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

By the early 1970s, California surfing had taken a sharp and dramatic tumble in the eyes of wave-riders everywhere—including Californians themselves, many of whom now regarded their own state with a disapproval that ranged from mild to masochistic. In part, it was leftover embarrassment over the war of words following Nat Young’s win in the 1966 World Championships, compounded by the state’s late arrival to the shortboard revolution. Southern California surf breaks had also endured a string of misfortunes in the late 1960s, including a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, a post-storm sandfill that turned Malibu into a closeout shorebreak, and a nuclear power plant opening on the cliffs above San Onofre.

But for most California surfers, the bad feelings stemmed from guilt over the fact that 

 state had commercialized, industrialized, and popularized the sport—which in surfing’s Age of Aquarius translated to a mile or more of bad karma.

The optimism that had long been a West Coast surfing hallmark was gone. By the late '60s in fact, it was trendy to proclaim that the sport here was headed toward the apocalypse. “In ten years, surfing in California will be choking out its death gasp,” 

 magazine noted. “In another ten years it will be completely dead.” A lot of surf moviemakers agreed, none more so than SURFER founder John Severson, whose last film, 1970’s 

, turned Southern California into surfing’s version of Dante's 

, with baton-wielding policemen standing in uniform on the beach at Huntington, fast-food joints lined up like dominoes on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, and urban runoff gushing from open pipes into the Ventura shorebreak.

California was still home to some excellent surfers. David Nuuhiwa effortlessly remade himself as a shortboarder, losing none of his feline artistry. Corky Carroll was energetic and fun to watch. Mike Purpus was the same, only more so, and had an amazing frontside cutback to boot. A San Diego kneeboarder named Steve Lis invented a wide split-tailed board called the “fish,” and was going faster down the line, and riding deeper in the tube, than any stand-up surfer.

But for the most part, in what seemed like atonement for the past sins of West Coast surfing exuberance, Californians now rode in minimalist fashion, on narrow Hawaiian-style boards—a great look in thundering eighteen-foot Sunset Beach, but ridiculous in the shoulder-high rollers at Hermosa or Windansea. Meanwhile, the state suffered a giant talent drain as hot young riders like Bill Hamilton, Owl Chapman, Sam Hawk, and Margo Godfrey all moved to Hawaii. Each surfer phrased it a little differently, but always the idea was to escape from the “California plastic trip.”

Those who stayed behind found themselves involved, one way or another, with a new and more-muscular beachfront aggressiveness, which came to be known as "localism." Most of it was simple turf-marking by resident surfers: spray-painted graffiti (“If you don’t live here, don’t surf here”) or rubbing surf wax across the windows of a visiting surfer’s car. Locals themselves viewed it differently. If the sins of modern surfing—crowded lineups, over-hyped competition, rampant surfing commercialism in general—had originated in California, then perhaps it was time to set things right. Or at least, to safeguard the good that was left. This was the thinking, anyway. Localism, always, was often defended as a return to purity.

There was nothing new about resident surfers harassing outsiders. In previous decades at Waikiki, Malibu, even some beaches in Sydney, visiting surfers had to watch their step or risk confrontations with the locals. But territorial acts prior to the late 1960s had a generic quality. Hard stares, shouted insults, fighting—none of this was particularly surf-specific. Introduce outsiders to any gathering of young, unsupervised adult males and your halfway to a fight.

In California in the early '70s, however, localism created its own particular look and code. Locals wore all-black wetsuits and rode color-free boards, slightly retrograde in design, with either the smallest available maker’s label or no label at all. The surf leash was frowned upon. Surf magazines were mostly disparaged for being too commercial. Because the surf movie genre didn’t wear its commercialism on its sleeve, the way ad-filled magazines did, it was for the most part given a pass.

Surfing competition was viewed as the ultimate evil, and it was during the 1969 Smirnoff International Pro-Am, held at a Santa Cruz break called Steamer Lane, that localism had a coming out of sorts. Contests looked different than they had just two years ago, when they were defined by noseriding and competition-stripe trunks. Top-ranked surfers now had long hair, dressed like rock stars on Casual Friday, and strolled around between heats gobbling handfuls of dried fruit and granola. Speaking over the PA system, the Smirnoff contest announcer reported on conditions at nearby Pleasure Point: “Eight feet, perfect shape, naked girls, dealers.”

Santa Cruz surfers had already proven themselves less than welcoming to outsiders. At the Smirnoff, they took things to a new level. A judging stand had been set up near the Steamer Lane cliffs, and at some late hour the night before the contest began, the entire structure, along with an empty VW bus—presumably belonging to a visiting surfer—were pushed over the edge, twenty feet down into the water. Five boards were stolen from the Hawaiian team. On the last day of competition, a group of local surfers refused to clear the water, and shouted up to all the “goose-stepping pigs” involved with the contest that “surfing is a free man’s art!”

