The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  On the afternoon of December 20, 1967, Brewer was in the LSD factory making new boards for team riders Reno Abellira and Gerry Lopez, when McTavish and Young drove up, unstrapped their plastic machines from the car roof, walked in and settled down for a long design rap. The conversation veered from mellow-stony to tense, but it had an immediate impact. After the Aussies left, the three Hawaiians returned to the shaping room, where Brewer had just finished a 9-foot 6-inch Pipeliner-style board for Abellira. Without saying a word, Brewer drew an outline on the foam blank meant for Lopez and from it crafted a wide-nosed, narrow-tailed, V-bottomed 8-foot 6-inch “mini-gun”—his answer to the plastic machine.

  DICK BREWER (CENTER), WITH TEAMRIDERS GERRY LOPEZ AND RENO ABELLIRA.

  Honolua Bay started pumping later that week. Big and nearly unrideable at first, it settled down to a perfect sixto-ten feet. The Aussies and the Hawaiians rode together for several days in a row—and the plastic machines ruled. Abellira and the rest of Brewer’s boys performed well, but in the longboard style; turning from the tail, shuffling forward for speed, then pedaling back again to change direction. McTavish planted himself on the deck of his deep-vee, swooped off the bottom, banked high, dropped and faded, laid it over again, crouched beneath the curl, then skimmed across into flat water near the channel. Young did the same thing. Early on, Young broke the nose off his board. He rescued it from the boulders, scrambled up the cliff to mix up a hot batch of resin, made the repair, and was back in action less than three hours later. It was the surf session of a lifetime.

  Incredibly, Brewer said afterward that the Hawaiians “owned Honolua,” and that as he watched the Aussies, who were riding what Brewer believed were hydrodynamically unsound boards, he “really felt sorry for them.” Brewer was a boardmaking holy man who inspired a cult-like devotion among some of the world’s best surfers—acolytes who were already calling him the Guru. But his public dismissal of the shortboard put him, at least for the moment, on the wrong side of history.

  “THIS WAS DURING THE ACID ERA. RIGHT? I TOLD ALL THE BOARD-SHAPERS IN CALIFORNIA TO GO UNDERGROUND, WITH THE INTENTION OF WRECKING THE SURFBORAD INDUSTRY–WHICH WE DID.”

  —Dick Brewer

  Paul Witzig was on the cliff at Honolua Bay, filming everything, and when the footage appeared in his new surf movie Hot Generation, which toured in early 1968, audiences finally got a full-color, big-screen hit of shortboard surfing. Nine out of ten American surfers walked in to see Hot Generation knowing little or nothing about short surfboards, and as Young and McTavish carved across those gorgeous blue-green Honolua walls in the film’s climatic sequence, it felt like the theater floor dropped away.

  In a companion article for Surfer, John Witzig wrote: “If you watch Nat and McTavish, your idea of surfing can never be the same.” Bob McTavish, in a bit of acid-filtered gibberish, encouraged readers to “break out from the straight line” by using the “inner-space probing zapper”—that is, the new deepvee boards—and to let their minds “stroll, run, leap, and laugh in gardens of crystal motion and sun and reality.”

  The shortboard revolution was now well and truly underway. Night after night, the Hot Generation credits rolled, the auditorium lights came up, and another two or three hundred excited if still bewildered moviegoers streamed out of the theater, each one thinking the same thing: “How fast can I get a new board?”

  Panic On the Showroom Floor

  How fast could you get a new board? Right away. And cheap, too. But only if you wanted a 9-foot 6-inch noserider—which by the spring of 1968 had become the Edsel of surfboard manufacturing.

  The major labels were in trouble right from the beginning of the shortboard revolution, starting with inventory. The surf boom was already cooling, but everybody had done the right thing anyway, business-wise, and warehoused hundreds of new boards in early 1968 with an eye toward the annual summer jump in sales. Thus, when customers began marching wallet-first into showrooms ready to buy a new V-bottom or mini-gun, there was nothing but rack after rack of fossilizing longboards.

