The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Shipley’s promotional masterstroke was to hand out free Bolts to just about every heavy-hitter who flew in for the North Shore winter season, and by the midseventies the company logo was visible on roughly three-quarters of all published surf photos taken in Hawaii. Lopez also made sure that the Bolt surf team included all the best Pipeline riders, including Rory Russell, a party-loving goofyfooter who couldn’t touch Lopez for style but spent just as much time inside the tube.

  For awhile, Lopez and Shipley were more concerned with reputation than sales, and Bolt never sold more than 2,500 boards a year. At their midsixties peak, Hobie and Weber, among others, each moved over twice the units Bolt did annually. Still, no company has ever matched Bolt’s media presence. By 1975, the never-trademarked Bolt logo was being copied so freely that Lopez took out a back-cover Surfer ad to politely ask that people “create their own symbols, and not use ours.” Nobody paid attention.

  “Shipley and I were just dumb surfers,” Lopez once said, and eventually Hang Ten founder Duke Boyd was brought onboard as CEO and primary share-holding partner. Over the next few years, the company transformed itself from a hardcore board manufacturer to the sport’s biggest, most over-reaching multiline corporation. Newly licensed Bolt products included backpacks, wallets, jewelry, towels, sunglasses, and even bodyboards, the company’s surf-world cachet dropping with each item.

  Lopez had no corporate duties with Bolt. His job, more or less, was to the ride inside the tube, get photographed, and show up two or three times a year at tradeshows. His image was the company image. This became steadily more problematic, such as when, in early 1975, Boyd introduced Lightning Bolt Sportswear and had Lopez model a tourist-shop T-shirt featuring the Bolt logo overprinted in huge multicolored block type with “Unsweetened Hawaiian Juice.” It’s not entirely clear how, but none of Bolt’s merchandising embarrassments touched Lopez, who soon cashed out with his reputation intact.

  By the end of the decade, Lopez had reached the end of his unchallenged dominance at Pipeline, and he opened a new chapter—personally, and for the surf world at large—by helping to pioneer the long, jungle-fronted reef tubes of Java. He also tidied up his commercial relationship with the sport. For starters, he got out ahead of the Big Wednesday critics in 1978 by describing his role as “a little silly.” He acknowledged his financial success with Bolt by saying he had “all the material possessions I could possibly use,” then added that all he really needed was a rack of boards, a pair of trunks, some wax, and a car. “The rest of the stuff is incidental.”

  This was Lopez’ great gift to the surf industry: the creation of what amounted to a soul-based mission statement. The circle had to be squared between surfing and commerce, and Lopez was the man—probably the only man—for the job. Guided by his example, all post-Bolt surf industry heavies were unified in their earnest declaration that profits were fine, but surfing always came first. Some believed it more than others. But nobody would ever go on record as saying they were in it for the money.

  GERRY LOPEZ, PIPELINE, 1972.

  Lopez continued to break ground as a surfer in the decades to come. While living in Bend, Oregon, he snow-boarded during winter, made beautiful and expensive custom-order surfboards, raised a family, continued his yoga practice, and occasionally flew to Indonesia for long, tube-filled surfing vacations. Wave quantity was no longer important. “Just a moment here or a moment there,” he said in 2004. “One good drop, a good turn, a tube. Those kinds of things can carry you for a long time—months, even years.”

  Extrapolating a bit, this was perhaps Lopez’ most attractive contribution yet: the idea that an aging surfer could ride ever-fewer waves but have an ever-richer experience, right up until the moment he shuffled off his mortal boardshorts and began soul surfing into the great hereafter.

