Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

The Dewey Weber Invitational Longboard Classic, a funky little one-day, no-prize-money “reunion” contest, was held at Manhattan Beach Pier on a warm late spring Saturday in 1981. Dick Dale songs blasted from the PA. Two or three vintage woodies were parked in the lot overlooking the pier. The surf was only waist-high, but David Nuuhiwa, early in the proceedings, caught a fast little left, walked to the nose, hung five, hung ten, and for a moment or two the whole beach time-warped back to 1966. Dozens of boom-era California longboard stars—most of whom had been living in obscurity since the shortboard revolution—filtered through the lineup over the next few hours. Robert August from 

was there. So were Corky Carroll, LJ Richards, Mark Martinson, Dale Dobson, even Dewey Weber himself. Just before the finals, an announcer directed everyone’s attention to the pier, where a “very special guest” was watching—and sure enough, there was burly big-wave legend Greg Noll leaning against the pier railing, raising a false-modest hand to acknowledge the cheers and whistles.

The Dewey Weber Classic was an early exercise in surfing nostalgia, and everyone loved it. "A bitchin' blast from the past!" wrote 

 and the calendar was soon filled with copycat Weber events. But the contests were just a small part of a much bigger trend. All at once, everybody seemed to rediscover a truth that had gotten buried during the shortboard revolution: longboarding was fun. Furthermore, plus-size equipment made a lot of sense for middle-age surfers—whose numbers were fast on the rise. The "longboard revival” lasted throughout the 1980s and beyond, and by 2000 the surfing population was more or less evenly split between shortboarders and longboarders. As surf journalist Steve Barilotti put it, the movement had become “a quiet coup.”

The return of the longboard wasn’t the sport's only back-to-the-future 1980s moment: big-wave surfing returned, California got its smile back, and popular culture again reembraced the sport. There were plenty of new and original developments as well, including the three-finned surfboard and a red-hot second generation of world-tour pros. But after spending a quarter-century looking for its center, surfing now began to settle into what looked to be a permanent configuration: a bona fide competition-filled modern-era sport for a select few, and for the many, a gently-countercultural lifestyle removed almost entirely from points, ratings, money, and the worst vagaries of surfing commercialism.

In hindsight, nothing in the sport's history seems as logical or inevitable as a return to longboarding. But in 1970, with shortboard revolutionaries still waving the torches used to incinerate the previous era—which included not just longboards, but boom-age surf culture in its entirety—the idea was laughable. “Have you walked up to one of those antiques [longboards] lately and tried to pick it up?” 

 magazine asked its readers in 1970. “Or for that matter, pictured yourself trying to actually 

 one?” Yet the shortboard revolution was flawed: tens of thousands of surfers quickly became frustrated with the twitchy new equipment, as well as the new hippie-heavy surf-world vibe, and gave up the sport altogether. Meanwhile, at breaks around the world, an endless stream of longboard-friendly waves—one-to-two-foot peelers that didn’t quite have the energy to power up the latest equipment—rolled through untouched. The shortboard revolution was nearly as wasteful as it was exciting.

 associate editor Kurt Ledterman wrote a short opinion piece called “Thinking Longer,” in which he reminded everyone that those old full-length boards—or the newer, lighter versions already turning up in retail showrooms—paddled like a dream and magically transformed little waves into something worth getting wet for. “Flashback to the past joys of the stall and a quick trip to the tip,” Ledterman wrote. “Re-stoke yourself to the delicate balance of trim.”

By the mid-1970s, some people were doing just that. Ben Aipa of Hawaii was spending a lot of time on a 9-foot 6-inch noserider, Con Surfboards took out full-page magazine ads showing longboards as well as shortboards (“The Best of Both Worlds”), and a longboard division was added to the US Surfing Championships’ schedule of events. Even Bob McTavish, the original shortboarder, returned to longboarding in small waves. “It’s much more fun than it looks,” he wrote in 1977, “and it looks like fun.”

