The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  From then on, the surf media devoured Pipeline. Waves here broke close to the beach, the color and lighting were beautiful, and each ride was like a miniature rocket launch, with a better than even chance of blowing up spectacularly. By the mid-1960s, Pipeline was on its way to becoming the sport’s most-watched, most-photographed break. Phil Edwards’ opening day experience had been edited into a perfect little two-minute drama for Surfing Hollow Days. John Peck’s New Year’s Day performance earned him a Surfer gatefold cover. A surf journalist called Butch Van Artsdalen “Mr. Pipeline,” and it stuck. Meanwhile, the Chantays’ 1963 surf instrumental “Pipeline” reached number four on the charts, making the break only slightly less famous than Malibu and Makaha.

  Long before anybody died at Pipeline, surf writers and moviemakers did their best to present it as a killer on the loose. Surf Guide’s first article on the break was called “Rest in Peace at the Pipeline,” and it predicted this little stretch of beach was about to become “a surfer’s graveyard.” Bruce Brown chilled Endless Summer viewers by describing the Pipeline bottom as studded with coral heads that “stick up like big overgrown railroad spikes,” and he showed a clip of Australian surfer Bob Pike, after a bad wipeout, being helped off the beach with a broken collarbone and three broken ribs. In truth, the Pipeline bottom is cracked and fissured but relatively flat and coral-free, but the legend stuck. Waimea Bay heavy Peter Cole said he wouldn’t ride Pipeline because of the “coral pinnacles that could actually sever my head from my body.”

  Joaquin Miro Quesada of Peru slammed onto the reef in 1967, broke his neck, and died a few hours later. It was the first Pipeline fatality. Thereafter, about every three years or so, Pipeline would claim another surfer. Lesser injuries were common: cuts and abrasions, plus the occasional broken bone, dislocation, or concussion. Most of the time, though, surfers who took horrific wipeouts at Pipeline came up without a scratch.

  But the risk was always there, and Pipeline had people psyched-out like no other surf spot in the world. The break defeated newcomers by the dozen. Some sat on the beach, unable to screw up the courage to paddle into the lineup. Others made it into the channel, stared into the pinwheeling tubes, and were frozen in place. Most first-timers who took a real hit left the water immediately, trembling and relieved, never to try again.

  Each year a few stuck it out, however, for reasons that were embedded in that clip of Phil Edwards getting shot like a cannonball from his first big Pipeline wave. Time got it wrong. Tuberiding wasn’t like smoking hashish. There was nothing opiate-like about it. Pipeline was the biggest, fastest rush in surfing—it was like hitting a crack pipe. Surfers who got a taste for it couldn’t get enough.

  “A Giant Green Cathedral, and I am There!”

  Longboarding was ridiculous in big, hollow surf. Butch Van Artsdalen rode Pipeline the way you’d imagine Buddy Rich would play drums with a sawed-off pair of two-by-fours. It could be done, but it wasn’t pretty.

  The shortboard changed that. Tuberiding—like noseriding a few years earlier—became the “sport within the sport,” while Pipeline went from being a “Roman gladiator pit” (as Bruce Brown put it) to something closer to the Holy See. If riding inside the tube would always remain difficult, starting in the late 1960s a high-intermediate surfer could expect to make the occasional visit, while advanced riders worked out the first arcs and lines in what would eventually become a whole applied geometry of tuberiding.

  The Hawaiians were on point, right from the start. Bob McTavish’s “plastic machine,” with its broad, clunky, spin-prone rear end, was never going to cut it at Pipeline. A narrow tail, lower overall volume, increased rocker, reduced weight—all were features required of a good tuberiding board, and Hawaii’s Dick Brewer used them in combination better than anybody. He also helped develop the “tucked-under” edge: an egg-shaped rail whose lower quarter was cut off by the bottom surface. It didn’t look like much, but the tucked-under edge was the era’s key design advance, after the plastic machine itself, as it greatly improved both traction and handling.

  The first great shortboard tuberider was a tightly-wound twenty-one-year-old haole Hawaiian named Jock Sutherland. He’d placed second to Nat Young in the 1966 World Championships, won the 1967 Duke event, and then crossed over to the new equipment without missing a beat. Sutherland had a certain old-fashioned quality, even in the late 1960s: he was well-groomed, with side-parted hair cut above his ears and collar, never sided with the anticompetition movement, and was polite to the squares. He’d been a great admirer of Butch Van Artsdalen, and his favorite Pipeline board, like Van Artsdalen’s, was bright red.