  Eventually, backed-up inventory could be marked down and sold. The larger problem for boardmakers like Hobie, Weber, Jacobs, and Noll (and to a lesser degree Sydney’s Brookvale-based Big Five companies) was simple industrial-level slowness. The plastic machine triggered a design free-for-all, with board specs changing by the week. When manufacturers submitted their latest magazine ads, they had to grind their teeth for two months until the issue hit the stands, by which time the featured boards had reached their sell-by date. The same thing happened on the showroom floor, where the first whiff of decay began floating off any display model after just a few weeks.

  It was more than just outdated equipment. Because long-boards weren’t cool, any company that had made its reputation during the longboard era, by association, wasn’t cool. For teenagers, buying a new Hobie in 1968 was like buying the latest Herman’s Hermits record. (There were exceptions. Surfwear giant Hang Ten was doomed, but function-first companies like O’Neill Wetsuits and Clark Foam came through the shortboard revolution stronger than ever.)

  Big-label boardmakers didn’t go down without a fight. Their first response, after realizing that the shortboard wasn’t a fad, was to lean on Surfer publisher John Severson—first as surf buddies, then as boycott-threatening advertisers—to keep the magazine from doing any in-depth reporting on the shortboard. Severson grudgingly complied; it wasn’t until the September 1968 issue that the magazine published its first comprehensive shortboard design feature. Petersen’s Surfing wasn’t so constrained, and the April 1968 issue opened with a revved-up editorial titled “There’s a Surfboard Revolution Going On!” The new equipment was described as “the best thing that ever happened to the world of surfing.” (Aussie-published articles on shortboards, meanwhile, had been running almost constantly since McTavish turned out his first full run of plastic machines in mid-1967.)

  Boardmakers then fired off a desperate barrage of new models, hoping that something would stick to the marketplace. The Brotherhood model tapped the groovy new counterculture lingo, as did the Aquarius, the Blue Morphos, the Crystal Ship, and the Deadly Flying Glove. Most new boards, though, just wanted to be identified as smaller and lighter: first the Mini, the Micro, and the Feather, then the Super Mini, the Mini-Feather, and the Micro Roller. There were dozens more, each one sounding like something you could fit into your shirt pocket.

  Design-wise, the boards were all over the place: blobs, disks, and mini-guns; squaretails, pintails, roundtails; 12-pounders, 10-pounders, 7-pounders. Plastic machines got up to 24 inches wide. The hardcore “pocket rockets” were slimmed down to just 16 inches. In just over two years, Nat Young went from riding a 7-foot 6-inch roundtail to a stubby 5-foot 10-inch to a narrow 7-foot double-ender. Fin design was its own complex and quick-evolving field. There were flexible fins and ultra-rigid fins; towering high aspect ratio fins, miniaturized “finger” fins, and long, low-profile keel fins. They were made from laminated wood, or mold-injected hard plastic, or hollowed-out fiberglass. An early version of the tri-fin came and went, as did an early version of the twin-fin. Most boards had a fin box; a “long box” was introduced that let the surfer adjust his fin a few inches up or down the center-line—all the way forward, and the board turned easier; all the back, and it had more bite.

  Regional differences in board design were pronounced. Hawaiian models were longer, narrower, and thinner. Australian boards were smaller and rounder. East Coast boards were thicker, as well as small and round. California boards were mostly in-between those from Australia and Hawaii. Aussies tended to keep their boards clean and white, the Hawaiians liked single colors (red and purple were favorites), and Californians, almost as if to make up for their last-to-the-party arrival to shortboard design, furiously decorated their boards with swirling multicolored “acid splash” tints.

  The new models and designs did nothing to improve the major boardmaker’s profit-and-loss statements. In 1966, nine out of ten surfers we
re riding name-brand boards. By 1970, it was one in two, if that, with a majority now either shopping among dozens of newer, smaller, nimbler companies or trying their luck in the growing backyard-builders network. The latter choice offered a big financial incentive: $130 was the going rate for a new board at the local shop. With a pair of sawhorses, a Surform, a few sheets of 60-grit, and a sanding block, you or a boardmaking buddy working out of the family garage could build the spacestick of your dreams for just $65 in materials. Magazine editors tried to herd everyone back to the showrooms of the companies that made up their publishing ad base. “The garage-soul program isn’t hurting anyone—except the surfer,” Petersen’s Surfing warned, adding that the sport was heading for “the dark ages.” The backyard trade exploded for five or six years anyway, until the best of the backyarders went on to found a new generation of surfboard companies.

