Versions of the twin-fin had knocked around ever since California boardmaker Bob Simmons made a series of what he called “duel-fin” boards in the late forties and early fifties. Geoff McCoy, Richards’ first surfboard sponsor, made hundreds of square-backed twin-fins in Australia during the early seventies, when the design had a short but intense burst of popularity. Richards’ new take, however, was the one that counted. It went into high gear effortlessly, and the speed didn’t seem to burn off during a turn. Because the board was smaller than what everybody else was riding, it had a tighter turning radius; because it was wide and fairly thick, it glided over the flat spots. Richards was ecstatic. Everybody else was dumbstruck. “I remember sweating out adjectives,” journalist and pro surfer Michael Tomson wrote two years later, recalling the first time he’d seen Richards on a twin-fin, “looking for something powerful enough to give life to his surfing performance.” Richards hadn’t yet won a championship, but Tomson already felt confident enough to nominate him as the generation’s key surfer. “In the same way Nat Young steered us through the late ’60s and into the early ’70s, Mark Richards is laying down the lines for ’80s.”
MARK RICHARDS AND TWIN-FIN, 1978.
The twin-fins had serious drawbacks. It couldn’t be elongated into a big-wave board, as Richards found out during the 1978–79 winter season, when he made a few gunned-out twin-fins for the North Shore and they all bombed. (He rightly suspected that the problem had to do with the fins being angled toward the nose. It was the same trouble McTavish had at Sunset Beach with the plastic machine—the board wanted to be in turn mode at all times.) Also, the twin-fin by nature rode “flat” and was difficult to control during any kind of sustained maneuver; Richards was one of a tiny handful of surfers with enough muscle and technique to push a twin-fin through a deep, gouging move. For everybody else, spinouts were common, as were slide-turns, half-turns, and wiggle-turns. Tens of thousands of surfers rushed to buy a new twin-fin, and the vast majority ended up looking less like Mark Richards and more like penguin chicks on a banked ice floe. Eventually, most of the world tour pros converted, but there were single-fin holdouts, including Wayne Bartholomew, Cheyne Horan, Michael Ho, and a powerful Aussie regularfooter named Simon Anderson.
The negatives didn’t seem to affect Richards. Beginning in 1979, having assembled two quivers of boards—twin-fins for smaller waves, single-fins for Hawaii—he was close to unbeatable. That year he won three of the opening four events, calmly let his huge lead vanish by skipping the South African and mainland America contests to stay home and shape a few boards—his way of recharging before the Hawaiian finale—then roared back in the season’s last event, passing three surfers at the wire to take both the contest and his first world championship.
It was a defining moment, not just for Richards and the still-germinal IPS tour, but for surfing as a whole. The new champion was living proof that the sport was a better place than it had been at the beginning of the decade. The mood, once heavy and brooding, had become lighter and brighter. Board design, thanks almost entirely to Richards’ twin-fin, was again in a fine, progressive state of flux. There was less concern about the “right” way to surf. Gerry Lopez could zen out in the tube at Pipeline, while Richards, a few yards down the beach at Off-the-Wall, fulfilled his desire to “rip, tear, and lacerate.” Surfers in general were an overweening and self-absorbed lot, as always. But Richards gave the sport a friendly, affable public face.
Cheyne Horan and Dane Kealoha kept Richards on his toes throughout his championship run. Horan was second to Bartholomew in 1978, then second to Richards in 1979, 1981, and 1982—and they became fairly bitter rivals in the process. Kealoha was runner-up in 1980. Richards graciously retired after winning his fourth title, at age twenty-five, saying, “I have no desire to bust down any more doors,” and that he thought of himself as “an ordinary person who can stand on a surfboard very well.” Returning to his family home in Newcastle, he shaped boards for his father’s surf shop and married his longtime girlfriend.
Three years after retiring, Richards accepted a wildcard entry to the 1985 Billabong Pro, a pro tour event, the better part of which was held in twenty-foot surf at Waimea Bay. He won. The following year, same event, same place, but the surf was nearly thirty-foot—as big as the day he trembled his way into the lineup for the 1974 Smirnoff as a seventeen-year-old rookie. He won again. By that point, Richards didn’t seem to be an ordinary person at all. He’d become a genuine surfing Superman.
