The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Surf cams, reports, and forecasts created a foundation for the surfer’s online experience. This was genuine no-messing-around online utility: the idea was to go from Internet surfing to actual surfing as fast as possible. And if there was no surf? Hours could be killed downloading videos, playing “fantasy surfer” games, booking surf vacations, watching live coverage of pro tour contests, following surf blogs, and joining endlessly belligerent forum “discussions.” Ten years after the meltdown, the Swell/Hardcloud/Bluetorch crowd were looking less like dupes and more like visionaries.

  Redesign: A New Era For Surf Magazines

  While the Internet arrived, collapsed, and recovered, traditional surf media during the late 1990s and most of the 2000s did nothing but thrive. The surfing population exploded, and surfers everywhere wanted their magazines, their videos and DVDs—and their surf Web sites. It wasn’t a zero-sum game. The pie simply got bigger for everybody.

  Print was especially hot. Internationally, the number of surf magazine titles went from forty in 1990 to seventy-five in 2000, peaking at just over a hundred in 2008—everything from freebie newspaper throwaways to expensive thick-stock glossies. Only a few survived to their fifth anniversary and beyond; most lasted a year or two, while dozens packed it in after just a handful of issues.

  The older magazines swam in ad revenue, particularly Surfer, which remained the sport’s flagship title at the turn of the twenty-first century—although Surfing had almost pulled even in terms of monthly circulation, at about 115,000, and was on track to eclipse its longtime rival in quality. In 1996, Surfer began to produce its annual “Big Issue,” which had an expanded trim size and higher page count. For Surfer’s fortieth anniversary in 1999, the Big Issue ran 340 pages. The 2007 Big Issue was a table-splitting 374 pages. Advertisers rushed to book space in the jumbo editions, and they sold well on the newsstand. Still, not everybody loved it. Content-wise, Big Issues were no different than Surfer’s regular issues. Bigger is better—that seemed to be the whole point. It was the publishing version of driving a Hummer.

  Surf-demographic targeting, or niche publishing, was the big trend. This had been done in the past, but not to this degree. Competition Surf, a transient midsixties publication out of New York, identified its audience plainly enough, as did the 1985-launched Bodyboarding. Tracks began as an eco-journal as much as a surf magazine. Then, starting in the early 1990s, it was almost impossible to find a magazine startup that wasn’t directed at a surfing subgenre. The first and most original was an elegant square-bound quarterly called The Surfer’s Journal. Made in San Clemente by ex-Surfer publisher Steve Pezman, the Journal was designed mainly for the over-thirty crowd.

  Surfer and Surfing were locked in mortal combat for the adolescent and young-adult reader, and doing whatever it took to up the hipness quotient—Surfer, for instance, hired grunge-design pioneer David Carson as art director, and for two years the magazine had a hard, dark, distressed look. So Pezman and his tiny staff veered sharply in the other direction. Opening an issue of the Journal was like stepping into a quiet, well-appointed library. Everything you needed to know about the Journal was there on the cover. The cover image—usually a photo, sometimes a painting—was framed in a Harper’s-style horizontal box on the middle of the page. The blurbs were short, formal, centered, and set in Times Roman. No exclamation points. No reader contest giveaways. The Journal was beautifully designed and photo-edited, and printed to an almost art-book quality standard.

  It was also fairly relentless in its pursuit of surf-world gravitas—articles could stretch out to ten thousand words, and the humor level never went much above wry amusement. Pezman willfully ignored the contest scene, and the top pros in general, but the magazine otherwise ranged further afield than any other surf publication. Roughly half of every issue was devoted to historical topics—nineteenth-century board design, landmark swell events, the origins of surf company logos, long features on surfing pioneers of every description. Some of the contemporary material was semi-experimental, as was the case with 1992’s “Finger Surfing,” a feature on Hawaiian surfer Brant Page, who made seven-inch foam-and-fiberglass replica boards, which he then “rode” with his middle and index fingers while crouched over a tiny stationary river wave. (Although, Page pointed out, the boards could also “be ridden on rugs, couches, beds, or your own body.”)

