The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  This last bit was a remarkable one-man achievement. George Downing, Wally Froiseth, John Kelly, and a few others had built specialized equipment and pointedly gone out to ride oversized waves. But none of them saw the need to redefine themselves as surfers. They invented big-wave surfing; that was enough. Trent invented the big-wave surfer. For reasons that can only be guessed at—a natural showman’s instinct, insecurity, a genuine belief in conquest as the transcendent human experience—Trent viewed the sport almost exclusively in terms of battle and combat. The Makaha board he got from Joe Quigg, a wicked 12-footer with a black dagger painted on the deck, was his “Sabre Jet.” Trent’s description of big-wave boards in general as “guns” has stuck to this day. He idolized World War I German flying ace Baron Manfred von Rich-thofen, and told friends that while paddling into the lineup during a huge swell he imagined himself as the Red Baron banking through a hive of Allied planes above the French countryside. Here in the big waves, and only here, Trent believed, could surfing rise above the level of sport and recreation and offer the surfer a chance to drape himself in glory, honor, and valor. “We’re warriors,” Trent once told a big-wave comrade, summing up their time together in heavy surf. “We didn’t have to kiss anybody’s ass. We came, we saw, we conquered. We’re Caesars!”

  Surfing’s Beat Generation

  By 1953, his second year in Hawaii, Trent was a ringleader among the fifteen or so California surfers living in a pair of Makaha Valley shack houses. It was the mainlanders’ third season on this side of the island, and news of their odd little commune had reached Honolulu. A twenty-five-year-old Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter named Sarah Park drove out to investigate. Trent told her that the surfers grew vegetables and speared fish, and that one of their group had just landed a sixty-five-pound turtle—that night’s dinner, presumably. The kitchen, Park noted, was little more than a Coleman stove. “Overhead, surfboards hang by rope so they can be let down with ease, while swim fins hang on chairs scattered between seven beds, bunks and cots.” Parks’ tone wasn’t judgmental; she took on the distancing voice of the amateur sociologist. And why not? Trent and his friends, obviously from decent middle-class stock, were choosing to live in a way that most would think of as curious, if not actually demeaning. “They are content to go without the usual luxuries of modern day living,” Park wrote, “just so they can surf.”

  The story made no mention of Downing and the rest of the Hawaiians; in fact, Park opened by saying that the “average Islander” had no idea as to Makaha’s actual location. While a new colony of enthusiastic mainland surfers homesteading on the West Side certainly fit the bill as a human-interest story, the implication in the Star-Bulletin article was that the Californians had “discovered” Makaha. This was wrong, but it became a persistent notion, and years later, the Californians were often recalled as the only surfers out at Makaha in the fifties. This misrepresentation would lead Downing and his friends to eventually feel a small and justified resentment against the Californians, though at the time they remained friendly.

  Park’s story ran on January 7, 1954, a little more than a year after the New York Times Magazine published a feature by Massachusetts writer John Clellon Holmes called “This is the Beat Generation.” Holmes had no idea what was happening on the surf at Makaha or Malibu, and Buzzy Trent and his friends for sure would have resisted any comparison between themselves and the landlocked nonconformists of Holmes’ article. But there were unmistakable and probably not accidental similarities between midfifties surfers and the Beats. Both groups were in part reacting to the self-satisfied, vaguely anxious, and consumer-oriented middle class that was developing in postwar America. When Clellon Holmes wrote of the Beats that “there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society . . . only to elude it,” he might have been describing the little surfer commune at Makaha. Holmes’ reference to the Beat Generation’s “lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills,” perfectly fit the image of Buzzy Trent wheeling his huge gun around and boring into a twenty-foot Point Surf screamer.

