The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Lots of parties, in other words, had an interest in surf competition’s growth and advancement. A Los Angeles Times preview of the 1960 West Coast Championships noted that “more than 200 surfboard enthusiasts” had signed up for the event, and the numbers only grew from there: over three hundred contestants for the 1962 Makaha International; four hundred for an event in San Diego in 1964; and nearly six hundred the following year for a contest in Hermosa Beach. Surf clubs, not much seen on the mainland since before the war, made a big comeback, in part as a way to improve surfing’s “image problem,” but mostly for the purpose of club league tournaments.

  Yet the relationship between surfing and competition was awkward, for reasons Tom Blake had cited decades earlier. “On one occasion, about 1918,” Blake wrote in Hawaiian Surfriders, “a riding contest was held, the winner being judged on form, etc. Everybody disagreed and that led them to believe surfriding contests were impracticable.” Another big event had to be cancelled for lack of waves, Blake continued, and at that point the Hawaiians shrugged and pretty much gave up on the whole idea—including Duke Kahanamoku, who skipped the inaugural Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships in 1928, even though he was the event’s top-billed competitor.

  This awkwardness remains today, and despite what a handful of world champions might claim, surfing’s best moments as a rule take place at a long, purposeful distance from the competitive arena. Few other sports can make the same claim. And no sport undermines the systematic, organizational imperatives of competition better than surfing. Scorekeeping, for example. Objective systems—whether based on speed, head-to-head racing, time spent standing on the board, number of waves caught, and points per maneuver—are all too far removed from surfing as normally practiced. In the few cases where objective systems have been tried, the sport turns into a ridiculous hybrid, like marathon dancing or competitive eating. Subjective scoring is the only real option, but subjectivity creates problems that have to be wrestled with at all times. How is the judging criteria determined? Should the criteria change depending on wave type? Who qualifies for a judging panel? How can a judge keep an eye on two, three, four surfers riding at once?

  Then there’s the ocean itself, which is the very definition of an uneven playing field. No two waves are the same, and surf conditions can change not just over the course of a day, but during a single heat.

  The number of surfers who choose to compete has always been small—probably less than 2 percent of all surfers at any given moment over the past fifty years have been regularly involved in organized competition. Still, nearly all of the best riders throughout the sport’s recent history are included in that 2 percent minority. True, the very idea of competition has been scorned and ridiculed as much as it’s been applauded; Mickey Dora called the Malibu Invitational the sport’s “simplest form of mass boredom and unimpeachable incompetence.” But the showcasing of talented surfers is almost always compelling, and when a big event is on, and the surf is cooperating, it’s easy to get pulled in.

  * * *

  Competition has been part of the sport since the beginning. In ancient Hawaii, hundreds would gather on the beach to cheer, feast, and gamble when a big royal-on-royal match took place. There were no hand-wringing questions over subjectivity. Two competitors took off on the same wave and raced for an in-shore buoy. Or better yet, one paddled out alone, while the other lugged a narrow holua sled to the top of a long stonepaved sledding track. On the beach, more or less equidistant from the two competitors, was a grass house. When a big-enough wave approached, an official visible to both contestants waved a tapa-cloth flag. The surfer caught the wave and rode for shore; the sledder took a running start, flung himself prone on his sled, and bombed downhill. First man to the grass house won.

  In the opening half of the twentieth century, objective scoring of some kind was still the rule. Surfers at a 1925 contest at San Diego’s Mission Beach were awarded a point for successfully completing each of ten different “forms,” which included standing, sitting, headstanding, turning around in a circle, and riding backward for at least four seconds. In later versions of the Pacific Coast Championships—surfing’s biggest prewar event, held in Southern California from 1928 to 1941—dozens of competitors arranged themselves in a single-file line, parallel to the shore, just south of a buoy placed beyond the surf. A second buoy was located near the beach, about seventy-five yards north of the first buoy. Each round lasted two hours, and a competitor scored a point for each completed ride that began from south of the outer buoy and continued unbroken to the far side of the nearshore buoy. None of the surfers could do much with those big, heavy wooden boards; the slanting angle required to get from buoy to buoy was a high enough test of skill. (Angling didn’t come into play during the Long Beach Surfing Contest, another big Depression-era event. Surfers just rode to the beach, charged back outside to paddle around an offshore buoy, then rode back in again. “Straight in, straight back out, and the guy who caught the most waves won the contest,” competitor LeRoy Grannis remembered decades later. “But that was kind of a screwy deal.”)

