The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  LSD was also popular. As with marijuana, most experiences were positive. North Shore powerhouse Jeff Hakman, decades after the fact, went into a near-reverie describing an afternoon with Jock Sutherland at Honolua Bay in early 1968: “The surf is eight-to-ten feet and perfect, each of us are on a really nice tab of Purple Owsley; I’d be sitting outside watching Jock’s silhouette go up and down this long wall, then I’m riding myself, both of us screaming. It was a dream! It was incredible! Those were probably the best moments of my surfing career.” The game, as Sutherland recalled, was to see how high you could get without having it affect the way you rode. “We’d pretty much do anything we could get our hands on. But not so much the downers, of course, because that slowed you up. It all tied in to how it affected your surfing.”

  Acid was also responsible for surfing’s first round of drug casualties, including former Hawaii state champion Jackie Eberle, who went catatonic after a weekend-long high in Maui and was institutionalized. Photographer Ron Stoner’s prodigious acid use in 1968—dropping three full blotter hits at once, for example, while his friends settled for a quarter-hit each—greased his slide into full-blown schizophrenic psychosis. David Nuuhiwa and Mike Hynson were both involved with the Laguna Beach–based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, nationwide supplier of Orange Sunshine acid, whose founding members (most of them surfers) all ended up dead, missing, or jailed.

  During the shortboard revolution, surfing never had quite the same affinity for cocaine as it did for pot and acid. For some years, beginning in the early seventies, surf magazines made winking reference to beachfront “snow flurries,” and coke, unlike LSD, never really went out of fashion. But there was no special relationship between surfing and coke, aside from the fact that, as surf writer Steve Barilotti put it, “surfing is a youthful culture and youth will have its party.”

  Heroin’s effect on the sport was much smaller but much darker. Because Australia was closest to the Golden Triangle’s opium-producing motherlode, Australian surfers did more and suffered more. “Dealers moved in and were selling on the beach, virtually calling guys out of the surf,” Queensland-born world champion Wayne Bartholomew once wrote, describing heroin’s midseventies introduction to his home town of Coolangatta. “I remember walking up to Point Danger one morning to check the waves and seeing a dozen of the hottest surfers all in a line to go into this house and shoot up.” But the misery was spread around. Hawaii state junior champion Rusty Starr overdosed and died in 1971, as did one-time Aussie prodigy Kevin Brennan. Surfing’s most vivid drug-related morality tale took place in 1979, when Westhampton golden boy Ricky Rasmussen, a twenty-seven-year-old former U.S. Championships titleholder, was shot in the face and killed while making an early morning Harlem drug score.

  PACIFIC VIBRATIONS

  Tragedy, though, never extinguished the romance of surfing’s drug culture. This was made obvious in 2001 with the release of Alan Weisbecker’s autobiographical memoir In Search of Captain Zero. Every surfer in the late 1960s and 1970s knew somebody who knew a guy who had run a boatload of pot up from Colombia, or traveled home from Europe with a pound or two of blonde Lebanese hash stuffed into a cored-out center of a new surfboard. Weisbecker, from Long Island, actually was that guy, and Captain Zero was a paean to his former life as a “contrabandista.” Wholesale drug trafficking, Weisbecker explains, allowed him to finance an “open-ended world surf tour . . . [to] do Endless Summer one better [and] put some Xs on what was in those days a largely blank world surf map.” The guts and confidence required to deal with heavy narco situations, Weisbecker writes, came from surfing itself. Faced with a gang of dagger-carrying ruffians in a Moroccan bazaar during a 1970 hash buy, Weisbecker begins to freak out, then collects himself with the thought, “These bastards can’t do anything to you; they never rode big Sunset Beach.”

  The surf world ate it up. Writer Kem Nunn called Captain Zero “a surfer’s On the Road,” and one magazine reviewer described Weisbecker as “a true surfer, rugged traveler, street-smart nomad and wise sage.” Here was a another version of the Mickey Dora surf-outlaw phenomenon. Surfers didn’t actually envy Weisbecker’s career as a drug-runner. Weisbecker himself saw the damage he’d done to his own life, and to the lives of friends, family, and lovers. “Abandonment,” he says near the end of Captain Zero. “It’s what I do best.” Still, most surfers liked to believe they were cut from similar cloth, that they were living a life less ordinary—even if their own version of contraband-running was an open beer between the legs while stuck in traffic.

