"Is Surfing Hip?" by Sam George, ran in the June 1998 issue of Surfer. This version has been slightly edited.

In a world of MTV Sports, X Games and Mountain Dew commercials, with Spandexed sky divers hopping out of planes with video cameras on their heads, with brain-dead bungee-jumpers falling off bridges for fun, with gang-baggy, shambling skaters scraping up against greasy parking lot partitions and sliding down handrails and flicking their boogers at the Establishment, with goateed snowboarders claiming to do “200-yard-long bottom turns” while engaged in a sport that takes at least three weeks to get pretty good at; in a world of “extreme” playground activities like BMX kiddy-bike hopping or freestyle in-line roller disco or “I’m not good enough to do this standing up” street luge; or retro-dork games like golf (which is not a sport because like softball, another game-not-a-sport, you can play it just as well while drinking beer), or all the bouncy-ball, sweaty gym time-killers that need a net and a whistle; in a sporting sound-bite society where wakeboarders catch big air but still need Mommy and Daddy to drive the boat, where rock climbers summit to the rafters on plastic walls, where mountain-bikers bounce up and down dirt tracks like motocrossers without motors and where the motocrossers are jumping motorhomes and dressing like the skaters who listen to the same music that the snowboarders do which is OK because it sounds rad in a halfpipe and besides, they’re all wearing the same style of sneakers anyway—the question begs to be asked:

The answer is: Oh yeah. Very hip. The original hip.

Hipper than hip. And you know it, too. You just don’t 


"Hip." Tracing its origins is a little sketchy, but the 

, at least, explains that the word derives from “hep” and the term "hepcat,” popularized by black jazz players in the 1930s. These from the word hepicat, or “person in the know,” from the West African language spoken by the Wolof people.

The images normally associated with hipsters are clear: smooth jazzmen blowing their lives away in blue-smoke barrooms; or khaki pants, small spiral-bound journals and plenty of booze and drugs keeping the Beats—and the next wave of followers, the beatniks—in black berets, goatees and bongos. Finally, the ultimate parody of those in the know: hippies, who knew only that they didn’t want to listen to the same music or wear the same clothes as their parents, and sure as hell didn’t want to go to Vietnam.

Hip is easy to imagine, but much harder to understand. Because what did these hip subcultures know, other than they were searching for something different? To search is not necessarily hip, and dissatisfaction is definitely not a hip state. Unlike Zen, hipness is not the journey, but the destination. Hip is where you live. It is something you do, someone you are. And it’s got to make someone else want to be like you, to wonder about what you know, and why they don't know.

I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was being driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea; especially as, though the tents and the ships were so near, he did not seem in the least to envy or even to take any notice of the crowds of his countrymen collected to view them as objects that were rare and curious.

This is from the journal of Captain James Cook, written in 1777, the Western World’s first surf report.

Of course, one could argue that by simply doing what comes naturally as an extension of one’s culture, a person does not automatically become hip—although in the case of the hip progenitor in Cook's log, he was obviously on a much different trip than his more materialistic brethren on shore. Primal African rhythms are the norm in Takoradi, Ghana, and have been for generations. But bring them to America, squeeze them through new instruments and play them in the uninhibited scenes of 1930s Chicago and New Orleans, and the result is a true hepcat. The same analogy works for surfing. Hawaiians, it could be said, were merely participating in a cultural pastime, but it took Americans to make the hepcat’s distinction.

Enter, then, the Father of Hip: Thomas Edward Blake.

There were California surfers before Tom Blake came to Santa Monica in 1920, and there were 

 beachboys in Hawaii before Blake showed up on the sands of Waikiki in 1924. But none of these earlier surfers had Blake’s clear sense of purpose and undaunted, unswerving passion. That Blake was originally from Wisconsin enabled him—like the jazz musicians who would parallel his pilgrimage during the same time period—to translate an ancient dance form into a lifestyle. Through his example, surfing wasn’t simply something that one did, but something that one was. And what Blake, most definitely, was in the know.

, Blake describes the sort of counterculture sensibilities that wouldn’t hit the mainstream for another quarter-century:

I like it [in Hawaii] because I can live simply and quietly here. I can live well, without the social life. I can dress as I please, for comfort, usually it’s a pair of canvas sneakers, light trousers and a sleeveless polo shirt with swimming trunks all day. My greatest pleasure is through my eyes, so why should I stay around Main Street or Broadway? The coco palms waving in the clean trade winds, the colors of the water on the coral reef greet my eyes each day as I near the beach, and when the giant waves are breaking white, far from shore, it means royal sport is waiting and I actually break into a run to get to the Outrigger Club, don trunks, and get out my favorite surfboard.