  Subjectively judged surfing competition was a by-product of the postwar Malibu chip board, which encouraged the surfer to perform on the wave, rather than simply hitch a ride to shore. Organizers for the inaugural 1954 Makaha International Surfing Championships, however, couldn’t bring themselves to embrace a purely subjective format, so they instead came up with a bizarre hybrid system: each ride was given a 1- to 10-point score in each of three categories—performance, wave height, distance ridden—which in turn were combined into a per-wave score ranging from a low of 3 to a perfect 30. Complaints about the judging system became an annual rite for hundreds of Makaha International competitors, and not without reason: the guy who caught a ten-footer and navigated a more or less straight line to a nearshore distance marker would score higher than the surfer who caught a six-footer and ripped through a dozen consecutive turns and cutbacks. California’s high-performers were especially put off by the Makaha judging, and not a single mainlander won a men’s division title over the course of the event’s eighteen-year history. In 1965, hot-dog supremo Dewey Weber—at a time when everyone in the surf industry, top riders included, was supposed to close rank and be supportive of big public events “for the good of the sport”—went on record as saying, “The Makaha contest is the worst.”

  Organizers for the 1956-founded Peru International tried to solve the problem by splitting their event in two: a big-wave division judged solely on wave height and distance covered, and a hotdogging division judged on turns and tricks.

  The Peru and Makaha events both featured tandem surfing, which was something like pairs figure skating, as brawny males lifted and maneuvered their waifish young female partners into a series of Kama-Sutra-like poses, including the Camel, the Arabesque, the Side Bird, and the High Stag. Tandem abruptly went out of fashion in the late 1960s, after surfboard designs changed. Even during its heyday, people weren’t really sure if it was graceful or contrived and silly. It was obviously sexed up, but that too seemed a little fraught. “There weren’t a lot of guys who wanted to compete in tandem contests,” world champion Mike Doyle later admitted. “It wasn’t macho enough for them. But that’s exactly what I liked about it. Tandem was a good excuse to get away from the chest-pounding guys and go play with the girls for a while.”

  * * *

  In the mid-1960s, the United States Surfing Association (USSA) finally took up surf contest standardization. Founded in 1961 by Orange County surfer and liquor store owner Brennan “Hevs” McClelland, the USSA wasn’t the sport’s first umbrella group—that would be the Australian Surf Board Association, which emerged briefly during the mid-1940s as a surfing-only alternative to the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia. However, with Hobie Alter and John Severson as charter supporters, along with virtually every other player in America’s newborn surf industry, the USSA was the first to take root. It was initially an all-volunteer group that operated
from McClelland’s Laguna Beach house. As McClelland wrote in the original mission statement, the USSA’s purpose was to make the sport “more serious and respectable.” Group advocacy—speaking on behalf of local surfers at various city council meetings dealing with surf restrictions, for example—was part of it. But the USSA also seemed just as intent on scolding what group officials variously referred to as hodads, gremlins, beach delinquents, and the ugly surfer, as well as those within the sport who didn’t fight this homegrown “bad element.”

  “It is pretty well established now that something on the order of 10% of surfers have created a ‘surfing problem’,” one USSA board member wrote in a 1962 surf magazine editorial. “Most people will further agree that there are about 50,000 surfers active today, which means there are about 5,000 surfers creating a problem for the rest of us. I believe it is going to take more than 5,000 ‘good guys,’ working actively, to counteract the 5,000 ‘bad guys.’ So, Mr. Average Surfer, your duty is clear. Until you and your surfing buddies are USSA members, and active in the affairs of the association, you have no right to complain if the USSA does not solve the ‘surfing problem’ overnight.”

