The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  He blew the Stubbies Pro. But two weeks later, in the preliminary rounds at Bells, he found his stride. And two days after that, on the second-to-last day of the event, with smooth eighteen-footers blowing in from the Southern Ocean—the biggest waves ever seen for a contest outside of the North Shore—Anderson simply left the rest of the field behind. The twin-fin riders on their jittery little boards looked as if they’d been pushed down a steep driveway in shopping carts. The best of the single-finners drew the kind of long, elegant lines that would have been new and exciting in 1971. On his airbrushed-blue 6-foot 6-inch Thruster, Anderson accelerated and cornered like a Formula One racer, from trough to crest and back again, all speed, power, and control, with his board stuck to the huge faces as if it were magnetized. Anderson’s equipment, clearly, made the difference. “Bells was the real test,” Anderson said later. “We hadn’t really evolved yet to a place where you could start a bottom turn, aim up, and actually increase speed through your turn off the top. At Bells, all of a sudden, there it was.”

  For those scant few onlookers not yet convinced that Anderson had just reordered surfboard design, on the last day at Bells, paired against small-wave master Cheyne Horan, Anderson took the final—in waist-high waves.

  The rest of the year was pretty much a Thruster coronation. Anderson returned to Narrabeen and the following month won the Coke contest. In December, he took out the Pipeline Masters. Surfing magazine named Anderson 1981’s Surfer of the Year. Reigning world champion Mark Richards, in a rare moment of pettiness, described the tri-fin as good “for surfers who can’t ride twin-fins properly,” but nobody else saw it that way. By the summer of 1982, the Thruster was being copied by every forward-thinking boardmaker in the sport (“tri-fin” was the generic term for the design), and by 1983 it was being used almost universally on shortboards and was popular as well among longboarders. There was plenty of fine-tuning to come, but as of 2010 the tri-fin remains the standard board design.

  Anderson probably should have stayed focused on the pro tour in 1981. Instead he skipped three of the eleven contests, mostly so he could stay home and make boards. As in 1980, he finished the year ranked number six. Anderson’s attitude was that if a world championship fell into his lap, great, but he wasn’t going to drop everything to chase it. He liked making boards, and was hugely gratified when his design caught on. In the middle of the 1981 season, Shaun Tomson inquired tentatively about getting a Thruster. Tomson expected a polite refusal; he and Anderson had just gone head-to-head in the Coke finals, and they would no doubt be meeting again in competition that year. Anderson not only rushed out a pair of boards for Tomson, he handed them over at no charge.

  Because he didn’t patent the tri-fin design, Anderson lost out on millions of dollars—probably tens of millions. This decision also meant that Anderson was still doing production shaping, out of financial necessity, in his fifties.

  Then again, no major surfboard breakthrough has ever been patented. Instead, board design has always provided a small but welcome patch of common ground in the sport. The stony indifference between surfers who don’t know each other can usually be broken with a little back-and-forth shop talk about surfboards, and boardmakers as a rule view their work as being part of a constant open-source project. “I sure wouldn’t mind five fuckin’ cents for every Thruster that’s been made,” Anderson once said in a kind of resigned growl. Of course, he created the Thruster using Geoff McCoy’s needle-nose design, after having looked over Frank Williams’ three-fin board at Narrabeen. After making his nickel-a-board royalty wish, Anderson smiled, shrugged, and added, “It’s always been a very sharing industry.”

  Surf and Destroy

  Surfing was again on the upswing, so Hollywood and the American mainstream press returned their attention to the sport. Between them, journalists and filmmakers in the late seventies and throughout the eighties couldn’t seem to decide whether surfers were crazy and violent or crazy and stupid, but either way the unhinged people they described had little to do with actual wave-riders, and much more to do, perhaps, with the state of American pop culture.