  STAB, 2006.

  More experimental yet, the Journal ran just four ads per issue and had a $12.95 newsstand price. The magazine ended its first year with a circulation of less than eight thousand. But Pezman put together a lean, efficient operation, his readership was deeply loyal, and the Journal was in the black from the moment in launched.

  * * *

  A handful of longboard magazines came and went during the 1990s. The Roxy Girl phenomenon ignited a pastel-hued explosion of women’s magazines, most of which were two-parts Surfer, one-part Seventeen. England’s Surfer’s Path, with its earnest tone and Zenned-out mandala logotype, took aim at what editors believed were two overlapping constituencies, the hardcore surf traveler and the committed surfing environmentalist. In mid-2004, Path became the first “green” surf mag, printing on unbleached recycled paper with soy-based inks.

  In general, though, the new magazines all had a more conservative view of the sport than their predecessors from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when surfing was in full counterculture swoon. This was especially true in America, where the surfing population was not only bigger and older but wealthier; in 1995, the median household income of Surfer readers was $50,250, compared with the nationwide average of $34,100, and the gap only widened in the years ahead. Publishers cleaned things up accordingly. Swear words that had gotten past copyedit, even during the 1980s, were now cut from articles, or primly masked with asterisks (“sh*t” or “s**t,” for example, depending on the editor’s mood during final corrections). The wink-and-nod references to pot smoking were long gone, replaced with finger-wagging columns like “Seven Reasons to Lay off the Weed.”

  Mirroring the attitude of the surfing majority—and to further reduce the chances of causing offense—American surf magazines mostly steered clear of politics. When the subject did come up, editors invariably scampered onto neutral ground. A 2004 Surfing article briefly outlining policy differences between presidential candidates George Bush and John Kerry concluded by saying that “the answers lie somewhere in the middle.” Veteran California surf journalist Sam George took neutrality a step further. “The boundaries of a surfer’s world are different than any political map,” he wrote, before advising his readers to “be apolitical and proud.” The environment was a different matter. Threatened surf breaks, beach access issues, oil spills—all were regularly covered in the surf press, and readers were constantly urged to take action. Surfrider remained far and away the biggest organization of its kind in the sport; by 2010, the group had seventy chapters in America, and international branches in France, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Brazil.

  * * *

  Stab was launched in 2004, partly in response to the surf media’s drift to the safe middle. Published out of Sydney, Stab appeared to have its own small-bore demographic intentions, just like the other newcomers—about one-third of Stab’s content was devoted to male fashion. A dozen or so pages beyond the center spread, readers had to flip the magazine upside down and start over from the back cover, which had its own Stab Style logotype. But the surf-hipster fashion features didn’t define Stab. It was the editorial voice, which was nimble, profane, and wickedly funny, and belonged mostly to editor and cofounder Derek Reilly.

  The editor of Australia’s Surfing Life during the second half of the 1990s, Reilly had established himself as the sport’s foremost print-media wit. With Stab, he gave full expression to his hybridized take on modern wave-riding, in which the sport is juxtaposed—at a careening rate of speed, with the reader left to guess at the intended level of irony—with sex, drugs, drinking, politics, violence, religion, literature, and, of course, fashion
. Most of it was as smart as it was smartass. A short column titled “The Beginner’s Guide to Islam,” for example, was filled with Reilly zingers (“for a religious tract, the Koran lays down a pretty hip beat: be cool to others, donate 2.5% of your income to charity, fast once a year, and lay off the hookers and martinis”), but beneath the jokes, the information was solid.

  Stab’s Web site was even more eclectic. Along with surf features, the site provided links to all manner of literary, political, and pop culture ephemera: in mid-2008, it included a New Yorker review of David Sedaris’ new book, a downloadable short story by Ernest Hemingway, and YouTube clips of Martin Luther King, Dean Martin, Barack Obama, and comedian Sarah Silverman. Viewers were greeted to the site with the notice: “If you want shallow journalism and gratuitous nudity, you’ve come to the right portal you creep.” Stab offered everything, first and foremost, as entertainment. The banter never stopped.

