"Surfing is an art, not a sport." God help us. You could lift a fleet of zeppelins with all the hot air generated by surfers waxing poetic about "the art." Open any surf magazine from 1970, and the surfing-as-art fatuity wafts off the pages in small clouds.

We all enjoy a little postprandial cigar-and-brandy chat about who, in surf history, looked the best simply standing atop a board, and the three names that come up most often are David Nuuhiwa, Gerry Lopez and Tom Curren. Smoothness doesn’t come in a higher grade. Nuuhiwa’s bones seemed to flex when he surfed. His joints were dusted in graphite. Paw pads on his feet. Who knows where it came from? David’s father was some kind of double-secret 12th-degree martial arts black belt, and David himself spent a few years during his childhood in a Hawaiian valley somewhere being raised by panthers. 

For six or seven years, beginning in 1965, American surfers were zombified by their obsession with David Nuuhiwa, surf media included. SURFER's 1967 shameless America-First "High Performers" articles were balanced almost entirely on Nuuhiwa's slender teenaged shoulders. Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman bought enough Nuuhiwa-earmarked film stock to goose Kodachrome’s NYSE price. America's finest surfers meanwhile battled to see who build the most lavish temple of praise to Nuuhiwa's skills, and that includes rival Corky Carroll who, thinking back to the just-held 1966 World Championships (famously not won by Nuuhiwa), "The whole beach was screaming and tears were coming out of their eyes when David was surfing."

Over the past few days I’ve reignited my own boyhood obsession with Nuuhiwa, and what stands out this time around is how well his surfing holds up without any contextual support. This isn’t as common as you might think. Nat Young, for example, was the most progressive competitive surfer of 1966 and took that year’s world title in San Diego without breaking a sweat. But to fully appreciate Young’s wave-riding, you need to know where the sport was at that moment in terms of performance, board design, and even transpacific Aussie-American surfing politics. You need to have at least passing knowledge of the shortboard revolution, noseriding versus “involvement," and the New Era. Young gathered all these things and more in his huge Avatar-sized hands, from the technical to the doctrinal, crushed everything down to something the size of a soccer ball, and drop-kicked the sport into its future. It was masterful. But his actual surfing? If you’re, I don’t know, Nicki Minaj or David Cameron or this week’s recruits in the Richard Schmidt Surf School—anybody without a surf history background—you watch a Nat Young 1966 highlight reel and you’re looking at a handsome guy wrestling a nine-foot board.

David Nuuhiwa is different. You don’t have to explain or contextualize his surfing any more than you have to explain or contextualize the Brooklyn Bridge or the Side 2 of “Revolver.” The beauty stans on its own. It self-generates. 

Those who didn’t care for Nuuhiwa, and they were out there too, for various reasons, were as obsessed with him as the rest of us. Aussie surf journalist John Witzig took shots at Nuuhiwa in his hair-tearing 1967 masterpiece “We’re Tops Now.” Five years later, during the 1972 World Championships, also in San Diego, Nuuhiwa’s competition board was stolen and curb-stomped in half, graffitied, stabbed with a knife, and strung up gangland style from the Ocean Beach Pier.

Two days ago I came across a strange 1969 photo in SURFER and wondered for a moment if the magazine at that point had jumped sides and was taking a not-so-subtle dig at Nuuhiwa. The full-page shot shows him mercilessly burning an unnamed surfer, and the caption reads “Nuuhiwa showing positive aggression.” To my ears, that reads like irony. But no. Just the opposite, I'm guessing. SURFER ran the shot because David looks so feline and graceful that the poor guy getting burned (see below) simply didn’t register. 

It turns out that Nuuhiwa was one of the premier wave-snakes of his generation. Which, maybe, it depends on how you view these things, weighs in favor of the surfer-as-artist claim. Here’s a line from "Good Art, Bad People," a 

 op-ed from 2012: “The creation of truly great art requires a degree of concentration, commitment, dedication, and preoccupation—of selfishness, in a word—that sets that artist apart and makes him not an outlaw, exactly, but a law unto himself.” And later in the same article: “He was in the grip of art, and the cruel thing about art—of great art, anyway—is that it requires its practitioners to be wrapped up in themselves in a way that’s a little inhuman.” The 

 piece namechecks Hemingway, Wagner, Degas, Picasso, Eliot, Mailer and Dickens, among art world heavyweights.

David Nuuhiwa as surfing's Edgar Degas? That works, actually. 

[Photos: Jeff Divine, Brad Barrett, LeRoy Grannis]

DAVID NUUHIWA AND SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SURFER-AS-ARTIST

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