“The Huntington Run-On,” by Drew Kampion, SURFER, January 1970

“This year’s Huntington Contest,” says Drew Kampion, “can be summed up in a single sentence.” And it is.

Once again the prime-time soap opera threw out its net and dragged in the fish of the sea along the scum of the earth the of the patch and the run of mill as the eleventh annual huntington beach united states surfing championships got underway and finished getting underway beneath bright skies and gentle winds with plenty of big surf and freaky people in the beautiful pier city of huntington beach site of the largest police concentration in the entire world (per capita) and oft times canablis center to a depraved orange county populace plagued by operation intercept and low-flying marine helicopters american flag decals irate parents irate children recent bad weather brought on by excessive strontium ninety particles in the wind and therefore on the grass and therefore in the bellies and eventually the udders of cows and therefore in the milk too huntington beach where for eleven straight years in varying surf conditions ranging from poor to super-excellent the united states surfing champ has been chosen with varying degrees of validity this year being no exception as corky carroll ripped apart some tremendous stupendous and scary left walls that came wedging in from the south and shoved all the action up close to the pier where the odds were running very high in favor of the pilings this year especially by finals time when already johnny fain reno abellira mickey munoz dru harrison and several others had fed the ravished cement verticals their shiny nice sub-ten-pounders and got off with only the splintered ruptured leftovers because of all these huge nasty waves that had come crashing into everything on friday before the saturday contest opening when half the people practicing ended up with two halves and heartache so that adapting to emergency boards became an added fun happening on saturday’s man- eating green maulers though in some elite circles defiance proved successful one of the perilous few being the man who brought the greatest impact to the contest from hawaii gerry lopez side-slip-in-front-of-the-inviting-pilings specialist many times faced with fringing hollow wedging walls who negotiated the pier in a variety of fashions ranging from full-on sideslip to through-the-lip in front of the t’s to drive straight through with a smile to prone out and never hardly was ruffled though there were a few tense moments when he lost it two feet in front of a cement buttress on at least one occasion while on the pier the gallery grimaced and watched closely to see it all fly and amid the frolic paced the salvation spreaders revivalists and hordes of teenies intent upon their own pimply scene while beneath them tiger makin took amazing risks playing cannonball with gnarly guns of navarone waves throwing himself into the air over the tops of waves around the bottoms and through several predictably disastrous situations from which he invariably emerged unscathed and smiling once six inches in front of one of the t’s pilings when the announcer had nearly sounded the death knell for him which brings to mind the announcing which attained a higher level of poetry and homeric hyperbole than ever before achieved or recorded or uttered in the syllabic somnambulism breathed to life in huntington’s eleven years as a contest situation in attendance by the nation’s greatest several of whom were as a matter of fact in attendance this very year among their numbers michael tabeling east coast fantastic-nattish ripper who showed well locally before and after but not during his heat along with claude codgen the east coast’s new top number one surfer in this case a goofy-foot who is capable of an interesting and explosive backside that rises and falls in pizzicato to some invisible unheard bippy tune while among the other invited guests such pinnacles of the sport as reno abellira with brewer-built emergency up-kicked nose which kept catching and jimmy blears who occasionally got completely out of the wave and into some airborne exploration and then there was (whew!) sharron weber who got back her round-trip from hawaii by winning the first place women’s award of a round-trip ticket to hawaii by riding sort of well on several waves and then letting her little body drop very suddenly down about the biggest wave of the contest that had to be a close-out but wasn’t and she charged through the pier and out the other side to the tune of eighty-four rolls of exposed kodachrome II for there were a great deal of the photo enthusiasts on hand to line the beach in a rasty row of chrome and garrish black and shutter clickings and all kinds of mean and nasty things happening there beneath the judging stands where all the points were awarded and interferences duly recorded for such horrendous breaches of surfing etiquette as not seeing someone twenty feet behind you on a certain wave when chuck dent walked up and pecked johnny fain on the ear or blew in his ear as the case may be while things were developing outside such as dru harrison evolving into a surfer of such tremendous grace and smoothness that he is becoming an imminent rival of long-the-head-of-the-smoothness-and-grace-dept david nuuhiwa who didn’t show bad himself though a cut foot got in the way as cut feet will and reined him to a halt before the final heat which also didn’t include charging hotty brad through-the-lip mccaul who got no better than third in his prelim mainly due to poor wave selection and dale dobson who once again demonstrated his hair and ultimate coordination in times of great duress like under tons of falling water which at times can feel very heavy when it makes bodily contact but then this is 1969 and tube rides are out i suppose though deserving people such as corky carroll rolf aurness mike purpus dru harrison and gerry lopez were on hand when the final of the men’s event convened in the nifty ten-knots-towards-the-pier current though rolf for a change didn’t either get it on or yawn spending much too much time riding behind folks that dropped in in front of him because he kept taking off so far back no one thought he’d be able to make it out which occasionally turned out to be the case or mike purpus who surfed a trifle stock but nonetheless under full control at all times and thus avoided the usual penalties involved in experimenting during the finals such as blowing whatever you’re trying and thus blowing the heat so mike finished third and rolf fourth and dru grabbed off several backside biggies and did them well for second while gerry lopez who probably contributed the most to the contest overall pooped out after a late start in the final and never managed to approach his performances of the earlier heat which left corky to pick off the biggest waves and ride them the longest in good control and with a moderate degree of free-flowing expressionist surfing that was a thousand percent improvement over any of his prior contest performances this year or since the mid-point of last year’s beach riots and therefore found himself settled nicely into a clean and clear victory which when combined with his entry and victory in the hernia-inducing pier paddle race insured his reception of the top award of the whole affair which is the duke kahanamoku perpetual trophy for all-around best surfer and the cork was glad indeed to receive the same for this was a very necessary win for him that had been having a dry season up till then while in other departments elation was also in abundance as dewey dewfish weber squeaked by mickey mongoose munoz for the senior men’s top spot which was awarded by master of ceremonies brennan hevs mcclelland in the form of gigantic bear hugs kisses and the like for which the crowd turned on a riot of laughter which worried the cops but not hevs who had successfully elucidated laughter throughout the day’s festivities such that we would recommend he m c the entire happening next year for such is his control over crowds and his sense of the dramatic and his perception that without him (this is serious hevs) the huntington contest would have been much less fun and much less successful while in the kamaainas it was smooth riding hawaiian-experienced kit horn and in the boys joey baldwin and in the juniors niles osborne who ripped and i almost forgot the dory race that was won by the l a county lifeguards in an event that featured at least twenty overturnings and many close calls with the pilings but fortunately for a change no busted people or boats so that’s nice to hear anyway and so the thing broke up and for thirty miles up and down the honeycombed-by-oil-pumps coast the internal combustion engines revelled in their diaphanous purge of pollutants into the air while hitchhikers hitched and greasy burgers were flipped on greasy skillets in greasy spoons and huntington surfboard shops sold off the last of their sunday boards and a few patient souls paddled out into the finally deserted pier surf above which the pier drained itself of the motley gathering that had been its two-day infestation and all sped off or retired from the quote scene of the crime unquote and once again the lazy atmosphere of huntington beach was restored as six hippies were arrested for creating a public nuisance while an albino-bleached red-eyed lovely was beaten in a local bar and an ambulance careened north on coast highway towards huntington cliffs in search of a carcass while toilets in the area continued to flush bodily impurities out of the home and into the playgrounds so that was that and we’ll see you next year for the eleventh time making it number twelve and what is there in between but life Yes!

1969 United States Surfing Championships

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