The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  All of this contributed to the idea, even among hardcore competitors, that surf events were really nothing more than a supplement to wave-riding in its natural form. “Real surfing” was a popular linguistic marker, used to put some distance between surf competition and a never-explicitly-defined pure version of the sport. In any event, nobody took competition all that seriously. Surfers, and surf events, were still amateur, in the best sense of the word. A contest wasn’t anything you trained or practiced for. Maybe you’d log some extra hours of water time before a big meet, or arrive at the event site a few days ahead of schedule to get used to local wave conditions, but that was about it.

  A major surf contest, finally, was a social gathering as much as an athletic test, one that involved admirers and groupies and some Animal House one-upsmanship in “getting radical.” For every competitor who showed up on finals day limbered-up and morning-fresh, another was bloodshot and trembling from the night before. Performing well with a massive hangover was itself taken by many as a sign of surfing greatness. What made Windansea Surf Club members swell with pride at the 1963 Malibu Invitational wasn’t just that they’d placed five of their own in the finals, but that four had been passed-out drunk just hours before.

  Phil Edwards Changes the Game

  Nothing better highlights surfing’s uneasy relationship to competition than the example set in the late 1950s and early 1960s by California surf heroes Mickey Dora and Phil Edwards. Both competed on occasion, but neither ever won, and it didn’t matter a bit. Jack Haley, Mike Haley, and Ron Sizemore rode to victory, in that order, in the West Coast Surfing Championships from 1959 to 1961, but every grem from Mission Beach to Narrabeen knew that Dora and Edwards surfed circles around those guys. Both had incredible style and presence in the water, and in the surf world that made them immortal, instead of mere champions. Much of what counted in their surfing was found in unquantifiable areas: the timing, the transitions, the gestures—all things that couldn’t really be scored or judged. Edwards once remarked that the “best surfer in the world is the guy having the most fun,” and this would be used as a gentle antithesis to those who overemphasized competition. He was more direct, if less poetic, in a 1964 Surfer interview, saying he “never considered surfing a particularly competitive sport,” and that he “didn’t see what the point [of competition] was.”

  Dora’s black-knight legend grew over the decades to the point where every other boom-era surfer was pushed to the margins. At the time, though, Edwards was the sport’s most popular and respected figure. He’s credited as the original “power surfer,” meaning he turned deeper and harder than anybody before him, but the description isn’t quite right. A signature Phil Edwards turn was deployed in two stages: a blunt, almost heaving change in direction that left him half unbalanced and at risk for a wipeout (that was the power part), then a rapid bebopping set of nods, bows, twists, and hand movements as he reflexively pulled everything back to center. It should have looked awkward, even bumbling. Edwards made it elegant and improvisational. He was also the best trimmer in the business—quiet, smooth, and fast—which served in perfect counterpoint to the big turns. Edwards’ surfing looked better in person or on film than it did in photographs; the spontaneity didn’t come across in still images, nor did the odd little post-turn semiquaver movements. He was elegant in some photos, rough in others, but almost never both at the same time—and it was the two in combination that made his riding great.

  Edwards wasn’t above accenting a ride with a flashy move or two, but he rightly declared himself a member of what was then called the “functional” school, which stood in mild opposition to hotdogging. Joey Cabell of Hawaii embodied a third style, based on flow and control. Neither Cabell nor Edwards was interested in spinners or coffins or the rest of the hotdogger’s bag of tricks. Yet where Edwards was powerful and ad hoc, Cabell was powerful and precise—almost fussy. The two were sometimes paired off as the best all-arounders of the late 1950s and early 1960s, although Edwards generally got the nod. “Cabell, perpetually graceful, surfed like a Greek statue come to life,” a surf journalist once wrote. “Edwards was different. He seemed to be in conversation with each wave, much of it relaxed and humorous. He’d go into a turn looking as if he’d been unexpectedly shoved, then finish off smoother than Gene Kelly.”

  Edwards was friendly and casual, and always open to a late-afternoon beer with friends. He could also be hardworking and intense, and maintained a beach-going hauteur that kept the grems from swarming too thickly when he hit the surf. In 1961, when filmmaker Bruce Brown picked him to star in Surfing Hollow Days, Edwards was a mature-looking twenty-four. He was handsome in a way that testified to his life as a hardcore surfer—tanned and muscled, sun-lightened brown hair, untucked aloha shirt—but next to the growing mob of peroxided surfing newcomers, he looked like an adult. A very cool adult.