  Chapter 6: The Fortune Seekers Early 1970s–1980

  SANTOSHA NAUGHTON-PETERSON INDONESIA ULUWATU GRAJAGAN JIM BANKS PROFESSIONAL SURFING FRED HEMMINGS THE PIPELINE MASTERS RANDY RARICK A WORLD PRO TOUR IAN CAIRNS PETER TOWNEND “BUSTIN’ DOWN THE DOOR” THE STUBBIES SURF CLASSIC JAPAN WAYNE BARTHOLOMEW NORTH SHORE VIOLENCE THE NEW SOUTH AFRICANS SHAUN TOMSON TUBERIDING REINVENTED DURBAN JEFFRIES BAY SURFING AND APAR THEID FREE RIDE MARK RICHARDS “SEX AND TUBERIDES” THE 1974 SMIRNOFF PRO-AM BEN AIPA THE TWIN-FIN MARGO OBERG SURFING AND SEXISM LYNN BOYER

  The professional competition circuit and exotic travel—these topics never went out of style among surfers during the 1970s. Eventually, the two would be reconciled, but for most of the decade they seemed to pull the sport in completely different directions. Travel was the great unifier. Every surfer loved dreaming about it, planning it, doing it, and telling the stories afterward. Professional surfing was divisive: you were for it or against it. There was even a geographic difference between the two. Contests kept things focused on the surfing hubs: Sydney, Durban, the North Shore, the Gold Coast, Southern California. Travel, of course, was all about getting as far away from the hubs as possible.

  The tension was, in part, continued fallout from the shortboard revolution. Wave-riders were still trying to calibrate their definition of exactly what it was they were doing out there in the surf; for a decade after the shortboard was introduced, there was nonstop angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate as to whether surfing was a “sport” or an “art.” (“Lifestyle” was a strong contender as well.) Also, there remained among most surfers a powerful tendency to divide everybody else—other surfers included; other surfers especially—into Us or Them categories. Local or nonlocal. Soulful or sell-out. Travel surfer or contest surfer. In the years to come, surfers would be often be described as “tribal” by anyone looking to present them as graced with a kind of special connection to each other and their surroundings. That hasn’t been the case for a long, long time—if ever. At best, for the past sixty or seventy years, the sport has been an uneasy conglomerate of many tribes.

  Professional surfing was, by definition, elitist. It directly affected a microscopically tiny number of wave-riders. But the new seventies-born emphasis on prize money, sponsorship deals, rating points, winners and losers—these things all affected how the sport viewed itself. That’s why the debate was so hot. Travel was surfing at its most democratic. Not everyone had the time, money, or ambition to go island-hopping in the South Pacific or to set up camp on a jungle-lined beach in Java. But it wasn’t hard to bring some version of the travel fantasy to life. Any resolute wave-hunter could load a duffel bag and a few water jugs into a car and spend a semi-feral week or two in a remote corner of Baja, or Western Australia, or the Natal Coast.

  BERNIE BAKER, EL SALVADOR, 1970.

  The Road to Santosha

  Exotic surf travel was a 1960s invention. Up to then, the only full-dress surf excursion was the odd steamer trip across the Pacific to Hawaii. And even that was a voyage to the great known, not the great unknown. In 1963, Australian Peter Troy set out on his first and longest transnational adventure, which he soon after described in a Surfer article entitled “Around the World on a Surfboard.” The 125,000-mile journey was filled with great waves and new friendships, and a few jaunty indiscretions. (In Brazil, Troy was jailed briefly on a gold-smuggling charge; in Monte Carlo he was offered work as a gigolo.) And 1963 was also the year Bruce Brown jetted off to film The Endless Summer. Brown’s movie burned so brightly as the model of first-generation surf travel that other adventures—including a dozen or so well-reported trips that had preceded it—were by and large struck from the record.

  Not until the shortboard revolution, however, did exotic surf become the sport’s holy grail. Part of it was the equipment. A new 7-foot, 10-pound spacestick was so much easier to travel with than a signature model noserider. Mostly, though, it was the tenor of the times. Just about every buzz-phrase of the period—“do your own thing,” “soul surfing,” “back to nature”—was an invitation to pack up and go, to feed your head with new places and experiences, and score some hot, uncrowded waves. Drugs played a part. In the l
ate sixties and throughout the seventies, probably half of the hardcore surf travelers were moonlighting as dope smugglers, or vice-versa. Many of those who weren’t trafficking were at least encouraged by the thought of visiting places where the highs were cheap and often legal.