  A 1981 Newsweek article described “surf gangs” who faced off against nonlocals with “rocks, sticks, knives . . . chains and even guns.” The magazine’s leading piece of evidence was the rise of the Surf Punks, a Los Angeles rock-satire act whose debut album My Beach had just sold a hundred thousand copies, with songs like “Punchout at Malibu” and “Somebody Ripped My Stick.” Newsweek provided no actual statistics on surf-related violence, and localism-inspired aggression had peaked at least five years earlier, but the magazine wouldn’t be deterred. The crowd at Huntington was a “snarling, sideswiping throng”; in Redondo there were “rival gangs” who had “split the beach down the middle by painting a line across the boardwalk”; and at other breaks there were troubles between “edgy short-haired punks and their laid-back, long-haired elders.” Those brave enough to keep reading to the final paragraph would likely not have been reassured by surf journalist Jim Kempton’s reasonable and realistic assessment that “there’s less violence in surfing in one year than in any one high-school football practice.”

  Simple surf-related mayhem wasn’t enough for Esquire, which added a religious twist in “Walking on Water,” a long 1982 feature portraying “a new order of surfer, one who rides with Jesus and waits for Armageddon.” After briefly reviewing the sixties surf boom—now described without fail as the sport’s “golden years”; never mind how strange and disturbing wave-riding had in fact appeared to most journalists at the time—writer Frank Rose grimly switches to present tense to describe a Southern California cultural landscape filled with parking lot brawls, drive-by shootings, and freeway torture-murders; a place where “madness has been reasserting itself as the number-one mode of expression.” Surfers were deep in the mix, Rose said, and many had responded with a kind of end-times religious hysteria. “If your member causes you to sin, cut it off!” one Jesus-loving surfer reportedly shouts while running down the beach at a surf contest.

  There were elements of truth to the Esquire and Newsweek articles, and to every other mainstream hit piece written about surfing during the 1980s. Punchouts at Huntington Pier weren’t unheard of. Palos Verdes locals really did throw rocks from the top of the cliff at nonlocals. But there was also a lot of lazy, myopic, predetermined reporting. Frank Rose didn’t care that there were miles of beaches on either side of Huntington Pier where tens of thousands of surfers got their two or three hours of wave-riding in and drove home happy. Or that there were hundreds of California breaks north of Santa Barbara where the crowds were small or nonexistent. The Orange County religious wacko yelling at surfers to cut their dicks off—that was the story Esquire went with. Southern California’s ongoing ridiculousness—that was the message. Writers had been mining the same journalistic vein for decades. The sport deserved better.

  * * *

  Hollywood’s return to surfing began with 1978’s Big Wednesday. It cost $11 million—five times more than any other Hollywood-made surf movie—and was directed by John Milius, a burly USC film school graduate who’d recently hit it big as the guns-and-blood director of Dillinger and The Wind and the Lion.

  Milius had the right background. Fifteen years earlier he’d been a teenaged Malibu regular, and for Big Wednesday’s first act he attempted to re-create his surfing youth, just as friend and fellow USC film school classmate George Lucas re-created Friday night cruising in American Graffiti. But where Graffiti took place over the course of a single night and ended on a quiet note, Milius tracked three surf-buddies for ten years and brought it home with a bombastic surf event—the “big Wednesday” of the title.

  To give his film a full dose of high-action verisimilitude, Milius put together an all-star second unit of surfing cameramen, including Bud Browne and George Greenough. He also hired Peter Townend, Ian Cairns, and Bill Hamilton to stunt-double for the leads and brought in Gerry Lopez for a cameo. The effort paid off. Big Wednesday’s
action sequences were better than anything yet seen on the big screen, including Endless Summer. Furthermore, there were moments of rude good humor in the early going, and Hollywood newcomer Gary Busey sunk his oversize teeth into a costarring role as the friendly but slightly unhinged Leroy the Masochist.

  It wasn’t enough. Big Wednesday’s plot was paint-by-numbers, its characters were thinner than fiberglass, and the grand finale—the “day like no other”—was long, clumsy, and false. The New York Times called the movie “resoundingly awful,” and a Los Angeles Times review said Milius had “aimed for the lowest, most mindless common denominator.” Big Wednesday bombed at the box office. It came back to life as a minor cult favorite, but twenty years passed before Hollywood again took a chance on a surfing-focused production.

