Greg Noll grabbed on to every surfing career opportunity that came his way, with mixed results. On one end there was the actual surfing, where Noll's hulking figure practically defined big-wave riding throughout the 1960s; and Greg Noll Surfboards which, like Noll himself, was big and solid. On the other end, we've got his failed one-off Surfer's Annual magazine, which looked like a middle schooler's cut-and-paste collage project. Somewhere in between are his five his Search for Surf movies, made with the same care and attention as a middling TikTok, but a big-screen stoker for the Gidget-era gremmies nonetheless.

Very much in the Greg Noll "win" column is the nonstop and sure-handed branding Noll did for himself and for his surfboard company. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Noll was as good at marketing as he was riding huge Waimea. I'm thinking, first, of his incredible signature black-and-white trunks—which Noll may have 

 but never mind; all is fair in love, war, and self-promotion. Then we've got all those great Greg Noll Surfboards logos, very much including the early ones in which a cartoon Noll is pot-bellied and stick-legged and riding through the hand-lettered typeface in a sleepy parallel stance—an aggressively silly graphic that aired out, just a bit, the clenched locker-room machismo of big-wave surfing. Maybe best of all were the Greg Noll Surfboards ads and promos, the best of which ran in 1967, to promote Miki Dora's "Da Cat" model.

Here is a short tribute, in roughly chronological order, to Greg Noll's side gig as a marketing man.

 top, artist unknown, was printed in 1959 or 1960. The yellow two-sided price list was made by Rick Griffin in 1960, when Griffin was just 16. It was Noll, not SURFER's John Severson, who first took note of the prodigiously and playfully gifted young cartoonist. "You could see Rick's talent just falling all over the place," Noll later recalled. "I made him a deal. Do me a price list and I'll give you a board." Thus Griffin's career was launched atop a Greg Noll custom board made of non-expanding foam and 20-oz glass.

Noll wears standard-issue single-color trunks

. By the North Shore winter of '62-'63, however, he was never seen without his instantly-signature black-and-white striped trunks, so the obvious guess is he got his first pair in '61. "Bud Browne would shoot pictures of us," Noll once said, explaining how the trunks came to be, "and later we'd sit around at the restaurant looking at proofsheets, trying to figure out who was who. And this one guy kept ripping me off, saying, 'Hey, that's me!" So I just said 'Piss on this,' and went to M. Nii's and ordered myself a pair of jailhouse trunks." (Sidebar: in the VHS 

compilation Bruce Brown says "We didn't start calling you the Bull until probably 1963," and Noll agrees. In a later interview, he said Phil Edwards gave him the name. "I knew I was gonna get it on this one wave [at Pipeline], but instead of jumping off I just squatted down and got eaten alive, and later that day Phil said, 'You bull-headed son of a bitch, I think I'll just call you the Bull from now on.")

This 1966 double-page Surfing magazine ad

 is a dud, design-wise, but as a flex to declare your company as the Number One choice for big-wave surfers it is a slam dunk. The roll call here includes Ricky Grigg, Peter Cole, George Downing, Paul Strauch, Fred Van Dyke, Felipe Pomar, and Jose Angel—so much firepower, in fact, that Noll himself is not pictured. This is also around the time when Noll began using a pair of his famous striped trunks, hung from a coat rack, as a kind of secondary logo (see above, lower right; and below, also lower right), doing for his jams what Grouch Marx did for his mustache.

Greg Noll Surfboards crowning promo achievement

 was a '66-'67 series of print ads for Miki Dora's "Da Cat" model surfboard—the "most audacious surfboard model and marketing campaign anyone had ever seen," as the Surfer's Journal later said. The board itself was advanced but doomed, as it came out not long before the shortboard revolution. The ads, however—most of them with first-person text written by Dora, full of insult humor and conspiratorial head-fakes—were punchy and nimble and beautifully designed and gave Dora an elevated platform from which he could milk the surf industry while also clawing it to ribbons. Noll later recalled the creative process for the Cat ads. It should be noted that Noll himself didn't do any design work, here or on anything else presented on this page. But he did a lot of concept work, hired all the people involved, and had final approval on everything. Noll later recalled the process for the Da Cat campaign: "Miki would come up with an idea, then Duke Boyd and myself, along with Dick Graham and Miki, would all get together. They were a lot of fun to do. The idea was to be absolutely insulting; the ads were funny, rude, nasty. We'd bring it to the magazine guys and they'd say, 'Hey, we can't print this shit,' so our job [Noll, Boyd, Graham] and our job was to make it palatable enough to print." Noll noted that they sold roughly 2,000 Da Cat models over the course of its run, which is good, not great. But he added that the model sold for $175, which was about $50 more than what model other boards went for at the time.

 but it was very on-brand for Noll to not only make a paperweight out of shaper Ricky James' severed thumb, but to whip that thing out at the drop of a hat and tell the making-of story for 50-plus years. And yes, that is James on the left, thumbless and very much still employed by Noll.

