The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Even though the event was scheduled in early January, right in the middle of the winter surf season, everybody arrived to find a waveless ocean. The paddling and swim competitions were held, but all the riding events were cancelled. Bad surf—even no surf at all—was of course a lurking possibility for any contest with a nonflexible event date. Undaunted, the Waikiki Surf Club returned the next year, just as well organized and fully sponsored; with a modest head-high swell running, the whole slate of events went off without a hitch. For the next fifteen years, the Makaha International ran without interruption.

  * * *

  Big-wave riding advanced to a new and terrifying place during a two-day run at Makaha, on January 13 and 14, 1958. The weather was hot and windless as Makaha shuddered from the output of a gigantic North Pacific storm, which meteorologists later estimated covered nearly a million square miles.

  A day earlier, the West Side had been flat. Buzzy Trent had gone to bed in his Makaha Valley home that evening after drinking two or three Primos, only to snap awake just after midnight to the thundering noise of incoming surf. He ran outside and spent two hours watching huge moonlit waves roll through before going back to sleep.

  Paddling out not long after daybreak, Trent was thrilled and a little spooked to find the deep-water channel adjacent to the break, normally a calm zone on even the biggest days, slowly rolling and shifting, while twenty-footers looped over in the Bowl section. Paddling further outside, he found George Downing already sitting at the far end of the takeoff area, waiting. A few more surfers would paddle out as the day progressed and ride with varying degrees of fortune and mishap. (Not long after catching a screamer from the top of the point all the way through, filmmaker John Severson blacked out underwater during a wipeout and nearly died.) But Trent and Downing, already known as the era’s ranking big-wave masters, owned the day.

  Of the two, the Hawaiian was the more accomplished surfer. But Trent was more compelling. At the beginning of a ride, after snapping up into a wrestler’s squat, he’d launch his board like a missile on the highest possible line across the wave face and hold position until he either coasted into the channel or was deep-sixed by whitewater. There was more technique involved than met the eye, but Trent’s style looked like surfing’s version of power-lifting. Downing, strong but wiry, had a lower angle of attack and was able to make small, fluid adjustments as he raced forward. Unlike Trent, he wouldn’t sacrifice himself to a lost cause; once the ride began to fall apart, Downing would quietly step off the back of his board, tuck into a ball as he plunged beneath the surface, and avoid—usually—the worst of the explosion that followed.

  Makaha during that mid-January swell was perfection on a never-seen-before grand scale. Trent, grabbing the only point of reference he had, often described it as looking like a “giant Malibu.” Even so, the waves were generally so fast as to be unmakeable. Most of Trent’s rides came spectacularly undone at some point, but he got at least a half-dozen keepers from the top of the Point, through the Bowl, and into deep water, each one a catapulting three-hundred-yard race where maximum board speed was an exact match for the chasing speed of the wave.

  The swell got even bigger as the day progressed, leveling off in the midafternoon somewhere around thirty or thirty-five feet and still smooth as cream. At about 3 P.M., Trent repositioned himself near the channel to watch six or eight sets of waves funnel slowly down the coast from distant Keana Point. Each wave seemed to inflate as it hit the top of the Makaha lineup, just before the curl arced out and down to create a huge, black, pinwheeling hole of a tube, the size and diameter of which remained unchanged from the top of the Point through to the Bowl. The waves weren’t actually getting bigger at that point, but a line had been crossed. Trent later claimed his whole existence led to this moment. The realization that the waves before him were in fact too big and fast to ride, he said, was “terrible . . . just terrible.” Humbled, he turned and caught a smaller wave to the beach.

  “THE CONTEST ORGANIZERS HAD THIS LUAU, AND A HASSLE DEVELOPED OVER HOW TO COOK THE PIG. THINGS GOT PRETTY HOT. ALL THE TROUBLE WAS BETWEEN THE MAKAHA GUYS AND WAIKIKI GUYS. THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN, INSTEAD OF BEATING EACH OTHER UP, THEY DECIDED TO BEAT THE HAOLES.”

  —Flippy Hoffman, on the first Makaha International Surfing Championships

  Downing’s run ended the next morning, after he sprint-paddled over four progressively bigger waves only to be caught out by the fifth. He pushed his board away and swam for the bottom, felt his sinuses rupture from the pressure change as the wave moved overhead, and broke the surface a few moments later with blood pooling in the back of his throat and rushing from his nose.