  Right after Big Wednesday, in what almost seemed to be an act of creative absolution, Milius proved himself more than capable of producing a memorable big-screen surf character. As screenwriter for 1979’s Apocalypse Now, Milius invented the brilliant but crazy William Kilgore, goofyfooter and U.S. Army Air Cavalry Colonel, played to Academy Award–winning perfection by Robert Duvall. Kilgore’s order to firebomb a North Vietnamese village “into the Stone Age” so that he and a few of his troops can ride a nearby pointbreak is insane, but surfers understood the impulse. Napalm was extreme, sure—but wave-lust will be satisfied. Similarly, when Kilgore famously barks out the exclamation, “Charlie don’t surf!” it was understood not just as a line of demarcation between surfers and the Viet Cong—“Charlie”—but between surfers and the world in general.

  Despite all the encouragement to view surfers as dangerous, the public came to see them mostly as harmless, drug-addled, clueless slackers—thanks largely to Sean Penn’s turn as surfer-dude extraordinaire Jeff Spicoli in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Like Colonel Kilgore, Spicoli is a surfer-rebel to the hilt—eating bare-chested in the school cafeteria, having pizza delivered to his U.S. History class, and declaring with total confidence that the only two things required in life were “some tasty waves [and] a cool buzz.” Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe introduced Spicoli in the 1981 book version of Fast Times, a semi-autobiographical account of his year spent undercover as a student at Clairemont High in San Diego. In the film, Sean Penn turned the character into a comedy masterpiece by simply imitating the permastoned friends from his teen years surfing in Malibu.

  SEAN PENN IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH.

  ROBERT DUVALL IN APOCALYPSE NOW.

  LEW BOREN’S SHARK-BITTEN KNEEBOARD, MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, 1981.

  Surfers weren’t quite sure what to make of Spicoli and Fast Times. Clearly, they were being laughed at, which often provoked a defensive response—Surfing magazine called Fast Times a “stupid teen flick.” But from there it got a little complicated. Anyone looking to make the point that surfing was still being bum-rapped by outsiders held Spicoli up as a grossly unfair stereotype. Anyone trying to make the opposite point—that the sport needed to clean up its act—held Spicoli up as an all-too-familiar archetype. Years passed before surfers warmed to Spicoli. Surf journalist Ben Marcus eventually completed the transformation by ranking Penn’s performance “up there with the likes of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and John Belushi.”

  Twenty-five years after Gidget, Hollywood still had yet to produce anything resembling a good surf movie. But with Jeff Spicoli and Colonel Kilgore, it had at least come up with two first-rate surfing characters.

  Sharks: Terror From Below

  On Christmas Eve 1981, a twenty-five-year-old wetsuit-clad Monterey County kneeboarder named Lew Boren was pulled from the shallows of Pacific Grove. His body was bloodless, with a perfectly symmetrical armpit-to-hip bite taken out of his torso—the work of a twenty-foot-long, four-thousand-pound white shark. This time around, the media attention didn’t seem particularly sensationalized. Most surfers understood that the odds of getting hit by a shark were statistically null, even in high-risk zones, which included Northern California’s Monterey-to-Sonoma “Red Triangle,” the entire coast of South Australia, Byron Bay in New South Wales, Queensland’s Stradbroke Island, parts of Hawaii, both sides of Florida, and any non-netted beach in South Africa. In fact, just a few months before Boren’s death, Surfing magazine had reported that sharks accounted for no more than five hundred known deaths in all of human history.

  Boren, however, was California’s first surfer shark fatality, and that was news. Truly scary news. For a month or so after his death, West Coast surfers—even those living hundreds of miles from the attack site—paddled into the lineup like jittery late-night New Yorkers walking home while Son of Sam was still at large.

  How to deal with the thought of being ripped open and devoured by an apex predator with killing skills honed over the course of 400 million years? Ancient Hawaiians made fervent prayers to their shark god. The Aussies simply tried to out-brute the animal—in a lurid sequence from Hot Generation, Paul Witzig’s 1968 surf movie, a nonaggressive nurse shark laying on a dock is wrenched, gaffed, and stun-gunned to death with help from Queensland state surfing champion Russell Hughes. After the movie Jaws came out, lots of American surfers offered a homage of sorts, by riding boards with an attacking great white airbrushed onto their boards. (There was also a bit of red, white, and blue bluster: asked by a California surf magazine how long it would take before they’d paddle out at a break where a fatal attack had taken place, 62 percent of respondents said “the same day” or “one day after.”)