Margo Oberg and Women’s Surfing
In March 1981, a sun-weathered twenty-eight-year-old haole-Hawaiian named Margo Oberg made the cover of Surfer . Two months later she became the first woman to get a full-length Surfer profile. The magazine’s editorial staff felt the need to start redressing the sport’s history of sexism, which had only gotten worse over the past decade or so—Surfer, in fact, hadn’t put a woman on the cover since 1964. Oberg was the obvious choice. Not only was she the reigning world champion, she was also hands down the most resilient pro of the era, male or female. She’d outlasted two generations of surfers, wrestled a few demons, and was still on top.
While a freshman at Santa Barbara High School, just a few weeks after her fifteenth birthday, Margo Godfrey (as she was then known) won the 1968 World Surfing Championships in Puerto Rico. Two years later she had a breakdown, in part because she’d put enormous pressure on herself to defend her title in 1970 and come up short. At seventeen she was retired from competition, pencil-thin from a macrobiotic diet and a born-again Christian. In 1972 she married Steve Oberg, CPA-in-training and assistant pastor for the Church of the Living Word, moved to Kauai, and spent three happy years “learning to be a nobody.” In Kauai, she cooked dinner, baked cookies, tended her houseplants, and continued to surf. Kauai was localized to a point where it was off the map as a surfing destination, and Oberg often had the lineup to herself. She rarely ventured off the island. In 1975, some friends talked her into accepting an invitation to a women-only pro contest at Malibu, and she flew to Los Angeles, hit the water, and snapped up the $1,500 first-place check without so much as a glance back at the other competitors.
At age 24, Oberg was already a cool-handed vet. She was expert in any size waves, but four years in Hawaii had also given her a taste for the big stuff. Most other first-generation female pros would, if necessary, grit their teeth and paddle into double-or triple-overhead Sunset Beach, which had become the default competition venue for women’s events in Hawaii. Oberg stalked the big fringing peaks like a predator—a very Christian predator. Riding a huge one at Sunset, Oberg said, was “like bargaining with God. I’ve been on waves that are 30-feet high, and it’s like angels are holding my arms up. It’s a miracle.”
After the Malibu victory, Oberg was back in the game. Contest wins began piling up, and three IPS world tour championships followed, in 1977, 1980, and 1981.
* * *
It’s hard to pinpoint any direct causes for the decline of women’s surfing in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, but Oberg—through no fault of her own—hadn’t really helped the cause as a teenage world champion. Her predecessor, Joyce Hoffman, had not only won two world titles in the midsixties, but was blond, fizzy, photogenic, and attention-loving. She said things like, “Surfing has brought me success, friends, new experiences, and opportunities, and I hope to be able to repay the sport someday for all of this.” As a teen, Oberg was mousy, withdrawn, and a bit . . . off. While surfing, she said in a 1970 interview, “I like to talk to seaweed, and birds, and myself.” After a good day in the waves, she continued, “I’m pumped with the juice of joy and satisfaction . . . and desire to kiss my mother with abundant love.” Then, suddenly, she dropped out of sight. Oberg wasn’t obligated to be a leader or proselytize for new female recruits, but it likely wasn’t coincidental that the number of women surfers tailed off during her first world title reign.
Nevertheless, Oberg was always considered a kind of mascot favorite among Ameri
can surf journalists and filmmakers, and she had a fairly high profile until she left California. Two-time world champion Sharron Weber of Honolulu (no relation to hotdog icon Dewey Weber) wasn’t so lucky. After finishing second to Oberg in the 1968 titles, Weber had back-to-back world championship wins in 1970 and 1972—the world contest at that time was held every other year—and for good measure, she was a five-time Hawaii state champion and the 1969 American champion. In all that time, none of the surf magazines asked her for an interview. None of the filmmakers called her down to the beach for a shoot. Surfer didn’t give her so much as a passing mention in its coverage of the 1972 Championships, then it misspelled her name in the results box at the end of the article.
