and the grinding tube. With only about a hundred cameras firing off sequences, MR emerges from the curl triumphant, acknowledging the hoots and whistles. Then someone tells him. Shaun goes on that season to establish the single greatest performance gap that has ever existed on the North Shore, surfing virtually a decade ahead technique-wise of such luminary contemporaries as Richards, Bartholomew, Cairns, and Ho. MR, even after winning four subsequent world titles, still bristles whenever the topic of the great wave comes up.
1981
Narrabeen surfer/shaper Simon Anderson effectively changes the shapes of things to come with a groundbreaking performance on one of his three-finned Thrusters in the finals of the Pipeline Masters. Whipping around deep on a set wave, Anderson bottom-turns deep and pulls up into the tube standing upright, the inside fin allowing the big backsider to climb and drop in the barrel, emerging from under the curtain in the channel to win the event. One week later a less publicized but no less significant affirmation occurs when shaper Dennis Pang takes his first, hastily built 7'4" Thruster out on a good-size day at Sunset and stylishly proves to the still-skeptical North Shore cognoscenti that the design is no fluke.
1989
Enjoying dinner at Pizza Bob's in Haleiwa, twenty-two-year-old Brock Little, the North Shore's top young gun, mentions that he'd someday like to surf Waimea in the moonlight. Dinner partner, the late Jack Denny, suggests there is no time like the present, especially considering the moon on that evening is almost full and, at 9:30 p.m., just rising over the hills of Pupukea. Little, who will later go on to forge a career responding to dares as a Hollywood stuntman, wolfs down his last piece of Sicilian Special, drives to the bay, entourage in tow, and not only goes out but also actually jumps in off the rocks on the point rather than paddle out through the bay-a route considered suicidal even in the daytime. While his awed fans watch from shorehooting only when they make out his tracks shimmering in the moonlight-Little enjoys what he calls "fun Waimea. About 18 foot."
When the following morning word of his nocturnal session sweeps the Strip, Little's transformation is complete: He is now officially a hellman.
2001
Thirty-five-year-old Brock Little, fresh from the Mainland and sporting an uncharacteristic wax rash on his pate chest, sits on the beach under the Pipeline lifeguard tower, shaking his head. He has just been asked a question in regard to his romantic life-more specifically the May-September romance Little struck up with Blue Crush star twenty-year-old Kate Bosworth during the last season's filming and has been continuing, somewhat problematically, to this day. Little's rueful response gives the impression that compared with surfing Waimea at night, dating a Hollywood actress just out of her teens is a much more daunting challenge.
1990
The Weatherly family moves into a modest beachfront house just to the west of the Pipeline right-of-way. Sons Jason and Benji take advantage of their proximity to the most torrid stretch of surf on Earth to develop into fine performers in their own right. It's their friends, however, who really establish "Benji's Backyard" as the epicenter of a progressive surfing movement later dubbed "the New School." Kelly Slater, Shane Dorian, Ross Williams, Pat O'Connell, Taylor Knox, Rob Machado, the Malloys, Kalani Robb, Akita Aipa, and Todd Chesser are just a few of the yard's denizens, all of whom benefit hugely from both the unobstructed view of Pipeline, Backdoor, and Off-the-Wall and the inevitable push from the hypercritical gallery up in the grass. Also living in the yard is a penniless, fresh-faced young videographer from Solana Beach named Taylor Steele, whose unblinking eye would go on to provide the new movement with plenty of momentum.
1980
In one of the strangest episodes in the North Shore's complex social dynamic, California insurance junior mogul Ray Keller of UIAA Insurance, looking for some sort of entry into the island surf scene, decides to personally bankroll an attempt to produce a Hawaiian world champion. Keller's campaign involves a liberal expenditure of funds, deemed as "sponsorship" of a number of notable local surfers, including actual contenders Buzzy Kerbox and Hans Hedemann. This deluge of cash, vast surfboard quivers, and free automobiles, combined with Keller's shrill cheerleading, produces an intimidating air of entitlement that simmers over at the Pipeline Masters. There, following the semifinals elimination of UIAA-sponsored Buttons Kaluhiokalani due to an interference call, a battery of incensed locals storms the judge's tower, sending the frightened judging panel scrambling for a nearby beach house. From a position of relative safety the decision is then made to reverse the decision and put Buttons back into what has since been called "the Seven-Man Final." During that heat-featuring Bobby Owens, Simon Anderson, Al Byrne, Wayne Bartholomew, Shaun Tomson, and Chris Barella-Kaluhiokalani inadvertently drops in several more times but-surprise!-still places third in the event.
1991
In what is considered by many to be the decade's single greatest day of surfing, the '91 Eddie is held in super-clean, maximumsize Waimea, brushed to perfection by uncharacteristic southwest winds. Peak moments abound, including one spectacular over-thefalls high dive by Haleiwa s Kerry Terukina. But it's Brock Little who provides a one-man highli
ght reel, pulling into and almost out of the biggest tubes of the biggest Waimea waves ever attempted, freefalling midface for a horrendous beating. Little eventually finishes second behind Keone Downing on a day that is still the benchmark against which all paddle-in sessions are measured.
1992
By this time the annual Thanksgiving dinner at the single-story, ranch-style home of the Hill family, just down from Laniakea, has become the North Shore's coolest tradition. Gathering for turkey and stuffing with son Ronald is the cream of the New School generation, including Kelly Slater, the Malloys, the Weatherlys, Brock and Clark Little, Matty Liu, Shane Dorian, Rob Machado, Todd Chesser, Seth McKinney, Akita Aipa, Donnie Solomon, and just about every other connected young star on the strip. In the next few years, however, tragedy will leave the dinner table with two notable vacancies.
1982
In November Hurricane Iwa roars over the Hawaiian Islands in the middle of the annual winter surf season, devastating portions of Oahu with 100-plus-knot winds and high storm surges. The North Shore is especially hard hit, left without power and water for nine days. The scenes and disaster are shocking, trees and telephone poles toppled, roads flooded, and the ever-dapper Shaun Tomson seen with a beard for the first time in his life. (He should've listened to his visiting mother, who hoarded cases of Perrier from a nearby liquor store at the first sign of storm clouds.) Surfers, nothing if not adaptable, adjust quickly, lining up at Foodland when it opens its useless freezer section and distributes free Haagen Dazs rather than let it melt and descending en masse on the nearby Kuiliima Hotel to bathe in its resort pool.
1990
Pipeline ace and rising Billabong promo-star Ronnie Burns is found dead in the hills behind Velzyland, lying next to his motocross bike. The surf scene is stunned at the loss of the affable, talented goofy foot, and rumors fly. An autopsy later reveals, however, that Burns in fact died from a pulmonary condition complicated by asthma.