The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Greg Noll and the Last Big Wave

  “Whatever happened to big-wave surfing?”

  Hawaiian surf journalist Leonard Brady posed this question in a 1982 Surfer magazine article. For several weeks Brady had been watching a few big-wave diehards take on Waimea Bay, and he couldn’t believe the drama that was on display: the huge field of play; the raw line of attack; the pursuing avalanche of whitewater; the cleaved difference between a made ride and a wipeout. How was it possible, Brady wondered, that this great, brutal version of surfing had fallen out of favor? In his article, Brady mocked what he clearly felt was a timid era in the sport’s history—“Have surfers turned into candyasses? Will lavender be the board color of the eighties?”—and he saluted those few who still took on the big stuff.

  Several people tried to answer Brady’s question: One big-wave vet said the Pacific over the past fifteen years had been in a low-production cycle. Another agreed that the new generation lacked the necessary toughness. But what actually happened was that big-wave riding simply fell out of style—another victim of the shortboard revolution. In the late 1960s, the only ones tackling big waves were a group of surfers who’d come of age a decade or more earlier. They were respected by the shortboard generation, but they weren’t hip—and, by association, neither was their preferred form of riding. The Waimea warhorses, as one young Turk dismissively put it, were a bunch of “big, older, muscle-bound guys” who just wanted to take off and “do the squat and drop.”

  The shortboarders had a point. Tight-radius turns, whitewater rebounds, tuberiding—none of these hot new moves could be put into practice when the surf got much bigger than fifteen feet. “Many people don’t give a damn about big-wave riding,” a Surfing editor wrote, just after the revolution began, adding that Waimea-style riding wasn’t “a valid test of contemporary, ‘now’ surfing.”

  The revolutionaries would have their way. Contemporary, “now” surfing would soon rule the sport. But not before Greg Noll got a chance to play his last, best big-wave card, during the Swell of ’69.

  * * *

  In late November of that year, a trio of North Pacific storms combined to deliver a weeklong broadside of huge waves to California and Hawaii. On December 4, as the swell unloaded on Oahu, all North Shore breaks, including Waimea, were buried under mountainous lines of whitewater. Sixty beach-front homes were destroyed or damaged, and boats docked at Haliewa Harbor were deposited along Kam Highway. The ocean surge, in places, reached nearly forty feet above sea level. Evacuation warnings were given hours before the big surf hit, but many stayed behind, and two people were swept away and drowned.

  Only slightly reduced after bending around Keana Point, the swell rolled onto Oahu’s West Side, and at daybreak the waves were twenty feet and porcelain smooth as they hit Makaha. It was back-to-the-future time. Makaha had been surfing’s original ultimate challenge—the place where big-wave surfing branched off from the rest of the sport and became its own special category. Then in the late fifties, everybody shifted focus to the North Shore. But occasionally the North Shore overloaded, triggering a small cross-island migration back to Makaha, where the surf would be a notch or two smaller and still rideable.

  “I THOUGHT TO MYSELF, ‘IF I DON’T DO THIS, I’LL BE EIGHTY YEARS OLD, BANGING MY CANE AROUND, STILL PISSED OFF THAT I’D GONE CHICKENSHIT ON THE ONE DAY I’D WORKED FOR ALL MY LIFE.’ SO I REALLY DIDN’T HAVE A CHOICE.”

  —Greg Noll, recalling his last and biggest big wave, at Makaha, in 1969

  A dozen surfers rode Makaha on the morning of December 4, 1969. But the swell continued to rise, and by 1:30 that afternoon, with the biggest sets topping thirty feet, the only person left in the water—sitting a hundred yards or more beyond any known takeoff spot—was Greg Noll.

  At thirty-two, Noll was a veteran North Shore campaigner. In 1957 he’d led the first charge at Waimea and then gone on to become the sport’s most recognized big-wave surfer. Noll later claimed that he woke up that December morning “totally stoked on surfing, and sure that I’d be doing exactly what I was doing for the rest of my life.” But it wasn’t that simple. Noll’s surfboard business was failing, as was his marriage, and while he had an appreciation for the new shortboard style—what he gamely referred to as “your intricate art-form type of surfing”—the sport was passing him by.

  OPPOSITE: LA JOLLA COVE SWELL OF 1969.

