“The Old Pro Comes Home: Rick Grigg Wins Duke Invitational,” by Bill Cleary, SURFER magazine, May 1967

The big silver jetliner banks sharply like a toy on the string of a daredevil child. Suddenly, we are sifting down through cotton candy clouds toward the Island.

Oahu . . . green and red in a turquoise sea, like in someone's watercolor imagination. Unreal.

Waikiki is gaiety: No time for negatives about the flat surf. The Duke's well-oiled contest machinery is moving forward, piloted by his right-hand man, Kimo McVay. And in the lobby of the Surfrider Hotel, the surfers have arrived.

Greetings are enthusiastic. Feverish is more like it. Pale and a little bookish after two years on the mainland, Rick Grigg enters tentatively, and is engulfed by the sea of old friends. The fever is contagious.

A little apart, Greg Noll and Mickey Dora, make clandestine conversation with their hands . . . Van Artsdalen and Hemmings Indian wrestle at the front desk to amuse a pretty Hawaiian clerk. Edwards, Froiseth, and Hollinger, who will be the judges, listen intently to meet director Fred Van Dyke as he explains the 20-point scoring system. “That's it,” says Van Dyke. “Inside the curl—that’s the name of the game.” Elsewhere . . . Pomar speaking rapid Spanish with another dark-skinned Latin. Beyond . . . the young set: Hakman, Sutherland, and Hawaiians Aipa and Aikau. None of them looks in place. Too loose. Meanwhile, the tourists stand by stiffly, fingering their Instamatic cameras, swallowed up by aloha shirts and ankle-length muumuus, gawking. Who are these people? they wonder.

Their answer: The Ali‘i of the surfing world, flown here by the Duke, each and every one of them the personal guest of surfing's Grand Old Man himself. Last year SURFER billed the Duke Meet “the perfect surfing contest.” How will it turn out this year?

The phone. Morning already? Impossible. The clock says six. I pick up the receiver. A friend on the North Shore. “It's happening! It's doing it!” he shouts. “The surf . . . the surf!” he shouts breathlessly. “Listen,” he says, “I’ll hold the phone out the window.”

For a moment, nothing. Then one low rumble like distant gunfire. . . and again. The surf 

An hour later—and now it's real. Row upon row they come, charging in over the horizon like plumed cavalry. The waves of Sunset. Conditions are perfect: the tradewinds breathe down gently from the mountains; the huge swells rush onward over the reefs, trembling as they come . . . burning, exploding, demolishing everything in their path as the first heat struggles out over the battlefield into combat.

The meet has begun. There will be four heats, 45 minutes each, six men to a heat. They will need every second. Already the boneyard looks more like a cemetery, abandoned surfboards jutting up here and there like tombstones. Anxious eyes scan the ocean for their fallen riders.

Waiting for his heat stands Rick Grigg, alone, braced against a solitary tree. He hasn’t ridden Sunset in two years. The square jaw hangs slack, eyes glazed, following the waves. Sunset has been his place in the past; an old friendship is rekindling.

Silence. Then, unexpectedly, his mouth forms the words; the eyes are still engaged. “It’s tall out there.”

The second heat enters the water. Santa Cruz entry Doug Haut is missing. “Just wasn’t his day . . . didn't feel like riding,” a friend says. Haut is not alone. East Coast hopeful Gary Propper prones in. Too angry out there. He’s used to smaller stuff. “Like learning to fly in a Piper Cub, and then stepping into a jet!” explains Van Dyke. No one blames Propper, the meet’s youngest entry.

A big wave! Outside, Sunset veteran Rusty Miller wheels around right in the very maw of this raging monster and drives down . . . 

 His board skitters. Out of control! “Ohhh!” A sickening moan from the crowd follows his wipeout. Wave after wave pummels him. Miller is not alone out there. The same thing is happening to others. But Rusty drags himself up onto the beach, he can’t walk. It looks bad. His face is contorted with pain. They rush him to Kahuku Hospital.

