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

 magazine ran a feature in 1965 titled “Phil Edwards Picks the Top Ten Noseriders.” Heading the list was a 17-year-old goofyfooter with a last name that the surf world was still stumbling over—David Nuuhiwa. The Hawaiian pronunciation was something close to “Newee-

-Wa.” To kids on the beach it was either “New-

Edwards’ list was a who’s-who of high performance surfers in the mid-'60s. It included Corky Carroll, a junior division chatterbox who went on to become the winningest American surfer of the decade; a smooth and gentlemanly Hawaiian named Paul Strauch; and Malibu specialist Lance Carson—a noserider with superhuman balance, as well as a roaring early-stage alcoholic, who once famously climbed up nude on the hood of a friend’s car and was conveyed across a Winchell’s parking lot with a honey-glazed donut wrapped like a tea cozy around his member. Not on Edwards’ list, but everyone’s favorite all-arounder, was Mike Doyle—a big, rangy, hatched-nosed regularfooter who won surf contests, paddleboard races, and tandem events, and rode the heavies at Sunset and Waimea.

These were all big-name surfers. But they were all more or less regular guys, too—someone you might strike up a conversation with in the lineup during a lull. David Nuuhiwa was different: smooth enough in the water to make other top surfers look as if they were riding over gravel, but also dark and quiet, with Miles-Davis-strength cool. Nuuhiwa had star quality the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Duke Kahanamoku in his Jazz Age prime. By late 1965, Nuuhiwa was practically levitating over the American surf scene.

The cool was born in part out of hardship. Motherless since the age of four, he arrived in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1962, a 14-year-old dropout, the runaway son of a Waikiki beachboy. Nuuhiwa connected with Donald Takayama—another immensely talented Hawaiian runaway. Nuuhiwa earned his keep sweeping foam dust off the floors of the Weber Surfboards factory where Takayama, just 18 years old himself shaped boards.

Surfing came easy to Nuuhiwa. He was almost extra-human in the water, a hybrid, with panther-soft feet and maybe vestigial gills if you got close enough to see, and by age 17 his wave-riding style verged on the immaculate: arms resting low off the hips while trimming, face calm, shoulders, hands, legs, hips, and ankles all moving together as if they were coated in graphite. Where Phil Edwards made an art out of overreach and recovery, Nuuhiwa put his turns together like Rudolf Nureyev on a long pass across the floor at Lincoln Center. The two surfers were physically distinct as well: the slender and smooth-limbed Nuuhiwa, despite being just over six feet tall, looked almost waifish next to the hairy-shouldered Edwards. Big surf didn’t particularly interest Nuuhiwa, although he rode well during his occasional visits to the North Shore.

Nuuhiwa was the USSA juniors champion for three years in a row, beginning in 1964, and in 1965 he was a division winner at the Makaha International and the US Championships. But the growing Nuuhiwa phenomenon had little to do with contest ratings. It was the polished turns, the elegant trim line, and above all—Nuuhiwa’s signature move—the long, time-suspending noserides.

Riding the forward half of a surfboard was an old trick. By the mid-'40s, Hawaiian hot curl ace Rabbit Kekai had moved all the way up to the front quarter. But noseriding wasn't identified as a maneuver unto itself until the early 1950s, after the surfboard fin had developed to a point where it could really anchor the tail. Dale Velzy is sometimes credited as the first surfer to hang five toes off the front end, and the obvious next move was to get all ten toes over—Velzy, again, probably got there first. Noseriding was a big enough deal by the end of the fifties that John Severson included a “Toes on the Nose” layout in the debut issue of 

There are two great things about noseriding. First, it looks impossible. With all that weight on the tip of a thin, narrow, floating platform, how could the front end 

 sink? (Answer: water drawing up the wave face gets trapped beneath the nose’s planing surface, making a thin, fragile, weight-bearing platform.) There are plenty of subtleties and variations, and real noseriding mastery takes years to achieve. Nevertheless, because it's generally performed at medium-slow speed, in waist-high-or-smaller waves, it's an easy trick to work on. You can practice cross-stepping—the elegant but much harder way of moving across the board, as distinct from the shuffle-up method—in the smallest, junkiest conditions. On a closeout, you can hustle forward for what better surfers in the early '60s dismissively referred to as a “kamikaze run” and perch briefly on the tip before the ride disintegrated. Cutting back is hard. Hanging five, for just a moment or two, is fairly easy.

The other great thing about noseriding is that it makes the surfer feel weightless. Because your board wasn’t visible, it feels as if it simply doesn't exist. “When you get up there, you kind of lose your mind,” one top noserider said. “There’s nothing in front of you; nothing but air. It’s just your feet gliding across the wave.”

By 1963, noseriding had become a surf-world obsession—or “a sport within the sport,” as surf journalist Bill Cleary put it. 

 ran noseriding how-to columns and published an all-noseriding calendar. Board manufacturers produced special noseriding boards with an extra-wide front end for increased lift and stability—Con Surfboards’ “Ugly” model measured an elephantine twenty inches, rail to rail, one foot down from the tip. Judges thumbed their stopwatches and barked out times during noseriding-only competitions, in which each surfer’s score was determined by the total number of seconds spent on the nose over the course of the event. Five seconds was considered a medium-long noseride; ten seconds and you were close to record-breaking territory.

David Nuuhiwa turned noseriding from a trick into an artform. His movements were so fluid that he didn't seem to move to the front end, but simply materialized there, and thus perched he might rest his fingertips lightly on his hips, or lift a foot antennae-like out into the airspace ahead, or lightly pressure the inside rail so that his board sideslipped down the face—an incredibly difficult bit of maneuvering. But mostly, he would just stand in quiet, hypnotic repose for seconds at a time. “He changed surfing,” one journalist wrote. “For awhile, in fact, David was surfing itself, a pharaoh, noseriding to the adoring masses.”

While Nuuhiwa changed surfing, it changed him. Wary and shy at age 16, by 18 he displayed a growing imperiousness—and this, too, was something new in the sport. Surfing celebrity was still a new development, and famous surfers (Miki Dora excepted) had for the most part offered themselves to the media as good-natured beach jocks. Nuuhiwa was the sport's first rock star. In 1966 he had his thick black hair cut into a Mick Jagger-

 shag, didn’t return phone calls, and used the royalties from his hot-selling David Nuuhiwa Noserider signature model to buy a purple Porsche 911, which he drove like hell to Whisky-A-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip.

As the adulation from Nuuhiwa’s adoring masses grew, a few surfing insiders wondered how long it would be before this fast young peacock-in-the-making would hit a bump in the road. Not long, as it turned out.

By late 1965, David Nuuhiwa was practically levitating over the American surf scene. He was smooth to a point where he made other top surfers look as if they were riding over gravel. He was also dark and quiet, with Miles-Davis-strength cool.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

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