  PHIL EDWARDS, TRESTLES.

  Edwards greatly admired Mickey Dora, who was four years older and had been a mentor of sorts in 1951, when the two teenagers spent a friendly summer dueling at San Onofre and Trestles. “I copied everything he did,” Edwards later said. “Sometimes I feel I’m a two-bit version of Mickey Dora.” Where Dora grew up to be a kind of court jester, insulting and reproachful, always with an eye to keeping people off his wave, his surf break, his sport, Edwards became one of surfing’s most enthusiastic promoters. He seemed genuinely interested in making a gift of the sport to “the legions of the unjazzed,” as he described nonsurfers. But he also, and without apology, wanted to put his good name to commercial use—and that would be easier and more profitable if surfing had a higher profile. The Phil Edwards Model, a sleek but hard-to-ride squaretail released by Hobie in 1963, was the sport’s first signature board. A Phil Edwards skateboard was on the streets the following year, just before the introduction of his signature line of Hang Ten beachwear and the Phil Edwards Winter Fur Jacket.

  “THE MOST FUN YOU’LL EVER HAVE IN SURFING IS THE FIRST TIME YOU CATCH A WAVE. THEN YOU START THINKING, ‘I WONDER IF I’M BETTER THAN THIS GUY OR THAT GUY.’ YOU BRING COMPETITION INTO IT, AND IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM THERE.”

  —Phil Edwards

  Had it been anybody else, at least a few surfers would have been muttering “sellout.” But Edwards was beyond criticism. Rebels liked him because he wasn’t a trophy-chaser and because of his Dora connection. The USSA crowd liked him because he was clean-cut, and while he didn’t often compete, he could be persuaded occasionally to work as a surf contest judge. In 1964, even though others were now riding at Edwards’ level (and he was spending increasing amounts of time on his self-built catamaran), he was announced as a landslide winner in the first Surfer Poll Awards, as voted by the readers of Surfer magazine, and the accolades piled on from there. Surfing Illustrated named him the “Best Overall Surfer” in 1965, and he was among the first group of inductees to International Surfing’s Hall of Fame. Edwards made the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1966, with a headline calling him the “world’s best on a board.” Reporter Bob Ottum added, “Phil Edwards is responsible for giving the sport its Jack Armstrong look.”

  Ottum also coauthored Edwards’ autobiography, You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago, in which Edwards and his surfing buddies are presented as fun-loving casually enlightened bohemians. In an early chapter, Edwards recalls his 1954 apprenticeship at the just-opened Hobie Surfboards shop:

  First thing I did was move in. We made surfboards by day, Hobie and I, and by night I would throw an unfinished board across two sawhorses, lie down and pull a blanket over me, and sleep. Balsa boards are really not all that bad for sleeping on. If nothing else, it gives you a certain feel for surfboards; you know their every nuance of bend and shape. I suppose it’s a little like Henry Moore pulling up a blanket and sleeping on one of his huge sculptures, the better to soak in through his pores the soaring sweep and gentle arc of them. One of them sits in the middle of the fountain now at Lincoln Center in New York. I don’t know if he ever slept on it o
r not, [but] by squinting your eyes just right, you can see yourself lying on the top of it, a ratty old blanket pulled over you, wearing Levis, your bare feet sticking out the bottom.

  All of this taught me several things: 1) How to shape surfboards better, 2) how to scare away burglars—the sight of a guy rising off a surfboard with a blanket draped around him was a little like a corpse rising off a slab, and it scared the hell out of them every time, and 3) it is better if you put each leg of the sawhorse into a bucket of water to keep scorpions and other bugs from climbing up and eating you at night.

  You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago turned out to be a too-appropriate title, as the book was printed and shipped in mid-1967, just as Edwards wrapped up his surfing career. The sport had found a voice worthy of sharing with the nonsurfing world, but a new generation was already crowding in. You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago was remaindered. Edwards—a near-relic at twenty-nine, but still capable of a stylish exit—climbed aboard his catamaran and happily sailed out of the limelight.

