The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  “GYPSY TOUR” PROS MIKE PURPUS (FRONT) AND IAN CAIRNS.

  California’s surf-boom hangover persisted, in other words. Pro surfing wasn’t yet completely welcome on the West Coast. Florida had an IPS event. New Jersey had an IPS event. But for five straight years, from 1976 to 1980, the world circuit passed by without so much as a glance at California. Surfing in general, meanwhile, still wasn’t of much interest to American culture at large. Sports Illustrated ran a short feature on the birth of the IPS and a cover story on Pipeline. Penthouse ran a long profile on Shaun Tomson. Hawaiian pro Laura Blears did a Playboy pictorial that included a full-page, full-frontal shot of her straddling a bright red Lightning Bolt surfboard. A few more odds and ends aside, that was about it for surfing coverage in nonsurfing publications.

  It was a different story in Australia and South Africa. Sydney’s Coca-Cola/2SM Surfabout contest was featured on nationwide news programs; the Morning-Herald reported on the event with boldface headline grabbers like “Battle of the Boards” and “Superstars Wiped out by Rookies.” The Durban 500 drew huge crowds, and it was front-page news when local boy Shaun Tomson was named South African Sportsman of the Year in 1979 and inducted into the national Sports Hall of Fame.

  LA JOLLA SURFERS ON A 1972 MIDWINTER ROAD TRIP, DURING CALIFORNIA’S “UNDERGROUND” PERIOD.

  Pro tour prize money got better, slowly. IPS winnings weren’t about to put any surfer in the “Jack Nicklaus category,” as world champion Peter Townend blithely predicted. But the bottom line got better each year. In 1976, the prize money total for the year was just over $77,500. By 1979 it was $160,000. The growth in part reflected the increased presence of corporate sponsors, a handful of whom were immediately convinced to take a chance on this “new sport.” It didn’t cost much to get in: primary sponsorship for an IPS event in the 1970s went for about $8,000; auxiliary sponsorships could be had for as little as $500. Coca-Cola was the biggest, most committed IPS corporate sponsor. Smirnoff, Avis, Jose Cuervo, Pan Am, and Rolex also backed the pro tour during its formative years.

  However, most of the prize money still came from the surf industry. Surfwear companies like Hang Ten, Stubbies, and Offshore were the IPS sugar daddies, and the wetsuit manufacturers—Rip Curl, especially—chipped in as well. Lightning Bolt sponsored an event or two in the midseventies, but boardmakers never regained the economic clout they had in the sixties and were now the surf industry’s poor cousins.

  Surf companies also began to award salary contracts to the top pros. At first, there was a complete industry-wide information blackout about the terms being offered. None of the surfers went on record to talk about their deals. One world champion later suggested that it was all kept hush-hush because everybody was getting paid under the table. But that wasn’t quite true, especially the ranking pros. Insecurity helped keep things quiet; a lot of surfers were afraid they were making less than the other pros. Image was also at stake. It was one thing to hoist up a big fat IPS prize-money check—on the beach, at the end of the contest, in front of cheering spectators. This had a jackpot strike-it-rich coolness. Negotiating a monthly retainer with a surf company lawyer in a windowless boardroom somewhere—that made the surfer look like any other second-rate entry-level pro athlete.

  It eventually came out that the top eight or ten first-generation IPS pros had low-five-figure sponsorship contracts. Newly crowned world champion Mark Richards, in 1979, added $15,000 in endorsements to $25,000 in prize money, for a $40,000 year-end total; photos circulated of Richards, in mirrored aviator shades, behind the wheel of his brand-new silver Porsche 911SC. On the other hand, he was still living at home, rent-free, with his parents.

  Meanwhile, Fred Hemmings added an IPS women’s division in 1977, and Hawaiian surfer Margo Oberg, to nobody’s surprise, won the championship. Other world tour changes soon followed. The starting field for each event was determined by the ratings sheet, not backroom-drafted invitee lists. Judging criteria was better defined, and the judges panel at a given contest, instead of being rounded up by the contest organizer, had to be picked from an IPS-approved list. These were all improvements.

