The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  SKI RIDER (TOP) AND SURFER, FAIRY BOWER, AUSTRALIA, EARLY 1940s.

  SURF BOAT RACES, 1956 INTERNATIONAL SURF CARNIVAL.

  BONDI BEACH WAVE-RIDING DEMONSTRATION BY TOMMY ZAHN (LEFT) AND GREG NOLL.

  The carnival was made up of two rounds of competition: the first in the town of Torquay, not far from Melbourne and the games, the second in Sydney. Both events, as expected, were dominated by the home team. For local surfers, the real action took place before and after the carnival events, as the Americans waxed up their boards for a series of impromptu demonstrations. (Because the Australian “surfboard” was then equivalent to the American paddleboard, locals dubbed this new type of wavecraft a “Malibu.”) The first one took place in dumping head-high waves at Sydney’s Avalon Beach, before a few thousand spectators who’d gathered earlier in the day for a warm-up surf carnival. The Aussie smirking vanished in a flash once Noll and his teammates paddled out and showed the local blokes how to ride a Malibu board correctly.

  Local boardmaker Gordon Woods was at work when the demonstration began. “This chap came running in, aghast,” Woods recalled, “looked at me and said, ‘You’ve gotta see these Yanks! They go across the wave, turn around, and go back the other direction!’” Woods hustled down to the beach and saw for himself, “and realized straight away that everything we’d accomplished up to that point was now redundant. That was it. The sixteen-foot boards were done overnight.” Within forty-eight hours, Woods had not only arranged to buy lifeguard Bob Burnside’s 9-foot 6-inch Velzy-Jacobs pig upon the American’s departure, but decided to drive six hundred miles to Torquay for the opening round of the carnival, just to keep on eye on his investment.

  Noll meanwhile proved himself a solid trencherman in the pubs as well as a sexual decathlete—over a single twenty-four-hour span he partnered with five different women—and quickly became the Australian’s favorite Yank. After a three-day Torquay-to-Sydney road trip with his hosts, Noll rejoined his American teammates, unshaven and stinking of alcohol, the Team USA patch ripped from his warm-up jacket and replaced by an Aussie-made patch of Disney character Gladstone Gander sculling a frothy mug of beer.

  The buzz about the Yanks only grew. Hundreds of carnival fans stayed behind after the official events to watch Noll and his friends ride their Malibus, and hardcore surfers rushed the visitors as they left the water to talk and ask questions, and to get a closer look at the boards. Another half-dozen prized Malibus were sold to locals before the Americans left the country.

  Once more, as with Duke Kahanamoku’s introductory demonstrations in 1915, the course of Australian surf history was charted by outsiders. It wouldn’t happen again. The sport began to emancipate itself from surf clubs and rescue work almost overnight, and just ten years later Australia overtook Hawaii and Southern California to become the world’s most progressive surfing region.

  * * *

  Held up to the standard Malibu Aussie toothpick, the new boards were so small and rounded as to appear toy-like. On closer look, the imports were in fact space-age by comparison. Local boardmakers had no experience with resin and fiberglass, and had shown no interest in balsa; nearly all Australian surfcraft was made of framing timber, marine plywood, and varnish. They were astonished at the Malibus’ strength and lightness. The design features on the new boards were just as intriguing, starting with the fin, and moving on to the rocker and foil, the rolled edges, and the wide-backed outline.

  The select few Aussies who now owned a genuine Malibu were among the country’s best surfers, but riding the new equipment still proved difficult. “I couldn’t really paddle the thing,” a Torquay surfer said of first attempt, “and when I did try and stand up, it just flipped out from underneath me. ”The process was made harder by the fact that—apart from everyone’s recollection of what they’d seen the Americans do at Torquay and the Sydney beaches—there was no guide or example to follow. It was therefore an intently studious nation of surfers who filed into movie theaters and surf clubs a few months later to watch Service in the Sun, a half-hour SLSA promo film. Service was funded by Australian oil giant Ampol, who had also sponsored the International Surf Carnival, and the cameras were trained on the Americans throughout their visit: exiting their Qantas DC-3 at the Sydney airport, throwing boomerangs on a headland, and finally—in a tidy three-and-half-minute sequence, much of it filmed in slow motion—surfing at Bondi. Greg Noll and Malibu golden boy Tommy Zahn were the stars as they turned, stalled, trimmed, cut back, and cross-stepped their way across the smooth bottle-green beachbreak waves.

