Eddie Aikau made his mark at Sunset Beach before Waimea, so maybe there's some poetic justice in that the first and totally unremembered Eddie Aikau Invitational, sponsored by Quiksilver, was held at Sunset. The waves were okay, not great. Northwest swell, dropping throughout the day, some funky tradewind bump in the afternoon. In the final, local boy Denton Miyamura beat Marvin Foster, Hans Hedemann and both Ho brothers, and pocketed $5,000—which sounds like peanuts untill you find out that Dane Kealoha earned a flimsy $1,000 for his Duke Classic win two weeks later. Top pros in 1984 were basically one missed paycheck away from selling lemonade on Kam Highway.

Anyway, it would have been nice if the surf had pumped for Denton and the boys that afternoon, but it didn't, which meant the photographers didn't much bother, which meant there were no photos for the article, which meant the debut Eddie Invitational earned a half-assed two-paragraph rundown in SURFER and nothing at all in 

The Quiksilver promo team flew back to Costa Mesa, took stock, and to their credit figured out that the world apparently did not need another off-the-shelf pro event at Sunset Beach. They instead huddled up that summer with George Downing and Eddie Rothman and flew back to Hawaii the following winter with a contest idea worthy of Eddie Aikau: a single-day, huge-or-nothing big-wave throwdown.

You know the rest. Brother Clyde won the contest, 18-year-old rookie charger Brock Little made his bones, Roger Erikson produced the wipeout of the year, and SURFER did a last-minute switcharoo to get the Eddie contest on the cover. 

And so it went, into our brave big-wave future: Keone, Bruce, Noah, Kelly, Healey, Long, all giving of their best in what were often Deathstar Waimea conditions, and thus elevating the Quiksilver into an event that we've held near and dear for over three decades. 

1984: THE EDDIE TAKES A MULLIGAN

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