There is a much-published photo of Tom Blake that we would do well to examine more closely so that we can understand how much it defines us, his children. The photo was taken in 1935. Blake is on the beach in Waikiki, tan and fit and posed in front of a bunch of giant wooden surfboards. But take a look at that quiver: the two on his right are hollowed-out reproductions (you didn't think all this old-board restoration stuff going on these days is new, did you?) of ancient Hawaiian 

. Those are his shorter hotdog boards. Behind him is his favorite shooter, a hollowed 

, for big water and graceful sliding. To his left is a square-railed hollow version of an 

, but with a swallowtail outlined for future R&D. On his far left are his revolutionary record-setting paddle boards (Blake won the first Catalina race in 1934), a hollow one for racing, and a solid one for training. Oh, and Blake is wearing trunks, in an era when other surfers all wore wool one-pieces and tank suits.

What this photo reveals isn’t just a man’s boards but a man's life, a man’s choices. Blake was into surfing, not as a pastime, not as sport, but as a philosophy, as a way of life.

, writer-poet and New Bohemian Malcolm Crowley characterizes the mood of mainstream American culture:

The business-Christian ethic represented by the Saturday Evening Post is familiar to most people, but one feature of it has not been sufficiently emphasized. Substantially, it was a production ethic. The great virtues it taught were industry, thrift and personal initiative. The workman should be industrious in order to produce more for his employer; he should save money in order to become a capitalist himself, then found new factories where other workmen would toil industriously, and save, and become capitalists in return.

In counterpoint, Crowley then profiles Greenwich Village in New York City—a bastion of free-thinking in Crowley's opinion—and establishes a checklist of hipness. Hipness, he writes, is “not only a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all Bohemias, it was also a doctrine."

The interesting thing, for us, is how Crowley's code fits surfing so perfectly. In fact, the surfing life up until the early 1960s shamed even the hippest place in America, because the Village Bohemians described by Crowley reached their exalted state by sitting on their asses in teashops, smoking cigarettes, sipping absinthe and wearing new hairdos while listening to someone else’s music. Surfers, on the other hand, were out-paganing these new pagans, worshipping, as Blake put it, “under the blessed church of the open sky,” plugged straight into the coolest natural source of energy on the planet.

Aside from that, check out how surfing exemplifies (or at least used to exemplify) Crowley’s eight-point definition of hip:


Why do you think Duke and his crew were called beachboys? In fact, mainstream America still has a hard time accepting the fact that adults surf.)


Miki Dora at Malibu, Nat Young at Honolua Bay, Tom Curren in Indonesia. The list is endless.


“Ku mai! Ku mai! Ka nalu nui mai Kahiki mai!" Do golfers pray for tee times? Do skaters sacrifice their boards in hopes of finding the perfect handrail?


Even the Beach Boys got this one right: “Catch a wave and you're siftin' on top of the world."


One of our founding fathers put it best when he wrote surfing’s declaration of independence in the first issue of this magazine: “In this crowded world the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day, the perfect wave, and be alone with the surf and his thoughts.”


OK, surfing has suffered in this department lately, but it wasn't always so. Three names: Isobel Latham, Vickie Flaxman, Kathy Kohner. Go ahead, look them up.


Kick off your shoes, take off the long pants, slip into your favorite pair of surf trunks and—see what I mean?


Which we have been doing since Whitey Harrison stowed away on the U.S.S. Monterey, bound for Honolulu, in 1932. And more recently, there was a little thing called 

Tom Blake, Pete Peterson, Peanuts Larsen, Dorian Paskowitz, Buzzy Trent, Bud Browne, Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin, Dale Velzy, Bob Simmons, Tom Zahn, Les Williams—the list goes on and on. Every one of these cultural pioneers emanated more hipness in their littlest sandy toe than any gloomy Parisian bistro or North Beach java house full of morose stream-of-consciousness Kerouacs, sideline-howling Ginsbergs or ghost-eyed, smackd-out, “it used to be all about the music, man" trumpet players.


You'll notice that surfing's hipness timeline screeches to a half in the early '60s. This is not surfing's fault. Or, more accurately, it is surfing's fault, but surfers themselves are not to blame.