Later, a cast cemented to one leg, Rusty commented, “I’d already lost my board once, and since that cost me 20 minutes, I figured I’d have to get out there and really catch a good one. So I took a chance I shouldn’t have. I picked up an outside wave. The drop was tremendous. I hit the bottom, and the wave literally exploded! It wrenched me. But my foot stuck to the wax. The wave twisted again, then pounded me to the bottom. Over and over again it pounded me and—well, you can see for yourself what happened.”

“A spiral fracture. Eight weeks in the cast.”

“Naw, it was great! I don’t usually dig wipeouts. I’m no masochist. But it was fantastic out there. Look at that color. The greens. The whites. Really amazing! You just can’t get more out of surfing than you can at Sunset. This is the best contest in the world!”

One of the best things about the Duke is that it doesn't look like a contest. Just lean, hard, professional performance, designed for surfers by surfers. Not for spectators. (Their day will come when the meet is aired a couple of months later on CBS TV.)

Greg Noll lumbers from the water, his huge bull chest heaving. He stares out over the steaming ocean. “You forget what it's really like out there,” he mutters.

Dora isn’t far behind him. The Cat is limping; there’s a bandage around his right knee. He looks around nervously then shades his eyes and squints out at the horizon, whiskers twitching visibly.

“Got it yesterday. Here. In the shorebreak. Board got me like a guillotine. I laid there flapping like a fish for 20 minutes before I could walk.”

“Are you kidding? I should’ve gone home on the plane last night. Caught one wave in front of Cloutier. My leg caved on the way down. I jump off the side. I come up; the board’s gone. I swim after it. It’s disappearing over the horizon in the rip. I hobble up onto the beach and grab another board out of the car and shoot back out again. Another wave, this time on the shoulder. Then comes the clean-up set. I swim in after my board again and paddle back out. Another clean-up set. It’s getting monotonous. By this time the boat is towing my first board in from the outer rip, so I grab that. Then I get bombed again. I come up. The board’s gone. So I swim over into the channel. Some channel! Those things are still blitzing me and I’m munching the bottom. Now it’s beginning to get to me. Can’t kick with the bad leg. Suddenly the other one’s cramping up! Can’t kick at all now. I’m still eating soup. Somehow I'm able to dog-paddle in without the legs. And I drag myself up onto the beach just in time to hear some creep claiming I had to be rescued by the boat. A lot of 

 but that’s about all I can tell you. It happens every year. Either I crack my skull . . . or the legs go . . . or something else happens . . . and I go home and nurse my wounds for the next 11 months.”

“Yeah,” Noll interrupts. “But it’s still the best day all year. The best day I’ve ever seen here, in fact. Come to think of it, it just might be the best day that’s ever been at Sunset! So how can you have a bad thing? The perfect contest, huh?”

The prelims are over. The top two surfers from each heat move into the finals, but a tie has brought the total of finalists to nine. Last year’s winner, Jeff Hakman, is not among them.

Now the real battle will commence. How will they ride? What will be the winning strategy? Ninety minutes will decide it. The surf is growing 

;the wind, too, is blowing stronger, wrestling tubes into tunnels and tunnels into raging caverns. More than one man will be lost inside those tubes; few will find their way to daylight . . . without swimming.

And the first is Hemmings. He comes beating his way to shore with the huge arms of an angry leviathan. “Where is it?” he yells.

His mother is right there with field glasses. “There, Fred, there!” she cries. “In the rip!”

Hemmings plunges right in after it and churns his way through the angry current, catching the board before it has reached that part of the rip that doesn’t let go. In no time, he’s back in the lineup. But it cost him 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, Greg Noll paddles outside. His strategy is to pick up the really big ones—and he does, one of them pushing 18-feet.

Newcomers Aikau and Aipa are performing with a brilliance far beyond their years. Doyle rides consistently but seems to lack his usual imagination; no one thinks the less of him for it. Big water can wring a man dry.

