"Jazz Man: Tom Morey: the Man Who Gave Waves to the World," by Steve Barilotti, ran in the April 1996 issue of SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.


So we’re huddled under this overpass out in the middle of the Godforsaken desert west of Yuma somewhere, waiting out a hellacious thunderstorm that has Tom Morey absolutely freaked. The rain hits the black griddle of asphalt and steams off in spectral wisps. Banshee winds rock our van and two-second lightning bolts come snarling out of the low, gray sky, blasting distant stands of saguaro cactus into charred, arthritic skeletons.

Morey is convinced we are going to die. “I’m not going anywhere.” he declares. “It’s too dangerous—we’ll all be fried!”

Marchia, Morey's wife, remains silent and serene through the whirling turmoil, having seen the measure of her husband’s brilliant moods over the past 20 years. She knows that his bad humor, like this brief desert tempest, will soon pass.

Our generic white mommy-van, stuffed with spongy little mutant boards reeking of toxic polymers, is at first sight an unlikely surf vehicle. But given our ultimate destination (New Braunfels, Texas), and our purpose (to surf a man-made 6-foot tube called the FlowRider), it is perhaps entirely appropriate. After all, this aerodynamic breadbox is essentially archaic technology redefined by bytes, chips and hybrid materials to maximize its efficiency and comfort—as is the ergonomically engineered wave we're driving 1,000 miles into the heart of America to ride tomorrow.

It stops raining and a dusty rainbow suddenly blossoms over the arid, primeval landscape. And Morey, inventor of the Boogie Board and perhaps the most revered and reviled man among modern waveriders, surveys the desert while noodling a gay ragtime ditty on his thrift-store ukulele. High little notes sprinkle the air. He has that misty look of rapture and distraction again: playing, thinking, dreaming—bathed in the warm weird waters of total cognition. The hot wind ruffles his thatchy gray hair. And like a benign version of the jungle-mad Kurtz, Morey grins fiercely at the rainbow and mutters:

One of the more telling icons of Tom Morey’s nature is a picture of him in 1956 finessing a very stylish matador cross-step to the nose at Malibu. His board is in optimum trim down a thigh-high peeler, body held in relaxed stately carriage. Arms are raised, and the finger English is just so—as if he were a buffed Fred Astaire in baggies ballroom dancing after midnight with an imagined debutante.

One more thing: he’s going left. At Malibu. Probably the only left that broke all day and on this morning in 1956 he’s on it and the photographer’s on it and he hits this wonderful pose and it all clicks together—

—in another moment of sidetrack synchronicity that makes up Morey's day-to-day. Mr. Zig against a herd of resolute Zaggers.

But to say that Morey is a diehard contrarian would be to miss the point. It’s just that he quite literally dances to the offbeat sound of his own weird drummer.

For example, Morey likes to give his 10-second parable of the three little pigs who worked like hell to build a house that gave them protection from the Big Bad Wolf.

“ . . . so then these self-centered little hogs all went squealing inside their stone house where they can live like frigging pigs,” he says with a disbelieving tone. “What’s wrong with living like a Wolf?”


On this hot fall afternoon, Morey, age 60, is whanging tennis balls against a wall at San Clemente High School. He swings the racquet in rhythmic 4/4 time, accent on the downbeat, and wearing his preferred court togs—flowered baggies and nothing else. Shoes seem anathema to Morey; he only wears them when forced to. I suspect they represent something truly wrong with modern society.

After a while he abandons his racquet and starts shagging a football over the net to his youngest son Matt, age 16. A shy, good-looking kid of medium build, Matt has a great no-style style, wearing an old-man cloth hat and oversized golf shorts and driving a classic 1956 Chevy wagon with a bitchin' primer and rust paint job and blue smoke belching from the tailpipe. Matt plays wide receiver for San Clemente High.

Tom’s pretty good at lobbing the ball himself, having played for three years on his high school team in Laguna Beach in the early ’50s before he broke his collarbone. His throws are workmanlike and accurate. I fire questions to him as he motions Matt to go long.

In human history, how does surfing figure in the equation?

(Heaves a clean spiral) I think human history has evolved to the point where surfing has been created. With the advent of surfing has come the advent of World peace. And the realization that there’s plenty to do, plenty of cycles to ride. We can just go out there and ride stuff that comes along.