  There were other similarities. Hardcore surfers and Beats were both found in equally tiny numbers relative to their influence—or as fifties poet Gregory Corso said dismissively, “Three friends does not make a generation,” alluding to the holy Beat trinity of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Travel was essential to both groups: the Beats migrating from New York to San Francisco, while the surfers journeyed from Southern California to Oahu and back again. More than anything, they shared a disregard for American materialism. Kerouac’s mission statement that “Everything belongs to me because I am poor” wasn’t an exhortation to steal—although Mickey Dora might have taken it that way—but an invitation to set stock by experience and sensation, not money and goods.

  Beyond this, however, the two groups veered into completely different directions. The Beats were mostly educated and intellectual, politically aware and sexually open-minded (homosexuality was fine with Beats; terrifying to surfers), and connected at every point across the progressive-dissident spectrum. What the Beats stood for was largely defined by what they were against; the starting point for the entire movement was opposition. Surfers of the fifties had no such reach or complexity. Surfers wanted to ride waves and lounge on the beach—that was their starting point—and it so happened that the drive to do so was strong enough that they separated from the mainstream to a point more or less equidistant to that of the Beats. Surfing was counterculture in its narrowest, most practical form.

  BUZZY TRENT (RIGHT) AND LES WILLIAMS, MAKAHA, 1952.

  BUZZY TRENT, MAKAHA.

  SURFING ON THE BASQUE COAST, 1963.

  CLUB WAIKIKI, LIMA, PERU, EARLY 1950s.

  While there was a great advantage to having explicit, achievable goals—“Surfers are happy people because they always know what they want,” as one big-wave rider put it—creating a life to serve those goals didn’t necessarily put the surfer on the road to knowledge and insight. Plenty of Middle America’s most retrograde habits, ideas, and beliefs were carried over to the beaches and lineups. Trent, for example, used the word “nigger” in public and his boorishness toward women extended well beyond the ignoble standards of the time. Freedom and a gnawing lust for experience defined Trent’s life, and by that measure he and the rest of his fiftiesera surfing peers were Beat Generation fellow travelers. But there was also at times a smallness and obstinacy to their world. In making their great watery leap for independence, a lot of other interesting developments—pretty much all other interesting developments—went right past them. “If I had a couple of bucks to buy a book, I wouldn’t,” a Malibu surfer told Life magazine in 1957, the same year On the Road was published. “I’d buy some beer.”

  France and Peru, Up and Riding

  In the 1950s, surfing slowly caught on around the world. Apart from Australia, the typical non-American surfing community was small and static, located on or near a resort beach, with a dozen or so lifeguards and weekenders all happily riding their outdated planks and hollows. Compared to the United States, surfers overseas tended to be older and more settled, and the sport was often taken up in an atmosphere of wealth and glamour. This was the case in both France and Peru.

  In 1956, screenwriter Peter Vietrel, along with Richard Zanuck, a Malibu regular and son of Twentieth Century Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck, brought a Velzy-Jacobs surfboard along when they flew into Biarritz, France, to do location shots for The Sun Also Rises. A handful of locals picked up the sport right away. Not surprisingly, they took their cues from California and Hawaii—but a distinct Frenchness was present from the start. (Including the obligatory bow to socialism, as members of France’s first surf club duly paid into a group health insurance policy.) From the sand-bottomed lineup at Grande Plage, France’s most popular break, surfers looked back to see the grand Hotel du Palais and the beachfront Art Deco splendor of the Casino Barriere de Biarritz, where Edith Piaf and Yves Montand performed for elegant Galois-smoking
touristes. Joel de Rosnay, France’s first national surfing champion, wasn’t anywhere near the best surfer in the world, but as a teenage member of the Paris University ski team, surf instructor to Catherine Deneuve, and future PhD-holding director of applied research at the Pasteur Institute, he was without question the most debonair.

  Surfing had meanwhile become a new recreational favorite among the Peruvian elite, falling in just behind polo and yachting, and taken up with great enthusiasm by the well-bred playboy sons of industrialists, bankers, plantation owners, military officers, and political attaches. Carlos Dogny of Lima, the son of a French Army colonel and a Peruvian sugarcane heiress, learned to surf during a 1938 visit to Waikiki and returned home with a beautiful hollow board given to him by Duke Kahanamoku. Dogny noted that his home-town beach at Miraflores had a long, easy, rolling surf. He rode his new board there and encouraged his friends to give it a try.