  After Endless Summer, anyone with a few extra minutes and an atlas figured out that a huge majority of the world’s breaks still waited to be discovered. Surf magazines and movies provided a slow drip of travel exotica: Aussie teenage phenom Wayne Lynch wearing a red fez and djellaba robe, about to score some nice reef waves in Morocco; the Windansea Surf Club in the clear blue waters of Fiji; hot East Coast junior Claude Codgen flying from Miami to Ceylon to Madras and riding a break called Seventh Pagoda.

  One of the best finds—and certainly the most trumpeted, as it showed up in 1974 as both a Surfer cover feature and a full-length movie—was the mysterious “forgotten island of Santosha,” home to what looked like the world’s longest, fastest left-breaking wave. Very mysterious indeed. Santosha was obviously tropical, and at least part Hindu, but it didn’t turn up on any map—because “Santosha” was a made-up name. Deception wasn’t a new thing for surf travelers. Bruce Brown had filmed the dramatic Lawrence-of-Arabia-march-across-the-dunes “discovery” of Cape St. Francis the day after his crew had actually ridden there. But “Santosha” was a more deliberate feint. Rather than a plot device, it conformed to the belief that a surf break discovery should remain both unnamed and unmapped. Getting away from the crowd was the main reason people traveled for waves. Identifying a new break to the surfing public at large—as writers and moviemakers had done automatically until the late sixties—became the grossest possible violation of the surf traveler’s code.

  Of course, to really keep a break under wraps, the images and stories wouldn’t be made public at all, even with the name and location blacked out. But the Santosha producers, and a lot of other camera-carrying surf travelers, were eager to put their good fortune on display. Fifteen years passed before “Santosha” was publicly identified as Mauritius.

  Out There: The Naughton-Peterson Adventures

  Surf travel articles were a mixed bag. The photos were great. The writing was awful. Curious about what it might be like to hang out in Santosha—wherever the hell it was? According to the Surfer piece: “Santosha is a state of mind, a state of being, a forgotten state of happiness and peace . . . [where] the land belonged to all of us [and] there seems to be no measure for time.”

  AFTER ENDLESS SUMMER, ANYONE WITH A FEW EXTRA MINUTES AND AN ATLAS COULD FIGURE OUT THAT A HUGE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD’S BREAKS STILL WAITED TO BE DISCOVERED.

  The travel writing void was suddenly, cheerfully filled by Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson, two unknown teenage surfers from Orange County. On their first trip, in early 1973, they drove south in Peterson’s VW bug for a long, low-budget tour through Central America. A few weeks after arriving, they mailed off a parcel of slides and handwritten notebook pages to Surfer, where it was crafted into a feature article called “Centroamerica.” No breaks were named. No countries were named.

  The end result wasn’t Kerouac. But it was funny and genuine and totally devoid of Santosha-like New Age drivel. Peterson was the lanky blonde kneeboarder and photographer. Naughton was the friendly two-hundred-pound regularfooter with the Burt Reynolds moustache. In six years, they produced another eight surf travel installments, mailed in from Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Good waves came into the picture at fairly regular intervals, but the heart of the Naughton-Peterson experience was found in the cantinas and beachfront tents, around the campfire, in a hammock, and under the hood of yet another broken-down car. They became the patron saints of American surf-adventurers simply by changing the emphasis—by recognizing that there really isn’t that much to say about great waves (the photos pretty much took care of that), while there’s no end of good fun to be had documenting the trials and tribulations of vagabond travel.

  MICKEY DORA, FRANCE, 1970.

  Peterson and Naughton split the writing duties. It was PG-rated fun, with the occasional mention of a “foxy chick” back home, a few mild swear words, lots of drinking and hangovers, and an arrest here and there for things like public urination. They made friends easily with other traveling surfers they met, and both were ready to partake fully in the local culture. They also spent a lot of time camped out alone on remote shores, waiting for waves, in that idly bored condition familiar to hardcore surf travelers of every generation. Midway through 1975’s “Eleven Chapters of an African Surfari,” they pose the question: “What do you do when there isn’t a swell and you’re sitting around trying to avoid the heat?”