  The 1958 Makaha swell was big-wave surfing’s most dramatic event to date, but it passed by largely undocumented. John Severson shot a roll of film over the two days, but the quality was poor. A few rides were used in Surf, his first movie (the only copy of which was either stolen or lost), and a few 16mm “frame grab” prints were made. None of the images, though, really showed off the surf’s true height and amplitude. In decades to come, Trent, Downing, Severson, and a few others, without fail or hesitation, would all say that Makaha during that two-day swell had served up the finest big waves in the sport’s history.

  Yet it never really became part of surfing lore. Makaha remained the anchor of West Side surfing, and huge Point Surf would always be an incomparable surf-world challenge. But by 1958 it was in fact already losing its place at the fore of big-wave surfing to Oahu’s North Shore—surfing’s own beautiful, tropical, hostile mecca.

  1957 MAKAHA INTERNATIONAL SURFING CHAMPIONSHIPS PROGRAM.

  Hell and High Water: The North Shore

  Dickie Cross’ death at Waimea Bay in 1943 remained the sport’s darkest, most disturbing cautionary tale. George Downing, Wally Froiseth, and a few other Hawaiian surfers drove out to the North Shore occasionally over the next ten years, but for the most part it went unridden.

  It was the Californians who turned the North Shore into a surfing obsession, beginning in 1953 when Flippy Hoffman and Bob Simmons, having spent three months in close quarters with their fellow mainlanders at Makaha, loaded up Hoffman’s Model A and rented a tiny white clapboard house on the tip of Sunset Point for ten dollars a month. During the day they surfed and fished. In the evenings they played chess, checkers, and ping-pong. Short trips were made up and down the coast to ride other breaks, but mostly they surfed directly in front of their house, at Sunset Beach, which even then was known island-wide as the North Shore’s most consistent wave. Their boards didn’t work very well. Neither man had switched over to the narrower big-wave models being produced by Downing and Joe Quigg, and both spent a lot of time chasing down lost boards.

  Hoffman would remember it as a great adventure, filled with hot rides and thumping wipeouts. But he also said the experience was often boring and repetitive. “We’d eat rice, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then surf. Then some guys would drive out from Makaha or Town, and we’d all surf. They’d leave, Simmons and I would surf again, then sit around and argue. Lots of that. We’d argue over chess, we’d argue about if some wave from that afternoon was twelve feet or twenty feet. Every day, that was pretty much it.”

  Greg Noll rode Sunset Beach for the first time in late 1954 as a visiting seventeen-year-old Southern California high school student and boardmaker, and over the next ten years, as the North Shore was steadily explored and mapped, he became the sport’s new big-wave icon. There would be no mistaking Noll for any other North Shore surfer: in his prime he was six foot two and 225 pounds, and wore black-and-white striped “jailhouse” jams. The surf media nicknamed him “the Bull,” partly for his congenital stubbornness and partly for the hunkered-down bovine power squat he used while riding.

  Noll was friendly and funny by nature, but belligerent while drunk, which was often, and he brawled his way through his late teens and twenties. In later years, Noll recalled his fights in the same easygoing and affectionate bar-room voice he used for
telling big-wave tales. At a house party once, he planted himself in front of fellow boardmaker and big-wave rider Dick Brewer, who’d been saying nasty things about Noll’s line of boards. “I asked Brewer to step outside,” Noll wrote in his autobiography, “but he wouldn’t go, so I popped him right where he stood. That’s all I did, just backhanded Brewer.” But it happened to “break his nose, and he sued me for $150,000.”

  The larger-than-life days were still ahead of Noll in 1954, during his first visit to Hawaii. Like every other ambitious mainland surfer of the era, Noll went straight to Makaha. And that was fine. Venturing out to the North Shore just a few weeks later, however, was love at first sight. Driving a battered ’37 Plymouth pickup through Haleiwa, a pair of enormous black lace panties looped over the truck’s antennae (“from a wonderful 300-pound Samoan lady who was very nice to us”), Noll and three friends rolled slowly up Kam Highway, craning their heads as they shouted and pointed at various likely-looking breaks. They pulled over to ride some eight-footers at Sunset. Nobody else was out. They didn’t see another surfer all afternoon.

