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

Modern surfing had long ago developed a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward competition, a legacy that began with Duke Kahanamoku and continued unchanged with Tom Blake and Phil Edwards. During the shortboard revolution, however, many came to regard competition as the very antithesis of surfing—and few were harder on it than new SURFER editor Drew Kampion. Most contests, he wrote, were “asinine displays,” with judging criteria so meaningless that the winner of any given heat “could just as well have stayed out of the water and played with himself.”

Competition didn’t go away. World Championship events were held in 1968, 1970, and 1972, and there was the embryonic growth of what would later become an international professional circuit. But at times it seemed as if competition existed just to give the sport’s groovier-than-thou tastemakers something to rail against and make fun of. "Contest clown” was the hot new insult, and a contest montage in a popular surf movie was set to circus music. Miki Dora—in the semifinals of the 1967 Malibu Invitational—made his feelings known when he dropped his trunks and bent over as he rode past the judging stand.

 entered the contest. Just as he’d entered that year’s Duke meet, two or three previous Malibu events, and several other contests during the boom years. Dora loved to criticize anything having to do with organized surfing, but that didn’t prevent him from showing up on contest day when the mood struck. This kind of anti-contest hypocrisy just grew stronger in years to come. After bad-mouthing the competition “system” with all its “plastic trips,” top surfers would invariably mail off their signed competition entry forms, and accept their trophies and prizes with a cool nod of the head. Nobody was secure enough to say so, but they actually liked pitting their skills against other surfers. They liked the prestige. And when it was on offer, they liked the money. Hawaii’s Bill Hamilton was a surfer of breathtaking poise and grace who railed against surfers being “exploited and screwed” by contest promoters. Still, he dutifully turned out for every major North Shore event, and even did contest reportage for the surf magazines. After pocketing $1,000 for finishing second in the 1971 Smirnoff Pro, Hamilton merrily noted in his 

 article that he appreciated “the ol’ green stuff” and that earning money in a contest was “a hell of a lot better than digging ditches.”

Surfing competition was still very much in the beta stage of development, and there were moments when it deserved all the piled-on sneering and contempt. Judging criteria remained poorly defined, and the judging itself was inconsistent. Many events were plagued by bad surf. Contest organization was rarely better than adequate, and often laughable. The 1972 World Championships distilled all these bad qualities and added a finishing touch of destructiveness. Organizers cancelled the event five weeks before it was scheduled to begin, uncanceled it three weeks later, missed an opportunity to hold the competition in perfect surf just up the coast, and brought things to a wheezing finish in two-foot windblown beachbreak slop. On finals day, early arrivals were greeted by the sight of David Nuuhiwa’s favorite board, a wide-backed “fish,” broken in two and hanging from a rope off the Ocean Beach Pier, with “Good Luck Dave” spray-painted across on the bottom. The fish design had originated in San Diego, and the local boys apparently felt that Nuuhiwa hadn’t given them enough credit for his board. The incident had more to do with hurt feelings and localism than the actual World Championships, but it seemed to underscore the failing health of surf competition in general. Afterward, the World Championships were put on hiatus for six years.

The anti-competition crowd found a hero in Wayne Lynch of Australia—surfing’s original man-child messiah. In 1969, the 16-year-old Lynch publicly renounced competition, even though he was regarded by far as the most advanced performance surfer in the world—doing things on waves that, as one awed writer put it, “bordered on the fourth dimension.”

Lynch was a rural-born fisherman’s son, from a state—Victoria—that had never before produced an A-grade surfer. At age 11, one year after he began riding waves, he entered and won an all-ages competition. At 13 he won the first of six consecutive Victoria state juniors’ titles; he also won four consecutive national junior division titles. Eventually Lynch began to voice complaints about competition, and in 1969’s “Gaudy Metal and Ego Trips,” his debut article for 

, he wrote that contests were filled with “jealousy and hate” and “clowns surfing for popular opinion.”

The buzz surrounding Lynch had nothing to do with his contest record. What mattered were the incredible photos of him that began trickling out of Australia in mid-1968, followed shortly by his jaw-dropping performance in the Paul Witzig movie 

. Lynch rode an oblong 7' 1" board of his own making—only a year after Bob McTavish had introduced the vee-bottom shortboard—and like George Greenough, he seemed to have dropped out of the sky after a long visit to the future. A grainy black-and-white shot of Lynch at Bells Beach, published in mid-1968, was the photographic mindblower of the year: at the base of a six-foot wave, Lynch had his board jammed over into a bottom turn so extreme that three-quarters of the bottom surface, and the entire fin save an inch at the very tip, was exposed. The move was advanced to the point of being incomprehensible, especially to the Americans, many of whom still thought hanging ten was the last word in performance surfing. What really made the photo was Lynch himself: poised and controlled, thin adolescent arms casually raised and bracketing his head, right hip jutting out to lead the turn—everything about his body position suggested that this kind of maneuvering wasn’t accidental or experimental, but familiar.

 confirmed this. Nat Young and hot Aussie newcomer Ted Spencer also had co-starring roles, and there was a long sequence featuring the best riders in the 1968 World Championships, but from the opening sequence to the end credits, Lynch made the other surfers in the film all but vanish. “It was just imagination,” Lynch said, when asked what inspired him to ride the way he did. “In 1966, the idea of walking up and hanging ten bored me shitless. So I’d lay in bed at night and dream about carving turns, and 360s, and all this other stuff, then go out the next morning and try it.”

Like Miki Dora and Phil Edwards before him, Lynch never quite managed to stay away from competition altogether. He entered the 1968 and 1970 World Championships, but didn't get results. In 1975 he won the prestigious Surfabout pro event in Sydney. Three years later Lynch had a spectacular runner-up finish in the 1978 Surfabout, but that year was better marked by the release of “A Day in the Life of Wayne Lynch,” a 15-minute documentary that showed him still living a woodsy existence in Victoria, making boards in a tin-roof backyard shed, and surfing the local reefs alone. Afterward, Lynch retired permanently from the contest circuit, but by that time he’d made his peace with surfing competition in general—as the sport itself would soon do. Yet Lynch's example reinforced the idea that titles and championships really only decorate the career of a great surfer, not define it.

At times it seemed like surf competition existed just to give the sport's groovier-than-thou tastemakers something to rail against and make fun of. “Contest clown” was the popular new insult, and a contest montage in a popular surf movie was set to circus music.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

No Contest

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