It was nothing personal against Weber. As the boards got shorter, and the dudes got higher, and the wave-riding got heavier, women surfers were just somehow—forgotten. In all of 1972, Surfing magazine published exactly one shot of a female surfer. Wetsuit manufacturers made suits only for males. Women surfers had two choices of swimwear: the hip-hugging bikini, with its easily displaced top and cheek-exposing bottoms, or the frumpish Jantzen-style one-piece. In the parking lots and lineups, sexism wasn’t much of a reach for the legions of male surfers who, to one degree or another, had already taken up the banner of localism. “When we sit up on the beach it’s cool,” as one young Huntington Beach female surfer put it. “But when we set foot in the water with boards—no more friendship. I’m not stopping surfing for anything, but I sure wish the vibes were better.”
There was no protocol for being a female surfer. The sport liked to think of itself as different, but the roughhousing, the scruffy Levis-and-T-shirt look, the casual public nudity and endless sex banter, the complicated lineup hierarchies based mostly on who could kick whose ass—these were all variants on typical teenage male behavior. It wasn’t impossible for a female surfer to carve out a niche in what was essentially a locker-room environment. Gidget did it. Joyce Hoffman did it. But it was hard, and often solitary, work.
Things improved a little during the midseventies. The Women’s International Surfing Association was founded in 1975 in Southern California—charter members included Jericho Poppler, a sparkly-eyed danseuse who’d studied at the Royal Danish School of ballet, and Hawaii’s Rell Sunn, the most graceful of all first-generation women pros. It was WISA’s first big event at Malibu that drew Margo Oberg out of retirement. “Surfing is truly a liberating sport,” WISA cofounder Mary Setterholm wrote just prior to launching the group. “Waves treat everyone equally.”
Theoretically, yes. But sexism in surfing only grew in the years to come. Who was the highest-profile woman surfer in 1975? It wasn’t Margo Oberg or any of the new WISA stars, but Honolulu semi-pro Laura Blears, who that year did a six-page, nude Playboy pictorial. Despite the fact that there were five professional women’s events in 1976, IPS founders Fred Hemmings and Randy Rarick didn’t bother to create a tour for the women, as they did for the men. The IPS did roll out a nine-event women’s tour in 1977, but it got scraps in terms of media coverage and prize money—the average purse for a men’s pro event that year was just under $8,000; for the women it was $3,000, and by 1980 the entire women’s pro tour had been whittled down to just two contests.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette, a pair of Sydney teenagers, experienced surfing sexism at its outermost limit, and told their story in the 1979 best-seller Puberty Blues—a barely fictionalized young adult novel about two schoolgirls trying to fit in with the “top surfie group” at Cronulla. When the surfers in Puberty Blues aren’t forcing themselves on thirteen-year-olds or waiting their turn in a gangbang, they trot away from the girls they’re “going with” and hit the waves.
Sue and I sat there on the sand. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock . . . warming up the towel, folding his clothes into neat little piles, fetching the banana fritters and chocolate thick-shakes and watching him chuck endless re-entries.
“Didja see me?”
“Yeah. It was great.”
“I got this really good one and I looked up and you weren’t lookin’!”
“I was. I saw you. I did.”
“Where’s the fritters.”
“Here yar.”
Then off they went again . . . and there we sat. Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock.”
The girls finally buy their own board and learn to surf, with predictable results. “Our gang disowned us. The guys walked by on their way to the afternoon swells. Wayne and Danny completely ignored us. We were dropped. Steve Strachan paused. ‘Yew chicks are bent.’ He shook his head. ‘Fuckin bent’.”
* * *
In the late 1970s, any excitement generated by the women’s pro tour focused on the great rivalry that developed between Margo Oberg and Lynn Boyer, a sweet-smiling, wickedly competitive Honolulu teenager. Boyer was the most dynamic female surfer of the age. She rode in a low spring-loaded crouch and did turns like Larry Bertlemann. Oberg had the range and polish and strategic know-how, but she had an upright old-guard stance; in general, she played the percentages. Boyer took more chances, wiped out more often, but was quick, modern, and flashy. She was also image-conscious and presented herself as a lightly sexed-up beachfront ingénue, with her brightly airbrushed surfboards setting off her curly red-blond hair and her own Lynn Boyer “shooting star” logo. Pretty much the entire sport had a crush on her.
MARGO OBERG, SUNSET, 1977.