But it doesn’t stop Hemmings. The Makaha Champ attacks Sunset, zig-zagging from top to bottom like the broken-field runner he is. For sheer aggressiveness, his is by far the most spectacular performance. But it’s a gamble.

Now from the sea—the roar of distant cannon. Off the point, in no-man’s land, the big set’s first salvos are exploding. And now down the alley of finger-reefs where the secrets of big Sunset lie concealed, the waves are running tall. And among them, one man is in the right spot, unwavering; with the coolness of an astronaut he stands; the others are in the wrong spot. One man. “It's Grigg!” comes the cry. And it is. Again and again, he rides. The waves are pouring through. The lines are broken; there is no stopping them. No stopping Grigg.

 late. Tail skittering . . . straight down. No—he made the drop! Now the wall. Crouched . . . driving up into it high, the translucent lip lunging, arms stretched out, reaching . . . “Ohhh!” from the crowd, the tunnel rumbling. Arms down now, relaxed . . . “Ahhh!” Now, once more, the drop, and the whole performance begins anew. Arms out, reaching . . . “Ohhh!” He leads them like a symphony. And so it is, here at Sunset Beach on this day. The Duke Meet. One man, his fellows, and the sea.

In this, the Second Annual Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, there was no one in the water even close to veteran Rick Grigg. In the finals, he amassed a record 243 points on his best five waves. Judge Phil Edwards gave him 94 out of a possible 100 points; Froiseth scored him 77, and Hollinger allowed him 72. Which put Grigg 24 points ahead of Mike Doyle, who took second place with 219. Next was Hemmings with 214, followed by Pomar with 208. Grigg’s tally of 243 was 29 points greater than the 214 scored last year by winner Jeff Hakman.

Hakman was but 17 when his name found its place on the Duke’s perpetual trophy—and indeed, today 

 the era of youthful High Performance; Hakman’s generation rides the center of the stage. Rick Grigg is from the older generation of pioneer High Performers, born into an era when there were few to follow. Rick was among the first to pioneer the big waves of Oahu's North Shore. But today, at 30, Rick Grigg is hardly a candidate for dry dock. In a far more important sense, his life is just beginning. An “Aquanaut” in the Navy’s “Man in the Sea” program, Rick has spent his last few years at La Jolla’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography studying for his PhD in Oceanography—a course which he's very nearly completed.

“This is the greatest thrill I’ve ever had in surfing,” were Rick Grigg's first words. “I never expected to win. Just being here was enough. And the best part for me is that I feel I was representing the older guys out there; it was like winning for them—not for myself. It was like saying ‘Here we are. We’ve been in the water for 20 years . . . and it’s darned near twenty-feet out there. That's a foot for every year. Let’s give it everything we’ve got!”

“You see, the older generation has given surfing everything it’s got. The younger generation will do everything we’ve done, but better, because we gave them a head start.”

Later, Fred Van Dyke, himself a seasoned veteran of many winters along the North Shore frontier and a long-time friend of Grigg, contributed some interesting highlights to the story of Rick’s victory. “Ricky didn’t have much confidence on the morning of the contest. When we started out for the North Shore in the bus he said, ‘It’s going to be too small. I haven’t got a prayer.’ But when we came over the hill and we saw the surf, I think we both knew he could win it. You see,” Fred went on softly, “there’s this peak at Sunset. Now 

 the kids ride it, but to me it has always been the Rick Grigg peak. And you know, I’m willing to bet that most of the young surfers who are hotdogging Sunset today saw the movies of Ricky when they were just learning, and they identified with his way of riding, and this is their subconscious reason for riding Sunset the way they do. So in the Duke meet, when it turned out they were competing with Rick Grigg—well, Rick found that, in a strange way, he was actually competing against his own image!"

Ricky Grigg had this to say: “I thought I was lucky enough just to get out of my heat. I’ve surfed around most of the guys for years. But, of course, I’d never seen much of Aipa or Aikau. I’d heard people raving about them, but since I knew they’d only been surfing a few years, my attitude was—well, I wasn’t too worried about them. But when I saw Aipa sinking his rail so far into these waves and cranking those turns of his, it was pretty spectacular. And then I 

 start to worry. They were all over that ocean, and guys with judgment like they’ve got are the greatest threat. They’ll catch more waves. And out of every 10 waves they catch, five are just bound to be fantastic.”