  In the weeks to come, Noll was surprised that his friends weren’t dying to go back and try again. He shouldn’t have been. Makaha was still everyone’s first choice—for locals and visitors. It was a one-stop surfing adventure, with all its thrills and excitement neatly confined to a single break. The North Shore’s abundance was still too much for most people. Taking in the entire spread of breaks from Haleiwa to Sunset Beach, on a sunny day with a fifteen-foot west swell running, was kind of like staring into the cosmos on a clear night—beautiful and overwhelming.

  Noll felt differently. He was still a raw teenager, but persistent and calculating, and his surf-world ambitions were growing by the month. Some part of him probably recognized that a guy looking to make a name for himself in the sport would be well advised to break away from Makaha, where an older and more experienced group of surfers had already dug in. So Noll directed his attention to the mostly unsettled reefs of the North Shore. By the end of 1955, he’d ridden Sunset perhaps three dozen times and had discovered a gnarly left-breaking wave near Laniakea, which was quickly designated Noll’s Reef. He made friends with Henry Preece, a stylish regularfooter from Haleiwa and the only Hawaiian surfer living on the North Shore. In early 1957—after making a splash a few months earlier at Australia’s International Surf Carnival—Noll trucked in a load of balsa, set up a pair of sawhorses in front of Preece’s beach shack, and as a small crowd gathered, proceeded over the course of a long weekend to build and distribute ten boards to the local kids in Haleiwa.

  GREG NOLL AT THE FINISH LINE, LIFEGUARD PADDLEBOARD RACE, 1956.

  Noll arrived for his fourth consecutive Hawaiian winter season in late 1957. Just twenty-one, he already had more North Shore experience than any other mainlander. Other visitors, though, were beginning to follow Noll’s lead: they would lease a rundown single-family house and sleep three or four to a room, or bunk in one of the Quonset huts just down the beach from Sunset, or live out of a panel van. Just marginally less rural than it had been before the war, the North Shore was still far more developed than the West Side. And safer, too, at least on land. Vacationing surfers at Makaha had semiregular run-ins with the local toughs from Waianae, the ghettoized town just down the coast; the North Shore’s pig farmers, fisherman, and plantation workers, on the other hand, simply ignored them.

  By 1957, the fear and mystery that had for years hung like a cloud over North Shore surf breaks was beginning to dissipate. Surfers had figured out that the quickest and safest way to the beach, in the event of a lost board, was to not head for the nearest deep-water channel, where the current pulls back out to sea, but to remain instead in the wave zone. This meant some added underwater punishment, but you’d be tumbling for land the whole time. At Sunset Beach, this new rule was especially important. Had Woody Brown and Dickie Cross known better during the early stages of their terrible misadventure in 1943, they would have simply paddled fifty yards toward Sunset Point during a lull, tossed their boards, and let the next set roll them in.

  Surfers were also reassured to discover that the North Shore, even in winter, offered plenty of days where the waves were six feet or less. Big North Shore surf, it turned out, could be approached step by step, at a pace determined by the individual. You didn’t have to grapple with fear and death every day. And if the waves were too big and heavy, it was an easy one-hour drive from Haleiwa to Makaha, where more often than not the surf would be half the size.

  * * *

  Ultimately, a dozen-or-so California pioneers saw to it that the North Shore replaced Makaha as surfing’s big-wave capital. Each year they returned in slightly bigger numbers, with a slightly raised level of confidence. Informality was the rule. With few exceptions, California surfers on the North Shore didn’t come off as determined sportsmen, like bullfighters or mountaineers, grimly pursuing their dangerous dance with fate; they acted like frat boys on spring break. They climbed to the top of Waimea Falls and double-dared each other to jump sixty feet to the lake below. When it rained, they hiked into the backcountry and went mud-sliding down pig trails. After a few beers, somebody might walk out to the porch and fireball a mouthful of lighter fluid onto a lit match. They went shirtless, stole chickens, played poker, and broke wind with the kind of volume and frequency that comes only from twice-daily servings of canned beans. John Severson bought a rusted ’41 Chevy sedan for $19.95, painted it from bumper to bumper in swirls, scrolls, and curlicues (tires included), hand-lettered “Sunset Special” across the passenger doors, then drove the car for months before selling it for $15.