  That said, for a decade or so, the world tour was never far removed from another not-ready-for-prime-time moment. There were bounced prize-money checks, and plenty of final heats where the world’s best were sent out to do battle in choppy knee-high surf—although folly could strike even when the checks were good and the surf was perfect. After one of their own was knocked out of the 1981 Pipeline Masters on an interference penalty, a gang of local Hawaiian surfers rushed the officials stand—two judges leapt from the scaffolding and took cover in a nearby beach house—and made it exceedingly clear that it was in the event’s best interest for organizers to reconsider the call. After a brief administrative huddle, the eliminated surfer was given a slot in the finals.

  The IPS development that caught everybody’s attention was unveiled at the 1977 season-opening Stubbies Surf Classic in Queensland, when competition director Peter Drouyn introduced the sport to a bracketed, single-elimination, tennis-style man-on-man format. Overlooking the violence and bad vibes from the previous North Shore season, Drouyn’s idea was to encourage rivalries. In order to put “a bit of bloody flair” into the proceedings, he felt you had to do away with the nearly anonymous scrimmaging of multicompetitor heats and have the pros go head to head.

  Burleigh was picked as the contest venue, and clean four-foot pointbreak tubes greeted the pros on the opening day of the contest. The weather was ideal, the crowds were out in force, and over the next six days the waves ranged from good to perfect. Local boys Michael Peterson and Wayne Bartholomew continued a long-running competition feud in a dazzling half-hour semifinal heat that came down to a back-to-back exchange in the final thirty seconds. Peterson took it by a mere 1.5 points. Shaun Tomson and Mark Richards were up next, and Tomson got the longest tuberide of the event—moments after the horn sounded to end the heat. Richards and Peterson made the finals. Richards had the brightest pro tour future of any surfer present that day, while Peterson was undernourished from heroin addiction, and teetering on the edge of a psychosis that would eventually land him in a mental institution. But Burleigh was Peterson’s home break, and some part of him must have known that this was the last hurrah—it was his final all the way.

  For years, the 1977 Stubbies was the benchmark against which all other pro tour events were measured. The surf was amazing, and the one-on-one battles were epic. Still, Drouyn’s new format had some problems. It doubled the length of the contest, and with just two surfers in the water at any given point (instead of four or six), it meant a lot of downtime between rides. But the Stubbies proved that man-on-man was the way to go, and it soon became the world tour standard. The pros liked having all that room in the water, and fans—just as Drouyn predicted—responded well when each heat could be viewed as a slug-it-out prizefight.

  Japan Catches the Wave

  Japan hosted four out of thirteen IPS tour events in 1979. Pro surfers at first looked at the schedule and wondered if there’d been a misprint. But no, it was true. Four in a row, right in the middle of the season. None of the contests turned out to be particularly interesting—waves for the JSP International Pro at Shonan Beach were so tiny, one surf journalist reported, that competitors had room for “a single turn before fins could be heard scraping the sand.” The events, though, served as a coming-out party of sorts, as Japan revealed itself to the Western surfing world as a distinctive and fairly bizarre surf nation.

  The sport had been growing in Japan since the mid-sixties, when California nisei boardmaker and entrepreneur Tak Kawahara began making regular visits to the east coast of Honshu island, where he spread his Malibu-learned surf gospel and quietly positioned himself as broker and middleman for the Japanese surf boom to follow. Japan’s postwar “economic miracle” was in its peak years, and a small but fully formed surf economy—including domestic surfboard and surfwear manufacturers, brisk import trade, a thrivin
g club scene, and a local competition circuit—materialized in the greater Tokyo area before the sixties were finished.

  JAPANESE SURFERS, NIIJIMA ISLAND, 1978.

  TAKAO KUGA, CHIBA.

  Japan was the most trend-happy country in the world, so perhaps it’s no surprise it went crazy for surfing. More interesting was how the sport was appropriated, immediately, by other trends. The first and best example was the Tokyo Summerland water park, which opened in 1967. The park’s main attraction was the “Surfatorium,” a five-story glass-and-steel dome containing a two-hundred-foot-long pool, with an industrial-grade forced-hydraulic pump system at one end capable of producing twenty highly chlorinated waist-high waves per minute. Each wave sighed to a close upon a plasticized “beach,” opposite an indoor tropical hillside made up of hundreds potted palms. Go-go girls Fruged and Watusied on a nearby stage while a house band played Beach Boys hits. Every hour, hundreds of Summerland park-goers streamed out of the water and for fifteen minutes stood politely by and watched as the pool was turned over to a handful of game but inexperienced local surfers—none of whom had ever ridden a real ocean wave.