  Everything else about Sutherland was new and of the moment. He out-drugged just about everybody, for starters. Friends called him “Spaceman.” LSD was his drug of choice, but as Sutherland put it, he’d smoke or swallow “pretty much anything I could get my hands on.” Even while high, he continued to win surf contests. He used big words and spoke in a tortured syntax that came off as both ironic and nonsensical. By riding a slightly bigger board, he told an interviewer, a surfer gained “elongation from section to section,” and could then “realize the distributive dexterities that are necessary to be truly efficient and ethereally exciting.” Nobody had any idea what he was saying, but they loved him anyway: Surfer readers voted Sutherland the most popular man in the sport for 1969.

  JOCK SUTHERLAND, 1969.

  In the water, there were times when Sutherland seemed to lose all impulse control. He was the first person to ride left at Waimea Bay, a right-breaking wave, and he once tried a small-wave fin-drift move on a triple-overhead mauler at Sunset Beach. (At Waimea he edged out just in time; at Sunset he got destroyed.) But Sutherland was first and foremost a control surfer. He rode using a wide, stable, almost rigid stance. Experimental moments aside, he drew his lines with great precision. Sutherland’s ultimate accomplishment as a tuberider, in fact, was to figure out how to control a part of the ride that had always been rushed and chaotic.

  Much of what he did was to make a few simple but important changes in body position. He widened his stance to a point where he didn’t have to shuffle forward after dropping down the face and bottom-turning—he could do everything from the same place on the board. While in the tube, he bent at the knees instead of the waist, lowered his butt, and shifted his torso forward. Addressing the biggest mistake made by longboard-era tuberiders, Sutherland kept his head up and his gaze leveled down his front arm, which extended out toward the exit like a gun sight. To come out of a tube, he reasoned, you needed to see where you were going.

  More important than any of this, however, was the way he set it all up beforehand. When a hollow section forms ahead of the surfer, the tuberide depends on a pretty simple high-speed approach and entry. But often the tube shapes up right at the takeoff, and the game at that point is to keep your speed in check, fix an angled mid-face line of attack while still in neutral, wait for the curl to pitch overhead, then hit the gas and race for the opening. Longboarders had used a similar kind of stall-and-trim move for smaller waves. Sutherland did it in bigger surf, to different ends, and by different means. He’d stroke into an overhead ready-to-tube wave at Pipeline, jump into his spread-out crouch, anchor his back arm into the wave face while dropping, then pivot slowly around to the left, motionless, like a weather vane in a light breeze. Everything up to this point was slow and deliberate, with almost no motion on Sutherland’s part. It was like a marksman taking aim. Blink and he was gone. Blink again and he was shooting out in a fine mist of tube spray, in the exact same crouch, twenty yards down the beach.

  TALES FROM THE TUBE, A 1971 SURFER COMIC BOOK INSERT.

  From the late 1960s into the 1970s, tuberiding generated a cult-like fascination among surfers. Surf journalists, interviewing the day’s top riders, approached the subject broadly (“What feeling do you get while riding in the tube?”) and specifically (“Do you spend most of your time in the tube watching the fringe of the wave?). Reader-submitted tub
e poetry arrived at surf magazines by the truckload: “And soon the wave began to curl/and I, so snug inside/Began to crouch, as child might crouch/in birth through womb-like glide.” Rick Griffin not only made tuberiding a featured part of his Surfer cartoons, the tube itself occasionally took on sentient, speaking form. Griffin also put together a twenty-four-page comic book called Tales from the Tube, with strips from Zap Comix regulars S. Clay Wilson and R. Crumb. Then there was George Greenough’s 1970 film The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun, which gave the public its first inside-out look at the tube—the viewing experience, for surfers, was as astonishing and exotic as Neil Armstrong’s recent moon walk.