  But something else was at work. Stab viewed the nonsurfing world as compelling and engaging—and given how proudly insular the surf media has always been, this bordered on subversion. As the old catchphrase went: “Surfing is life, the rest is details.” Reilly and Stab had a different take. Make the details interesting enough to your readers, and you’d end up with a more interesting readership. This was a surf-media first.

  Video Assault

  Surfing was the most radiantly cinematic activity to ever light up a screen, but by the early 1990s, surf movies as a rule weren’t looking much better than America’s Funniest Home Videos. Quality had plummeted in the previous decade as movies were replaced by the VHS cassette, and as filmmakers began shooting directly on videotape.

  With the release of 1992’s Momentum, San Diego’s Taylor Steele became surf videography’s accidental auteur. His pummeling forty-minute debut effort, made for just under $5,000, captured Kelly Slater and the rest of the teenage New School pros on the cusp of stardom. There was no formal arrangement, but Steele—a quiet, easygoing, unobtrusive presence—became the group’s in-house cameraman. He was still living with his parents, and Momentum was assembled in his bedroom, using a Mac II and an Avid editing system. In many ways, it was a by-the-book surf film, with a grab-bag opener, a wipeout sequence, plenty of North Shore action, and quickie segments on the top surfers. But it was stripped to the bone. No slow-motion. No water shots. No narration, interviews, comedy bits, or scenic views. Steele added a merciless punk rock soundtrack that including songs by the Offspring, Pennywise, and Bad Religion. Momentum’s 1992 release couldn’t have been better timed. Slater was about to win his first world title, New School surfing was all the rage, and Steele’s video came to mark a generational change, just as Free Ride had done fifteen years earlier.

  Typically, surf videos were available in surf shops or by mail order. Low sales figures were the rule—few titles went above five thousand units—thanks mostly to rampant bootlegging. Then again, production costs were so low that a videographer could move just a few hundred copies and still turn a profit. With fifteen thousand in sales and thumbs-up reviews in the surf magazines, Momentum was the video smash of the year, and it launched Steele into a long, rich, influential career. In 2002, he was the highest-ranked filmmaker on Surfer’s list of the “25 Most Powerful People in Surfing.” By then, Steele-produced videos and DVDs had reportedly grossed $10 million in worldwide sales—and that was before his wildly popular Drive-Thru travel series.

  Momentum’s success also brought down a fusillade of loud, shabby lookalike videos, which landed at a rate of fifty or so titles per year. “Cheap equipment, small budgets, and smaller imaginations,” a Surfer’s Journal writer lamented in 1998, having just dipped into the latest offerings, such as Liquid Meat, Surf Assassins, and The Kill. “Such are the common denominators among surf video producers.”

  There were a few quality-minded holdouts, though, all being sponsored, Medici-like, by the big surf companies. Manufacturers had been using surf cinema as a promo tool since the late 1950s, when Bruce Brown’s first movies were underwritten by boardmaker Dale Velzy. In the video age, this became industry practice; by the early 1990s the major surf companies were all releasing at least one title a year, mostly small-budget movies by independent filmmakers. Occasionally, though, a manufacturer was willing to break off a real chunk of money for a video project—up to $200,000. Sonny Miller of California and Australia’s Jack McCoy were both beneficiaries of the company system, and throughout the 1990s, any well-made surf video you cued up was invariably made by one or the other.

  Miller and McCoy both shot and edited on 16mm film. They operated from the water with as much skill as they did from land, and went to great lengths to insure that every clip was sharp, well-framed, and perfectly exposed. Both delivered the hardcore surf action, but mellowed things out with world-beat tracks, lingering scenic shots, and slow-motion. (Too much slow-motion, probably. But better too much than none at all, as was the case with all the shoot-on-video newcomers.)

  Miller was hired by Rip Curl in 1991 to make the first of what ended up being a half-dozen yearly installments in a travel series called The Search. His Searching for Tom Curren documentary won Video of the Year honors at the 1997 Surfer Magazine Video Awards.