  Japan’s surf boom didn’t really explode until the late 1970s, and it seemed to have as much to do with style as surfing. The IPS stars from Australia, Hawaii, and elsewhere were by then all riding brightly colored boards layered with sponsors’ logos—just like most of the items bursting out of the popular department stores in Tokyo’s Ginza district. New Wave attitude came into play as well. Everybody on tour was listening to Blondie, Devo, and the B-52s, and preening along to the music, and this was all very attractive to Japan’s young, free-spending, vogue-sensitive youth.

  Some of the Japanese newcomers were dedicated surfers. They had enough waves—barely. Pacific Ocean typhoons usually track to the east, away from the coast, which means an entire swell event can pass by in just a day or two. Mostly what arrives is smallish local windswell. However, the entire Japanese coast, west side included, is filled with bays, points, headlands and rivermouths, with lots of beaches in-between, and a few times a year, when conditions all line up, the waves change instantly from knee-high gurglers to overhead A-grade bottle-green tubes. Wave consistency here is similar to the American East Coast, but the set-ups are much better. When Japan turns on, it’s as good as Hawaii, as good as Indonesia.

  The vast majority of Japan’s first- and second-generation surfers lived in the greater Tokyo region. Because of this, the sport developed mostly in the feeble and badly polluted sandbar waves of nearby Sagami Bay, and among the slightly better (and cleaner) reefs and beaches of Chiba, a semirural length of coast on the Pacific side of Chiba Prefecture, about forty-five minutes by train southeast of Tokyo. Mobility and patience were the defining traits of the hardcore Japanese surfer. Individuality was not. “The nail that sticks up is hammered down,” the Japanese proverb states, and to a degree not found anywhere else in the world, Japanese surfers dressed, talked, and rode their waves very much alike. But the lineups were filled with talent, and a few stood out internationally during the late 1970s. Two of the best were Norihiko Okano and Hiromisha Soeda, both from the Tokyo area. Okano was a fast, nimble regularfooter who performed well in the 1978 Stubbies event in Australia. Soeda charged the big stuff and was IPS-ranked at number thirty in 1979. He was also his country’s most cosmopolitan surfer, having traveled to Hawaii, Indonesia, California, and Australia.

  But the Japanese pros, in the 1970s and after, made little or no impression outside of their country. Trade, industry, and commerce—this is what Japan soon meant to the surf world at large.

  Japanese surf shops had long been importing boards from America, but demand skyrocketed around the time the IPS was formed. By 1982 individual stores were placing orders for as many as a thousand boards a year. Big-name overseas shapers were in high demand. Rather than import finished boards from people like Dick Brewer, Gerry Lopez, or Endless Summer’s Robert August, the shapers instead arranged to do a work furlough in Japan. For most, it was a lonely, dull, labor-intensive gig. But the terms were impossible to resist: after contracting with a Japanese manufacturer to produce a set number of shaped blanks (anywhere from fifty to two hundred) over a set period of time (usually two to six weeks), the shaper was flown into Tokyo on the company account, housed and fed, given a clean state-of-the-art work station, and paid anywhere from two to four times his usual piecework rate. Everyone came out ahead. The shaper left with a five- or six-digit check. The manufacturer got a big stack of “name” boards without having to pay import prices. The customer had a better, less-expensive range of boards to choose from.

  Wetsuit and neoprene companies meanwhile were big on the export side. The Japanese had a gift for taking a foreign-developed product and making it better and less expensive than the original, and so it was with neoprene rubber. By 1980, the Japanese had come up with a softer, more flexible neoprene, and were shipping it by the thinly sliced ton to leading wetsuit companies in America and Australia. Victory and Hotline, both Tokyo-based manufacturers, were by then exporting wetsuits to California. Neither company was identified as Japanese in their U.S. advertising; American customers had grown to love their durable Sony and Toyota products, but “Made in Japan” still had a cheap-goods rap left over from the fifties and sixties. Victory and Hotline opened an East-to-West channel in finished surf goods, and in years to come, it only expanded.