“Well, we had 90 minutes out there in the finals, and they were judging us on our best five waves. I knew I could catch at least 10 waves in that amount of time, so my strategy was to play the first five conservatively—to ride in the pocket and all that, but the main thing was to ride well and hold on, to get those first five behind me, to make them good, solid twelve- and fourteen-point waves. And I did that in the first 20 minutes. After that, I could afford to take chances. I plenty of time left to play, and by then I was really warmed up. Confident. And I got lucky too. I got locked way back inside some tunnels that were so vertical I was lucky my board didn’t spin. When that happens, you just get so pumped up and enthusiastic that you start doing things you never knew you could do.”

“Isn’t two years a long time to be away from Sunset, Rick? Did you feel in control?”

“You don't forget something as beautiful as Sunset.” Rick’s eyes began to flash. Once again he was living it. The words came fast. His hands pantomimed surfboard and wave. “After the first few waves, I could really feel it again. The speed. I’d hit the bottom and 

 . . . I was right up inside that part of the wave I call the gullet. Hanging there with the skylight right over my head. Then the wave hollowed out and the wind swooshed under me and the board started 

 It was beginning to side-slip. I was right on that razor’s edge of needing bigger equipment. But it held. Way up there I could see the wave crack over! But instead of saying ‘Oh no, I’ll never make it!’ I hit that inside rail and drove right through. Really great!”

“Not of the waves. You see . . .” Rick paused and began anew. “The sea somehow molds the personality of the surfer. You become wild; the big waves themselves are wild. Reckless, in fact. Fear gets lost out there somewhere among the waves. Your physical self gets lost; you are part of it, you live it, you're flowing inside all of nature. And there you are—

Screaming through this beautiful, powerful, natural thing, with only the wind against you.”

Rick grinned. “Sunset is my favorite place. I have the most fun there; it’s the most versatile wave. I came over here in 1958 with Peter Cole, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that first day at Sunset. Consistent eight-foot sets were rolling through, and Peter and I paddled out. I was sitting there calmly, like I’d always done in California, waiting for a set. And I’d just been saying, ‘What a neat place!’ when a 12-foot monster rose up outside and nailed us. But that’s Sunset. You never know what’s going to happen. She’s fickle. Even when it’s up, there can be a set that’ll come through five or ten feet larger than any of the other waves and break way outside. Every set is different. Always changing. You have to be flexible and move with it.”

“Did you make many mistakes in the contest?”

“I always do. You try to play it closer and closer, and there you are, driving left into the peak when you suddenly realize you’ve penetrated too far. And you panic and come around twice as hard as you ever do, and the board bites in and doesn’t skid out from under you, and you thank God you’ve made it that far, and you just pray that when that lip comes down, it’ll come over your head instead of slamming down on top of you. Because if it ever hits you, that’s it. You haven’t got a chance in the world of staying on that board. That’s what happened to Rusty. A split-second thing. Yes, I was lucky out there.”

“When it was all over, did you think you’d won?”

Rick smiled. “Yes. After it was all finished, I did. Before we went out, though, I didn’t think I had a prayer. But I had incredible luck: Every time I paddled out a set was there to meet me. That’s just the way things happened. That part wasn’t skill; it wasn’t all judgment. It was the cosmos. Chance. But when the waves are big like they were, there’s so much ocean to cover and there’s so little time—anything can happen. One slight miscalculation, a piece of bad luck, some chop—and there goes your board. A 20-minute round trip to the beach and back. That can happen to the best surfer in the world. It happened to Strauch and Dora and Hakman. Last year, Jeff won. Next year, he might do it again. But watch Aipa. He’s a dark horse. He could win next year. Unless another old man like me wins it. Maybe Peter Cole.”

1966 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championships

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