The following is an excerpt from Morning Glass, Mike Doyle's 1993 autobiography. While Doyle refers to the 1965 contest as the Peruvian International—which it was—it doubled as the second World Surfing Championships.

In January 1965, I traveled with twelve other surfers from the Long Beach Surf Club to Lima, Peru, to compete in the Peruvian International. Our team was sponsored by Catalina Swimwear, which was eager to capitalize on the growing popularity of surfing.

The Peruvians had a beautiful clubhouse they called Club Waikiki, at Miraflores Beach, just outside Lima. It was more like a polo club than any surf club I’d ever seen. It had two swimming pools, a restaurant, bar, squash court, locker rooms, lots of pretty girls lying around, masseuses, and white-jacketed waiters running all over the place. Everyone who surfed in Peru at that time was wealthy. There weren’t any peasant surfers—no surf rats, no beach bums. Surfing was a gentleman’s sport in Peru, and almost all the surfers were very, very rich. They would work for a while in the morning, tending to their business affairs, then come down to the club for the rest of the day. They would surf for a couple of hours at the little beachbreak in front of the club, shower, then have lunch and cocktails on the terrace.

At Club Waikiki, guests weren’t allowed to carry their own surfboards down to the water—the servants did it for you. One of the Australian surfers, Nat Young, didn’t like that. When they tried to take his board from him, he snatched it back and said, “Goddamnit, leave me alone! I’ll carry my own board!” Which is how most of us felt, too. But Nat only insulted the servant, and probably our hosts as well, and in the end, the Indian carried his board anyway.

The servants waxed your board for you, too. If you lost your board, they would run over and shag it before it hit the rocks. You could surf right up to the beach, step off and walk away—the servants would run down, grab your board, and carry it up to your locker. If you happened to ding your board, at night a little Indian came out of a hole in back of the club and patched it for you. The whole scene seemed unnatural and made me uncomfortable. But the Peruvians were such great hosts, and they took the whole thing so seriously, we had no choice but to go along with it.

Most of the young Peruvian surfers were bored rich kids, like spoiled princes. They loved playing the role of Latin lovers, and they were outrageous partiers. But the older guys who sponsored the contest were active surfers, too. They’d paddle out and catch a wave just to show they still had the old animal prowess. Then they’d come in, have cocktails and lunch, and play a few rounds of paleta, which is kind of like badminton.

We stayed at a hotel in town, and a bus would pick us up and take us to the club every day, or to one of the many social events the Peruvians had planned for us. One afternoon they got us all drunk at the club, then took us to a bullring. They gave us capes and said, “Here, it’s time to fight the bulls.” I didn’t want to fight any bulls. Most of us didn’t. We tried to get out of it, tried to politely decline, but the Peruvians wouldn’t have it. It was a big macho deal to fight a bull, and everyone had to do it. The bulls had their horns trimmed so we wouldn’t get gored, but it was still dangerous. Several guys got flipped around, and we could have been badly hurt. I really hated that, but I did it.

On another occasion, the president of Peru at that time, Fernando Belaunde Terry, invited the whole Long Beach Surf Club to a banquet at the presidential palace. We all filed by in our blue blazers and shook his hand. We were honored—imagine, a president who wanted to meet surfers! We drank huge pitchers of pisco sours, which are like the national drink, and had a great time.

One of the contest sponsors was Pancho Wiese, the president of a big bank chain in Peru. He surfed and had even won a few local contests back in his prime. Another contest sponsor and organizer was Carlos Dogny, in his eighties by then, who had been one of the first surfers in Peru and had helped start Club Waikiki. The skin on his face was taught and almost translucent, as if he’d had several face lifts. He was still in great shape, though, and always had two or three young girls on his arm. Dogny never seemed to work, but he had a huge house, and he invited us all to come over for a big party. I remember he had a big bowl of photographs sitting on a table where everybody could look at them. They were all pictures of Dogny in swim trunks flexing his muscles, Dogny lifting weights, Dogny on the beach with young girls on his arm. I remember thinking some of them were pretty wild photos to be leaving around for the guests to see. But that’s the way he was, eager to project an image of great sexual vitality.

I was on a strict training regimen at the time. I was a vegetarian and trying to stay away from hard booze. I figured if I’d traveled all that way to compete in a surf contest, I owed it to myself and my sponsors to try my best. My roommate at the hotel was Reno Abellira, a great young Hawaiian surfer who was teaching me some yoga postures. Reno and I would get up early in the morning and do yoga, then go surf, trying to get ready for the contest.

But the Peruvians didn’t want us to train. They wanted us to drink and party. Before lunch, every day, they’d start drinking. One guy would stand up at the club, wave his drink at the rest of us, say “Salud!”, and insist that we all lift a glass with him. As soon as he sat down, another Peruvian would stand up and say, “Otra salud!” And we’d all have to drink another.

The contest was held at a place called Puntas Rocas, about thirty miles south of Lima, on a desolate point. There were some sharp barnacles that grew on the rocks there; the Peruvians called them 

, and they could punch holes in your feet if you weren’t careful, so some of the surfers wore tennis shoes. There was a heavy fog on the morning of the contest, but the waves were ten to twelve feet and well-shaped. The surf reminded me a lot of Swami’s, back in Encinitas, so I felt comfortable out there.