  At its height, Japan’s mainstream surf retail made all previous efforts—including America’s midsixties surf boom—look penny-ante by comparison. By 1982, Marui, the Japanese version of May Company, had not only turned over much of their sporting goods department to boards, wetsuits, and wave-riding equipment of every description, but it also filled the activewear sections of both the men’s and women’s departments with endless racks of surf company T-shirts, sweatshirts, trunks, walkshorts, and bikinis. Surf products made up $10 million of Marui’s annual sales, and other Japanese department stores weren’t far behind. Marui sponsored its first pro tour contest in 1981, launching the event in typical over-the-top Japanese style, with a uniformed marching band, skyrockets, a field of helium-filled balloons, and a cheerleading squad in matching “Marui Surf Pro” satin jackets. Surfing as yet had no trade associations, and nobody bothered to produce any composite national or international surf industry sales figures. But Surfer ventured a guess in 1983 that the sport was “now a bigger industry in Japan than perhaps anywhere else in the world.”

  * * *

  Surfing magazine hired South African world tour pro Michael Tomson to report on the 1979 IPS contests in Japan. “It’s hard to believe that such enthusiasm for anything could reach these dizzying heights,” he wrote from the bleachers at Tsushido Beach, one of the event sites, looking out at a huge afternoon throng of spectators. Maybe it wasn’t quite the biggest crowd ever gathered for a surfing contest. Then again, no competition was taking place. At 7 A.M., the event had been postponed until the following morning. Yet the beach and surf zone kept filling up. “Stretching down the coast,” Tomson continued, “all you can see are surfers, hundreds and hundreds of surfers, sitting in large clumps. This mystifies me. The surf is flat. Not one foot or one-to-two feet, but dead flat. In fact, from where I’m sitting it looks almost concave .”

  Tomson was the era’s most urbane pro, well-traveled and college educated. But in Japan it was one episode of future shock after the other. He visited surf shops that carried surf-themed cologne, snacks, and stationary. At the bars and discos, he saw huge corner-mounted TV screens jacked into an amazing playback device the Japanese called a VTR, or video tape recorder. For hours at a time, the TVs showed nothing but Tomson and his world-tour cohorts riding the North Shore. Even the unflagging politeness of the Japanese surfers was a bit unsettling. Surfing newcomers in Durban—and in Los Angeles, Honolulu, Sydney, and every other surf-world capital—were ignored or vibed. In Japan, visiting surfers were met with smiles and bows. Not just the pros. Everybody.

  The growth co
ntinued. In 1981, Japanese National Railways began allowing passengers to ride with surfboards, which by some accounts doubled the crowds overnight. Two years later, Fine Magazine for Surfer Girls, a Tokyo-based monthly magazine combining pro surfer interviews and contest coverage with fashion spreads and makeup tips, had a 600,000-strong readership. This wasn’t just the biggest surf-themed publication in the world. It was bigger than all other surf magazines combined.

  Of course, Fine subscribers didn’t wax up and paddle out any more than the readers of magic-girl manga did battle against evil monsters. It was the look—the trend—that counted. Japan’s surf vogue was of a piece with the tens of thousands of landlocked Americans who bought Weber Surf-boards T-shirts in the midsixties, and the squealing roomfuls of Aussie schoolgirls who stomped away their Friday nights to Little Pattie records. But Japanese surf fever hit a new level of consumer extravagance. It also introduced the sport to trend-fusion: by the early 1980s, the coolest bus-riding Tokyo teenagers, outfitted head to toe in the latest surf gear, were hunched over a new handheld electronic game called “Surferboy”—forerunner to Nintendo’s Game Boy.

  Odyssey: Wayne Bartholomew’s Grand Surfing Adventure

  Of the four IPS tour events in Japan in 1979, Mark Richards won the opener, Wayne Bartholomew took the third event, and Shaun Tomson rode to victory in the fourth. No surprises. These were the big stars from Free Ride, which was still playing to full houses in beach towns everywhere. Tomson had won the world title two years earlier, Bartholomew was the defending champion, and Richards was a few months away from winning the first of four world titles. They weren’t the only talented surfers out there, of course. Ian Cairns and Peter Townend, agile Michael Ho of Sunset Beach, Bondi’s lightning-fast teenage phenom Cheyne Horan, bruising power surfer Dane Kealoha, an afro-haired Honolulu regularfooter with the incredible polyrhythmic name of Montgomery “Buttons” Kaluhiokalani—these and a dozen more pros helped reinvent and revitalize the sport during the mid- and late-seventies. But Richards, Bartholomew, and Tomson were the headliners. They defined not just the nascent pro movement but this entire surfing era.