  The Original Surf Boom—In Hi-Fidelity and Technicolor

  Surfing had generated a lot of momentum by 1959—new boards, wetsuits, competition, surfer-produced films; a magazine on the way—and the sport was at a tipping point. Then the movie version of Gidget was released in April of that year and pushed it over the top. A nine-year surf explosion followed. While wave-riding itself became more popular, the boom was mostly a cultural phenomenon, one that spread into the near and far reaches of teenage consumerism. Tens of thousands of young people slow-danced to “Surfer Girl” and thronged the local Bijou to see Ride the Wild Surf; they shopped at May Company and bought nylon competition-strip trunks from the McGregor Surfer Collection, Hang Ten sneakers, and Cutex “Wipe Out Pink” toenail polish. Coppertone and Jantzen rolled out surf-theme ad campaigns—no surprise there. A ubiquitous Hamm’s Beer billboard showed Rusty Miller jamming down the face at Sunset Beach. Pepsi did surf ads. So did Triumph, Mobile, Chevy, and Dewar’s. It didn’t matter if you were a few state lines removed from the coast, the boom was inescapable. As the Saturday Evening Post put it in 1967, surfing was “the most successful California export since the orange.”

  Gidget author Frederick Kohner must have been astounded. His 1957 book had been a surprise statewide bestseller, but the Columbia Pictures’ movie was something else altogether: a coast-to-coast hit packed with Hollywood stars—Cliff Robertson as Kahoona, teen idol James Darren as Moondoggie, and a pitch-perfect Sandra Dee in the title roll—a catchy title song by the Four Preps, and a national promo campaign that included a ringing endorsement from American Bandstand’s Dick Clark.

  All the sex chatter and naughty words that gave the book version of Gidget an authentic-sounding voice were deleted from the screenplay—a tactical move by Columbia executives looking for a wholesome alternative to the greased-back leather-jacketed teen exploitation films. The movie nonetheless had its own cheerful bounce. There wasn’t much actual surfing, although Mickey Dora stunt-doubled all of Bobby Darren’s rides—if the onscreen action was brief, it was new and hot. But surfing itself didn’t really matter to America’s landlocked teens. It was the suntanned girls in bikinis, the shirtless boys playing bongos, the evening barefoot dance parties on the beach, the wet skin—all presented in glorious 35mm CinemaScope. In 1959, nothing looked as good onscreen as the California surfing life.

  Gidget was inoffensive to critics. According to the New York Times, Sandra Dee was “an appealing little hardhead,” the Malibu surfers were “reasonably sturdy lads,” and the movie itself “seems an ideal way to usher in the beach season.” It was a smash hit at the box office—especially with teenage girls, who hadn’t seen many of their own in take-charge leading roles onscreen. After the film, Gidget grew into a franchise, and over the next few years it would include another six Kohner-written books, two movie sequels, a comic book, and a TV series starring eighteen-year-old Sally Field. (Another TV series, two made-for-TV movies, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, and “Gidget—the Musical” would follow in the decades to come.)

  Gidget also provided Hollywood with a new and profitable model for its low-budget B-movie machinery, which cranked out “clean teen” entertainments where “young people” were fun-loving instead of threatening—more Pat Boone, less Jerry Lee Lewis. There was a pause in the early sixties, as if the studios were waiting to see if the surf fad had already played out. Then American International Pictures—creators of Bucket of Blood and The Beast with a Million Eyes—launched the beach movie genre with 1963’s Beach Party, which introduced Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and their bantering, never-consummated love match. Paramount and MGM chipped in a few titles over the next few years, but the real beach movie hits—Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo—were all Avalon-Funicello offerings.

  There were layers of ridiculousness to peel back here, beginning with the director’s choice to put two fair-skinned black-haired Italian-Americans in the lead roles. Protecting a reputation for wholesomeness earned during her years as the ranking Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeer, Funicello, by contractual order, could not be filmed in a bikini. Avalon had the kind of pale soft-muscled frame that in real life would have seen him laughed off the beach at Malibu. Brightly colored surfboards stood as props in the background, and not long after the opening credits, the guys all ran into the water and quickly rode back to shore in a pack, while Funicello and her girlfriends waved from the beach. Everybody clustered up and danced the Watusi, then set about defeating a biker gang, or space aliens, or a pack of bodybuilders.