Do you figure that surfing is a significant factor in human evolution?

(Makes a running catch with a grunt) Absolutely. But I don’t know that it’s a factor any more than a boat wake is a factor in the movement of a boat. A boat moves through the water and a wake shows up. Life’s taken place and surfing has shown up.

Surfing is rife with dimestore philosophers. It’s an occupational hazard for those who stare for hours at the great horizontal unknown. But none are quite so tangentially sharp as Morey. He is the master of the cosmic one-liner, the karmic zinger: “Have you heard about frisbyterianism? They believe that when you die your soul goes up on the roof and nobody can get it down.” He once fasted for a month on Kauai solely on a diet of corn. After a while he found that everything seemed funny to him. Why? Apparently, Morey tells me, there is an enzyme in corn that promotes euphoria. “That’s why things are ‘corny,’” he smiles in triumph. “You see: ears of corn—kernels of wisdom—seeds of truth. It’s all a biological pun!”

Like the sail, Velcro, and the computer chip, the bodyboard is an unsexy-looking piece of life-changing technology. As an invention, its creation was about as complicated as twisting a wiener dog out of party balloons—a simple slab of closed-cell foam quickly hacked into existence as a waveriding vehicle one morning with an electric turkey knife.

Yet for stand-up board surfers and the world in general, its effects have been profound. Morey straightfacedly ranks it with the spoon and Gutenberg press as one of the great inventions of mankind. While that declaration may at first seem the height of blatant self-promotion, the analogy is maddeningly close. For just as the Gutenberg press in 1450 took the power of the written word out of an elite priesthood and gave it to the masses, the Boogie Board let humanity have its first taste of stoke. In the big picture, Morey sees the Boogie Board not so much as a wavecraft but as a fundamental tool for promoting World understanding.

“The idea of the Boogie Board was to enjoy; to get in there, lie down and feel and really savor the wave. When you’re in a stand-up position, which I like to do, you’re in a combative mode. But when you’re lying down, you’re in an enjoying, meditative and absorbing mode. Some of the things I like the most I do lying down. The Boogie Board opens up the doors of life a little more. It causes more people to get out there and wiggle around, to be in the sun and the sand, to catch waves and learn about wave motion and to learn about not holding on and clinging to the old ways. To me, it’s essential for anybody to become a graduate of this planet that they learn to enjoy this activity.”

You only have to see the concentrated stoke on a 6-year-old’s face after rocketing down his first whitewater wave to know Morey’s right. Or a 60-year-old, for that matter. Or a middle-aged factory worker from Brooklyn, or a bunch of Czech students on holiday at Waikiki. Or the legions of women bodyboarders now filtering into the Pipeline lineup. Morey is the man who gave waves to the world.

“The Boogie Board is an incredible invention,” says shaping savant Carl Ekstrom, a longtime associate of Morey’s. “It’s introduced so many people to the power of the ocean and so many people have gotten pleasure from such a friendly little thing that I don’t know what else you’d compare it to. Maybe toilet paper.”

However, Morey’s vision of world enlightenment through better boogieing has not come without a price—at least to stand-up surfers. The prone position and low-entry ticket of bodyboarding have always bugged people who have taken the time to learn how to surf on their feet. They figure they’ve earned their spot in the lineup through years of failure, pain and humiliation, and why should they share their waves with a bunch of unenlightened neophytes?

Ron Romanosky, premier wave photographer and acerbic Wedge pandit, once postulated that golf takes infinitely more skill than bodyboarding. His reasoning: “You can’t prop a dead man up and make him tee off, but you can take a moldy old cadaver, stick him on a bodyboard and shove him down a wave.”

Point taken. Romanosk's thesis is all the more interesting when you realize he’s coming from a bodysurfer’s perspective.

Wedge purists consider the invading hordes of bodyboarders to be little better than fruit flies, establishing a niche in the lineup by sheer reproductive ability. At many spots around the world, this simmering resentment toward bodyboarders has begun to boil over.

“They’re standing their ground,” says Duncan Campbell, co-inventor of the Bonzer and an astute North Shore observer. “Anything under eight-foot at Pipeline they've pretty much taken over.”