  The Americans’ 1956 visit triggered a complete reset for Australian surfing. This involved more than adapting to new boards and mastering new maneuvers. SLSA officials had dismissed the Malibu-style riding as “self-indulgent,” making it clear that from now on dedicated surfers, literally and metaphorically, would have to set up camp on the opposite end of the beach from the surf lifesavers. Here again, the Yanks showed the way, starting with the idea that a surfboard belonged with its rider, not at the clubhouse. Another thing: always go for the best surf. The Americans came to Australia for the lifeguard competition, not to chase waves. When they did surf, however, they drove around to a few different beaches, hunting for the best conditions. The Aussie surfer, even following the break with the SLSA, would always have a strong tie to his home beach, but from now on the higher allegiance would be to finding the best waves possible. (Australian mobility in general got a huge boost with the 1948 introduction of the Holden FX sedan, the country’s first domestically produced car. Not long after the Americans left, the dull but dependable Holden wagon become an Aussie surf-world icon—just like the woody wagon in America.)

  There were new style markers to follow as well. Australian surfers had always worn the same high-waisted drawstring bun-hugger “costumes” used by the clubbies; some now began wearing American-style trunks, which were long and loose, and cut low on the hips. Also, where the toothpick board had to be hoisted onto a shoulder, propped against the side of the head, and carefully walked across the beach, the Malibu was carried under the arm, which let a surfer run to the water, arm and shoulder muscles neatly flexed as the board was pinned to the hip.

  For the hundreds of surf-stoked gremmies who returned to their local theaters two, three, or four times to watch Service in the Sun, it was clear that there were now two ways to be a surfer. Nothing, really, had been taken away from the surf clubs. Lifeguarding was exciting and competitive, traditional in the best sense of the word, and gave wave-riders a chance to honorably serve the community. But club life also meant discipline and rules, schedules and practice. The final split between surfies and clubbies wouldn’t happen for a few more years, but it became inevitable once the Americans showed that waves—and a surfing life in general—could be riffed on, not just man-handled. The choice came down to training or wave-riding, patrolling the beach or hanging on the beach, tight trunks or loose trunks, duty or coolness. No surprise. They decided to do it American style.

  Bud Browne and the First Surf Movies

  The Aussies got a second and far more potent dose of surf cinema in late 1957, when California’s Bud Browne sailed over with not one but two of his signature feature-length films: The Big Surf and Surfing in Hawaii. These were the first movies of their kind to be shown in Australia, and Bob Evans, one of the lucky surfers to score a Malibu board a few months earlier, arranged to have The Big Surf debut at Sydney’s Queenscliff Surf Club. It was the boardriders’ biggest social event of the year, with six hundred attendees jammed into the reception hall and spilling out into the warm summer night. As Browne’s movie hit the screen, Evans remembered, “Everybody stood up and yelled. They fell on the floor, jumped up and down—just stoked out of their tiny brains.”

  Browne expected no less. In 1953, working loosely from a model created a few years early by ski filmmaker Warren Miller (also an avid Los Angeles area surfer), Browne had put together a forty-five-minute film he called Hawaiian Surfing Movies. After
stapling a few notices on beachfront lightpoles in Santa Monica, he hosted a sold-out, one-night-only, 65¢-admission showing at a nearby junior high school auditorium. Browne was a school teacher and a former captain of the University of Southern California swim team, as well as a longtime surfer and lifeguard. He was soft-spoken and reserved, and at forty-one was roughly the same age as his audiences’ parents. Hawaiian Surfing Movies had just one more screening (for a smaller, quieter audience in San Diego County), but Browne nonetheless believed that surf filmmaking, given a full calendar of show dates, could afford him a modest living. He was right; profits were modest—almost nonexistent. Still, Browne enjoyed the moviemaking process—the travel and the freedom, as well as the production—and kept at it. Again copying Miller, he decided to release one movie a year.