  FRANKIE AVALON AND ANNETTE FUNICELLO IN BEACH PARTY.

  Ridiculous—and tons of fun. Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Dorothy Lamour, and Vincent Price all turned up in beach movie guest spots. Little Stevie Wonder, the Animals, the Supremes, and Dick Dale were among the musical performers. American International Pictures knew exactly what it was doing. Beach Party, filmed in two weeks for under $500,000, returned $6 million at the box office, and most of the company’s other beach movies did just as well. Real surfers were the only spoilsports. “Everyone knows that when you go down to surf, you are not on the beach wiggling and dancing,” a Surfing Illustrated reviewer solemnly noted, the farce of the whole beach movie project apparently not getting through, despite the Martians, pie fights, pink-satin-caped bodybuilders, and Buster Keaton cameos.

  * * *

  Columbia Pictures’ Ride the Wild Surf, released in 1964 at the height of the beach movie craze, was a straightforward light drama as predictable as nightfall. Three California surfers—Jody Wallis, Steamer Lane, and Chase Colton (played by Fabian, Tab Hunter, and Peter Brown, respectively)—fly in from California to ride the big stuff in Hawaii. All three fall in love, everyone breaks up and then makes up, and Jody wins the climactic big-wave surf contest at Waimea Bay.

  Surfing is closer to the foreground in Ride the Wild Surf, but young love, just as in Gidget, is the real focus. The underlying premise is also the same: American youth—surfers, in this case—will tire of delinquency and grow up. The kids onscreen are clean and groomed. No laws—moral or statutory—are broken. Of course Frankie wants to sleep with Annette, but that clearly isn’t going to happen until their wedding night. Moondoggie and Jody both go back to college. Kahoona renounces the life of the full-time surfer and returns to work. Furious (but respectfully so) at being called a “beach bum” by his girlfriend’s mother, Steamer Lane digs into his shirt pocket and throws down an impressive collection of bona fides: union card, pink slip, bank book, gold-member credit card. This is the emotional payoff, served up with watercress and a doily, for any Ride the Wild Surf audience member over the age of thirty. Approval and gratitude play across the mother’s face. “I’m sorry, boy,” she says. “Maybe you do understand the difference between work and play.”

  What set Ride the Wild Surf apart from Gidget (and all the beach movies) is that surfing, for the first time ever, gets the full high-end studio-powered professional treatment
. Of course, the same ridiculous back-projection trick that allowed James Darren and Frankie Avalon to “surf” through Gidget and Beach Party was again put to use, allowing a sprayed-down Fabian to hunker and sway through his surfing closeups while an empty wave breaks at some impossible distance behind him. But the rest of the surfing is great: long intricate rides on double-overhead walls at Sunset Beach, and thirty-foot Waimea Bay drops, with whitewater noise blasting from the theater speakers like a mortar rounds. Hulking big-wave star Greg Noll, in his trademark black-and-white “jailhouse jams,” thoroughly dominated the Waimea lineup during the Ride the Wild Surf location shoot, and he was the only possible choice to stunt-ride for James Mitchum’s “Eskimo”—Jody’s main rival. Mickey Dora doubled for Fabian. The girls in Ride the Wild Surf sit on the beach, waving at first, then gasping and looking worried. The audience gasped along with them—that’s how strong the surf clips were.

  Here, There, and Everywhere: The Surfer In Pop Culture

  “The medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan probably couldn’t have found Surf City if you dropped him off on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Main, but his soon-to-be-famous 1964 dictum fit the sport like a glove during the American boom years. As the surfer image filtered out across the cultural landscape, it shapeshifted from menace to sportsman to bohemian to fashion plate to object of ridicule—and as McLuhan said, form was determined less by the thing itself and more by the outlet.

  Hollywood presented the surfer as a mildly countercultural goof-off; just daring and mouthy enough to be interesting, but always likable and never more than a quick plot-turn away from returning to school or a job. Television dramas were another matter. Perhaps because the genre itself was aimed at older viewers, many of whom were uncomfortable with teen culture in general, small-screen surfers were nearly all villains. In “Who Killed the Surf Broad?” a 1964 episode of ABC’s popular crime show Burke’s Law, members of a local “surf gang” crack jokes when one of their own suddenly dies on the sand, and they get back to their wild beach party as soon as the corpse is picked up and removed.