  Jack McCoy was the last of the Old Guard surf-movie-makers still in the game; his debut film, Tubular Swells, made with Australia’s Dick Hoole, came out in 1975. McCoy became the genre’s standard-bearer. He had a richer color palette than anybody and the smoothest editing touch. McCoy was big on the idea of surfing-as-dreamscape; he layered on the production effects, and the best of his altered sequences had a fine psychedelic shimmer. The twelve movies McCoy made as Billabong’s in-house cinematographer during the 1990s were as weightless as everybody else’s, but they were dependably, often stunningly attractive. His 1995 Billabong Challenge won Video of the Year, as did Occy: the Occumentary, a 1999 title that helped established the “bio-vid” as the new century’s hottest video subcategory.

  The dynamic wasn’t much changed with the advent of DVDs and video downloads. Cheap and dirty Momentum-like videos were too easy to make, and too popular with groms wanting a quick surf-action fix; low-cost and fast access would always trump production niceties for a large segment of the surfing population.

  But a trend developed in the late nineties toward better-crafted, McCoy-style projects—or as journalist Steve Barilotti put it, there was a “gradual shift back from wave-riding porn to surfing-as-art-film.” Early efforts included Adrift, Litmus, The Seedling, and Thicker Than Water, which was coproduced by singer-songwriter Jack Johnson in 1999, not long before recording his debut album. These new works were shot on 16mm film and had mostly acoustic soundtracks. They got raves from surf magazine reviewers, and were often written up in the beach city alternative weeklies. All were marginally profitable.

  Part of the success was due to what Barilotti called a “surf cinema mini-renaissance,” as more ambitious producers began making short four-wall tours up and down the coast. For his 2004 film Blue Horizon, Jack McCoy went so far as to do live narration. Surf moviegoing was no longer the boozed-up, semi-combustible happening it had been during the barnstorming era. People were no longer starved for surf imagery—and never would be again, thanks to the Internet. Still, the return of the traveling surf movie was a welcome development. The big screen, everyone suddenly remembered, loved the sport. Always had, always would. The experience wasn’t as manically transporting as it had been, but getting together en masse, off the beach, at night, maybe just a little dressed up—that was more than enough reason to drop the remote and head for the auditorium.

  Surf Lit: The New Yorker and Beyond

  During the 1990s, the mainstream media at last came to view surfing as a permanent cultural fixture. No formal announcement, or single event, marked this shift. But more or less all at once, newspapers and magazines, novelists and documentary filmmakers, Hollywood studios and New York publishing houses—everybody seemed to decide that surfing was no longer a novelty or curi
osity. The audience for surfing stories now potentially included everyone. What this meant, for the most part, was a lot more of the same old stuff. Violence and danger had always been the mainstream media’s favorite surf-tropes, and that was still true. What were the three biggest surf stories of the 1990s and early 2000s? Mark Foo’s death at Maverick’s, “surf rage” localism, and thirteen-year-old Hawaiian surfer Bethany Hamilton’s return to the water just a few weeks after a tiger shark bit off her left arm.

  Yet the sport began appearing in places where it had long been conspicuously absent. Art galleries staged surfing exhibitions. Newspaper travel sections ran articles on exotic locations where good surf was the main draw. Famous surfers made the obituaries; when Mickey Dora died of pancreatic cancer in 2002, both the Los Angeles Times and the London Times published full-length notices, and smaller Dora obits ran everywhere from the Detroit Free Press to the Hartford Courant.

  DAN DUANE’S 1996 MEMOIR, CAUGHT INSIDE.

  The best works on surfing in the 1990s and 2000s took it as a given that everybody, nonsurfers included, understood the sport to be fun and attractive. Bruce Brown and The Endless Summer, decades earlier, had said just about everything that needed to be said on this point. Writers now sought to fit surfing into more complex settings, roughing up that pretty blue panorama with the messy human element. There were precursors. Early examples included David Rensin’s long and compelling 1983 profile on Mickey Dora for Los Angeles magazine and the unmoored big-wave riders in James Houston’s 1966 novel A Native Son of the Golden West—there was a gem or two to be plucked from the landfill of mainstream surf media.