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

The shortboard revolution rewrote surfing's performance handbook. The drop-knee cutback, an elegant weight-leveraging move where the surfer bent and lowered his rear leg like a proposing suitor—gone. Parallel-stance trim, gone. Noseriding continued for a year or so, just out of habit, but the shortboard’s thin front end didn’t offer much of a platform, and any noseriding was followed by a quick retreat as the board began pearling. Surfers were inching their way toward the tube, but hadn’t yet come up with a stance, or a line of attack, that would permit them frequent access to the “green room.” As a rule, the rider who found himself anywhere near a tube usually assumed a head-lowered, arms-splayed, bent-at-the-waist posture that more or less announced the upcoming wipeout.

Aesthetically, in fact, the new boards drove the sport into a deep ravine. 

 was still playing when the first plastic machines hit the beach, and what brought a hush of appreciation from audiences during the Cape St. Francis sequence wasn’t just the perfect surf, it was the way Mike Hynson, in full trim, brought his feet together, straightened his body up like a tuning fork, and simply let his board run as the curl spiraled off behind him. Here was a difficult thing made effortless.

With early shortboards, the difficult thing, almost without exception, looked very difficult indeed. The sport’s evolutionary wheel had never moved faster, and it was a thrill to gain access to places on a wave that were previously off limits. But the new terrain was difficult, and rarely navigated, even by the world’s best surfers, without a lot of torso-twisting, leg-pumping, and arm-waving.

As a result, for the first time since the missionaries landed in Hawaii, the wave-riding population in many areas declined. Surfing had always been a challening sport, and the new equipment made it harder still. Weeks, even months, were added to the learning curve for a shortboard-riding beginner. A lot of intermediates who didn’t surf regularly—weekenders and summer surfers—did the fashionable thing and went short, only to find they weren’t enjoying themselves nearly as much as they had on their discarded longboards. Older surfers had a harder time with the adjustment than younger surfers; just about every hot rider over the age of twenty-five found that it was impossible to cross over to a shortboard without dropping a level or two in the lineup ranking—many had to face the fact that their time on top had come and gone.

The sport got colder as well. Winter surfers had depended on the longboard’s buoyancy to keep them high and dry as much as possible—wetsuits were good but not 

 good—and the new boards left you half-submerged at all times. It was hard to get stoked on the performance qualities of your new stick while chattering the enamel off your teeth.

By mid-1968, all of this resulted in surfers leaving the sport at a faster rate than they were being replaced. There was no record-keeping, but America’s surfing population in the early 1970s was likely down 10 to 20 percent compared to what it had been in 1967. In the US Northeast, the drop-off may have been as high as 50 percent. Australia’s surfing population dipped as well, but not as much. At better breaks everywhere, the lineup seemed as crowded as ever. But there was noticeably more room at the lower end of the food chain.

Style-wise, all bets were off. Even the best surfers in the world had were navigating the new terrain with a lot of torso-twisting, leg-pumping, and arm-waving.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

Style Takes a Dive

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