  Noll’s goal had always been to ride the biggest wave possible, but the quest had stalled a few years earlier at about thirty feet. A wave that size is incredibly rare, for starters. It also displaces so much water as to be virtually unsurfable. With just a handful of exceptions, anybody who’d ever managed to hook into a thirty-footer was either hurled over the falls or pitched off somewhere down the face when his board started to hydroplane.

  The thirty-foot-plus surf Noll watched from his solitary place in the Makaha lineup, looking north toward Keana Point, was, he said, “demoralizing”—each wave looping over into a sepulchral tube, which then exploded like a warhead. He could have paddled in, but as Noll later said, his entire surfing life had built to this moment. Never before had he been in the presence of waves this size, and he knew it was unlikely to happen again. “I thought to myself, ‘If I don’t do this, I’ll be eighty years old, banging my cane around, still pissed off that I’d gone chickenshit on the one day I’d worked for all my life.’ So I really didn’t have a choice.”

  The last big wave of Greg Noll’s career, variously described by eyewitnesses as either thirty or thirty-five feet, shifted at the last moment into a closeout. Noll made a plunging drop, hit the flats, calmly stepped off his board, and was buried under a cyclonic drift of whitewater. Fifteen minutes later, boardless and gasping, he made it to the beach.

  It was a draw of sorts. The ride wasn’t completed, but Noll rode perfectly from crest to trough, and controlled his bailout. Amazingly, the event was neither filmed nor photographed; Noll sat in the lineup for more than an hour before picking his wave, and the photographers all left. But there were eyewitnesses, and word quickly spread that Noll’s wave was five or ten feet bigger than anything ever ridden.

  It should have been a triumph. Instead, Noll found himself, during a post-Makaha Surfing interview, having to admit that he was on the wrong side of the fashion curve. “Sure, you find a lot of guys these days saying, ‘Who gives a damn about big surf?’” Within eighteen months, Noll folded his business, moved to the Pacific Northwest, and found work as a commercial fisherman. He never rode big waves again. But he made a prediction.

  “Guys may end up digging the thing they now criticize,” he said in the Surfing interview. “You feel close to the small wave thing [now], and that’s great. But at some point the emphasis just begins to change. And what’s left is a big, damn, terrorizing wave.”

  With that bull’s-eye prophecy, Noll hung up his baggies and drove north.

  Eddie Aikau and Big-Wave Surfing’s Lost Era

  In the 1970s, feature-length articles on big waves all but vanished from the surf press. The mandated Waimea Bay finale, a surf movie showstopper for over a decade, was replaced by the mandated Pipeline sequence. Nat Young, arbiter of all things cool during the early years of the short-board revolution, said about big-wave surfing: “I’ve only done it once, on one wave, and I don’t wish to ever do it again. If those guys”—big-wave specialists—“can enjoy themselves while their hearts and guts are falling down a mineshaft, then I respect them and their courage. I just don’t think I could ever express myself while scared out of my wits.” Young’s word alone was probably enough to send big-wave riding into a long hibernation.

  Big-wave surfing never disappeared completely. It just moved to the background. Big-wave designs were improved, as boards developed a narrower silhouette and more lift in the nose and tail. Throughout the 1970s, a 10-foot Waimea gun crafted by eccentric boardmaking genius Dick Brewer was held in the same worshipful regard as a Pat Curren balsa spear had been a generation earlier. The big-wave
hero nearly disappeared as a surfing archetype, but the actual number of hardcore big-wave riders didn’t fall all that much—newcomers just paddled out and surfed anonymously.

  Eddie Aikau and James Jones of Hawaii, along with Ian Cairns, were the heavyweights in what would later be referred to as big-wave surfing’s “lost era.” Cairns was simply too good a surfer in all conditions to be pigeonholed as a big-wave rider, even though he paddled into twenty-five-footers with Noll-like fearlessness, and demolished the old surveyor-straight line of attack with a hooking bottom turn. Jones scored the big-wave coup of the decade by riding inside the tube at Waimea in 1977. Like the Smirnoff Pro three years earlier (also held at Waimea), Jones’ achievement was too big to ignore.