  Mr. Average Surfer didn’t much respond to the USSA’s call to arms. By 1963, after two years of nonstop promo efforts by surf shops and surf magazines, the USSA had just seventeen hundred members. Phase Two was launched shortly thereafter, when the group became the sanctioning body for American surf contests. After producing a codified set of event rules, the USSA cleverly required that all competitors in USSA-approved events be paid-in-full members of the organization—at which point membership shot up to five thousand. As of 1965, the USSA was done lecturing about the “surfing problem.” The group instead remained focused on thrashing out the procedural details of surfing competition, which created the basic genetic material for surf competition as it exists today.

  USSA officials wisely threw out any kind of objective judging format. Each ride would be scored on a subjective 1- to 20-point scale, by a judging panel consisting of three or five surfers. Wave height and distance were factored in but not measured outright; performance was emphasized. This was defined in the USSA rulebook as “riding in the tightest possible position to the curl,” and by doing “functional maneuvers performed in the critical section of the wave.” Contests were arranged as a series of elimination heats. A heat had five or six competitors, and lasted between ten and twenty minutes, depending on conditions; two or three surfers from each heat advanced to the next round. Limits were set on the number of waves a surfer could ride during a heat (usually between six and twelve), and a contestant’s best rides (three, four, or five, depending on the length of the heat) counted toward their final heat score. If a surfer interfered with somebody else’s ride, he or she was docked points, while the interfered-upon surfer was awarded an extra wave. Entrants practicing nearby who rode into the competition area might be disqualified altogether.

  TANDEM SURFING, 1964

  Rules and protocol, though, didn’t equal formality, and the typical 1960s USSA surf contest, with its Scoutmaster-like organizers and its small hive of keen but unpracticed competitors, had the neighborly feel of a soapbox derby. There wasn’t much equipment to haul around: a card table, some folding chairs, an airhorn (one blast to begin a heat, two to finish), a few pens and clipboards, and a bulletin board for posting results. Bunting and a PA system signified a big event. Judges were often barefoot and shirtless; makeshift judging towers were built with scaffolding planks and two ladders. For identification, each contestant wore a T-shirt with a block-print number on the chest and back (later changed to a colored nylon jersey). If it wasn’t a sunny beach day, the spectators might number less than twenty-five and be made up exclusively of competitors’ friends, family members, and love interests.

  Huntington Beach and the U.S. Surfing Championships

  The first West Coast Surfing Championships were held in 1959 at Huntington Beach. Four years later the meet was upgraded to become the United States Surfboard Championships, and it was the only USSA contest where spectators had a real presence: hundreds came out for the debut event, and turnout during the midsixties often hit ten thousand. The contest took place in September, which invariably brought the kind of warm early fall weather guaranteed to pull a crowd on any Southern California beach. But the real draw was Huntington itself, already well on its way to fame and notoriety as “Surf City.”

  Huntington in the late fifties was no longer the grubby oil boomtown it had been between the wars—with wooden derricks foresting the beachfront, tent cities, and roughnecks brawling in front of Main Street speakeasies just up from Pacific Coast Highway. It wasn’t Malibu either. Atomized raw crude still scented the air, the beach was speckled with tar-balls, and backyard oil pumps rhythmically nosed the ground at many of the cheap single-family cottages that now covered the beachfront. Waikiki, Malibu, Palos Verdes, and Australia’s Kirra Point—all had surf breaks lovely enough to be postcards. Huntington was flat, poor, and industrialized. Soon enough it picked up another nickname: “Surf Ghetto.”

  UNITED STATES SURFING CHAMPIONSHIPS, HUNTINGTON BEACH.

