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 first West Coast Surfing Championships were held in 1959 at Huntington Beach Pier. Four years later the meet was upgraded to become the United States Surfing Championships, and it was the only West Coast surf event where spectators had a real presence: hundreds came out for the debut event, and turnout during the mid-'60s often hit ten-thousand or more. The contest took place in September, which invariably brought the kind of warm early fall weather guaranteed to pull a crowd on any Southern California beach. But the real draw was Huntington itself, already well on its way to both fame and notoriety as “Surf City.”

Huntington in the late '50s was no longer the grubby oil boomtown it had been between the wars, with wooden derricks foresting the beachfront, tent cities, and roughnecks brawling in front of Main Street speakeasies just up from Pacific Coast Highway. Then again, it wasn’t Malibu either. Atomized raw crude still scented the air, the beach was speckled with tarballs, and the yards of the cheap single-family cottages that now covered the beachfront were often occupied by backyard oil pumps rhythmically nosing the ground. Waikiki, Malibu, Palos Verdes, Kirra Point—the landscapes surrounding these breaks were lovely enough to be postcards. Huntington was flat, poor, and industrialized. Soon enough it picked up another nickname: “Surf Ghetto.”

Huntington’s surfing pedigree, though, was first-rate. Waikiki transplant George Freeth likely rode Huntington as early as 1907, and Duke Kahanamoku stopped by once or twice during the 1920s, by which time local first-generation lifeguards were riding their planks on either side of the long municipal “pleasure pier.” Gordie Surfboards opened in 1956 and briefly held a monopoly on local surf trade, but others soon followed; by the early '60s nearly a dozen shops were located on the Main Street/Pacific Coast Highway axis, adjacent to the pier, and Huntington became the hub of American boardmaking. The surf wasn’t great, but it was consistent and plentiful; two-way sand-bottom peaks could be found along Huntington’s entire eight-mile beachfront. The space was needed. Huntington was connected by freeway to Anaheim, Fullerton, Garden Grove, and the rest of Orange County’s non-coastal suburban towns, as well as to what was called the Inland Empire—Fontana, Pomona, Riverside. Newly-minted surfers from these areas funneled into Huntington by the carload: on a glassy weekend morning in the summer of 1962, a local boardmaker, scanning from one side of the pier to the other, counted six hundred bodies in the water.

What made Huntington the seat of American competitive surfing was the pier itself—an 1,850-long concrete monster (over a third of a mile), with a pair of “T” crosspieces jutting parallel to the beach, and a terminus that would occasionally get battered into the surf by heavy winter storms. The best waves in town broke over the sandbars that formed on either side of the pier, and surfers often finished off a ride by shooting through the gaps in the mussel-fringed pilings. Spectators loved it. The sightlines were better at Huntington than anywhere on the coast, and there was always a chance of a mangling surfer-vs-piling wipeout. Boards usually took the impact, but scrapes and cuts were common, and about once a decade a rider would go head-first into a piling and die.

Huntington Beach Lifeguard chief Vince Moorehouse came up with the idea for what he ambitiously called the West Coast Surfing Championships, and in early 1959 he convinced both the Huntington Beach Recreation Department and the local Chamber of Commerce to approve and support the event. There were dissenters. Sure the contest would pump some cash into the Main Street retail zone, but wasn’t the city just turning itself over to a bunch of blond-haired juvenile delinquents? Moorehouse said he had it under control, and prevailed. A date was set. Entry forms were printed, filled out, and returned, with each surfer check-marking his or her division: men’s, women’s, or juniors’. Contestants turned up on the big day to find a hand-painted sign propped against the pier: “Huntington Beach—Surfing Capitol of the West Coast.” The sun was out, the waves were head-high and glassy, local surf hooligans found other things to do, and native son Jack Haley took home the men’s trophy. Moorehouse was right. The contest was a success.

Things grew from there, and quickly: more surfers, more divisions, more spectators. Pepsi signed on in 1962, becoming the first multinational company to back a surf contest, and the 1964 Championships were broadcast on ABC’s 

. City fathers had a few nervous moments over the years about safety (all contestants had to wear hard-plastic crash helmets) and crime (hooligan fears weren’t totally misplaced, as board thieves learned to worked the crowd mercilessly, even stealing from the competitor’s area). But for local merchants the event was like Christmas in autumn, and Huntington residents in general seemed to think their town’s embrace of surfing had worked out for the best. Civic pride was further stoked by Jan and Dean’s 1963 chart-topper “Surf City”—their tribute to the wave-dependent good life at Huntington.

Other high-profile contests were soon up and running, including the Malibu Invitational, the Australian National Titles, and the Virginia Beach Surfing Festival (soon renamed the East Coast Surfing Championships). Bad waves turned a lot of events into duds, but now and then a contest would become a true showcase, with top surfers pushing their skills to the outermost limits and beyond, while the crowd cheered and yelled. There was underdog Ron Sizemore trick-riding his way to victory over powerhouse Rusty Miller to win the 1961 West Coast Championships. Or Joey Cabell of Hawaii serenely defeating all comers in mauling 20-foot Point Surf to win at Makaha in 1963.

Still, there were a lot of people who cared less about expert wave-riding and more about spectacle. Contest organizers knew that an out-of-control rider windmilling straight toward the pier at Huntington, or novice competitors getting creamed in the Makaha shorebreak, could bring a crowd to its feet just as fast—

, actually—than a neat piece of high-line trim work. Lifeguard-team dory races were added to the big mainland events in the early 1960s, and spectators were rapt waiting for a boat-on-boat smashup, or at least a good capsizing.

All of this contributed to the idea, even among dedicated competitors, that surf contests were really just a supplement to wave-riding in its natural form. “Real surfing” was the surfer’s linguistic marker, used to put some distance between surf competition and a never-explicitly-defined pure version of the sport. In any event, few in the sport took competition all that seriously. Surfers, and surf events, were still amateur, in the best sense of the word. A surf contest wasn’t anything you trained or practiced for. Maybe you’d log some extra hours of water time before a big meet, or arrive at the event site a few days ahead of schedule to get used to local wave conditions, but that was about it.

A major surf contest, finally, was a social gathering as much as an athletic test, one that involved admirers and groupies and some 

 one-upsmanship in “getting radical.” For every competitor who showed up on finals day limbered-up and morning-fresh, another was bloodshot and foul-breathed from the night before. Performing well with a massive hangover was itself taken by many as a sign of surfing greatness. What made Windansea Surf Club members swell with pride at the 1963 Malibu Invitational wasn’t just that they’d placed five of their own in the finals, but that four had been passed-out drunk that morning.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Oil City Showdown

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