Gidget the All-Powerful

The Rebel Next Door

Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

Summer on the Inside

Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted

Surfing the Newsstand

Process of Elimination

Oil City Showdown

The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards

Technicolor Surf Boom

Heroes and Villains

Blackball Blues

Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

Flight of the Larrikin

Bob Evans Means Business

Midget Wins It All

But Will it Play in New York?

Houses of the Holy

We Own the Sidewalks

Beautiful from any Angle

Duke's Big Contest

Can You Handle the Penetrator?

Girls, Don't Panic!

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

An Invincible Summer

Ten-Year Boom

The earliest issues of SURFER included a short “Contests and Clubs” section, but it wasn’t until late 1962 that a surf meet earned feature-length treatment in the magazine, and another four years after that before publisher John Severson put a contest shot on the cover. Then as now, surfers recognized the gulf between the day-to-day experience of riding waves—which was often combative, yes, but also dreamy, quiet, private—and the judging panels, colored flags, numbered jerseys, and ear-splitting airhorn blasts of competitive surfing.

Still, the number and importance of surf contests would only grow in years to come. Teenagers were were driving the sport, after all, and a young man's urge to compete—the surfing population at that point was over 90% male—will almost trumped any notion of buffing his surf-rebel cred by 

 competing. Even antiestablishment icon Miki Dora, well past his teenage years, entered surf contests now and then.

Competition also made the sport more recognizable to a lot of people. A newspaper editor could now turn a surfing article over to a sportswriter, who in turn arrived at a contest, saw the trophies and heat draw, and was immediately on familiar ground. The surf press (

 included), concerned about the sport’s declining public image, saw that contests gave the wave-riders an opportunity to present themselves as good and trustworthy. The beachfront city councils who sanctioned the events, meanwhile, did so in hopes of gaining some control over a group who increasingly seemed to feel entitled to its various social transgressions. Hot-rodders, after all, had been lured off the streets to race in National Hot Rod Association-sponsored events, and thus converted from societal menace to weekend sportsmen. Maybe it could work for surfers, too.

Lots of parties, in other words, had an interest in surf competition’s growth and advancement. A 

 preview of the 1960 West Coast Championships noted that “more than 200 surfboard enthusiasts” had signed up for the event, and the numbers only grew from there: more than 300 contestants for the 1962 Makaha International; 400 for an event in San Diego in 1964; and nearly 600 the following year for a contest in Hermosa Beach. Surf clubs, not much seen on the mainland since before the war, made a comeback, in part as a way to improve surfing’s “image problem,” but mostly for the purpose of club league tournaments.

Yet the relationship between surfing and competition remained awkward, for reasons Tom Blake had cited nearly three decades earlier. “On one occasion, about 1918,” Blake wrote in 

, “a riding contest was held, the winner being judged on form, etc. Everybody disagreed and that led them to believe surfriding contests were impracticable.” Another big event had to be cancelled for lack of waves, Blake continued, and at that point the Hawaiians shrugged and pretty much gave up on the whole idea—including Duke Kahanamoku, who skipped the inaugural Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships in 1928, even though he was the event’s top-billed competitor.

This awkwardness remains today, and despite what a handful of world champions might claim, surfing’s best moments as a rule take place at a long, purposeful remove from the competitive arena. Few other sports can make the same claim. And 

 sport undermines the systematic, organizational imperatives of competition better than surfing. Scorekeeping, for example. Ideas for objective scoring systems—measured in terms of speed, head-to-head racing, time spent standing on the board, number of waves caught, wave size, or points per maneuver—have been tried and re-tried. In best-case scenarios, the result was to turn the sport into novel but nonsensical hybrid, like marathon dancing or competitive eating. Subjective scoring is the only real option, but subjectivity creates inherent problems that have to be wrestled with at all times. How is the judging criteria determined? By whom? Does the criteria change depending on wave type? Who qualifies for a judging panel? How can a judge keep an eye on two, three, four surfers riding at once?

Then there’s the ocean itself, which is the very definition of an uneven playing field. No two waves are the same, and surf conditions can change not just over the course of a day, but during a single heat. How can a judging system account for all that fluctuation?