  The number of surfer-related shark attacks went up during the first years of the twenty-first century, more or less in proportion to the rise in the number of surfers. Even so, the odds of being hit or killed by a shark remained conspicuously tiny. For example, there were just thirty confirmed attacks on West Coast surfers between 2000 and 2007, none fatal. Marine biologists have theorized that all attacks on humans are essentially a case of mistaken identify—after making a “test-bite” and discovering the target isn’t a well-fatted piece of marine life, the shark usually swims away. Meanwhile, conservationists have pointed out that the fishing industry kills tens of millions of sharks annually, and that many species (great white included) are in danger of extinction. Man is the real predator here, not sharks.

  That kind of analytic reasoning only goes so far when it’s you floating out there at dusk (the shark’s most active feeding period), during a lull, at a surf break teeming with marine life, while your buddies are already up on the beach toweling off. San Francisco writer and surfer Dan Duane—whose own fear of sharks began after a high school friend described in graphic detail a photograph he’d seen of Lew Boren on the coroner’s slab—recalled such a moment in his 1996 memoir Caught Inside. During a late afternoon session at a reef break just north of Santa Cruz, Duane watched as a seal emerged two or three feet behind an easygoing local surfer named Willie. Everything was calm and quiet; no approaching waves, a slate-gray sky, just a breath of wind. The seal, Duane wrote, “watched Willie’s back for a minute, then leapt out of the water and came down with a terrific slap: thrashing and kicking, Willie spun around on his board, utterly hysterical, face white, screaming, ‘What was that!? What the hell was that!?’”

  The phantom menace taking another noisy bite, that’s all.

  Power Surge: Tom Carroll and the New Aussie Pros

  Held in Japan, the Marui Pro contest was, along with Brazil’s Waimea 5000, the least-popular world-tour event among IPS pros. Top complaints included the long flight, bad surf, weird food, and a hard language. It was also the worst-covered event by the English-speaking surf publications (same reasons, plus lack of reader interest).

  “THE DISCIPLINE WAS INCREDIBLE. HE TRAINED. HE SURFED EVERY DAY AT DAWN. GIRLS THREW THEMSELEVS AT TOM, AND HE’D GO HOME TO BED AT NINE O’CLOCK. HE ACTUALLY DENIED HIMSELF A HELL OF A LOT.”

  —Mike Newling, on Tom Carroll

  Yet the 1982 Marui Pro proved to be one of the more interesting contests of the year. For starters, the surf, for once, wa
s good—overhead and offshore. Then, Mark Richards lost early, hobbled by his chronically sore lower back. Richards would win his fourth and final world title in 1982, but he would cite his back as one of the reasons for his pro tour retirement, three months later.

  The top story at the 1982 Marui contest, though, was the man-on-man finals pairing—the first exchange between twenty-one-year-old Australian Tom Carroll and Tom Curren, an eighteen-year-old from Santa Barbara. The two surfers were easy to tell apart. Carroll, the goofyfooter, was short and freckled, with speed-skater thighs, a barking voice, and a brightly-airbrushed board. Curren was the slender regularfooter on the white board who never said a thing. The Aussie was favored, but not by much. Curren was the hottest rookie to come along in years; this was just his second world tour event, and here he was in the finals. In the semis, Curren aced a long tube and beat Shaun Tomson, the world’s best tuberider. In the final, Carroll rode the best two waves, but didn’t have a good third score. Curren was smooth and steady from beginning to end, and the five-man judging panel split three-to-two in his favor.

  Pros, judges, clued-in fans, the surf media—everybody at Chiba that day understood the significance of the Marui Pro final. Curren and Carroll weren’t the only talented surfers on the world tour by any means, but they represented the future of high-end surfing. Everything you needed to know about the sport’s performance trajectory for rest of the decade could be graphed on Tom Carroll’s muscle-flexing turn combinations and Tom Curren’s ethereal flow and technique. “And so a new era gets underway,” surf journalist Paul Holmes wrote. “If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on one of these guys to take next year’s world championship—and, between the two of them, another few titles after that.” It was a safe bet.