  Surfboards, in fact, were the last boom-era product to crash. Surf music, beach movies, beachwear, skateboards—all were dead or dying by late 1966. Hobie Surfboards, meanwhile, sold seven thousand boards that year—the company’s best-ever annual sales figure—and did it again in 1967. Gordon Woods Surfboards, atop the much smaller Australian market, peaked at the same time.

  But by 1970, virtually everyone was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Greg Noll liquidated in 1971. Hap Jacobs sold his company; so did Bing Copeland. Dewey Weber watched his business shrink from a thriving five-store operation to a single midsize outlet in Hermosa Beach. Gordon Woods and Denny Keogh, fierce Brookvale district rivals in the 1960s, both launched boat-making companies. Hobie Alter had been paying more attention to boats than surfboards since marketing the twin-hull Hobie Cat in 1967. He guided Hobie Surfboards away from board manufacturing to beachwear and accessories, turned the business over to his sons, and moved to Idaho.

  Shortboard Surfing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  The shortboard revolution caused upheaval and change in the lineup, too. The drop-knee cutback—an elegant weight-leveraging move where the surfer bent and lowered his rear leg like a proposing suitor—gone. Parallel-stance trim; gone. Noseriding continued for a year or so, just out of habit, but the shortboard’s thin front end didn’t offer much of a platform, and any noseriding was followed by a quick retreat as the board began pearling. Surfers were inching their way toward the tube, but hadn’t yet come up with a stance, or a line of attack, that would permit them access to the green room. The rider who found himself anywhere near a tube usually assumed a head-lowered, arms-splayed, bent-at-the-waist posture that more or less announced the upcoming wipeout.

  Aesthetically, in fact, the new boards drove the sport into a deep ravine. Endless Summer was still playing when the first plastic machines hit the beach, and what brought a hush of appreciation during the Cape St. Francis sequence wasn’t just the perfect surf, it was the way Mike Hynson, in full trim, brought his feet together, straightened his body up like a tuning fork, and simply let his board run as the curl spiraled off behind him. Here was a difficult thing made effortless.

  With early shortboards, the difficult thing, almost without exception, looked very difficult indeed. The sport’s evolutionary wheel had never moved faster, and it was a thrill to gain access to places on a wave that had always been mostly off limits—the tube, the curl, the whitewater. But the new terrain was difficult, even for the world’s best surfers, and rarely navigated without a lot of torso-twisting, leg-pumping, and arm-waving.

  As a result, for the first time since the missionaries landed in Hawaii, the wave-riding population declined. Surfing had always been a hard sport, and the new equipment made it harder still. Weeks were added to the learning curve for a shortboard-riding beginner. A lot of intermediates who didn’t surf regularly—weekenders and summer surfers—did the fashionable thing and went short, only to find they weren’t enjoying themselves nearly as much as they had on their noseriders. Older surfers had a harder time with the adjustment than younger surfers; just about every hot rider over the age of twenty-five found that it was impossible to cross over to a shortboard without dropping a level or two in the lineup ranking—many had to face the fact that their time on top had come and gone. Coldwater surfers had depended on the longboard’s buoyancy to keep them high and dry as much as possible—wetsuits were good but not that good. Shortboards left you half-submerged all the time. It was hard to get stoked on the performance qualities of your new stick while chattering the enamel off your teeth.

  By mid-1968, all of this resulted in surfers leaving the sport at a faster rate than they were being replaced. There was no recordkeeping, but America’s surfing population in the early 1970s was probably 10 to 20 percent less than what it had been in 1967. In the U.S. Northeast, the drop-off may have been as high as 50 percent. Australia’s surfing population dipped as well, but not as much. At better breaks everywhere, the lineup seemed as crowed as ever. But there was noticeably more room at the lower end of the food chain.

  Surf, Drugs, Rock and Roll

  There was a pause in 1968, a short pause, when the sport seemed to be wondering if it was going to keep up the façade of moving toward a cleaned-up, anti-hodad, mainstream-friendly version of itself. Then the calendar flipped over to 1969, and from Hermosa to Haliewa to Melbourne it was all flashing peace signs, avocado smoothies, and hand-sized marijuana leaves glassed into the decks of new boards—right where the Hobie and Jacobs labels used to go.