  Go for a swim in the 80-degree ocean, which is nice, but when you come out, the sun dries you off so fast you’re caked with salt, and the little village kids all run cause they think you’ve got leprosy. Count your malaria pills, maybe, or read another book. Write letters, sure, and freak a few people out back home by telling them you’ve met the native girl of your dreams and are moving in with her tribe. Read your snake-bite kit instructions again, and go for a walk in the jungle. But you may still get bit by a gabon viper, or spitting cobra, or some other poisonous snake in these parts, and then forget what the instructions said to do. The heat cuts down on a lot of your activities. When you sweat while doing a simple thing like eating, you know it’s hot and there’s little way around it.

  Published a decade or so after The Endless Summer, the Naughton-Peterson articles convey the same mood and message: that surfing is the perfect excuse to get out there and experience the world. The main difference—apart from the fact that Bruce Brown became “the surfing millionaire,” while Naughton and Peterson’s paltry Surfer checks didn’t even cover expenses—was that Endless Summer arrived at a time when California was regarded as the sport’s benevolent leader. When Naughton and Peterson were on the road, California was the serpent in the garden—polluted, crowded, violent, and commercialized—and to some degree they had to drag that unwanted luggage around with them. Parched and grubby while camped on a desert point in Morocco, Naughton and Peterson met a bearded Latin American wave-hunter named Tito Rosemberg. They greeted him by saying, “All right! You’re the first Brazilian surfer we’ve ever met! We’re from California.” Rosemberg answered with a cheerful putdown: “That’s okay, I won’t hold it against you.”

  Rosemberg tossed them a few tangerines, and within the hour had invited them aboard his tricked-out Land Rover for the next leg of their journey. He liked Naughton and Peterson. Everybody liked Naughton and Peterson, and the benefits were greater than they knew. On the way to becoming surf travel folk heroes, Naughton and Peterson pumped a bit of life back into California’s deflated surf-world reputation. Of course, they had to leave America to do so. They also pointed out that it was all the “bad vibes” from “Clockwork Orange County,” their home, that drove them to hit the road in the first place. But they were Californians through and through, spoke in their natural California voices, and even admitted to getting homesick. They were as cheerful and upbeat while covering a women’s pro surfing event at Malibu in the summer of 1975 as they’d been earlier that year doing oyster shooters in El Salvador.

  “We had to laugh,” they wrote at the end of one of their trips, having arrived safely back in Huntington Beach, “because we’d been to so many countries that now even home seemed like a foreign place.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement for California, but the native surfers were smiling again—some were, anyway—and that was an improvement.

  At Play in the Wave Fields of Indonesia

  It was the tone of the Naughton-Peterson adventures that endured. The details of their trips—the single-fin boards, the moustaches, the endless procession of surf-rack-equipped Volkswagens—would all soon be pinned like butterflies in the display case of 1970s surfing. Naughton and Peterson continued to travel in the years to come, but they seemed to accept their assigned place in the cultural timeline. Their first retrospective article, as if on
cue, was published in 1980.

  ULUWATU LINEUP, BALI, MIDSEVENTIES.

  In the midseventies, just as the Naughton-Peterson stories were becoming popular, surfers everywhere were becoming familiar with Uluwatu, a glistening temple-fronted break located on the southwest corner of Bali. Uluwatu was a great find, but it turned out to be just the first link in a 2,500-mile-long chain of discoveries that is still being forged today, almost forty years later. In the end, Indonesia would reveal itself to be the world’s richest wave zone.

  Australian surfers did most of the exploratory work up and down the Indonesian coast. Dempasar, Bali’s capital city, was a relatively easy five-hour flight from Sydney—closer than Hawaii was to California. Bali had been the default starting point for anyone visiting Indonesia since the 1930s, when wealthy Europeans, along with a few Americans—the same linen-wearing society crowd found at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore—began to gather on the hillside artist colony of Ubud to sip tuak, watch the silk-wrapped native dancers, and listen to chiming, trance-inducing gamelan music. There was some interest in the coast, too, and a Los Angeles expat named Robert Koke opened the Kuta Beach Hotel in 1936; Koke soon imported two plank-style boards from Waikiki and encouraged his guests to try “surf shooting” in front of the hotel.