  By 1958 Browne had three competitors, all from Southern California: Greg Noll, who had started building surfboards commercially; future Endless Summer producer Bruce Brown; and John Severson, who would soon found Surfer magazine. Each filmmaker was a one-man production company, responsible for everything: shooting, editing, scoring, promotions, booking, and accounting. They all used the same model Bell & Howell 16mm camera and shot the same A-list surfers at the same locations. Noll was the least tech-savvy of the group. Standing behind their tripods one afternoon in Hawaii, Bruce Brown glanced over at Noll and asked about his f-stop setting. Noll looked blank. Brown hesitated, then gestured to the numbered ring on Noll’s lens and said it adjusted the amount of incoming light. Noll shrugged and said the guy at the store had done all that stuff when he’d bought the camera a few months earlier.

  Each film cost about $5,000 to make, was a little over an hour long, and consisted mainly of a series of two- or three-minute action sequences focusing on a specific rider or break. Lifestyle vignettes and short comedy sketches were included: the gang bombing down a steep mud track in Hawaii after a storm, or a frustrated wave-rider dumping a box of Surf detergent into a flat Makaha lineup to magically bring forth a big swell. The soundtracks were all bootlegged jazz or rock, and the music choices as a rule were excellent. Some of the poster art—especially anything done by Severson—was just as good. There were some catchy titles: 1958’s Slippery When Wet was followed by Cat on a Hot Foam Board, Barefoot Adventure, Big Wednesday, Sunset Surf Craze, Hot Dog on a Stick, and Spinning Boards.

  The movies themselves were more or less all the same. Each went by like a marching band, loud and cheerful, steady and predictable, ride after ride, wave after wave. Bud Browne learned not to trifle with the formula after debuting 1958’s Surf Down Under at a San Diego school auditorium. Because he’d come up a bit light on surf action during his previous year’s visit to Australia, Browne added some travelogue shots of kangaroos and koala bears, a surf carnival sequence, and a long panoramic view of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. The crowd at first watched the nonsurfing clips in silence, then someone booed, and within seconds the hall was filled with catcalls and shouted insults. “I spent the next day ruthlessly cutting and editing,” Browne recalled. “And I never again misjudged surf film audiences.”

  Noll’s films were the roughest, and Severson’s were the best-crafted, but in truth they were all no more than a step or two removed from home movies—which fit the sport like a glove. Surfing was still very much a do-it-yourself activity, and a slick, polished 1950s surfing movie would have looked false. Authenticity mattered. Being there in the audience, drunk and loud and rowdy beneath a lowering haze of cigarette smoke, not watching the film so much as bouncing off it—that mattered even more. Surf movies toured from beach town to beach town, and the filmmaker himself introduced the film, did live narration, and handed out raffled-off door prizes during intermission. Posters and handbills announcing each film were hung on light poles and taped to storefront windows, then stolen by resident gremmies as room decorations. Almost all other promotion was word of mouth. None of the films were advertised in the newspapers. There were no reviews. While movie theaters and school auditoriums were preferred, a touring film would just as often be screened at the local Elks Lodge, union hall, or civic center—the kinds of places where the filmmaker had to pay a few extra bucks to have someone set up and put away two hundred metal folding chairs.

  The surf movie fed a growing hunger for surf media of any kind. There was also the novelty of anything having to do with the sport taking place indoors, at night, off the beach.

  But there was something else. Small groups were now the rule in surfing. A road trip, for example, was usually a three-person-or-fewer affair—for logistical ease and seating comfort, but also as a matter of resource control. Fewer people equaled more waves per surfer. Crowded lineups had become a top-three surfing complaint, along with flat spells and onshore winds. Movies were different. Apart from surfing contests, the surf film was the only event that brought wave-riders together in meaningful numbers. Two hundred people was about average, but crowds could go up to five hundred, with just enough female attendees at any given show to put a mild sexual charge into the air. (The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium sat three thousand, but that was surf moviedom’s Coliseum.) Rocking down to the local auditorium to see Let There Be Surf, or Going My Wave, or Have Board, Will Travel—it didn’t really matter what was playing—gave surfers a chance, even for just a couple of hours, to check their own strongly held negative view of crowds. It allowed them a social latitude that was normally forbidden.