  Surfer Tunes in, Turns On

  Surfer founder and publisher John Severson didn’t just embrace the counterculture, he turned it into sound business practice. In early 1968, Surfer remained the bulwark of surf media conservatism. The photography was first-rate, the magazine was well-organized and professionally assembled, and circulation was holding steady at a hundred thousand—by these and other measures, no other surf periodical was close.

  “I CRAWLED DOWN THE HALLWAY TO JOHN SEVERSON’S OFFICE. WE’D ALREADY SMOKED ABOUT A DOZEN DOUBLE-ENDERS THAT MORNING, ONE OR TWO IN THE ART DEPARTMENT TRYING TO ‘VISUALIZE GREATNESS.’ ‘RRRNGGHH!’ I GROWLED AT SEVO. ‘AAARRNNNNGGGLLAAAAHHH!’ HE GARGLED BACK. I NODDED, AND WE EACH CRAWLED BACK TO OUR OFFICES.”

  —Surfer editor Drew Kampion

  Surfer was also as predictable as oatmeal. If it wasn’t yet square, it was heading in that direction, with how-to advice on forming a college surf team, lengthy coverage of the new USSA ratings, and a cornball reader-submitted “Surftoons” section. Twice the magazine editorialized against marijuana use: the reader was sternly warned not to rely “on the fumes of a burning Mexican weed to give him a physical edge” and reminded that “there’s no substitute for good reflexes, conditioning and the will to win.” Severson, then thirty-four, had taken up golf, joined a country club, moved into a gated San Clemente development—next door to just-elected President Nixon’s “Western White House,” no less—and bought a new Jaguar sedan, which he kept clean and sand-free.

  Severson’s introduction to pot in early 1968 seemed to break his bourgeois fetters at a single blow—or exhale. Before Christmas of that year, he traded his longboard for a new shortboard, grew a luxuriant Sergeant Pepper’s moustache, and began to reassemble his magazine. The first and biggest change was to turn the editor’s seat over to Drew Kampion, an intense, Dylan-loving, twenty-four-year-old Buffalo-born transplant with a college English degree who put in enough hours at Malibu during the boom years to know who was hot and who was posing. Kampion was a prodigious writer; earnest and cynical by turns; a peacenik with a sharp tongue and a great sense of humor. He was the driving force behind what was called the “new” Surfer, but other talented Surfer newcomers also did their part: art director Hy Moore, photo editor Brad Barrett, and a sublimely gifted teenage photographer named Art Brewer.

  SURFER MAGAZINE, 1968.

  The turnaround was astonishing. Kampion covered the 1969 U.S. Championships with a single vertiginous 2,500-word run-on sentence, and wrote articles with titles like “Conversations with Spirit Forms.” Within a year of his arrival, Surfer had a poetry section, a fondness for experimental fiction (sometimes presented in stage-play form), and was set to launch an environmental column called “Our Mother Ocean.” Antiestablishment bona fides were flashed at every opportunity: Zap Comix cartoonist R. Crumb did a Surfer subscription ad, and a mock editorial notified readers that “at this very moment, the PTA, John Birch Society, Daughters of the Revolution, and the Four Freshman are rallying their forces to march on Surfer magazine.” When a top Aussie rider sent a message via Surfer to the American team flying in for the 1970 World Championships that “we await you with open minds and open hearts, and our girls await you with open legs,” the remark sailed through copyedit without raising an eyebrow.

  Then Murphy came back. Rick Griffin’s wildly popular cartoon surf-imp was last seen in the pages of Surfer in 1965, just before Griffin moved to San Francisco, where
he contributed to Zap, designed the Rolling Stone logo, and did album art for the Grateful Dead. Severson and Griffin had parted on bad terms, after arguing over Griffin’s small but unconcealed pro-drug references in his Surfer strips. With Severson now reborn as a middle-aged flower child, the two reestablished contact and the publisher asked for a new Murphy strip—“something really electric,” as Griffin recalled. Murphy’s 1969 return to Surfer came in a hallucinatory four-color gush (previous installments had been black-and-white), with our once-chipper little hero now wearing a Hopi Indian mask, gibbering in acid-speak, and briefly igniting into a firerimmed eyeball.