Over the next three or four years, a few hundred surfers worldwide became dedicated longboarders. Mostly, though, longboarding was something shortboarders did on a whim, usually on a hot, near-flat summer afternoon. Longboards were cheap and plentiful: Harbour Cheaters, Hansen Hustlers, Yater Spoons, and Bing Pipeliners—many of them in near-mint condition beneath the wax and grime—were priced at ten or twenty bucks at garage sales and swap meets. The whole thing was still cheap and DIY and a little sloppy.

Early-revival longboarding manifest itself most clearly in San Diego’s annual Stone Steps Invitational, a longboard-only event where each competitor, before each heat, had to kill an 82-ounce bucket of beer. There were five rounds, prelims to finals, live music, homemade trophies, and the inevitable afternoon nudity. Some entrants, like venerable old school longboard hero Donald Takayama, seemed to ride better as the event progressed. Others didn’t. “Upon hearing my named called for the next round,” one constant recalled, “I staggered over to the judges' table to present myself and scratch out of the heat.”

The longboard movement picked up speed following the 1981 Weber Classic. Windansea Surf Club reformed, as did other mothballed West Coast clubs. David Nuuhiwa, Herbie Fletcher, Lance Carson, and other mid-'60s favorites were back on the scene, flanked by a new generation of full-time longboarders, including China Uemura of Hawaii, and California’s Paskowitz brothers, Israel and Jonathan, two of Dorian Paskowitz’s sons. Mike Eaton and Phil Becker headed up a small but growing list of American boardmakers who specialized in what were often referred to as “logs” or “tanks.” There were traditional longboarders, who generally used single-fins (often vintage) and rode in the classic style. And there were “progressive” or “modern” longboarders, who preferred lighter tri-fin models and mastered a few of the canonical moves—noseriding, drop-knee cutbacks—but rode as if they were using an oversized shortboard. Professional longboard contests were held, and in 1986 Nat Young of Australia easily became the first pro-era longboard champ. Young was the brilliant, bellicose winner of the 1966 World Surfing Championships in San Diego—the last event of its kind to feature longboards—who then became a crusading early-convert shortboarder. His return to the fold was a crowning full-circle moment for the longboard revival’s opening phase.

Young, McTavish, Nuuhiwa, Fletcher—everybody said the same thing: longboarding was a return to “fun” surfing. Catching lots of waves, cross-stepping, spinners, effortless trim—it was a blast, simple as that. But longboarders also used “fun” as a weapon of sorts, to blast away at localism, pro tour careerism, windy soul-surfing pieties, and all the rest of the accumulated seriousness that had grown like vines over the sport during the previous twenty years. In California, regional pride was involved, too. Sure, longboarding was a retro-trend. But California had more longboard surfers, clubs, and contests than anywhere in the world. The state was at last making a surfing comeback, and the longboard was a big part of it.

Longboarding was a friendlier, more democratic way to surf. People shared waves. They swapped boards. They talked more in the lineup. Except at the highest levels, boundary-pushing performance didn’t count for much. The riding characteristic longboarders valued above all others was 

, which was freely enjoyed not just by experts and intermediates but beginners as well. Longboarding was the only way to go if you were overweight or out of shape, and that included thousands of surfers who’d quit the sport in the late '60s. For half a decade or more, longboarding seemed like an open-ended high school reunion. For the first time ever, the sport had a middle-aged—and generally upper-middle-class—market. Lawyers, real estate agents, and middle managers were now among those who got up at 5 am for the pre-work dawn patrol, then hit it hard on the weekends before their kids’ soccer games. During the 1970s, it was rare to find a surfer 40 or older. Beginning in the mid-1980s, at some popular longboard breaks, 

 surfers were over 40. (Eighteen was probably the average age for a surfer during the '60s and early '70s. The number went up steadily from there, and by 2000 it was likely getting close to 30.)

Nostalgia was a big part of longboarding. The returnees, after all, were baby-boomers, which meant they’d been rapturously celebrating their own past since the 1973 release of 

. Surf bands reformed to endlessly play “Walk Don’t Run” and “Pipeline.” 

