I sort of hate myself for the enjoyment I took in putting together this little showcase of bad behavior, all of which took place during the 1972 World Surfing Championships in San Diego, either at the Harbor Island Travelodge or nearby. Bunch of punk-ass surfers being dumb and destructive, is what it comes down to. On the other hand, I also hate the fact that surf contest organizers, then and now and apparently forever, keep staging events at the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, thus ensuring that the sport, in it's most public setting, will too often look ridiculous not just to the world at large (shoulder shrug; doesn't bother me much) but to surfers themselves (contests are so great when done right; so for fuck's sake, and it ain't rocket science, stop doing it so wrong). Thus, to stretch a point, the destruction and dumbness are justified.

Yes? No? You're not convinced. You want to know, before agreeing or disagreeing, just how dumb and destructive.


Today is the first day of the 1972 World Surfing Championships, and California is coming through with typical two-foot wind slop. No competition today. At the Harbor Island Travelodge, the surfers are strutting and boozing.


Everyone got back to the Travelodge and ran in wild packs through the layers and layers of identical corridors in the hotel, loading up the elevators till they broke down and jammed between floors. Women ran from their rooms in nightgowns as fire alarms blared doom. Hotel managers rushed puffily down carpeted hallways, desperation and panic in their eyes, sweat streaming from their faces. When calm is restored, the manager orders all World Contest personnel out by nine o'clock the next morning, but Eduardo Arena and George Downing make an appeal after the man cools down. The sign in the lobby says: "Travelodge—1972 World Surfing Championships Headquarters," and it is not removed.


The hotel was an amazing scene. I stayed with Mark Warren and Terry Baker, a judge, and it was a fairly conservative room. Down the corridor, it was MP [Michael Peterson], Andy Mac [Andy MacKinnon] and PT [Peter Townend] in a room together, and this was the happening room. The locals were on to MP—he was the Australian champ who’d already recorded a couple of minor drug convictions back home. He attracted every weirdo and hippy in town. People were leaving offerings on MP’s doorstep—ounces of pot, notes, gifts. There were no older, wiser, sobering influences. Col Smith, the senior member of our team, was the biggest maniac out of all of us. At the hotel pool, he started jumping off the diving board onto his surfboard, and soon boards were shooting out of the water onto people’s laps. We were all screaming and hooting and hotel staff kept trying to kick us out but to no avail.


One-hundred-fifty-four surfers were booked into the Travelodge, 34 more than budgeted, and the event was already $6,000 down after the first day. Within 48 hours the, $500 worth of hotel towels were stolen, someone used a room to clean several kilos of grass and had left two huge garbage bags of seeds and stems sitting in the hallway, and $1,200 in unauthorized room service charges had been written off by the hotel. Meanwhile, a contest official drove a six-ton Ford truck onto the sidewalk outside the lobby, collapsing a large canvas canopy and demolishing two newspaper racks and three potted palms.


I walked into a room where the Peruvian guys were staying there was a salad bowl full of coke. A fucking salad bowl, I'll never forget it. Just this mountain of coke in a big giant bowl and anybody who came in could snort up whatever they wanted.


We were in the car park nice and early on a Sunday morning, and there are all sorts of drug deals going down. MP [Michael Peterson] is all excited, going, "Hey, look at that over there. That looks like speed, that one."


I was at the 1966 World Championships in San Diego, when it was all girls and psychedelics. In '72 it was all girls and cocaine. It was a fuckin' snowstorm. I remember driving around San Diego with some Peruvians one night, snorting coke from a bag as we went along. Eventually we ran out, so the guy driving, who was no more than 18, pulled over, opened the trunk, came back with a huge one-pound bag and just opened it up right there in the car.


The party was on the third floor, in adjoining suites, and was hosted by the Peruvians. Very few of them spoke English, but this minor social handicap was nothing that couldn't be remedied by copious amounts of Peruvian cash, which enabled them to buy gallons of Chivas Regal and enormous quantities of other exotic refreshments which were being drunk, smoked and snorted as if there were no tomorrow. The air was practically unbreathable from cigarette smoke, and any conversation was an exercise in shouting to be heard over the noise of bad Peruvian music playing at full volume from a portable stereo.


On the beach at the contest site one afternoon Michael Ho came up to me and asked if I had a screwdriver. I had my single-fin with a fin box. So yeah, I had a screwdriver. I was thinking Michael wanted to adjust his fin. But no, he grabs my screwdriver, jiggers the lock on a rental car, and breaks into it. Then hands it back to me, smiles, and politely says thanks. My jaw was on the ground. I'd never seen anything like that. All I could think was, wow, I have lived such a fucking sheltered life in West Oz.


We ended up doing a run down to Mexico in our rented cars. We were all lined up to go through the border checkpoint, but they wouldn't let MR [Mark Richards] and I through because we were under 18. So the rest of the team went into Mexico for the day. They left us with one of the cars and we spent the day at the San Ysidro McDonalds. We hung out inside for a while but soon became bored, so I said to MR, "Let's go for a little burn around the car park." I drove and MR sat there not looking too sure about the whole deal. I started getting cocky, doing wheelies, and MR was hanging onto the dashboard. The more worried he looked the more it egged me on. I was doing burnouts and donuts, completely illegal, no license. We're burning around the lot, I'm screaming and tooting the horn, dust going everywhere, and the next moment, CRASH! and the front of the car is wrapped around a light pole. MR was in shock. His mouth was moving but the words couldn't come out. He was just opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Eventually all the boys came back. They had bottles of tequila with worms inside, Col Smith had some great stories about the women, and they'd apparently made quite an impression on Tijuana. Nobody seemed to be concerned about the rent-a-car.


Quite a few of the surfers abused the complimentary dinners at various local restaurants by trying to scam free meals for friends. The hotel destruction and the disappearance of hundreds of hotel towels was immature and just plain stupid, [as was] the abuse of unauthorized long-distance phone calls and room service, which caused additional indebtedness for contest promoters. Finally, three weeks after the contest, one of the complimentary Chevy Vega cars donated for the competition was still missing.

MOTEL HELL: SURFERS SACK LOCAL TRAVELODGE DURING THE '72 CHAMPIONSHIPS

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