Dick Brewer turns 78 today. Of all the shaping gurus, Brewer sat on the tallest mountain, had the most acolytes, wore the most beatific expression, and spoke in the deepest, most spellbinding voice. He was the guru's guru. Lopez, Abellira, Fitzgerald, and Chapman, among others, learned their boardmaking craft at his knee. Virtually every notable surfer of the 1960s and '70s rode Brewer's boards at one time or another. They 

 for his boards, in fact, when other marquee shapers were giving free sticks to the surfing elite like bottles of Primo.

There will be a time—it may already be here, in fact—when the demigod board shaper and his magic planer will vanish from our sport. Integrated hardware-software shaping packages have been the industry standard for years. The brainwork today is done on a keyboard. Shaping itself is performed by a frame-mounted four-axis robotic arm. 

Great. Bring on the science, I say. Let us code our way to a brighter wave-riding future.

But make no mistake. There is a tradeoff. With the extinction of the foam-dusted Gibran-meets-Gandalf shaper, we take another step toward orthodox sports-world conformity. The shaping machine will never refer to itself in casually arrogant third person, as Dick Brewer loved to do. The dev-shaper of the future, unlike Brewer, will never justify his CMS-loaded array of board-related data and specs as a way to "express my level of consciousness to my fellow man." This is a loss. I am in the position, in other words, of missing the hot air while celebrating its disappearance. The boards are better. The sport is less interesting.

DICK BREWER: OUR FIRST, LAST, GREATEST SHAPING GURU

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