The best surfers in the world were there: George Downing, Mickey Munoz, Paul Strauch, Buffalo Keaulana, Fred Hemmings, Nat Young and Joey Cabell, just to name a few. In my first heat, Downing dropped in ahead of me, and I had to bail out to avoid hitting him. The wave took my board and carried it all the way to the rocky shore, about a mile away. I was able to bodysurf in, grab my board and paddle back out. I placed second in that heat and eventually went on to the finals.

A handsome young Peruvian, Felipe Pomar, won the contest, with Nat Young taking second and Paul Strauch third. Some people thought favoritism in world surfing had stretched all the way to South America. Personally, I thought Pomar outshined us all on his home waves and deserved to win.

Once the contest was finished, the Peruvians wanted to party even harder. They took us all to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Lima, where everybody got drunk. Little by little things started to get out of control until eventually everybody was throwing food and smashing plates on the floor. George Downing, who had been coming to the Peruvian Invitational since 1955 and was sort of the Hawaiian ringleader, started breaking chairs and smashing them over the tables. I suppose he figured that was what the Peruvians expected of us, so he did his best to make them happy. The Americans started throwing food at the Hawaiians, and the Hawaiians fought back by throwing plates at us. The crazier it got, the more the Peruvians loved it.

What really confused me was that the Chinese who owned the restaurant didn’t seem to mind the demolition. They weren’t thrilled about it the way our hosts were, but they accepted it in good humor. Later, when we all finally staggered out of the place, our hosts handed the restaurant owners a big stack of cash.

One of the Peruvians involved in the contest was Pitty Block, a wealthy race car driver who had competed on the international Grand Prix circuit. He was a bit heavy, dressed well, and always had a wild look in his eye. He made his living from a very successful body shop in Lima. All the Peruvians who were in the surf club drove the fastest American cars—Corvettes, GTOs, Trans Ams—and they all drove like madmen, which meant their cars were always in Pitty Block's shop getting fixed.

The night after the dinner at the Chinese restaurant, Pitty asked me and a couple of others to take a drive with him. He had a Jaguar XKE, and we all crammed into it. As soon as we left the hotel, he started going about eighty miles an hour through the narrow side streets of Lima, I suppose to demonstrate his skill as a driver. An Indian peasant pushing a little cart full of oranges couldn’t get out of his way, and Pitty splattered that cart like a cartoon. I was scrunched down in the back of the Jaguar, thinking we were going to get thrown into jail. But Pitty just screeched to halt and told us, “No problem.” He got out, walked over to the little Indian, who was terrified, pulled out a roll of cash, and handed him a few bills. The Indian nodded agreeably but then pointed to the wrecked cart. So Pitty handed him a few more bills. Now the Indian was elated! He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Not only had he sold all his oranges, but he would get a new cart as well. Getting run over by Pitty Block was probably the luckiest thing to happen to him in years.

Pitty laughed, gave us a nod that everything was alright, hopped back into the Jag, revved the engine a few times, and we were off again at eighty miles an hour.

Before long we were way out in the country. I heard Pitty say something about a whorehouse, but I already knew there were several whorehouses right around the comer from our hotel back in Lima, so I couldn’t understand what we were doing out here in the middle of nowhere.

We finally pulled up to an old colonial-style mansion surrounded by rows and rows of new American cars. Pitty explained that this was an “official whorehouse.” As near as I could tell, that meant the place had been set up by the ruling class, for the ruling class. That way there would be no blackmail, no bad rumors leaking out, no embarrassment to the men or their families. They controlled everything.

Inside, it was like a huge barroom. All the Peruvians from Club Waikiki were there—they’d just moved the party from Lima proper out to their whorehouse in the country. Most of the Hawaiians were there ahead of us and already in great form. They knew the routine, and they were primed for it.

I was amazed to see that every girl in the place was absolutely gorgeous. There were Asian girls, Peruvian girls, American girls. All of them exotically beautiful.

Pitty pointed, then asked me, “Which one do you want?”

I felt a little uneasy. I was twenty-three and not exactly naive when it came to sex, but I’d never seen anything like this before.

“Don’t worry about the cost,” Pitty said. “I’ll take care of it.”

I pointed to a Japanese girl and said, “She’s nice.”

Pitty smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Okay, come on.”

He led me over, nodded, and she immediately took me to a back room. We had a couple of drinks and talked for a while. She waited until I was relaxed and comfortable before she initiated the sex. She was a real professional.

When I rejoined the others, Pitty asked me, “Did you enjoy yourself?” When I nodded, Pitty pointed toward the girls again and said, “Do you see another one you like?”

I must have looked shocked because Pitty laughed out loud. I’d been thinking this was a one-course meal—I didn’t know it was a smorgasbord. But looking around, I noticed that some of the older Peruvians disappeared with a different girl every few minutes. And when Pitty went into the back rooms, he took two girls at a time.

Sometime that night, I came to the realization that the Peruvians couldn’t have cared less about the Peruvian International Surfing Contest. They just loved watching the rest of us go berserk in their country. They had already indulged themselves with every kind of pleasure imaginable, and the only new pleasure for them came from watching us do the same. Officially they were our hosts, but actually we were there to entertain them.

[Photos: Jose Antonio de Lavalle, Dick Graham]

"THE PERUVIANS LOVED WATCHING US GO BERSERK IN THEIR COUNTRY" - MIKE DOYLE REMEMBERS CLUB WAIKIKI

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