  The sport never really tested the waters of the counter-culture. It ran, jumped, and cannonballed into the deep end. Surf magazines ran feature-length articles written in free-verse stanzas: “You are Moses/with a fiberglass snake/entering eternity.” The new O’Neill Wetsuits ad campaign showed a nude model with her short john pulled down to her waist. Revered boardmaker Dick Brewer put on a pair of surf trunks each morning, drove out to a tiny Buddhist temple in the hills of Kauai, sat in full lotus for an hour, then drove back to his workshop and fired up the planer. The sport began to groan beneath the weight of its own newly added significance and meaning. “Because surfing, in its pure form, deals with an equilibrium involvement between man and his nature,” surf journalist Drew Kampion wrote in 1970, “it becomes, almost by definition, an ecologically pure undertaking. Perhaps even an undertaking so basic that it performs an evolutionary function.”

  Fashion-wise, surfing’s new makeover was mostly lifted from West Hollywood and the East Village. Attendees at the 1969 Surfer Magazine Readers Poll Awards banquet wore beaded headbands, paisley-print scarves, fringed suede jackets, and half-tint wireframe glasses—the whole scene could have been transported straight from the backstage trailer at Woodstock. David Nuuhiwa let his thick black hair grow to his shoulders, outfitted himself in the latest and finest Melrose boutique threads, accessorized with silver inlaid-turquoise jewelry, and exuded the same shadowy panther-like presence in Southern California surf towns that Jim Morrison did in the bars and clubs of Sunset Boulevard. The simple, no-accoutrement, boom-era “surfer look”—an original style legacy built up over nearly twenty-five years—was passé. Surfers now took their dress cues from album covers and Rolling Stone magazine.

  Drugs, though, not clothes, were what really put surfing in the countercultural fast lane. In beach towns everywhere, drugs were cheap, available, and popular, and surfers availed themselves like rock and rollers. Nearly everyone involved with the development of the short surfboard was an enthusiastic stoner. Dick Brewer dropped acid regularly, and Nat Young remembers that he and Bob McTavish “smoked a big fat one” before every Honolua Bay session in 1967. Surfing’s drug culture only expanded from there. Wilkin Surfboards in Los Angeles debuted its Meth Model in 1968 with the tagline “For Those Who Like Speed,” and top surfers attached themselves to a giant ceramic hookah in Morning of the Earth, Australia’s most popular early-seventies surf movie. For most people, as photographer Jeff Divine recalled, surfing wasn’t just about surfing; the full experience involved “parking on the beach, surfing nude, smoking, taking acid, putting huge
speakers on top of the car and blaring Santana, Hendrix, and the Doors.”

  There were holdouts. Midget Farrelly finished his 1969 antidrug opinion piece for Surfing World magazine by asking, “Does the beach take dope, do the waves take dope, do the seagulls take dope? Man, if you’re part of that scene, you won’t either.” Fred Hemmings, writing for Surfer the same year, reported that a top Hawaiian rider had recently “blown his mind” on drugs, then warned readers that there was “no hope in dope.” Few people were listening. As Hemmings himself ruefully admitted a few years later, the awards banquet following the 1968 World Championships “looked like a Cheech and Chong convention.”

  Marijuana was the surfer’s drug of choice, and it fit easily within established surfer culture. Surfers prided themselves on being rebellious—not quite criminal, but not rule-abiding either—and pot was the perfect misdemeanor-level drug. Easy to grow, easy to buy, and easy to transport, pot appealed to the surfer’s DIY home-based enterprising spirit. The pot-smoking ritual fit comfortably, too. Wariness toward anyone from outside your local break remained the sport’s default setting, and there weren’t many friendly gestures one surfer could make to another. Sharing a bar of wax, that worked. Lighting up a joint and passing it on—that was even better. Finally, surfing and pot were seen by many as complimentary natural highs. As one first-generation shortboarder put it, “The mood of the times made for a really creative period in surfing, and the mood was largely the result of getting stoned.”