  Surfer’s design changes were just as radical. The magazine’s format during the boom years had been loosely modeled after Sports Illustrated. Now it pulled style elements from Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Graphis. Cover blurbs were eliminated for awhile, leaving just a full-bleed photo and logotype. When the blurbs returned, it was mostly to give Kampion a chance to do some irony flexing: one 1970 cover read “First Annual End of the World Issue.”

  Not everybody liked Surfer’s new direction. “What happened to your magazine?” one longtime reader asked. “It used to be a colorful portrayal of a good, clean sport. Now you’ve stooped to yellow journalism, poetry, rabblerousing, ‘cosmic communion,’ ‘soul encounters,’ and all that other psychobabble.” Severson himself occasionally blinked at his own creation. “Drew Kampion came on flashing like a strobe light, but often got a little too serious,” he later wrote, recalling the supercharged effect of his new editor. “Remember, we’re just a surfin’ magazine.” Severson’s own sister gave up her free subscription when the magazine began printing swear words.

  For the most part, Surfer’s counterculture plunge was a great success. Communication Arts magazine, publishing’s graphic design arbiter, did a five-page spread on Surfer in 1970 and gave the July issue an “Outstanding Cover Design” award. Ad revenue in 1969 and 1970 was actually above what it had been during the boom years. Every issue in 1969 was over a hundred pages, a Surfer first, and a minor economic miracle, given how the boardmaking industry was spiraling downward.

  The Surfer high didn’t last long. Severson sold the magazine in 1971 and retired with his family to Maui. Kampion defected not long after to rival Surfing. New publisher Steve Pezman—who twenty years later would introduce luxe surf publishing with The Surfer’s Journal—did well to keep Surfer’s alternative-press credentials from lapsing, but in the midseventies the sport’s underground period drew to a close, as the sport once again groomed itself for a general audience. No more ironic cover blurbs. No more direct sex and drug references. Lots of great photos and plenty of readable articles. Clean, slick, and safe.

  Time Out: The Anticontest Movement

  Modern surfing had already developed a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward competition, a legacy that began with Duke Kahanamoku and continued unchanged through Tom Blake and Phil Edwards. During the shortboard revolution, however, many came to regard competition as the very antithesis of surfing—and few were harder on it than Drew Kampion. Most contests, he wrote, were “asinine displays,” with judging criteria so meaningless that the winner of any given heat “could just as well have stayed out of the water and played with himself.” Competition didn’t go away. World Championships events were held in 1968 and 1970, and there was the embryonic growth of what would later become an international professional circuit. But at times it seemed as if competition existed only to give the sport’s groovier-than-thou tastemakers something to rail against and make fun of. “Contest clown” was the popular new insult, and one surf movie ridiculed a contest montage by setting it to circus music. Mickey Dora—in the semifinals of the 1967 Malibu Invitational—made his feelings known by dropping his trunks as he rode past the judging stand.

  Then again, Dora had entered the contest. Just as he’d entered that year’s Duke meet, two or three previous Malibu events, and several other contests during the boom years. Dora loved to criticize anything having to do with organized surfing, but that didn’t prevent him from showing up on contest day when the mood struck. This kind of anticontest hypocrisy just grew stronger in years to come. After bad-mouthing the competition “system” with all its “plastic trips,” top surfers would invariably mail off their signed competition entry forms, and accept their trophies and prizes with a cool nod of the head. Nobody wanted to say it out loud, but they liked pitting their hard-won skills against other surfers. They liked the prestige. And when it was on offer, they liked the money. Hawaii’s Bill Hamilton was a surfer of breathtaking poise and grace who railed against surfers being “exploited and screwed” by contest promoters. Still, he dutifully turned out for every major North Shore event, and even did contest reportage for the surf magazines. After pocketing $1,000 for finishing second in the 1971 Smirnoff Pro, Hamilton merrily noted in his Surfer article that he appreciated “the ol’ green stuff” and that earning money in a contest was “a hell of a lot better than digging ditches.”

  DAVID NUUHIWA RIDING A FISH AT ROCKY POINT, OAHU, 1972.

