Dick Brewer was a boardmaker without equal. He was Gandalf and Oppenheimer and more Gandalf with a touch of Pollock. Brewer's understanding of how a surfboard's manifold design elements must blend and synchronize and accommodate—template, rails, rocker, edges, flats, curves—was fourth-dimensional. Magic boards danced from his shaping bay in the 1960s and '70s like 

 broomsticks into the eager hands of the world's best surfers. Yes, Brewer was dark and moody. He was also incredibly generous with both his time and knowledge—every influential boardmaker to follow either learned their craft at Brewer's knee, or made a Talmudic study of his boards whenever one came their way.

Dick Brewer can take all the praise and more and wear it like a suit of lights. It belongs to him.

But here's one thing that does not belong to him. Brewer did not start the shortboard revolution. He's been saying so in one form or another for nigh on 40 years, and the 2010 documentary 

(tagline: "An Epic Search for Surfing's Great Truth: Who Started the Shortboard Revolution?") is built on the premise of Brewer having a claim to being the shortboard progenitor. But it isn't true. Credit Brewer with the first "mini-gun." Or the first "pocket rocket." But the shortboard? As in "shortboard revolution?" That's Bob McTavish and George Greenough. Or the other way around.

I know this because I'm old enough (barely) to remember people talking about the subject in real time. There was simply no argument in the late '60s or early '70s about who started the shortboard revolution. I also know this because I spent the morning hunkered down over a bunch of moldering surf mags, paging through 50-year-old articles on board design. To wit:

"Australian's are responsible for the shortboard movement." (Bing Copeland, 1968)

"The Aussies are the people who really made surfboard design climb out of the stagnent '60s and start progressing." (Mike Diffenderfer, 1969)

"[Bob McTavish] acted as the translator of George Greenough's theories. Working and living together, the two actuated what was to prove the single most significant phase of the pending revolution." (

"The excitement started in the Islands this year when the Australians brought their strange vee-bottom stubs. Slowly the North Shore was turned on to the vee-bottoms. [Later], Dick Brewer and Bob McTavish had a pow-wow in Maui—the von Brauns of surfdom." (Rusty Miller, 1968)

"There was the Australian fad on the word 'involvement,' and everybody went Australian. [Today], these are the dudes [Brewer, Diffenderfer, others] who have taken surfing from where the Australians left off." (Owl Chapman, 1971)

"RB said that when he saw the Australians [and] and the potential of the vee, [he] had the realization that a board could go up as fast as it could go down." (Reno Abellira, 1975)

"Mini-boards are the most important breakthrough in surfing in recent years. It took the Aussies to do it." (Dick Brewer, 1968)

SHORT SURFBOARDS: "IT TOOK THE AUSSIES TO DO IT." DICK BREWER, YOUR THOUGHTS?

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