Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy would have been 79 today. I just did a file search and came up with an obituary I wrote in 2012 couple, when Tracy died, but I can’t remember where I sent it, or if it even got published. I also found on out an interview I did with Tube in 1993, when he was 58. Tracy was a sly one. The humor was constant but always on simmer, and cut with irony to a degree where you sometimes couldn't find the edges of the put-on. Or even if there was a put-on. No punchlines. He never worked blue. Not once did I hear Tubesteak swear, even mildly. It was as if he wanted to be funny without using any of the crutches that the rest of us depend on. A wonderful, singular man, not too concerned with the technicalities of wave-riding, but an amazing performer nonetheless. 

One summer I was really broke, so I got a job across the street, right next to the Malibu Inn, at a place called Tube's Steak and Lobster. And people would say to me, "Hey, you still at Tube's Steak?" Then it just went to Tubesteak. But people have always been confused about what it meant. A lot of people think that Tubesteak meant . . . ah, some kind of cylindrical piece of meat.

No, not for years. Last time I saw him he said, "Stick a fork in me, I'm done."

You're not somebody who particularly idolizes Dora.

Well, he wasn't really part of our [Malibu] scene. He wasn't part of the Gidget, Moondoggie, Tubesteak thing. He was down there a couple days a week, but nobody really wanted anything to do with him—with this self-exiled loner. His whole gig was to irritate people. And he'd irritate the little guy. He'd take a guy's board, some poor, helpless little guy, then a few days later he'd give it back.

But you agree that he influenced a lot of surfers.

Oh, absolutely. There was nobody like him. What I've just said—I mean, he did have this incredible presence. Everyone at Malibu started to surf like him, to walk like him; they did all his hand gestures. He was very elegant in his way, you know.

Tell me about the social side of surfing at Malibu. What music did you guys listen to?

In the mid-'50s, it was a lot of Harry Belafonte. Walking into a party, you know, it was always "Daaaaaay-oh!" Plus a lot of jazz. Anita O'Day, June Christy, Shorty Rodgers and the Lighthouse All-Stars

Did the Malibu guys spend any time with, say, the San Onofre guys?

No. That Sano thing—it's archaic now and it ws archaic then. That group hasn't changed. Sitting around with the ukuleles and the Hawaiian music. Nah.

Little Leaguers. T-ball. Malibu was the majors. Think of it this way. How many movies did you see about San Onofre? Or Windansea? Or the South Bay? Malibu was just magic. Remember how, when Tinkerbell flies, all those sparkles come down behind her, all the magic sparkles? Malibu was just covered with that stuff.

But we did travel sometimes. We'd pack up for the day and go to Seal Beach, and surf with Jack Haley. We felt pretty welcome down there. Then of course Dewey [Weber] and those guys would come up from South Bay and we'd be stoked—because they were hot surfers, and because we liked 'em and everybody just got along. Now, you know, it's difficult to go to somebody else's beach. They give you a hard time.

Is it true the lifeguards drove you out of Malibu?

Yes. I left the beach in 1959 when the lifeguards ruined it. We had a good thing going before that. We had a place to stay, nobody hassling us, we weren't hassling anybody. If you wanted to melt some wax on a new board, you'd dig a little hole, put down some twigs, light a fire, put the wax in a Hills Brothers coffee can and hold it over the fire. And one day, all of a sudden, some lifeguard comes running over and he kicks my coffee can over and screams "No fire on the beach!" And that was pretty much it.


Did surfing even have a sense of humor before Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy made his grand entrance at Malibu in the mid-‘50s? Sure, the sport had its funny guys. As far back as you want to go, you’ll find pictures of surfers laughing and having a good time, like everybody else at the beach. But when I think of surfing in the pre-Tubesteak decades, nothing all that funny comes to mind. Plank-riding Hawaiians popping their biceps for the tourists as they cruise straight for shore. Tom Blake, the lonely semi-tragic Depression-era surf hero. A crook-armed boardmaking genius named Bob Simmons, easily the weirdest and grumpiest of surfing’s Hall of Famers.

Tubesteak didn’t want to impress anybody. He didn’t want to make boards, or be a lifeguard, or ride big waves, or join a surf club. He didn’t want to convince non-surfers that surfing was a “legitimate” sport, to be taken seriously. Surfing, in Tubesteak’s view, was amazingly, perfectly, 

 serious. He the one who came up with the notion that having a good time on the beach wasn’t a byproduct of surfing, it was the whole deal. It was an idea that made him famous, first at Malibu, then up and down the West Coast, then all across the surf world. He rode waves, sure. But just one or two at a time, starting at the top of the point at Malibu and working his way toward the pier, gliding through a series of exaggerated comedic poses: Iron Cross to Stink-bug to Airplane. Then he’d step delicately off his board onto the sand, his incipient potbelly wet and gleaming, give a wave to everyone laughing on the beach, walk back to the driftwood shack he’d built earlier in the summer, pop open a beer and hold court.

Tubesteak often said that “Mickey ruled the surf”—referring to Mickey Dora, the infamous Black Knight of Malibu—“and I ruled the beach.” It was a grinning, mostly harmless kind of rule, though. Tubesteak could sling a put-down. He was outrageously elitist. But he wasn’t loud, or vulgar (“Tubesteak” moniker notwithstanding), or mean-spirited. He never picked on the little guy—that was Dora’s specialty. Surfing was a game to Tubesteak, a party, a show, a performance. And to his eternal credit, he didn’t overdo it. In 1960, at age 25, married and raising the first of his seven kids, with Malibu now under siege by hordes of 

-era gremmmies, Tubesteak left the beach and got on with his life. Still smiling.

WAS SURFING FUNNY BEFORE TUBESTEAK?

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