  Within a year Dogny started building Club Waikiki, a split-level structure at the foot of the dusty brown Miraflores beachfront cliffs. This was an altogether different gathering place than the salt-encrusted hangouts favored by American surfers. Visitors to Club Waikiki were met by a bowing white-jacketed attendant, who waved them into a lobby with marble floors and huge glass trophy cases. Music was softly piped across the grounds, which included a pool, a squash court, and a fully staffed kitchen and dining room. Upon request, cabana boys earning $300 a year ran down to a storage locker and fetched out $600 imported surfboards, to which they would apply a fresh coat of wax and hand off at water’s edge to the waiting club members; extra tips were earned for retrieving lost boards before they bumped across the rocky beach. Queens and presidents were among the guests of honor at Club Waikiki’s black-tie events. Membership was by nomination only, and the initiation fee by the early sixties was $25,000. “They’d paddle out and catch a wave, just to show they still had the old animal prowess,” one visiting surfer said, describing the average club member. “Then a quick shower and lunch, followed by three or four cocktails on the terrace.”

  Malibu Comes to Australia

  By the end of World War II, Australian surfers had been going at it hard for almost forty years, and the country’s wave-riding population had grown steadily. In 1949, nobody so much as raised an eyebrow after a newsreel claimed that “surfing is Australia’s most popular sport.” Yet surfing in postwar Australia was vastly different than it was in America. Or, put another way, isolated from trends in California and Hawaii, Australian surfing was more or less exactly the same as it had been during the Depression. This would end with the arrival of the Malibu chip in 1956.

  By that time, Charles “Snowy” McAlister had become the nation’s first definitive surfing character. There had been other Aussie greats, including Claude West, the quiet teenager who’d received Duke Kahanamoku’s demonstration board in 1915. But McAlister—the son of a mailman, a great pubmate and storyteller, and three-time national surfriding title holder—became the prototypical Aussie surfer. “We’d dress up a bit after being in the surf and gather outside the Ladies changerooms,” McAlister once said, recalling his beachfront rake’s progress in the 1920s. “The young holiday girls liked the surfers, and it was the place to ask them out.” This après surf approach to beachgoing would, decades later, no doubt have met with approval from the likes of Tubesteak Tracy and the rest of the postwar Malibu gang. McAlister was a one-man argument for the idea that surfing’s constitutional set of givens—the ride, the sun, the beach, and all the manifold promises of excitement, leisure, beauty, and adventure—is what creates surfers, not the other way around. It’s an activity that seems to shape wave-riders anywhere and everywhere into the mold of a Universal Surfer.

  Still, as it did before the war, the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, with its nine thousand members and a countrywide network of “surf clubs” (headquarters for locally funded lifeguard companies), efficiently prevented surfing from being anything more than an agreeable off-hours compliment to the more serious work of beach patrol and rescues. There were a few exceptions. A beefy surfboard builder named Frank Adler founded the Australian Surf Board Association in 1945 with the intention of putting some distance between surfing and lifeguarding, and a few years later Jack “Bluey” Mayes of Bondi Beach managed to attract nearly a hundred members into his all-surfing Cornel Wilde Gang—distinguished by their shaggy hair and preference for zoot suits. But the SLSA remained all-powerful. When young Queen Elizabeth II came to Bondi for the 1954 Royal Command Surf Carnival, a hundred thousand people jammed the beach and headlands, and sixty banner-carrying surf clubs marched solemnly past in formation before taking to the waves. It was a hot summer morning and the surf was up, and the Queen, in pearls and white gloves, was seen pointing excitedly during the final event as a powerful set of waves overturned the entire seven-strong field of surfboats.