  Greenough—the straw-haired autodidact kneeboarder from Santa Barbara whose radical midsixties turns and cutbacks had inspired the shortboard revolution—was also an enthusiastic filmmaker. He had enough family money to keep him on the beach, with cameras and a bottomless supply of 16mm film stock, throughout 1968 and 1969. Innermost Limits was his first and only full-length movie. Mostly, it was a stripped-down, by-the-book effort, but tacked on at the end was a ten-minute sequence titled “The Coming of the Dawn”—Greenough’s moon launch. To shoot from inside the tube, he built a nylon harness with a metal arm that positioned the camera just above shoulder level. The prototype, including harness, camera, and housing, weighed thirty pounds, but most of the “Dawn” shots were taken with a twenty-three-pound beta version. Because the subject matter was so close, Greenough used a 3.5mm fisheye lens. To better savor each moment of tube time, he filmed in super slow-motion. A toggle switch on the housing was used to start and stop the camera, and because it often wasn’t possible to stop shooting when a ride came to an unexpected end, Greenough was the first person to capture the wipeout from underwater—which, oddly, was a weirder, more vertiginous experience from a theater seat than in real life.

  The sequence just prior to “Coming of the Dawn” shows Greenough’s friends picking magic mushrooms in a field, and “Dawn” itself, not surprisingly, gets off to a trippy start: in monochromatic predawn darkness, Greenough has the camera aimed backward, to capture the wake of his board as it spins off into the vortex. Then the sun comes up, and the color fills in, and to the ecstatic pleasure of surf moviegoers everywhere, Greenough at last turns his camera around for the first POV shot. It was cinematic group hypnosis. Every unblinking eye in the theater was glued to the see-through curl on the top half of the screen as it stood to vertical, wavered, and at last began to sheet by overhead. The passing bubbles and droplets, all the light-refracted shimmer, every velvety ripple on the water surface—it was all there to be savored, at one-hundred frames per second.

  Writing for Surfer magazine two years earlier, Bob McTavish went a bit over the top as he recalled a Honolua Bay tuberide. “Thrrrust! Move it out! Up. Under. Curl. Coming over! Right over! Inside! A GIANT GREEN CATHEDRAL, AND I AM THERE!” After “Coming of the Dawn,” McTavish’s uncontrolled excitement made a lot more sense—even if you saw the film without a buzz on. It wasn’t just surfers. Art-rockers Pink Floyd projected Greenough’s inside-out clips onto a giant circular screen during concerts. “Echoes,” Greenough’s next film project, was the final segment of 1973’s Crystal Voyager—the only surf film to show at the Cannes Film Festival. Overwhelmed by the “Echoes” footage, a Melbourne film critic compared Greenough’s work to that of Shelley, Keats, and Rimbaud, and described the view from inside the tube as nothing less than the “crystal battlements wherein the Daemon of the Earth entrusted his temple.”

  It didn’t seem possible, but McTavish’s “GIANT GREEN CATHEDRAL” exclamation was beginning to sound restrained.

  Gerry Lopez: Solid Gold Soul

  Larry Bertlemann got the kids excited, and North Shore heavies like Barry Kanaiaupuni and Jeff Hakman inspired awe across the spectrum of wave-riders. But there was still a tiny sliver of daylight at the top of the Hawaiian pantheon, and there, slender as Gandhi, was Gerry Lopez—the coolest surfer alive; the Pipeline firewalker; the man who single-handedly raised the tuberide from a mere surfing maneuver to an advanced Zen practice.

  The Lopez-Pipeline union in the 1970s was another one of the sport’s perfect matches, like Mickey Dora at Malibu, and Greg Noll at Waimea Bay. But Lopez added a twist. Where everybody else used the wave as a platform upon which to perform, his idea was to literally disappear into the wave. In his best moments he didn’t seem to be performing at all—or at least not in the way Dora, Noll, and the rest performed. Lopez stood quietly, hands and arms relaxed at his sides, knees slightly bent, face calm. He wasn’t the first less-is-more surfer. But he did it in the ionized center of Pipeline tubes that exploded around him like cannon fire—he made the most difficult thing in the sport appear not just easy but meditative.

  Nobody had better timing than Gerry Lopez. He was a gifted surfer who would have left a mark no matter when he came on the scene. Yet every surf-world event, trend, and development seemed to go Lopez’s way, beginning with Jock Sutherland’s bewildering announcement in December 1969 that he’d voluntarily joined the U.S. Army and was shipping out forthwith, leaving the position for top Pipeline surfer wide open. Anticontest sentiment was peaking, too, which created a need for a new kind of surf hero. Lopez filled both roles, immediately and effortlessly. For six years, he was surfing’s preeminent figure.

