The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  * * *

  Discovering good surf in this corner of the world wasn’t a total shocker—anyone looking at a map could see the potential. Making things a lot easier for Brown and company was the fact that Durban and Cape Town had both already taken to the sport in a big way. Once in South Africa, they were pointed in the right direction.

  Durban, especially, had all the surf culture prerequisites: good waves, pleasant year-round weather, an enthusiastic beachgoing public, and a tradition of Australian-style surf lifesaving—wave skis and racing sixteens included—dating back to the late 1920s. Durban had sent a lifeguard team to Australia for the 1956 International Surf Carnival, and team members had all seen the Americans zipping around on their 10-foot Malibu boards. Returning home, the Durbanites began making what they called the “trick” board—a hollow timber-framed version of what the Americans were riding. Meanwhile, eight hundred miles to the southwest and completely unknown to the Durban surfers, a Cape Town crayfish diver named John Whitmore had already seen the California-style boards in a magazine article, and had built a few for himself and a few other local wave-riders.

  BAY OF PLENTY, DURBAN, EARLY 1960s.

  A grinning Afrikaner with a pointy chin beard, Whitmore was discovering new surf breaks almost by the week, first along the Cape Peninsula, then up the coast to Port Elizabeth and East London. In 1959, a roaming Hobie Surfboards employee named Dick Metz, near the end of a long worldwide journey, hitchhiked into Cape Town, where he met and befriended Whitmore. Through Metz’s connections, Whitmore became the South African distributor for Clark Foam and Surfer magazine, and by the time the Endless Summer group arrived in late 1963, he was the go-to guy for anything having to do with South African surfing. Whitmore had already done a bit of surf-recon on the jutting Cape St. Francis peninsula; it was his suggestion that Brown look for waves there.

  In most respects, South Africa was like any other emerging sixties-era surf region, with a profuse first bloom of clubs and shops, magazines and competitions. Max Wetteland of Durban represented South Africa in the 1964 World Surfing Championships and was a semifinalist. George Thomopolous and Tony Van Den Huevel would hold their own against the world’s best before the decade was over.

  SEGREGATED BEACH IN DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA, 1965.

  Apartheid racial policies had meanwhile come to define the country’s presence on the world stage. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, with his Cape Town–delivered “wind of change” speech in 1960, launched what turned out to be a long, slow, deepening period of global isolation for South Africa, and the effects were already being felt in the sports community: not long after the Endless Summer crew left the country, South Africa was banned from the 1964 Olympics. In years to come, local surfers (and a good portion of surfers around the world, for that matter) would insist that sports in general, and surfing in particular, had nothing to do with politics. But surfing and apartheid were destined to cross paths, with results that often made surfers look shallow and ignorant. In 1966, Surfer ran a photo of a somber black teenager on a Durban beach with three board-carrying white surfers in the background, along with a caption noting that South Africa’s segregated beaches meant that “this native youngster can’t join [in] for a little fun in the surf.” Dozens of readers turned on the magazine. “Why don’t you guys think before your write such trash?” one subscriber wrote in a letter to the editor. “It only takes a thing like this to ruin a good magazine like yours,” another said. A Florida reader wrote: “Segregation can’t be that bad . . . the beaches are practically segregated here in Jacksonville, in that the whites stay with whites and the blacks with blacks . . . this way, everybody’s happy.”

  Voices for tolerance and equality were heard as well. After all, surfing was a Polynesian export, with the sublimely dark-brown Duke Kahanamoku recognized as the sport’s grand patriarch. For this reason alone surfing was probably less reflexively racist than 1960s America at large. Surfer published an editorial in response to what became a small flood of letters trigged by the 1966 Durban beach photo, saying that “human dignity and equality [should be a] concern for all of us,” and that the magazine would bring to light “any force that would hamper any surfer from enjoying the sport anywhere in the world.” Nobody dropped their board and rushed off to march on Selma. But the sport would continue to now and again take an honorable stand against racism.

  * * *

  As a movie, The Endless Summer exists in its own completely unpoliticized world—although Brown at one point cuts to a panning shot of dolphins swimming through a Durban lineup while throwing in a mild gag: “Sharks and porpoises have yet to integrate in South Africa.” He’d polished the line, along the rest of the voice-over script, during Endless Summer’s debut tour in 1964, when Brown screened the movie himself and did live narration.