Surfers who choose to compete regularly have always been in a tiny minority—probably less than five-percent of all surfers at any given moment over the past 50 years have been regularly involved in organized competition. Still, nearly all of the best wave-riders throughout the sport’s recent history are included in that five-percent minority. True, the very idea of competition has been scorned and ridiculed as much as it’s been applauded. Australian surf messiah Wayne Lynch said contest were for "clowns surfing for popular opinion." Miki Dora called the Malibu Invitational the sport’s “simplest form of mass boredom and unimpeachable incompetence.” Surf contests often lived up to these kinds of descriptions. But not always. During a big event, when the waves are cooperating, and the judging is a non-issue, and the world's best surfers are being showcased, the results are compelling—even mesmerizing.

Competition has always been a part of surfing. In ancient Hawaii, hundreds would gather on the beach to cheer, feast, and gamble when a big royal-on-royal match took place. There were no hand-wringing questions over subjectivity. Two competitors took off on the same wave and raced for an in-shore buoy. First one there wins. Or better yet, one competitor paddled out alone, while the other lugged a narrow 

 sled to the top of a long stoned-paved sledding track. On the beach, more or less equidistant from the two competitors, was a grass house. When a big-enough wave approached, an official visible to both contestants waved a tapa-cloth flag. The surfer caught the wave and rode for shore; the sledder took a running start, flung himself prone on his sled, and bombed downhill. First man to the grass house wins.

In the opening half of the 20th century, objective scoring of one type or another was still the rule. Surfers at a 1925 contest at San Diego’s Mission Beach were awarded a point for successfully completing each of ten different “forms,” which included standing, sitting, headstanding, turning around in a circle, and riding backward. In later versions of the Pacific Coast Championships—surfing’s biggest prewar event, held in Southern California from 1928 to 1941—dozens of competitors arranged themselves in a single-file line, parallel to the shore, just south of a buoy placed beyond the surf. A second buoy was located near the beach, about seventy-five yards north of the first buoy. Each round lasted two hours, and a competitor scored a point for each completed ride that began from south of the outer buoy and continued unbroken to the far side of the nearshore buoy. Nobody could do much with those big, heavy wooden boards; the slanting angle required to get from buoy to buoy was a high enough test of skill. (Angling didn’t come into play during the Long Beach Surfing Contest, another big Depression-era event. Surfers just rode to the beach, charged back outside to paddle around an offshore buoy, then rode back in again. “Straight in, straight back out, and the guy who caught the most waves won the contest,” competitor LeRoy Grannis remembered decades later.)

Subjectively-judged surfing competition was a byproduct of the postwar Malibu chip board, which encouraged the surfer to perform on the wave, rather than simply hitch a ride to shore. Organizers for the inaugural 1954 Makaha International Surfing Championships, however, couldn’t bring themselves to embrace a purely subjective format, so they instead came up with a hybrid system: each ride was given a 1- to 10-point score in each of three categories—performance, wave height, distance ridden—which in turn were combined into a per-wave score ranging from a low of 3 to a perfect 30. Complaints about the judging system became an annual rite Makaha International competitors, and not without reason: the guy who caught a ten-footer and navigated a more or less straight line to a nearshore distance marker would score higher than the surfer who caught a six-footer and ripped into a half-dozen consecutive turns and cutbacks. California’s high-performers were especially aggrieved by the Makaha judging, and not a single mainlander won a men’s division title over the course of the event’s eighteen-year history. In 1965, hotdog supremo Dewey Weber—at a time when everyone in the surf industry, top riders included, was supposed to close rank and be supportive of big public events “for the good of the sport”—went on record as saying, “The Makaha contest is the worst.” (Organizers for the 1956-founded Peru International tried to solve the problem by splitting their event in two: a big-wave division judged solely on wave height and distance covered, and a hotdogging division judged on turns and tricks. Nobody was especially happy with that solution either.)

The Peru and Makaha events both featured tandem surfing, which was surfing's version of pairs figure skating, with brawny males living and twirling their waifish young female partners into a series of Kama-Sutra-like poses, including the Camel, the Side Bird, and the High Stag. Tandem went out of fashion in the late 1960s, after surfboard designs changed, but even during its heyday, people weren’t quite sure if it was graceful or ridiculous. It was obviously sexed up, but that too seemed a little fraught. “There weren’t a lot of guys who wanted to compete in tandem contests,” world champion Mike Doyle later admitted. “It wasn’t macho enough for them. But that’s exactly what I liked about it. Tandem was a good excuse to get away from the chest-pounding guys and go play with the girls for a while.”