Twenty-five IPS women’s tour events were held between 1977 and 1981. Oberg and Boyer won twenty of them. For five years, no other female pro surfer was even in the game. Oberg squeaked out the championship in 1977, then Boyer won in 1978, pushing her rival into a second retirement. (“Don’t you love how I lose?” Oberg later said with a grin. “I quit and pout.”) With no challenger, Boyer cruised to a second title in 1979, then got steamrolled by an Oberg comeback, in which the veteran pro won five of the six scheduled events in 1980 and 1981—the most dominant run in women’s pro tour history—on her way to another two championships. Oberg then retired for a third and final time.
LYNN BOYER.
Both surfers kept their distance from the other women pros. Oberg was older and married and deeply involved with the church. Boyer, as Honolulu Star-Bulletin journalist Greg Ambrose later noted, “had a monomaniacal desire to be Number One, [which] left no time for distractions—no friends, no relationships, no dating, no fun.” More to the point, Boyer was also a fledgling alcoholic and a deeply closeted lesbian. At the time, there were no openly gay professional athletes; Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova hadn’t yet come out. Boyer drank and had flings with women, then worried constantly that somebody was going to find out. “You have all these secrets,” she told Ambrose. “You can’t let anyone know how you are because they might get an edge on you.” Years passed before Boyer got sober and came out, and given the sport’s deep homophobia, her decision to remain closeted was understandable. (Asked by a surf magazine in 1988 to name his least-favorite things, a top-ranked Australian pro named Rob Bain added “homosexuals” to a short list that began with “nuclear arms” and “drugs addicts.”)
The only other female IPS pro to get any attention during the Oberg-Boyer years was Jericho Poppler, a dark-haired coquette from Long Beach, California, who was runner-up in the 1979 IPS final standings, cofounder of WISA, and founder of the short-lived Golden Girls promotion troupe—surfing’s answer to Charlie’s Angels. Like Boyer, Poppler was another image-conscious pro: for her 1980 Surfer magazine photo shoot, she chose to recline seductively in a bubble bath holding an open bottle of champagne. Feminism was on Poppler’s agenda, since with WISA she hoped “to organize women’s surfing.” But she wanted to sex it up, too.
The Oberg-Boyer rivalry was good for the pro tour, and everyone got a kick out of Poppler. But there still weren’t very many women inspired enough to pick up a board and hit the surf. By most estimates, females still made up less than 5 percent of the total worldwide surfing population�
��just as it had been in the 1960s. Another fifteen years would pass before that figure began to change.
Chapter 7: The Long and the short of It 1981–1991
RETURN OF THE LONGBOARD SIMON ANDERSON THE THRUSTER BIG WEDNESDAY JEFF SPICOLI SHARKS AND SURFING TOM CARROLL AUSSIE DOMINATION MARK OCCHI LUPO TOM CURREN “STYLE IS EVERYTHING” AL MERRICK THE OP PRO RIOT IN HUNTINGTON SEAN COLLINS WAVE FORECASTING SURFLINE INSIDE-OUT SURF PHOTOGRAPHY AARON CHANG THE VIDEO TAKEOVER TAVARUA WAVES FOR SALE A BILLION-DOLLAR SURF INDUSTRY SURFING AND THE ENVIRNOMENT SURFRIDER FOUNDATION THE RPROS GET POLITICAL BRAZIL EDDIE AIKAU BIG-WAVE REVIVAL KEN BRADSHAW MARK FOO
The Dewey Weber Invitational Longboard Classic, a funky little one-day, no-prize-money “reunion” contest, was held at Manhattan Beach Pier on a warm late spring Saturday in 1981. Dick Dale songs blasted from the PA. Two or three vintage woodies were parked in the lot overlooking the pier. The surf was only waist-high, but David Nuuhiwa, early in the proceedings, caught a fast little left, walked to the nose, hung five, hung ten, and for a moment or two the whole beach time-warped back to 1966. Dozens of boom-era California longboard stars—most of whom had been living in surf-world obscurity since the shortboard revolution—filtered through the lineup over the next few hours. Robert August from The Endless Summer was there. So were Corky Carroll, LJ Richards, Mark Martinson, Dale Dobson, even Dewey Weber himself. Just before the finals, an announcer directed everyone’s attention to the pier, where a “very special guest” was watching—and sure enough, there was burly big-wave legend Greg Noll leaning against the pier railing, raising his hand modestly to acknowledge the cheers and whistles.
The History of Surfing Page 53