Campbell was recently on the beach at Pipe on a perfect 8-foot day with Morey and Mike Stewart, watching 90 percent of the waves being ridden by bodyboarders. The stand-up surfers were consistently out-positioned by a hardcore crew of spongers, male and female. Campbell remembers being alternately stoked and dismayed.

“It was mindblowing, and at the same time scary. Here was Morey watching his creation being put to incredible use; witnessing these guys getting deeper than any stand-up surfer could ever dream of—just owning one of the best spots in the world. As a designer, I was stoked to be in that moment with Tom. But at the same moment, I was thinking that for the first time in surfing history there could be a stronger force at small Pipeline than stand-up surfers. That’s hard for me to digest.”

And at crowded spots like Pipeline and Rocky Point, there have already been flare-ups that might someday spark an all-out turf war based on what wave tool you choose.

On the first good day at Pipeline this year, for instance, there was an ugly moment when top bodyboarder Haouli Reeves and 1993 world champ Derek Ho got into a drop-in feud that ended with Ho being launched and badly pounded by an 8-foot wave. The fight was carried to the beach, where Reeves duked it out against Derek and Michael Ho both. Weeks later, many North Shore residents were wondering if the fight would mark the beginning of a civil war between the prone and the standing.

I asked Morey if we can’t just all learn to get along.

“I don’t think the red ants and the black ants are ever going to be excited about hanging out with each other,” he answered. “Things eat each other; we’re all killers. I think humans need to be warriors. We just need to learn to make war on stuff that’s bothering 

 of us rather than warring with each other. Let’s fight cancer and trash and AIDS and let mankind develop.”

As a young man, Morey was both witness and player to two important cultural movements that flowered in California during the ’50s: surfing and jazz. Both had repercussions outside their realms and both are intertwined like rhythm and melody in Morey's psyche.

As a math major at USC in the mid-’50s, Morey spent his off-campus hours at Malibu watching the ascendancy of Dora, Mickey Munoz, Phil Edwards, Dewey Weber and others as they perfected their licks in the machine-like waves reeling off First Point. He knew Quigg and Kivlin and Blake. He became friends with Bob Simmons and from him learned about the new resin and fiberglass technology just being released to the general public. And most important to his future destiny as a surfboard innovator, he became a disciple of proto-shaper/surfer Dale Velzy, taking copious notes on all the latest brainchilds Velzy would bring down to the Pit.

But jazz was Morey’s first love. As an adolescent growing up in Laguna Beach, he was a prodigy on the drums and considered to be one of the best young players in the country. When jazz great Stu Williamson showed up in Laguna Beach in 1949 without a drummer, 14-year-old Morey got a week-long gig backing him up. Later, in college, Morey would occasionally sit in at the legendary Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, jamming with the likes of Bud Shank (who did the soundtrack for Bruce Brown's first two movies), Art Pepper, Howard Rumsey and the Lighthouse AH Stars during the heyday of West Coast jazz. One of Morey’s greatest thrills was playing with Dizzy Gillespie during an impromptu Honolulu gig in 1980. Tom still keeps a basic kit in his garage/office to keep the juices flowing when he’s designing wavecraft or running stock options on his Mac computer.

Which might explain why I have such trouble keeping up with Morey in an extended conversation. If thoughts have beats, then Morey thinks in 5/4 time, a highly evolved and complicated cadence that frees the music profoundly when perfected. Once he gets going, he quickly switches gear from the workaday 4/4 rock beat of humanity to some truly strange cerebral rhythms. It shows in Morey's style to this day: cool, ironic, articulate, and supremely improvisational.

“Tom has the ability to design in terms of paradigm shifts,” says Mike Stewart, Morey's shop boy and early protege on the Big Island in the early ’80s and now considered by many to be the best surfer in the world, stand-up or prone. “He can either pick up on an overlooked concept or set off on a totally fresh direction.”

Morey’s optimistic spaceman’s view of the world is perhaps more easily understood when you realize he is a longtime devotee of Bahaism, a religion based on the belief that mankind is entering an era of enlightenment, peace and evolution.

“The Baha’u’llah defines God as what is essential and essentially unknowable,” Morey says. “The mystery of mysteries. Those things that bring us closer to that are religions. Baseball is a religion, hockey is a religion, doing a job is a religion. Under those criteria, surfing is also a religion, although not officially recognized as one.”