It didn’t take many incidents like this to earn the West Coast a reputation for localism. In actual fact, there were just a handful of genuinely hardcore localized California surf breaks. At the top of the list were Windansea in San Diego, Lunada Bay in Los Angeles County, Oxnard’s Hollywood-by-the-Sea, and Seaside Point in north Oregon. Intimidation was the locals’ real stock in trade—long stares, repeated drop-ins, verbal abuse. Car vandalism, ranging from tire flattening to smash-and-grab stereo rip-offs, was common as well. Acts of physical violence were usually limited to shoves, slaps, and punches. Weapons were unheard of.

Locals went about their business with little or no fear of reprisal. Huntington Beach aside, beachfront police presence was almost nonexistent, and local groups were never organized or named, which meant their profile outside of surfing was invisible. Rarely did a victimized surfer file a crime report. Running off to the Man just wasn’t cool—better to take the hit, surf some other break next time, and warn your buddies to steer clear.

 steer clear from what were called “localized” breaks. Reputation and notoriety, far more than regular doses of violence, made localism an amazingly effective anti-crowd tool. Was there really some lunatic Oxnard dude with a four-inch galvanized nail resined bayonet-like to the nose of his board, ready to put a hole in any “souther” who dared to paddle out at Hollywood-by-the-Sea? Didn’t matter. Every day-tripping surfer heading north from LA County had heard the story, and 99 percent chose to drive right past Oxnard to the less-fraught beaches of North Ventura or Santa Barbara.

Localism traveled well. In Hawaii, especially, it flourished. A loosely structured group called the Hui (better known as the Black Shorts) established a heavy presence on Oahu’s North Shore. The entire island of Kauai was understood to be off-limits to visiting surfers. At Narrabeen, in Sydney, hardcore locals went against type by being active (and very successful) in competition. They also showed a real flair for harassment. The break was too good, and too close to the nation’s surfing population center, to keep outsiders completely away, but a ranking member of the Narrabeen Boardriders Club (which in later years proudly if mistakenly credited itself with having “invented localism”) would literally blow holes into a crowd by methodically driving a bucket of golf balls from the water’s edge into the lineup. A handful of older, grizzled surfers from South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula had their moments as well. One out-of-towner, crawling over the nearshore rocks after an exhausting swim in through heavy surf, looked up and found a bearded local holding his board under one arm. The local surfer placed a foot on the visitor’s head and calmly explained that he could have his board back “if you buy an ounce of mull”—pot—“off me.”

Localism eventually dropped most or all of its before-the-fall pieties—some next-generation locals would even use the latest equipment, bright colors included—and offered itself instead as a rough but necessary form of stewardship. Crowds were just getting worse, and vigilant locals were the only thing preventing total lineup chaos. Or so the argument went. Meanwhile, some heavily localized spots became slightly more visitor-tolerant (Hollywood-by-the-Sea and Narrabeen among them), while other areas grew less so, including breaks in developing countries that had previously been surfed only by visitors.

The surf press struggled with localism. Editorial pages occasionally railed against it just as they had railed against the “hodad problem” in the early 1960s. “Jesus, what’s happening here?” 

 asked in 1972. “Do the waves only belong to the aggressive strong guy? [Not long ago] it was all brotherhood and nature. Now it’s ‘don’t come to my beach, brother, or I’ll bust your head'.” As the editors saw it, a few bad apples were ruining things for the surfing majority. In years' past, membership in groups like the United States Surfing Association or the Australian Surfriders Association had been touted as a solution to hodad-ism. This new problem was trickier. The best 

 could offer in 1972 was to ask that we all “think about the Golden Rule.” Other magazines made appeals that were just as earnest and just as feeble.

Unmentioned by surf editorialists was the fact that localism’s benefits extended to 

 local surfers, not just a relatively small group of hard cases. Localism thrived on complicity. At any given localized break, there were dozens of regulars who 

 confront outsiders, or break into their cars, but knew the guys who did. You'd go along to get along, and a less-crowded lineup meant more waves for both the heavies and their supporters.

But it was a little more complicated than that. Throughout the surf world, localized and non-localized, it was generally accepted notion that resident surfers actually 

 deserve more waves than non-residents. Locals often pushed things too far, sure. But maybe that was preferable to a totally open and equal playing field, where you ended up with a Malibu-esque free-for-all. Surfing proudly had no oversight, no rules or penalties. Some kind of self-administered “stewardship,” at least in concept, actually made a kind of sense.

In practice, though, localism often wound up as nothing more than a cover for beachfront vigilantism. Locals weren’t necessarily wrong about things like over-commercialization and the need for lineup hierarchy and a semblance of order in the water. But greed, not fairness, was always localism’s driving force. This was epitomized in 1980 by a Southern California novelty band called the Surf Punks and the song “My Beach,” their anthem to localism. Whether it made you laugh or cringe, the band got right to the simplicity of the whole enterprise with a punishing two-chord melody and a lyric made up of nothing but barked-out single-syllable words: “My beach! My wave! My chick! Go home!” Localism got the 

Narrabeen surfers showed a real flair for harassing outsiders. One ranking member of the local boardriders club, for example, would blow holes into a crowd by methodically driving a bucket of golf balls from the water's edge into the lineup.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

There Will be Slaps

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