In the mid-1960s, the United States Surfing Association at last tried to standardize the surf contest format. Founded in 1961 by Orange County surfer and liquor store owner Brennan “Hevs” McClelland, the USSA wasn’t the sport’s first umbrella group—that would be the Australian Surf Board Association, which emerged briefly during the mid-'40s as a surfing-only alternative to the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia. However, with boardmaking titan Hobie Alter and SURFER publisher John Severson as charter supporters, along with virtually every other player in America’s newborn surf industry, the USSA was the first to take root. It was initially an all-volunteer group that operated from McClelland’s Laguna Beach house. As McClelland wrote in the original mission statement, the USSA’s purpose was to make the sport “more serious and respectable.” Group advocacy—speaking on behalf of local surfers at various city council meetings dealing with surf restrictions, for example—was part of it. But the USSA also seemed just as intent on scolding what group officials variously referred to as hodads, gremlins, beach delinquents, and the "ugly surfer," as well as those within the sport who didn’t fight this internal “bad element.”

“It is pretty well established now that something on the order of 10% of surfers have created a ‘surfing problem’,” a USSA board member wrote in a 1962 surf magazine editorial. “Most people will further agree that there are about 50,000 surfers active today, which means there are about 5,000 surfers creating a problem for the rest of us. I believe it is going to take more than 5,000 ‘good guys,’ working actively, to counteract the 5,000 ‘bad guys.’ So, Mr. Average Surfer, your duty is clear. Until you and your surfing buddies are USSA members, and active in the affairs of the association, you have no right to complain if the USSA does not solve the ‘surfing problem’ overnight.”

Mr. Average Surfer wasn't all that interested. By 1963, after two years of nonstop promo efforts, the USSA had just 1,700 members. At that point the group change gears and became the sanctioning body for American surf contests. After codifying the rules under which a USSA event could be held, the organization cleverly required that all surf content entrants be paid-in-full members of the organization—at which point membership shot up to 5,000 almost overnight. (In Australia, Bob Evans of Sydney was doing much the same thing with his newly-founded Australian Surfriders Association.) By 1965, the USSA was done lecturing about the “surfing problem.” The group instead continued to thrash out the procedural details of surfing competition—and thus help create the base genetic material for surf competition as it exists today.

USSA officials wisely threw out any kind of objective judging format. Each ride would be scored on a subjective 1- to 20-point scale, by a judging panel consisting of three or five surfers. Wave height and distance were factored in but not measured outright; performance was emphasized. This was defined in the USSA rulebook as “riding in the tightest possible position to the curl,” and by doing “functional maneuvers performed in the critical section of the wave.” Contests were arranged as a series of elimination heats. Each heat had five or six competitors, and lasted between ten and twenty minutes, depending on conditions; two or three surfers from each heat advanced to the next round. Limits were set on the number of waves a surfer could ride during a heat (usually between six and twelve), and scores from a contestant’s best rides (three, four, or five, depending on the length of the heat) were combined to get their heat score. If a surfer interfered with somebody else’s ride, he or she was docked points, while the interfered-upon surfer was awarded an extra wave.

Rules and protocol, however, didn’t equal formality, and the typical 1960s USSA surf contest, with its Scoutmaster-like organizers and its small hive of keen but unpracticed competitors, had the neighborly feel of a soap box derby. There wasn’t much equipment to haul around: a card table, some folding chairs, an airhorn (one blast to begin a heat, two to finish), some pens and clipboards, and a bulletin board for posting results. Bunting and a PA system signified a big event. Judges were often barefoot and shirtless; makeshift judging towers were built with scaffolding planks and two ladders. For identification, each contestant wore a T-shirt with a block-print number on the chest and back (later changed to a colored nylon jersey). If it wasn’t a sunny beach day, the spectators might number less than twenty-five and be made up exclusively of competitors’ friends, family members, and love interests. Still, there was victory and drama. Trophies were handed out. Champions were declared. Surfing competition, for better and worse, was here to stay.

Surfing competition would soon have rules and protocol, but this didn't equal formality. The typical 1960s surf contest, with its Scoutmaster-like organizers and its small hive of keen but unpracticed competitors, had the neighborly feel of a soap box derby.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Process of Elimination

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