  Huntington’s surfing pedigree, though, was first-rate. Hawaiian transplant George Freeth likely rode Huntington as early as 1907, and Duke Kahanamoku stopped by once or twice during the 1920s, by which time first-generation Huntington lifeguards were riding their planks on either side of the long municipal “pleasure pier.” Gordie Surfboards opened in 1956 and briefly held a monopoly on local surf trade, but others soon followed; by the early 1960s nearly a dozen shops were located on the Main Street/Pacific Coast Highway axis, adjacent to the pier, and Huntington had become the Detroit of American boardmaking. The surf wasn’t great, but it was consistent and plentiful; two-way sand-bottom peaks could be found along Huntington’s entire eight-mile beachfront. The space was needed. Huntington was connected by freeway to Anaheim, Fullerton, Garden Grove, and the rest of Orange County’s non-coastal suburban patchwork, as well as to what was called the Inland Empire—Bellflower, Pomona, Riverside. Newly minted surfers from these areas funneled into Huntington by the carload: on a glassy weekend morning in the summer of 1962, a local boardmaker, scanning from one side of the pier to the other, counted six hundred bodies in the water.

  What made Huntington the seat of American competitive surfing was the pier itself—a concrete monster at 1,850 feet (over a third of a mile), with a pair of “T” crosspieces jutting parallel to the beach, and a terminus that at regular intervals was battered down into the ocean by heavy winter surf. The best waves in town broke over the sandbars that formed on either side of the pier, and surfers often finished off a ride by shooting through the gaps in the mussel-fringed pilings. Spectators loved it. The sightlines were better here than anywhere on the coast, and there was always a chance of a mangling pier-piling wipeout. Boards usually took the impact, but scrapes and cuts were common, and about once a decade a surfer went head-first into a piling and died.

  Lifeguard chief Vince Moorehouse came up with the idea for what he ambitiously called the West Coast Surfing Championships, and in early 1959 he convinced both the Huntington Beach Recreation Department and the local Chamber of Commerce to approve and support the event. There were dissenters. Even if the contest was good for the Main Street retail zone, wasn’t the city just turning itself over to a bunch of blond-haired juvenile delinquents? But Moorehouse prevailed. The date was set, and entry forms were printed, filled out, and returned, with each surfer check-marking his or her division: men’s, women’s, or juniors’. Contestants turned up on the big day to find a hand-painted sign propped against the pier: “Huntington Beach—Surfing Capitol of the West Coast.” The sun was out, the waves rolled in head-high and glassy, local surf hooligans apparently found other things to do, and native son Jack Haley took home the men’s trophy.

  The event grew quickly: more surfers, more divisions, and more spectators. Pepsi signed on in 1962, becoming the first multinational company to back
a surf contest, and the 1964 Championships were broadcast on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. City fathers had a few nervous moments over the years about safety (all contestants had to wear hard-plastic crash helmets) and crime (hooligan fears weren’t totally misplaced, as board thieves learned to worked the crowd mercilessly, even stealing from the competitor’s area). But for local merchants the event was like Christmas in autumn, and Huntington residents in general seemed to think their town’s embrace of surfing had worked out for the best. Civic pride was further stoked by Jan and Dean’s 1963 chart-topper “Surf City”—their tribute to the good life at Huntington.

  * * *

  Other high-profile contests were up and running in the 1960s, including the Malibu Invitational, the Australian National Titles, and the Virginia Beach Surfing Festival (soon renamed the East Coast Surfing Championships). Bad waves turned a lot of events into duds, but now and then a contest became a real showcase, with the hoi polloi cleared from the water and top surfers blasting through their repertoires to cheers and applause from the crowd. There was underdog Ron Sizemore trick-riding his way to victory over powerhouse Rusty Miller to win the 1961 West Coast Championships. Or Joey Cabell of Hawaii serenely taking on all comers in mauling twenty-foot Point Surf to win Makaha in 1963.

  Still, there were a lot of people who cared less about expert wave-riding and more about spectacle. Contest organizers knew that what really brought a crowd to its feet wasn’t a perfectly executed cutback or a neat piece of high-line trim work, but the slightly out-of-control rider windmilling straight toward the pier at Huntington, or novice competitors getting creamed in the Makaha shorebreak. Lifeguard-team dory races were added to the big mainland events in the early 1960s, and they became popular for the same reason: the anticipation of a boat-on-boat smashup, or at least a good capsizing.