  The sport benefited to some degree from its association with the SLSA. Australian surfers were “knights of the boards,” as one newsreel put it, and the surfboard itself was “a sling for David against the mighty Goliath of the sea.” Surfing and heroism went hand in hand. Yet by American standards, the actual wave-riding taking place at Manly, Bondi, and the rest of Australia’s popular surfing beaches was laughable. The finless hollow surfboard remained popular in Australia long after it was discarded by American surfers, and Australian surfers rode as they always had—straight for the beach, or “cornering” on the gentlest of angles, often in group formation.

  Geographic and cultural isolation explained much of Australia’s weirdly suspended postwar development in the waves. Few Australians vacationed in Hawaii, and even fewer in California, so nobody saw firsthand what was taking places on foreign shores. The media wasn’t much help. Television didn’t arrive in Australia until 1956, and only on occasion did surfing turn up in the imported American movies and magazines. Beyond that, Australians had an obstinate native pride with regard to anything having to do with the beach, including surfing—and not without reason. The surf club was an Australian invention, after all, and nobody in the world was better at surf rescue work. Duke Kahanamoku’s demonstrations were fondly remembered, and Hawaiians were considered the world’s best surfers, but many also believed that Australia’s waves were so different from Hawaii’s that it was essentially a different sport.

  Meanwhile, Australians didn’t think much about California surfing one way or another. When visiting Hollywood hunk Peter Lawford left his new balsa chip at the Bondi Beach Surf Club during a film shoot, two or three locals took the board out for a test-ride, weren’t impressed, and let it sit unused in a corner of the clubhouse. Four years later, Queenscliff local John “Nipper” Williams got his hands on a dilapidated but seaworthy Malibu chip. “Everyone thought the board was a joke,” Manly Beach surfer Bob Evans later said. “Except for Nipper and several thousand California surfers.”

  Aussie surfers, in the end, just weren’t all that concerned with progress or change. “They ride the waves,” a sportswriter wrote in 1949, describing the routine followed by a group of Manly Beach surfers, “then return to the beach to play medicine ball, and later return to the clubhouse for a hot shower and a spot of weightlifting.” There was tradition, even glory, to all this. If an Australian surfer wanted to ride just as his father had ridden, it was hard to blame him. Not with the white-gloved Queen of England herself on the beach watching in admiration.

  * * *

  In 1956, Australia hosted the Summer Olympics in Melbourne. The games were a cultural coming-out party for Australia, and everything proceeded smoothly over the course of the sixteen-day event. Word went out that the host nation was friendly and well-organized, and sports fans everywhere cheered as teenage Sydney sprinter Beth Cuthbert won three golds in track, while the mighty Australian swim team torpedoed their way to a 1-2-3 finish in both the men’s and women’s 100-meter freestyle—a still-unmatched Olympic feat.

  SLSA officials had lobbied the Australian Olympic Committee to choose surf
lifesaving as one of two “demonstration sports” allowed to each Olympic host country, but the committee chose baseball and Australian rules football. As consolation, the SLSA was allowed to organize what was formally named the International and Australian Surf Championship Carnival—better known as the International Surf Carnival. Great Britain, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ceylon were each invited to send a team. America sent two squads: a ten-man team from Hawaii and a twelve-man team from Southern California that included a roughhousing Los Angeles County teenager named Greg Noll.

  All of the Americans were complete unknowns to their surf club hosts, who nonetheless greeted them at the airport with big chip-toothed smiles and plenty of handshaking and backslapping, leavened with a bit of Aussie arrogance and condescension. The welcoming party included a club captain, Noll later recalled, and as the visitors’ surfboards were loaded onto a flatbed truck, he offhandedly picked one up, turned to Noll, and asked, “What are these for?” It was a bantering little put-down; Noll smiled and mumbled a friendly sort of nonanswer. Curious but unimpressed, the clubbie glanced at the board’s oversized fin, rapped his knuckle a couple of times against the deck, set it down, gestured to the stack of boards, and with a dismissive grin said, “Two bob for the works, mate.”