Anything truly hip will eventually be consumed by popularity. It’s almost a law of nature. Columbia Pictures’ 

, released in 1959, made surfing out to be so hip that everyone wanted to be a surfer—or at least dress and talk like one. And once that happened, like a pack of wolves following the youth of America’s collective buffalo herd, in came the marketing men.

This was nothing new. Crowley saw it happening back in 1934, during the inevitable demise of his beloved Village’s hipness: “Though it lay no plots in advance, American business was quick enough to use the situation, to exploit the new market for cigarettes and cosmetics, and to realize that, in advertising pages and movie palaces, sex appeal was now the surest appeal.”

So just where did that leave surfing, the sexiest sport in America? Reeling, in its hippest of hearts, under the brunt of two heavy mainstream body blows: the first in the mid-'60s, second in the late '80s. Big business took the Code and threw it back in our faces. And the sad thing is, a lot of us danced to the piper, strip-mining that which made surfing special and dumping the ore into the open market. Once that happened, it wasn’t “them” anymore, but us who perpetuated the betrayal. “they” only made 

 once. With all the money that poured in, the newly-rich surf moguls were able to ease the pain by buying compounds in Cabo and trips to Tavarua, while the trailings of surfing’s once awesome hipness washed downriver to the sea.

Which, of course, is right where it should be: it only needs salt water to grow. Keep in mind surfing’s great secret, unfathomable to the brightest business minds in America: 

itself was not hip, but two buddies, two Mickeys—Dora and Munoz—getting paid scale to double for James Darren and Sandra Dee on a clean, 4-foot day at Secos? 


Tough call, especially when looking at our current role models. Kelly Slater in a golf shirt? Rob Machado, mailing in his last Pipe Masters heat so he could get back up to Petey Johnson’s lawn to practice his chip shot? Kelly should be watching 

 Machado should want to dress like Wayne Lynch, not Happy Gilmore. This new motocross chic? Enjoy yourself, Kalani: it'll all come crashing down with the first broken navicular.

Then there’s that most transparent pose: the surfer as guitar-slinging rock star. Give it up, guys: you don't play like Curren, you can't play like Curren, you won’t play like Curren. Recently, a major American surf magazine contained a feature in which a former advertising salesman "defined" the current state of surfing in the ’90s: “Donavon Frankenreiter came over with his acoustic guitar in 1990 and asked me to show him a few chords. Now the guy’s traveling the world playing stadium tours or booking club gigs every night. Surf all day, jam all night and maintain surf industry sponsors and status along the way. Brilliant. And chicks dig a guy with a guitar, just watch MTV.”

Excuse me, Mr. Z., but what planet do you surf on?

As for snowboarding, only Joey Cabell, Mickey Munoz and Gerry Lopez can truly be forgiven their recent obsession with the mountains. They’ve proved themselves enough, for God’s sake. As far as the rest of the “boarding generation” is concerned, ask yourself this: would you even consider standing in a lift line if it took as long to get good at “riding” as it did to master surfing? Bullshit.

So, to answer the question: Yes. Surfing was hip, is hip, will always be hip.

Just not for the reasons that everyone thinks. Antoine de St. Exupery, the French pilot-philosopher who should have been a surfer, put it best in his book 

, published posthumously in 1950. “But the love of the dance does not mean the love of you, the dancer. Your significance flows from your work of art; it is not the work of art that draws its prestige from you.”

You surf stars might want to consider this—but don’t think too hard. Because no matter how well you surf, how significant your “art," any stardom that happens to come with it is just a facade. For all of his fame and distractions, Kelly Slater is at the core of his existence a stoked surfer. What he really loves is to paddle out and catch a wave, then ride it back to shore. Then paddle out and catch another. We know this, because, unlike the fan in a sports arena or at the foot of some concert stage, what Kelly does is what we do. Unlike devotees of music or art or literature, we’re not in the audience.

A 7-year-old paddling out next to his dad at Sebastian Inlet for the first time; a young woman winning a pro contest at Sunset Beach; a white-haired, wrinkled gremmie riding into a warm Indian summer sunset at San Onofre—each of them is playing their own song, painting their own portrait, writing their own story. Each is “in the know,” keenly aware (whether they realize it or not) that, despite the many attempts to commercialize and shrink-wrap the whole thing, surfing is still special, and that they are special for doing it. Because what’s endured through the eras is the satisfaction that comes with the knowledge that you’ve made the choice to spend your life riding waves.

This, and the fact that surfing isn't included in the X Games.

[Photos: Tom Servais, Tom Blake, John Witzig]

"IS SURFING HIP?" by SAM GEORGE (1998)

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