Revolution is not a Dinner Party

The Tao of George

Getting Slippery with Bob McTavish

Bismarck with a Tan

Plastic Machine

Enlightenment at Honolua Bay

Panic on the Showroom Floor

Style Takes a Dive

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Surfer Goes Electrical Bananas

No Contest

There Will be Slaps

Kook Straps, Cadillacs, and Sex Wax

Blame it on the Boogie

Country Soul

Higher and Brighter with Alby Falzon

Fresh Blood on the Newsstand

Long Road to Bells Beach

Speed Freaks

Gods of Thunder

The Impossible Wave

Into the Vortex

Gerry Lopez, Pipeline Firewalker

The Rubberman Cometh

Barefoot Revolution

From the late 1950s forward, through every change in board design and riding style, and every shift in surfing’s global balance of power, Hawaii remained the sport's magnetic center. The shortboard revolution did nothing but underscore this fact, and from 1969 to 1976, very little happened in surfing that wasn’t somehow aligned with respect to Hawaii.

Fred Hemmings had called short surfboards “absurd for Hawaiian surf,” but in fact they were a godsend. Riding a longboard at a place like Sunset Beach was the surfing equivalent of extreme tobogganing. You leaned forward, held on, and took your chances. With the shortboard, it was like downhill skiing—fast and difficult, but with infinitely better handling and control. Hawaiian surf also stripped away much of the stylistic clutter that emerged with shortboards—all the twisting and gyrating as riders tested the limits of maneuverability. Small waves gave surfers, even the best in the world, freedom to overdo the body mechanics. Big waves forced you to stay with the basic, to pare down, to stay focused. Shortboard riding was smoother and more refined in Hawaii than anywhere else.

Other elements were working in Hawaii’s favor. Commercialism was out (or at least the appearance of commercialism), and the islands were viewed as an Edenic alternative to the overdeveloped “plastic trip” of Southern California and Sydney. Hawaii had no indigenous surf media, and very little exportable surf-related manufacturing. Haleiwa, the only town on Oahu’s North Shore, had less than 1,500 residents in 1970, and the coast between Kaena Point and Kawela Bay was known as “Country” years before the Australia’s Byron Bay project came to represent the “country soul” ideal.

There was also a rising demand for color surf photography, and nowhere looked as good through a viewfinder as Hawaii. The North Shore functioned as a seven-mile-long outdoor studio, and surfers and photographers, after years of annual winter gatherings, had developed a symbiotic relationship. Everybody understood lighting conditions and which breaks looked best at certain times of the day. Surfers did rudimentary color-coordinating with an eye toward publication. Cameras had an almost pheromonal effect on the lineup: turns were pushed a little harder, tuberides taken a little deeper, so that photos would be that much more radical and thus likely to be printed. This wasn’t exclusive to Hawaii, but only here did the process go on for weeks at a time, in consistently big, dramatic, color-saturated waves.

Meanwhile, despite the era’s anticontest, anti-commercial sentiments, Hawaii became the world’s capitol for international surf competition. In 1970, the then-five-year-old Duke Kahanamoku Invitational was a surf-world institution, and from 1971 forward there were never less than three big winter events held on the North Shore. (California and Australia, in 1971, didn’t have a single international surf contest between them.) Sure, you came to Hawaii to put yourself “inside the lacey filigree, beyond the pastel skies”—ride inside the tube—as Drew Kampion wrote. But increasingly, you also came to do battle with your fellow surfers, in hopes of nabbing a trophy and some prize money.

Yet it wasn’t the contests, or the photographers, or the “country” idealization, or even the big waves that gave Hawaii its authority during the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. What put Hawaii over the top was its surfers.

There wasn’t a bottomless supply of talent here, as there seemed to be in Australia. But the Hawaiian elite were so much better than everyone else on the North Shore, and so relentlessly filmed and photographed, that the rest of world’s surfers often seemed massed together in the background like movie-set extras. California transplant Sam Hawk rode spear-like across vast, vertical walls at Pipeline. Teenager Michael Ho, not much over five feet tall, zapped up and down at Velzyland as if he were riding on a thin cushion of air. Hawaiian Eddie Aikau rode gigantic Waimea Bay better than anyone before him. Reno Abellira blended his turns with Euclidean precision, crouched over his board like Bruce Lee facing down a gang of Hong Kong toughs. Margo Oberg, another West Coast migrant, kept Hawaii on top of women’s surfing throughout the decade, along with Sharron Weber, Laura Blears, Rell Sunn, Becky Benson, and a red-haired dynamo named Lynn Boyer.

The North Shore remained the center of the surfing universe, Sunset Beach was the center of the North Shore, and Sunset was ruled by Barry Kanaiaupuni and Jeff Hakman, the yin and yang of power surfing. Kanaiaupuni was the most unorthodox surfer of the age. He rode in a narrow, almost delicate stance, feet and legs positioned in a kind of 

, but threw his board around like Miles Davis on a long freestyle bob riff. The whiplashing bottom turn was Kanaiaupuni‘s signature move, but much of what he did was unexpected and strange; launching into a big northwest peak at Sunset, for instance, he might straighten up to full height, begin with a little comma-shaped pivot move toward the curl, snap it back to center, drop to a crouch, fade slightly to the left, and lean into a furrowing turn a beat or two before actually reaching the trough. For almost anyone else, even the A-listers, in the same circumstances, it was stand, squat, drop, and turn. Only Kanaiupuni had access to a full set of options at Sunset Beach.

Hakman's mastery ran just as deep, but took a different shape. He was all balance, utility, and faultless construction. He rode low and centered, arms extended from muscle-packed shoulders like glider wings, and his movements were as limited as they were fluid. Hakman shared honors with Kanaiaupuni for having the most powerful bottom turn in surfing, but the Kanaiaupuni version was tighter-arced and set to his own weird tempo, while Hakman’s covered more ground and was almost metronomically timed. Not surprisingly, Kanaiaupuni surfed his way into a lot of dead ends and spent half of any given session swimming after his board. Hakman could ride for an entire afternoon—an entire week—without falling. Yet there was a warmth to Hakman’s surfing that kept it from ever looking rote or overpracticed; he often looked like the happiest man in the water. A slow-motion clip from 

 shows him riding out in front of a closeout section, and as the whitewater churns and grinds around his shoulders Hakman’s face unexpectedly breaks into a wide, elated smile—it’s one of surfing’s most joyous big-screen moments.

The North Shore remained the center of the surfing universe, Sunset Beach was the center of the North Shore, and Sunset was ruled by Barry Kanaiaupuni and Jeff Hakman, the yin and yang of power surfing.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

Gods of Thunder

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