  One of the new mainlanders was a lanky sad-eyed boardmaker from La Jolla named Pat Curren. During his second visit to the North Shore, Curren rented a three-bedroom beachfront house at Sunset for himself and nine other San Diego–area surfers, removed all the furniture, demolished the partition walls in the front of the house, installed horizontal floor-to-ceiling surfboard racks along one side, and built a long trestle down the middle of the room. Curren had a passing interest in Norse legend—he called the new digs Mead Hall. Normally the quietest and most reserved of the California surfers, he was so inspired by the renovation that he’d preside at mealtime wearing a thrift-shop Viking helmet, pound his fist on the tabletop, raise one foaming beaker of mead after the other, and exhort his friends to do the same in a broken Old English–surfer dialect.

  Along with Greg Noll, Curren became one of the leaders of the North Shore pioneering effort during the late fifties. Back in California, while most of the others mainland big-wave riders were attending college, Curren worked as a draftsman and a carpenter and did underwater repairs on the Santa Barbara Channel oil platforms; he had an air of offhand but absolute mechanical competence. Curren’s high rank on the North Shore had a lot to do with the specialized big-wave boards he made—sleek, perfectly crafted 12-foot balsa pintails, described by one surfer as “a cross between a work of art and a weapon.” Downing and Quigg invented the finned big-wave surfboard, but Curren improved on the design, with subtle but crucial adjustments to the rocker curve and bottom contours. Curren was also the slouching near-mute apotheosis of surf-cool: draining an afternoon beer, flicking a cigarette butt to the side, then taking down Malibu golden boy Tommy Zahn in a paddle race; flying to Hawaii one season with no luggage save a ten-pound sack of flour for making tortillas; sailing the three-thousand-mile Great Circle route from Honolulu to Los Angeles on a 64-foot cutter and posing for a photo en route, bearded and watch-capped, a huge Havana cigar jutting from a corner of his mouth, left hand on the wheel, right hand holding a shot glass of crème de menthe.

  “NOBODY TAUGHT ME. DOES ANYBODY TEACH ANYBODY? IT’S LIKE LEARNING HOW TO RIDE A BIKE. SOMEBODY GIVES YOU A PUSH, THEN WATCHES YOU CRASH INTO A POLE.”

  —Pat Curren, on learning how to ride big surf

  Cooler than all these things put together, Curren would invariably pick off and ride the biggest, thickest, meanest wave of t
he day. With Zen-like patience he’d sit on his board at least ten yards beyond anybody else, then wait an hour, two hours, three hours if necessary, for the grand slam set wave. The ride itself was stripped down and fluid, as Curren went into a deep crouch, spread his arms like wings, and led with chest and long chin; tearing across a huge wave face, in circumstances where other riders dropped automatically into a survival stance, Curren looked like an Art Deco hood ornament.

  “And he didn’t give a shit if anyone saw it or not,” fellow big-wave charger Peter Cole said. “The rest of us would run around, chasing photographers, ‘Did you get the shot? Huh? Did you?’ While Pat would just grab the wave of the day, walk up the beach, and vanish.”

  * * *

  PAT CURREN (RIGHT), YOKOHAMA BAY, OAHU.

  JOSE ANGEL, HAWAII.

  Other notable California transplants included Cole, Jose Angel, Fred Van Dyke, and Ricky Grigg. (Marge Calhoun and teenage surf champion Linda Benson both rode the North Shore in the 1950s, but the surf scene here during the early years was almost exclusively male.) All four were college educated. All were toughened up as surfers in the biting-cold waters of the San Francisco Bay Area. Each decided, by the end of the 1950s, to move permanently to Hawaii. Beyond these commonalities, however, there was no explaining how and why they were able to charge into the lineup on days when nearly everyone else remained safely above the high tide line.

  The hottest surfer of the bunch by far, Grigg simply focused his giant self-confidence into the big-wave arena. Cole wasn’t in Grigg’s league in terms of talent, but he had been a successful collegiate swimmer and had the arm span of an NBA center. Pool training had given Cole tremendous lung capacity, and he believed that he could swim, dive, or frog-kick out of any situation—a belief justified by his cheerful presence in the Sunset Beach lineup for fifty-plus years. Van Dyke claimed he rode big waves for a variety of Freudian reasons, all of which boiled down to “not feeling loved.” Greg Noll worked a related psychoanalytic angle, saying, “When I was a little guy I got my ass kicked a lot, and that pretty much explains why I did what I did in big surf.” But where Noll went after the heavy stuff with gusto, Van Dyke did so like a man going to the gallows. “Where does it end?” he’d ask himself. “How many times do I have to prove myself out there?”