  “For as long as I can remember, Waimea has been the sport’s biggest challenge,” Jones said in a Surfing article that read like a throwback to 1962. “In all the years I’ve seen it break, some intriguing questions persisted. Could a surfer ride the tube there at twenty feet? Or would he drown in the attempt?” Jones put himself inside a cavernous twenty-five-footer, lost control, and popped up a few seconds later, rattled but unharmed. “I didn’t want to do it again,” he admitted. Nobody else did either—for the moment, at least.

  Eddie Aikau didn’t retool the performance standard the way Cairns and Jones did, but he became the sport’s defining big-wave figure. Aikau was a natural. On a heavy day at Waimea in 1966, he rode for six straight hours and caught over a dozen twenty-footers. He was a twenty-year-old line worker at the Dole Pineapple cannery—and it was his first time at Waimea. Ten months later he returned and casually dominated the biggest day of the year, and from that point on Aikau was big-wave surfing’s one-man elite.

  It was a cool triumph. Aikau had a bowlegged stance, and rode straight-backed, with his arms extended and quiet. He wasn’t much for big flashy turns or cutbacks, and in smaller waves he could go unnoticed. Aikau’s singular talent emerged only in huge surf, during those red-lining moments of descent, just after takeoff. Everything at this point depends on an ability to quash the fight-or-flight response. Good surfers learn to hunker down and ride it out. Big-wave pretenders either abandon ship or freeze up. Aikau was the only one who seemed to actually relax at this critical stage. Freefalling down the face, or half-eaten by whitewater, he often looked calm—even serene.

  Aikau was a friendly but shy Catholic-raised Hawaiian. He spoke in a deep pidgin-laced mumble and lived with his big working-class family in a secluded house next to a Chinese graveyard, a few miles behind downtown Honolulu. In 1968, Aikau and Butch Van Artsdalen were hired as the North Shore’s first lifeguards, and most afternoons he could be found in his bright-orange Waimea guard tower, strumming Hawaiian standards on guitar and singing quietly. Competition wasn’t a big deal to Aikau, but he was happy to enter the North Shore events; by 1974 he’d become a six-time Duke Invitational finalist. Otherwise, he had almost no commercial ties to surfing and just a passing interest in surf-world fame.

  Aikau turned thirty in 1976. He’d become involved in the Hawaiian Renaissance movement, which worked to revive traditional Hawaiian arts and culture, and was soon training as a crew member for the Hokule’a, a 60-foot replica of a Polynesian voyaging canoe. The plan was to sail it 2,400 miles, using ancient navigational techniques, from Hawaii to Tahiti. In mid-March 1978—three months after he at last won the Duke contest—Aikau was aboard the Hokule’a when it overturned in heavy seas twenty miles west of Lanai. The radio and all provisions were lost. Twelve hours after capsizing, Aikau got on his board—he’d planned on surfing once in Tahiti—and began to paddle for Lanai, intending to get help. He was never seen again.

  EDDIE AIKAU, WAIMEA.

  Aikau’s reputation grew in the months and years that followed. It was strange. He’d always been something of a periphery surf-world figure. The magazines didn’t interview him. He was never a surf-movie headliner. Even the Duke win didn’t get much notice. But Aikau’s slack-key-strumming presence had quietly, over the years, become a fixed part of the North Shore, almost immutable, like the reefs or the tradewinds. His passing made the sport feel less anchored.

  By 1978, big-wave riding was a full decade into its long interregnum. With Aikau gone, the whole thing couldn’t help but further collapse in on itself.

  Colossus: The Return of Big-Wave Surfing

  Incredibly, just weeks after Leonard Brady wrote his 1982 big-wave article for Surfer, the North Pacific let loose with the greatest run of big-wave surf on record—seven huge swells arrived at one-week intervals from mid-February to early March. One journal-keeping Waimea veteran later reported that the Bay was twenty feet or bigger twenty-three times that season, which was roughly equal to the previous five years combined.

  In response to this run of giant waves, Surfer put together a four-article package under a banner headline reading “MONSTER SURF!” The magazine flipped over on its back like a puppy and rolled around in the drama. It was there in the images: Huge Waimea, glassy Makaha, a rugged big-wave rider holding the two pieces of his snapped board, another kneel-ing in prayer on the beach at Waimea before paddling out, a hard-hat-wearing Honolulu City and County worker putting up a “High Surf Area: Beach Closed” sign along Kam Highway. The text pushed the theme just as hard. Big-wave riders, Leonard Brady wrote, lived on “an ultra-level us regular surfers aren’t even aware of.” They were the surfing equivalent of fighter pilots, “strapped into their winged chemical bombs, primed to light the fuse and charge.” Sunset and Pipeline, Brady continued, were “the scrub brush growing around the Giant Redwood of Waimea.”