  Technically the movie was still a work in progress, and Brown often made small edits from one showing to the next, but the basic sequences were finished. So was all the subcontracted production work. A San Clemente band named the Sandals had recorded the soundtrack, which included “Theme from Endless Summer,” a minor-key surf instrumental masterpiece containing a harmonica bridge that would, in decades to come, make Baby Boom surfers weep with nostalgia. John Van Hamersveld, a moddish twenty-two-year-old Art Center graduate, was hired to make the Endless Summer poster; the Pop Art gem featured Brown, August, and Hynson in black silhouette against a blazing Day-Glo sunset—it became the sport’s inescapable image, just as “Endless Summer” itself became the sport’s inescapable tagline.

  SURFER MAGAZINE AD.

  Even in its barnstorming beta version, Endless Summer was already skewed toward a general audience. Brown opened the film with a ten-minute primer explaining the different forms of surfing. Throughout the movie, he showed plenty of noncelebrities: beginners in Ghana, intermediates in South Africa, bellyboarding natives in Tahiti. Surf films had never been vulgar or graphic, but Endless Summer was the cleanest yet, with no trace of the cigarettes, wine bottles, or funky living quarters seen in movies like Slippery When Wet. There was nothing more racy than two or three lingering bikini shots. Brown might have expected some eye-rolling from hardcore surfers at what was obviously a softening of the surf movie genre. But they loved it. So what if Endless Summer was G-rated—the sport was being described back to them, correctly and in full, and it was great.

  Endless Summer features of real surfers traveling to real locations, and it couldn’t be described as anything but a documentary. Except Brown didn’t really care about documenting, in any meaningful sense, his four-month trip around the world. He didn’t care about documenting the sport in general, for that matter. What he wanted to do—what he did flawlessly—was present the look and feel of surfing in its best moments. Endless Summer was an impressionist work. Brown was craftsman enough to arrange, conceal, accent, and outright invent as required.

  The untruths were mostly small and thrown in for dramatic effect, like the overstated fifty-fifty odds that a surfer caught on the wrong side of Durban’s netted beaches would be killed by a shark. Some of the inventions were longer and more elaborate, including the discovery of the perfect wave at Cape St. Francis. In the film, Brown, Hynson, and August cross miles of sun-blasted dunes to finally stand gaping—along with the audience—before a heavenly vista of empty, sparkling-blue, right-breaking point surf. Hyson and August rush out into the best waves of their lives. Brown, narrating, tells us that they’d started the day not expecting to find any surf. “We didn’t even know if we’d find the water.” But here it was, Brown continued, and he estimated that the Cape St. Francis surf was probably this good three hundred days a year.

  “WITH THE KIND OF COURAGE–SOME MIGHT SAY FOOLHARDINESS–REQUIRED TO BECOME A SURFER, BROWN OPENED HIS FILM (IN NEW YORK) WITHOUT THE AUSPICES OF A DISTRIBUTOR OR EVEN A PRESS AGENT. HE’S JUST CRAZY ENOUGH TO BECOME QUITE COMFORTABLY RICH.”

  —The New York Times, 1966

  In truth, the group began their stay
on the Cape by checking into a beachfront hostel. The following morning, Hynson noticed a likely-looking break a mile or so to the south, walked up by himself, starting riding, and was soon joined by the others. Ninety minutes later, the waves shut down. And that was it for their visit. With nothing to surf the next day, they all spent two or three hours marching up and down the dunes for the camera; Brown had determined overnight that he needed an ex post facto opening sequence to set up their wave score. The remark about Cape St. Francis surf being good three hundred days a year—Brown pulled that out of thin air a few months later, while writing the voice-over.

  An interesting thing happened when Hynson finally told the real Cape St. Francis story in 1993. Nobody cared. The waves themselves were real, if nowhere near as consistent as Brown claimed, and the beachfront really was made up of dunes. But it wasn’t that. Every surfer, at some rare and transcendent moment, will unexpectedly find the perfect wave—even if it’s just a fluke afternoon at their local shorebreak. In the editing room, Brown arranged events to highlight a universally shared surfing dream. It wasn’t deceit. It was a gift.