  BUD BROWNE, EDITING ON THE NORTH SHORE.

  LOS ANGELES SURFERS LINE UP FOR 1960’s SURF FEVER.

  True, it was often a crude form of uplift. Firecrackers were lit and rolled across the floor to the next row of seats. Bottlecaps zipped through the air. High-decibel beer-belches rang out. A motorcyclist might blow in through the side door, ride up one aisle and down the other, then gun back out the way he came.

  What older surfers invariably describe first when talking about early surf movies is the tearing thunderclap of cheers and whistles and stomping feet that began when the lights dimmed and the first blue-green image lit up the screen—a roaring noise signifying not just a manic willingness to be entertained, but the pure joy of an otherwise staunchly nonaligned multitude coming together briefly, powerfully, ecstatically as a group.

  YOU DIDN’T WATCH A SURF MOVIE SO MUCH AS YOU BOUNCED OFF IT. LIT FIRECRACKERS ROLLED ACROSS THE FLOOR. BOTTLECAPS ZIPPED THROUGH THE AIR. A MOTORCYCLIST MIGHT BLOW IN THROUGHT THE SIDE DOOR, RIDE UP ONE AISLE AND DOWN THE OTHER, THEN GUN BACK OUT THE WAY HE CAME.

  Makaha: the Big Show Continues

  Every fifties surf movie ended with a punishing big-wave finale. There were other compulsory features: beachbreak whipturns and cutbacks, hokey comedy bits, travel sequences to Mexico with tequila-pickled tourista surfers in sombreros, beater cars with boards stacked on the roof bumping along a dirt track toward the ocean. But in the end, the point was to send everyone home thrilled and maybe a little bit scared, and the foolproof way to do that was to wrap things up with a few minutes of the heavy stuff from Hawaii. Moviemakers had plenty of footage to choose from. New big-wave breaks were being pioneered, and more surfers than ever—motivated in part by the cameras on the beach; “Kodak courage,” as it was called—were willing to jump into the deep end.

  For most of the fifties, Makaha only consolidated its position as surfing’s premier big-wave break. In late 1953, just as the encampment of mainland Makaha surfers was being introduced to the world, Makaha itself had an official commencement of sorts, thanks to a photograph taken by part-time beachboy Thomas “Scoop” Tsuzuki. In the photo three surfers are trimming hard, almost in formation, on a clean and sparkling fifteen-foot wave: Woody Brown on the left, George Downing in the center, and Buzzy Trent just slightly behind and above Downing; long knifing contrails run out from the back of each rider’s board and slant up to the curl. Tsuzuki’s shot made the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on November 27. AP sent it out over the wire, and by week’s end it had been published in over a dozen mainland newspapers, f
rom the Long Beach Independent to the Reno Evening Gazette to the Sheboygan Press in Wisconsin.

  Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Of course, surf photos had already been published in every major magazine and newspaper across the nation, but the waves were rarely larger than six feet. Tsuzuki’s shot was a revelation. Nonsurfers marveled at the daredevilry of it all, while any mainland surfer with an ounce of big-wave ambition looked at the photo and experienced the same rush of fear and attraction. The wave was huge by surfing standards of the time. Yet it somehow didn’t register as terrifying—the smoothness was too inviting, and all three riders were blowing down the line in such an easy and controlled style. Some number of California surfers who’d never before visited Hawaii saw the photo and immediately made plans to go over themselves and try their luck at Makaha. How many actually went is unclear. The surf press, in years to come, looking to give the sport’s big-wave creation story a bit of added sweep and grandeur, would report that the Tsuzuki image triggered an “exodus” or “migration” from the West Coast to Hawaii. The actual number was probably less than twenty.

  Then, in late January 1954, the Waikiki Surf Club, in partnership with the local Lions Club, hosted the Makaha International Surfing Championships, which further established Makaha as surfing’s first big-wave capital. Boardriding was the main attraction, but tandem surfing, bodysurfing, paddleboard races, and a run-swim relay were also on the schedule. About seventy-five competitors signed up—nobody was rude enough to mention that the only “international” entrants were from Southern California—and enough spectators turned out on contest day that the Honolulu police were called out to direct traffic along Makaha’s normally deserted two-lane beachfront road.