Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Surfing began to retrieve and recycle its past in the early 1980s, when the longboard was so enthusiastically put back into play, and the process continued with the return of big-wave riding. The sport was broader, more interesting, and more inclusive for these efforts. Introduced in the '90s, the “retro movement” began as a half-ironic trek to the soul-surfing headwaters of the late-'60s and '70s. It wasn’t a sport-wide craze. But by early in the new century, in most surf towns, it wasn’t hard to find at least a few bearded Generation Y surfers with a closet full of vintage threads, a moldering beavertail wetsuit jacket, and at least two or three battered swap-meet single-fin boards ostentatiously displayed in the living room.

There was more to it than beach-hipster fashion wankery, though. The retro movement tapped into a broader desire among surfers everywhere for an alternative presentation—one that didn’t involve competition, ratings, logo overkill, and gratuitous aggression. You didn’t need to be a hardcore soul-era reenactor to enjoy videos like 

’s poetic slowed-down grooviness. (You did, however, need a raised threshold for earnestness and high purpose. Aussie writer and director Andrew Kidman, surfing’s principal neo-soul auteur, compared the sport’s new interest in its past to Bob Dylan’s tutelage under Woody Guthrie.)

The retro movement also inspired a much-needed change in surfing equipment. In the early 1990s, shortboards went hyper-thin, narrow, and lifted. This New School-influenced “glass slipper” design provided turn-on-a-dime handling for the world’s best surfers but was a disaster for anyone below the expert level—it paddled like a serving tray, felt twitchy underfoot, and bogged down the moment it hit a flat spot. “For the first time in the sport’s history,” California surfer-shaper Dave Parmenter wrote in 1993, “the boards being ridden by pros cannot be ridden by the average surfer.” In response, Parmenter created a wide, flat, thoroughly practical alternative called the Stubb-Vector. The Stubb didn’t ricochet off the lip or twirl in midair. But it caught waves like a dream, planed well, turned smoothly, and was user-friendly in just about every way. It also had the sex appeal of a VW Beetle. World-tour pros ignored the Stubb, as did most surf magazine editors, and it was doomed to niche-level popularity.

Retro exponents agreed with Parmenter that most surfers needed more foam under their feet. Their preferred design, however, was a stumpy, split-tailed twin-fin called the “fish.” Introduced nearly three decades earlier by San Diego kneeboarder Steve Lis, the fish liked to run on a straight line and was a chore to ride in hollow surf—but it absolutely breezed across small, powerless waves.

The fish was the hottest board to hit the market since the tri-fin. Style legend Tom Curren rode his to poetic effect at Jeffreys Bay, and better still, the fish was pulled from the deepest recesses of the newly-fashionized '70s. This meant it could be introduced (or reintroduced) as the very height of 

 surf-cool. To better market the whole thing, there was an unspoken agreement among boardmakers and the surf media that the fish could be modified or updated in any number of ways—curvier outline, more rocker, three fins instead of two—and still be called a fish.

It wasn’t just the fish. The retro movement encouraged board experimentation in general, and surfing was better off for it. High-performance tri-fins remained the shortboarder’s default equipment choice. But the pressure was now off to ride what the pros were riding, and from the early 2000s forward, especially when conditions were marginal, surfers took to the water on a menagerie of wave-craft: fish, quad-fins, antique single-fins, hulls—even longboards.

Originally, longboarding’s place in the retro movement was a little hard to pin down. In general, shortboarders and longboarders still didn’t have much to do with each other, and plenty of breaks remained segregated. But tensions between the two groups had eased over the decades. Furthermore, a young and conspicuously hip new generation of longboarders had arrived, and Joel Tudor of San Diego, the group’s best-known member, had for better and worse become surfing’s poster boy for all things retro.

Tudor was a child prodigy longboarder in the early '90s. Freckled and thin, with a helium-pitched voice, by age 15 he had the smoothest longboarding touch of anyone this side of David Nuuhiwa. He won two longboard championships (in 1998 and 2004) but resisted being categorized, and by the late '90s he was devoting half of his water time to shortboards—all carefully replicated from the late '60s and '70s. As the sport’s first and coolest proponent of retro-chic (“Joel, what’s it like to have more soul in your little finger than most people will have in their entire life?” gushed a 

 magazine editor during in 1998 interview, too excited to keep his metaphor pointed in one direction), Tudor decorated his whole life with artifacts from the past: he drove a ’64 Chevy Bel Air with period surf racks bolted to the roof, listened to Charlie Parker, wore bell-bottoms, burned incense, and cut his hair in a Wayne Lynch 

 shag. He had a sharp tongue and was a dependable surf-industry critic. He was also an echo-chamber for any Age of Aquarius cliché. “I’m just trying to pass along a message,” he said a few months after his 

Cynics happily gnawed away at the Tudor image, starting with the mind-expanding fact that the average retail price for a Joel Tudor Surfboards “Diamond T” model noserider—with soulful hand-lettered decals and backyard-style abstract finish—was a cool $1,050. Yet Tudor made no bones about being a professional. He could ride a trend as well as he could ride a First Point Malibu peeler.

Business aside, Tuder genuinely seemed to be pulling more from the surfing experience than just about anybody. He rode a lot of different boards and rode them all extraordinarily well. All that rooting around in the past, furthermore, had provided him not just with an excellent jazz LP collection and enough vintage clothes to stock a Goodwill outlet, but with some worthwhile and mostly-forgotten ideas about what it meant to be a surfer. It was Tudor who reminded everybody just how much better a surfboard looks without a lot of labels and stickers; most of his boards, long and short, had one small logo on the deck and none on the bottom. By word and example, Tudor also did a better job than any surfer his age at expanding the criteria for high-performance surfing. “It’s not just how much you can do on a wave, or how crazy you can get,” he said in 1999. “It’s also, How much 

 can you make it? How much beauty and style can you put into it?”

Greater variety in surfboard equipment, and more attention to riding style—these ideas never should have been “retro” to begin with. But they were, and it’s much to Tudor’s credit that both were back in vogue—along with paisley-covered boards and the Nixon-era beavertail wetsuit—as surfing glided into a new century.

From one angle, surfing's retro movement looked like beach-hipster fashion wankery. But it also tapped into a broader desire among surfers everywhere for an alternative way to surf—one that didn't involve competition, ratings, logo overkill, and gratuitous aggression.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

A Dance with the Past

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