  * * *

  Wowing the gremlins and femlins with his debut version of Endless Summer in 1964, driving from beach town to beach town, Elks Club to VFW hall, was no big deal. Brown had been impressing that audience for years. Booking the film into eight thousand theaters across the country and earning raves from Time and The New Yorker—that was another story. Indeed, when Brown hit this high mark, it was one of the great achievements in the history of independent film.

  BRUCE BROWN, 1963.

  Brown needed a distribution deal, and to get one he had to prove that Endless Summer could play to a general audience. He took the film to the Sunset Theater in Wichita, Kansas, America’s most landlocked city, and over the course of two snowbound weeks in early 1965, a new voiced-dubbed edition of Endless Summer outgrossed My Fair Lady and The Great Race. When distributors still weren’t convinced, Brown spent $50,000 to have the film blown up from 16mm to 35mm, kicked in another $25,000 in promotions, and arranged for what amounted to Endless Summer’s third debut, in June 1966, this time at a dingy Lower Manhattan theater called Kips Bay. The Gilgo Beach crew who’d seen Endless Summer two years earlier lined up again to buy tickets, but this time they were outnumbered by nonsurfers. The Kips Bay engagement was a smash hit, Brown got a sweet deal with Cinema V Distributing, and Endless Summer finally went nationwide.

  The New York Times lauded Endless Summer for its “hypnotic beauty and almost continuous excitement.” Time called it “an epic.” Sounding glad for the chance to test-drive some teen lingo, The New Yorker closed its review with: “Great background music. Great movie. Out of sight.” Newsweek hit a rare note of criticism, saying the movie was “not very well made,” and that Brown “knew little about the niceties of shooting a documentary.” Then the reviewer went ahead and named it one of the ten best films of 1966 anyway. That’s the kind of roll Brown and his movie were on. (Oscar voters ignored Endless Summer for that year’s Academy Awards, but Brown came back to win a Best Documentary nomination for his 1971 motorcycle film On Any Sunday.)

  Audiences turned out in big numbers for Endless Summer well into 1967; at Kips Bay, the movie played continuously for nine months. In mid-June 1967, the Times reported that Brown had just earned his first million—serious money at a time when the average American suburban household income was about $7,500—and that Columbia Pictures would be releasing the film overseas. Robert August, working behind the counter at Jacobs Surfboards when Endless Summer crossed over, later said that ticket sales benefited from student protests, race riots, and the Vietnam war. “Everything was controversial. Everybody was tense. And Bruce’s movie was a big time-out. It was like, ‘Let’s just have fun for awhile.’”

  Brown himself was cheerful and casual during his Endless Summer promotional appearances on The Tonight Show and The Jack Paar Program. But as he told the Times, he was “tired of talking about surfing” and had no plans to make a sequel. He kept his word. Brown was a wealthy thirty-year-old with a wife and three kids, and by the end the 1967 he’d quit working. For two years he rode dirt bikes, trolled for broadbill swordfish in his new Boston Whaler, and hung around the house with his family.

  Again, his timing was perfect. What Endless Summer reviewers and distributors didn’t know in 1967, what moviegoing audiences from Flagstaff to Rochester didn’t know—and what Brown certainly did know—was that surfing had gone into pupation and was already beginning to emerge, in a strobe-lit cloud of pot smoke, as a radically different sport. Thirty-year-olds weren’t especially welcome. Brown was one of the few surfers from his generation to exit entirely on his own terms.

  The Endless Summer, the surf boom’s last and best manifestation, would eventually be granted everlasting cinematic life in revival houses, on cable TV, on VHS and DVD. Eventually it would be added to the United States National Film Registry. But in the early post-boom era, it went from relevant to obsolete nearly overnight. All that 1963-shot footage had looked passably modern three years later, when the film opened nationwide. But by late 1967, for hardcore surfers at least, Endless Summer already looked as if it were set in amber.