  ALEC COOKE JUMPED OUT OF A HELICOPTER FOR THIS 1984 SESSION AT THIRD REEF PIPELINE.

  Brady also interviewed the new crew of big-wave surfers, and they got right into the swing. Huge waves provided the sport with its “last spiritual sanctuary,” one said. “You die a little every time you wipe out,” added Roger Erikson, a bearded double-tour Vietnam vet who had literally surfed his way out of a debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder. “When I go down, it’s not like I go down by myself. I go down with all the guys who are out. I go down with Eddie—every time, I see him. I see life, I see death. I see everything; every mistake I’ve made.”

  In the beginning, much of big-wave surfing’s Second Age was taken straight out of deep freeze from twenty years earlier. Waimea was still the ultimate break. Ricky Grigg and Peter Cole, big-wave originals from the fifties and sixties, were still in the lineup. With a few exceptions, most of the younger crew rode in the old “squat and drop” style. (They also had a platoon-like sense of responsibility for each other—something that was nearly unheard of elsewhere in the surf world.)

  Yet the North Shore was a different place than it had been fifteen years earlier. Crowds had doubled, photographers were everywhere, and hundreds of surfing-based careers were now bouncing off each other like Lotto balls. For years, big-wave riding had been excepted from most of this. Now it was being absorbed into surfing’s hurly-burly mainstream. It couldn’t happen fast enough for some of the younger big-wave riders, who, far from being spare and unassuming, were already professionalized to one degree or another.

  For better or worse, Mark Foo and Alec Cooke were at the forefront of big-wave surfing’s reinvention. After washing out on the pro tour, Foo got a sponsorship deal with Anheuser-Busch in 1982, ordered a 10-foot Waimea gun with a gigantic black-and-red Michelob logo spread across the bottom, and jump-started his career as a big-wave specialist. Cooke, meanwhile, changed his name to “Ace Cool” and made headlines in 1984 by leaping out of a helicopter to ride twenty-foot surf at Kaena Point, while a hired photographer captured every move. To the disgust of the old-guard North Shore fellowship, Cooke had commemorative T-shirts made, compared himself to daredevil Evel Knievel, and bragged that he was aiming for a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records as the guy who rode the world’s biggest wave. A year later, Cooke earned some grudging peer respect, and another big dose of media coverage, when he again jumped from a he
licopter into the lineup, this time riding a thirty-footer on a distant reef outside of Pipeline.

  COOKE’S AIRBORNE 11-FOOT BOARD.

  The new age of big-wave surfing had an organized coming-out party in early 1986, with the Quiksilver/Eddie Aikau Big-Wave Invitational—the first event designed specifically for Waimea Bay. Contest rules stipulated that the waves had to be twenty feet or bigger. Thirty invitees were on standby for two months, waiting for meet director George Downing to give the high sign. As it turned out, the surf was barely twenty feet, and windy in the bargain, but it was a showcase event nonetheless. One of the day’s standouts was Brock Little, a ropey eighteen-year-old who lived a short bike ride away and cheerfully avoided all the sturm und drang big-wave rhetoric. (Waimea wasn’t a spiritual sanctuary to Little. Riding there was “just the funnest thing ever!”) Another was Darrick Doerner, a flinty Sunset Beach lifeguard who’d done his Waimea apprenticeship under Aikau himself and was now regarded as the world’s most naturally gifted big-wave surfer.

  The Quiksilver contest was divided into two rounds. Each round consisted of three ten-man heats, each heat was an hour long, and a surfer’s final score was determined by his aggregate point total over both rounds. Consistency was key, and for not putting a foot wrong all day, the $5,000 Quiksilver first-place check went to a teary Clyde Aikau, who rode a ten-year-old board that once belonged to his older brother, Eddie. Clyde said that Eddie himself—in the form of a sea turtle—had guided him to the winning wave.