Here is a shortened version of the thumb story, as told by Noll in his autobiography:

One day, in our old shop on Pacific Coast Highway, Ricky was sawing center strips for boards and talking to one of his buddies at the same time. I told him, “Ricky, goddammit, pay attention to what you’re doing.” He says, “I am, I am.” He’s telling stories to this guy and the saw is whining away as it cuts out center strips.

Suddenly Ricky yells, “Oh, God!” I rush over, and there’s his thumb on the floor. I grab a paper towel, scoop it up and take Ricky to the hospital. All the time we’re driving, I’m talking to him, trying to keep him from going into shock.

“Do you think they can sew it back on?” he asks me.

“Oh yeah, they got modern-day medicine, no sweat, Rick. Just settle down, everything is going to be just fine. They’ll sew it back on. You may have a little scar but everything is going to be O.K.”

I’m driving and he’s sitting on the passenger side and the thumb is between us, on the seat. While we’re talking, Ricky keeps looking down at it as though the thumb is a third person in the car.

As soon as we get to the hospital, they take Ricky into Emergency. I’ve got the thumb and Ricky is clasping the stub and the doctor walks in. Ricky says, “I’m so glad you’re here. Are you going to be able to sew my thumb back on, Doc?”

The doctor had the worst bedside manner of any doctor I’ve ever met. He says, “No, it wouldn’t do any good. We could sew it back on, but it would just turn black and fall off in a few days. There’s no use in even trying.”

Now Ricky is really going into shock over the whole situation and he says, “Doc, please. I don’t know what my girlfriend will think of me. I don’t care if it works or anything. Just sew it back on so it looks good.”

Of course, they didn’t sew the thumb back on. I saw that a nurse had the thumb and was going to dispose of it. I said, “Do you mind if I take that with me?” She thought it was kind of an odd request, but she gave it to me. I didn’t tell Ricky.

After they got Ricky bandaged up I took him home, gave him a couple of beers and left him there to relax. Then I went back to the shop and mixed up a nice, slow batch of resin in a Dixie cup. Dropped the thumb in it. Let it set up, then took off the Dixie cup. It was absolutely perfect. A paperweight with a thumb suspended in it.

In the shop, we used the thumb as a sort of novelty item. We stuck it in the showcase where we had fins, wax, and skateboard accessories. People browsing the showcase would say, “Hey, take a look at this fake thumb.” Then they’d take a closer look and say, “Jesus Christ, it isn’t a fake. Look, you can see dirt under the fingernail.”

The thumb got to be such a conversation piece that guys started coming in from all over the place just to see it. I came into the shop one Saturday and there must have been eight or ten guys shoulder-deep at the showcase, trying to get a glimpse of the thumb.

Meanwhile, Ricky gets wind that his thumb is on display. I hear he’s mad, so I put away the thumb for safekeeping. He comes in asking for his thumb. We had a giant argument about whose thumb it was. I said, “I found it.” Ricky said, “I don’t care. You’re not supposed to put a guy’s thumb on display.”

Ricky and I argued about the thumb for nearly two years. I still have it. It’s buried in a box somewhere.

 from 1970, with Noll playing the bitter and burdened voice of purity. "I'VE HAD IT," the man who just four years ago was bragging on his boardmaking plant as being the biggest in all of surfdom. "I've had it with the lies, the BS, the impersonalized ethics presently being used in every phase of the surfing world today. We're trying a new thing; there's nothing involved or complicated about it. I believe that there are people who are just as tired as we are of all the BS that's going down today. If so, maybe you can dig the simple concept of a good clean board that works, being created by guys that understand their particular surfing conditions." Noll had gleefully cut against the grain throughout his career, but this newly somber counterculture version of himself fit like a hairshirt, and not long after this ad was published he closed his business and drove north to a life of fishing, crabbing, and, eventually, legend-grooming.

[Photos: Tim McCullough, LeRoy Grannis, CR Stecyk, Art Brewer]

HE'S GOT THE LOOK: GREG NOLL CHARGES LIKE A BULL INTO THE MARKETING GAME

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