  Chapter 5: Barefoot Revolution 1966–1974

  GEORGE GREENOUGH BOB MCTAVISH THE NEW ERA NAT YOUNG THE 1966 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS “WE’RE TOPS NOW” PLASTIC MACHINES SHORTBOARD REVOLUTION DICK BREWER HONOLUA BAY SURFING STONED DREW KAMPION THE ANTICONTEST MOVEMENT WAYNE LYNCH EVOLUTION LOCALISM SEX WAX THE SURF LEASH TOM MOREY BODYBOARDING COUNTRY SOUL MORNING OF THE EARTH TRACKS MAGAZINE BELLS BEACH QUIKSILVER MICHAEL PETERSON THE GOLD COAST BARRY KANAIAUPUNI THE HAWAIIAN STYLE LARRY BERTLEMANN TUBE RIDING: A SHORT HISTORY PIPELINE GERRY LO PEZ LIGHTNING BOLT

  It has always seemed a bit grandiose that any surfing era should be called a “revolution,” but the late-sixties shortboard revolution was just that—in miniature, at least. Old ways and ideas were thrown over in a furious rush. Young leaders ground their bare feet into the backs of their predecessors and pushed forward. Like most revolutions, it had an exciting, necessary, even righteous urgency that could, from other angles, also appear excessive, wasteful, and even silly. Never before or since has the sport changed so much and so abruptly.

  The shortboard revolution thundered across the surfing landscape for roughly three years, beginning in 1967. It was really two distinct but conjoined movements: one equipment-related, the other cultural.

  During that period, surfboards were transformed from bulky 9-foot 6-inch, 26-pound noseriders to 6-foot 6-inch, 9-pound “mind machines.” Shortboards had numerous practical advantages over what were soon called (and always disparagingly) “longboards.” They were easy to carry, fit anywhere in the house, and could be stowed inside a car—smaller versions even fit in the trunk. The new boards had compensatory disadvantages, too: they paddled low and slow, which meant you couldn’t catch as many waves, and the lighter models were fragile. But all of these issues were incidental. Short surfboards overhauled the ride itself. Hanging ten was out. Straight-line trim was out. Now it was all about fin-flexing bottom turns, “roller coaster” moves off the whitewater, and tucking yourself into the “green room”—otherwise known as the tube.

  Equipment and wave-riding, though, were just the starting point for the shortboard revolution, which reshaped every last nook and cranny of the surfing world: fashion and language, media and competition, ritual and doctrine. This was when surfing did its best to abdicate from the world of sport. Other athletes—everyone from Joe Namath to Joe Frazier—were getting high, growing their hair, and listening to the Beatles’ White Album. But surfers virtually melted into the counterculture, in ways both engaging and absurd. Magazine articles were titled “Hallucinations” and “Bad Karma at Huntington Beach.” One of the era’s most progressive surfers, Hawaii’s Jock Sutherland, did his best riding while tripping on acid. California boardmaker Charlie Quesnel ran a Surfer ad consisting of nothing more than the phrase “I had a vision,” a
tiny PO box address, and a rearview photo of Quesnel standing on a rock in a forest, nude, with arms stretched overhead.

  GEORGE GREENOUGH AND “VELO,” 1966.

  The shortboard revolution had plenty of soft, decorative touches—the paisleys and mandalas, the tie-dye, and all that long flowing hair—but it also introduced a hardness that exceeded anything from the sport’s past. A territorial practice called “localism” became an abiding surf-world presence, and the sport’s first drug fatalities were counted. Surfing’s ingrained cooler-than-you pettiness, too, was worse for all the peace and brotherhood rhetoric. “You were on the bus or off the bus,” Drew Kampion wrote, looking back years later at the shortboard revolution. Kampion was the top surf journalist of the period—thoughtful and funny, and capable of writing about surfers as “Brothers, together on the periphery of God’s exploded memory.” But he also embodied the partisanship of this loud, rousing, divisive era. “You got it or you didn’t,” Kampion wrote. “You believed in gravity or you believed in space.”

  Lines between Us and Them were sharply drawn. A lot of knives were hidden behind the peace banners. No suprises there. Revolution, as Chairman Mao said, is not a dinner party.

  George Greenough Leads the Way

  Near the beginning of Endless Summer, a Santa Barbara kneeboarder named George Greenough rides one of the best-looking waves in the picture—a small but incredibly long peeler at a break called Sandspit. Filmmaker Bruce Brown offered the wave as a kind of novelty (“a short board and a long ride”) and moved on. He didn’t know it at the time, but what Brown captured at Sandspit was the shortboard revolution in its prenatal stage.