In keeping with the Bahai spirit, the three-digit numbers found on earlier Boogie Boards Were not model numbers but dates. Boogie Boards from 1974 up to 1989 were imprinted with the Bahai year dating from the year 1844, the year the prophet Bab (the Gate) was revealed as the herald of his new age and the birth of the Bahai faith. We are currently in the year 152.

“All that mysticism and spirituality is connected to a higher, evolved way of thinking,” says George Orbelian, author of Essential Surfing and SURFER Magazine’s former surfboard design editor. “When you look at Morey's contributions, you see that he wasn’t shackled by the norm of thought that everybody else had trouble getting beyond. He brought to surfing a blend of science and spirituality. You have drawings of Michelangelo and da Vinci in which they imagine a technology that took hundreds of years to develop. All the great thinkers were able to transcend the boundaries of technology of their time. In our sport, Tom has no equal in that regard.”

For the record: Tom Morey is not a bazillionaire. He sold his rights to the Boogie Board in the late ’70s and spent most of the money on other inventions and playing the stock market. He lives modestly in a trim Capistrano Beach townhouse with his wife and son Matt. He earns income from various projects. Mattel, the current manufacturer of the Boogie, retains him as sort of an in-house design guru.

“I might have been smarter to stick with royalties," he says, thinking back to his decision to sell. "But then again it might have been a hang-up. I might not have learned what I have learned. How much money do I need? How many meals am I going to miss? I've got a little money, a condominium in Mexico, a couple of cars and an income. I’m a happy camper.”

Morey is sitting on the sanded tailgate of a classic 1946 Mercury woody wagon he’s restoring. The ’46 is one of the rarest woodies around, commanding top dollar in the collector’s market. But Morey says it just suits him. He found it in a farmer’s field in Northern California and it took him three days to tow the neglected and rusting hulk to Capo Beach. But someday it’s going to be cherry. Then, he says, he wants to shoot it into outer space.

“It would be the first orbital space station wagon.”

Morey brings out his newest invention: a prototype hybrid bodyboard. It’s 4’ 5", gunmetal gray, with sharp stingers halfway down the body. The now-famous inverse “vacuum track” Boogie Board rails trail aft from the stingers. Although the manufactured version of this new board will be made of soft foam, the prototype is standard foam and fiberglass, modeled by Ekstrom. He calls it a “VacuuMax.”

I’m unimpressed until he flips it over. There, set equidistant across the wide crescent tail, is a single-fin box. It’s for stand-up surfing.

“This is the missing link. In the last 10 years, the most exciting things I’ve seen have been with the use of bodyboards by masters like Mike Stewart and Ben Severson and what guys like Kelly Slater and Terje Haakonsen are doing on super-short strap-in soft boards on the FlowRider wave. They’re riding inside the tube, landing on the explosions. The thing with these new boards is that they're short and lightweight with enough skeg to keep you in, but if you want to rip it out as you’re spinning around, you can. I can show you movies of guys stand-up surfing Boogie Boards in overhead surf, and they’re climbing, dropping and cutting back and surfing the hell out of these super-short boards

As Morey waxes on, the implications begin to creep in. And like Duncan Campbell, what I feel is a mixture of awe and dread. Basically what Morey is offering the World is a small, lightweight, safe surfing vehicle that can be ridden by any level of waverider in any waves and will never be charged a board fee by the; lines for exceeding baggage limitations. A kind of Volksboard built for the masses and the aficionado that can be modified according to wave conditions or the skill of the rider—prone or erect.

The VacuuMax will be built and sold by Mattel, and is due on the market this spring. Currently, there are more than 600,000 bodyboards sold each year in the US, compared to 125,000 surfboards. You do the math.

Can lightning strike twice? Possibly. If Morey’s new board performs as he predicts it will, we could be looking at the first fundamental design shift in surfboard technology since the introduction of the Thruster in 1980. Or maybe not. Maybe Morey's new board will turn out to just be an interesting experiment.

"A man need not know where his final step as an adult will put him," he says, "before taking his first step as a baby."

"JAZZ MAN," TOM MOREY PROFILE BY STEVE BARILOTTI (1996)

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