  GERRY LOPEZ

  By shrewdly managing his image, Lopez was able to be different things to different people. He was never really an anticontest surfer, for example. He traveled to California, Peru, and Australia to compete, and entered just about every pro event on the North Shore during the early and midseventies. Being involved didn’t mean he was consumed, however. He took contests on his own terms—a trait first demonstrated in 1969, when Lopez, then twenty years old, showed up at Huntington Pier for the U.S. Championships. He was small and slender (five foot eight, 140 pounds), quiet and watchful, unknown outside of Hawaii, and he wowed the Huntington judges with his patented fin-drift maneuver. He surfed through the prelims, into the finals, and took fifth. He made an equally strong impression on the beach, sitting next to the pilings just before the last heat of the contest, eyes closed, in perfect full lotus position. It looked as if he’d completely tuned out the entire whirligig beach scene—twenty thousand spectators, the PA announcer, the damp lime-green nylon competition vest he was wearing. Lopez was in his own world. By such means, he was able to surf in all the contests he wanted, yet also remain the epitome of the soul surfer.

  “EATING IT AT PIPELINE IS NO PICNIC. ALL I’VE REALLY BEEN DOING ALL THESE YEARS IS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW NOT TO EAT IT. THE REST—IT’S JUST TRYING TO CATCH THE WAVE, GET TO THE END, AND MAKE A GRACEFUL EXIT.”

  —Gerry Lopez

  Modesty was part of Lopez’ charm. All he ever really hoped to do at Pipeline, he once said, was “figure out how not to eat it.” But he wasn’t above the occasional quiet display of confidence. During a filmed interview in 1974, at the end of a detailed address on the mechanics of tuberiding at Pipeline, Lopez paused, gave a little shrug, and said, “It’s a cakewalk.” He knew better. A brief clip in Pacific Vibrations showed him catching an edge halfway down a smooth twelve-footer at Pipeline and getting horribly pitched into the maw. In 1972, while surfing an oversized afternoon at Pipeline that the magazines would immortalize as Huge Monday, Lopez went head-first into the bottom and walked off the beach with loose teeth and blood running down one side of his face.

  The failures just underscored Lopez’ mastery. He walked an impossibly fine line at Pipeline. The fact that he had scars on his back, shoulders, and head from bouncing off the reef made it that much more incredible that he could ride with such poise. Everybody else grimaced or frowned as they came off the bottom and set a course through the tube section. Lopez usually rode with an expressionless tai chi gaze—except when he broke out in a little smile, at which point it really did look like a cakewalk.

  Lopez defied expectations throughout his career, in ways both large and small. While fortify
ing himself on the path to enlightenment with a twice-daily yoga practice and endless servings of brown rice and steamed veggies, he also turned up in an ad wearing a hunter’s vest, holding a shotgun. For a surf magazine portrait, he arranged to stand dutifully behind his mother—a small, fine-boned Japanese okaasan in a white ankle-length silk dress. He built a three-story dream house directly in front of Pipeline, then rented it and moved to a twenty-acre ranch on the foothills of Maui’s Haleakala crater, then left Hawaii altogether for the Pacific Northwest. Finally, Lopez had a towering surf-world commercial presence, which seemed to have no effect whatsoever on his reputation as “The Last Soul Surfer”—as Surfer magazine titled its longest and best Lopez profile. He attached his name to a failed surfwear company called “Pipeline,” played Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in the iron-and-blood fantasy movie Conan the Barbarian, and played himself in Warner Brothers’ overwrought surf drama Big Wednesday. These were the kind of career moves that typically got a surfer branded a sellout. Lopez walked away clean every time.

  * * *

  Lopez’ major commercial venture was Lightning Bolt Surfboards, a business he cofounded in 1970 with a Honolulu surf contest judge named Jack Shipley. Bolt was a hit from the day it launched. In the early years Bolt was essentially a boardmaking collective, with Hawaii’s top shapers, often working from garages or backyard sheds, delivering their boards to Bolt to be sold on consignment in a showroom in Honolulu. Hot Bolt shapers included Tom Parrish, Tom Eberly, Barry Kanaiaupuni, Reno Abellira, Tom Nellis, Bill Barnfield, and Lopez himself. Each board featured the jagged Lightning Bolt logo—about two feet long and placed on the stringer near the board’s nose—which by 1975 had become to surfers what the Louis Vuitton pattern was to socialites. Professionalism was coming into the sport, but the equipment wasn’t yet cluttered with sponsor stickers. Bolt, with its distinguishing letter-free logo, was the best-looking line of boards to ever come down the pike.