  Surfing competition was still very much in the beta stage of development, and there were moments when it deserved all the sneering and contempt. Judging criteria remained poorly defined, and the judging itself was inconsistent. Many events were plagued by bad surf. Contest organization was rarely better than adequate, and often laughable. The 1972 World Championships distilled all these qualities and added a finishing touch of destructiveness. Organizers canceled the event five weeks before it was scheduled to begin, uncanceled it three weeks later, missed a golden opportunity to hold the competition in perfect surf just up the coast, and brought things to a wheezing finish in two-foot windblown beachbreak slop. On finals day, early arrivals were greeted by the sight of David Nuuhiwa’s favorite board, a wide-backed “fish,” broken in two and hanging from a rope off the Ocean Beach Pier, with “Good Luck Dave” spray-painted across on the bottom. The fish design had originated in San Diego, and the local boys apparently felt that Nuuhiwa hadn’t given them enough credit for his board. The incident had more to do with localism-gone-bad than with the World Championships, but it seemed to underscore the failing health of surf competition in general. Afterward, the Championships were put on hiatus for six years.

  * * *

  The anticompetition crowd had a great hero in Wayne Lynch of Australia—surfing’s original man-child messiah. In 1969, the sixteen-year-old Lynch publicly renounced competition, even though he was regarded as the most advanced performance surfer in the world, able to do things on waves that, as one awed writer put it, “bordered on the fourth dimension.”

  Lynch was a rural-born fisherman’s son, from a state—Victoria—that had never before produced an A-grade surfer. At age eleven, one year after he began riding waves, he entered and won an all-ages competition. At thirteen he won the first of six consecutive Victoria state juniors’ titles; he also won four consecutive national junior division titles. Eventually, he began to voice complaints about competition, and in 1969’s “Gaudy Metal and Ego Trips,” his debut article for Surfer, Lynch wrote that contests were filled with “jealousy and hate” and “clowns surfing for popular opinion.”

  The excitement about Wayne Lynch had nothing to do with his contest record. What mattered were the incredible photos of him that began to trickle out of Australia in mid-1968, followed shortly by his jaw-dropping performance in the Paul Witzig movie Evolution. Lynch rode an oblong 7-foot 1-inch board of his own making—only a year after Nat Young and Bob McTavish had introduced the shortboard—and like George Greenough, he seemed to have dropped out of the sky after a long visit to the future. A grainy black-and-white shot of Lynch at Bells Beach, published in mid-1968, was the photographic mindblower of the year: at the base of a six-foot wave, Lynch had his board jammed over into a bottom turn so extreme that three-quarters of the bottom surface, and the entire fin save an inch at the very tip, was exposed. The move was advanced to the point of being incomprehensible, especially to
the Americans, many of whom still thought hanging ten was the last word in performance surfing. What really made the photo was Lynch himself: poised and controlled, thin adolescent arms casually raised and bracketing his head, right hip jutting out to lead the turn—everything about his body position suggested that this kind of maneuvering wasn’t accidental or experimental, but familiar.

  Evolution confirmed this. Nat Young and hot Aussie newcomer Ted Spencer also had costarring roles, and there was a long highlight sequence from the 1968 World Championships, but from the opening sequence to the end credits, Lynch made the other surfers in the film all but vanish. “It was just imagination,” Lynch later said, when asked what inspired him to ride the way he did. “In 1966, the idea of walking up and hanging ten bored me shitless. So I’d lay in bed at night and dream about carving turns, and 360s, and all this other stuff, then go out the next morning and try it.”

  Like Mickey Dora and Phil Edwards before him, Lynch never quite managed to stay away from competition altogether. He entered the 1970 World Championships (losing early). In 1975 he won the prestigious Surfabout pro event in Sydney. Three years later Lynch had a spectacular runner-up finish in the 1978 Surfabout, but that year was better marked by the release of A Day in the Life of Wayne Lynch, a fifteen-minute documentary that showed him still living a woodsy existence in Victoria, making boards in a tin-roof backyard shed, and surfing the local reefs alone. Afterward, Lynch retired permanently from the contest circuit, but by that time he’d made his peace with surfing competition in general—as the sport itself would soon do. Yet his example reinforced the idea that titles and championships really only decorate, not define, the career of a great surfer.