, in 1984, became surfing’s first big VHS hit. Woodie wagons came back in style—restored and expensive this time around, instead of mangy and disposable—along with aloha shirts, ukuleles, competition stripes, and flower-print jams. Veneration of old surfers soon hit a point where any B-lister from the '50s or '60s could now be addressed as a “legend.” Also, because a lot of revivalists came back to the sport with disposable income, their surf nostalgia quickly manifested itself in a collectibles market: that $15 garage-sale longboard find in 1977 was worth $300 by the late '80s, and the prices would skyrocket into the thousands of dollars in years to come.

Much of this was wonderful. Elders were being honored, surfing reclaimed its past, and longboarders as a rule—older, more settled, better grounded than their shortboard counterparts—pursued the sport in a cheerful, good-natured manner. On the other hand, longboarders wedged themselves into a lot of already-crowded lineups, on boards that gave them a huge tactical advantage. If the longboard revival seemed all but predestined, so was the backlash that followed.

It drove shortboarders nuts, for starters, that they were so handicapped in terms of paddling speed. Not all longboarders were wave hogs, but plenty were. “Herbie Fletcher,” one frustrated late-'70s Southern California surfer recalled, “was every shortboarder’s worst nightmare, as he steamrolled past us and caught four waves to our one.” The longboarder’s “fun” mantra also became a sore point. Of course it’s 

, the counterargument went. Longboarding is 

. The rewards and pleasures of shortboarding were in part distilled from the great amounts of practice, timing, and concentration required. As the number of longboarders went up, so too did the belief among shortboarders that 

 was the better, loftier form of surfing.

The sport's cool quotient took a hit, too. “There’s a prevailing notion that as surfers age they mutate into walruses,” surf journalist Steve Barilotti wrote. “The mustaches grow long and gray, the eyes crinkle to rheumy slits, and they begin to bark and puff their way around the lineup, shipping their magnificent sleek bellies about on great bargey logs.” Surfers were supposed to be young, fit, and daring—you did it in part to get away from adults. Longboarding made the sport older, slower, balder, and heavier. For a lot of young surfers, sharing the lineup with these merry middle-aged buffers was like sharing a club dance floor with your parents.

Violence wasn’t part of the longboard/shortboard divide, or at least not like it was with locals and nonlocals. There was plenty of mocking humor, though. One late-'80s T-shirt had a thumbs-up sign and “Shortboarders” printed on the chest; on the back was "Longboarders" and a huge raised middle-finger. Often, the two groups just went to their separate corners. It wasn’t written in stone, but places like First Point Malibu, First Point Noosa Heads, Queen’s Surf in Waikiki—smaller, softer, high-quality waves—became known as longboard waves, with the understanding that nearby breaks, (Third Point Malibu, Boiling Pot, Ala Moana) were for shortboarding.

At some level, people understood that the differences between the two groups had nothing to do with equipment choices. Surfers had felt pinched for waves since the 1950s, and it was always convenient to blame the shortfall on one group or another—newcomers, inlanders, nonlocals, bodyboarders. Lashing out, even if just for a laugh, had in fact become reflexive. So when longboarders began turning up in significant numbers, the sport automatically reacted with its habitual practice of dividing against itself. “Longboarding Today,” a peacemaking 1992 

 magazine article, noted that “a longboarder can be anybody now: your dad, your son, your friends, your heroes.” Prior to the introduction of sub-demographic magazines like 

 had been the sport’s most longboard-friendly voice—partly because its roots were sunk so deep into what was now referred to as the “classic” longboard era, and partly because 

 viewed itself as more egalitarian than its competitors. But in “Longboarding Today,” the magazine couldn’t help itself. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” the final sentence reads. “And he is riding a very big board.”

With the return of longboarding, surfing's cool quotient took a hit. Longboarding made the sport older, slower, balder, and heavier. For a lot of young surfers, sharing the lineup with these merry middle-aged buffers was like sharing a club dance floor with your parents.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Return of the Longboard

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