SUNDAY JOINT, 10-13-2024: DAVID NUUHIWA, THE PHARAOH WHO SHOT THE PIER

Hey All,

David Nuuhiwa's rank and standing as a benchmark surfer for the ages needs adjusting on both ends of his career. As a longboarder, peaking in 1966, he was even better than we remember—and there's not much room to move there, he's already rightfully thought of as among two or three best performance surfers of the pre-shortboard age. But still, yes, nudge him even further up. The long beautiful graphite-coated noserides are what everybody remembers, but his turns and positioning in general were just as advanced; the noseride-free opening wave of this clip, for example, matches the two waves that follow where David hangs five, ten, heels, all of it, smooth as warm honey.

Nuuhiwa's shortboard surfing, on the other hand, looking back, has not aged well. This is true for a lot of first-gen shortboarders, but by 1968 you have to judge everybody's performance against the standard Wayne Lynch was setting and resetting by the month, and David never quite figured out the new lines. Photographs from the period say otherwise, I know—shortboard shots of David from '68 to '72 look, if anything, even better than his longboard shots from '65 and '66. But roll the film. Watch the second half of this new clip and you'll see graceful moments here and there, but a lot more where the parts, arms, legs, head, board, all look out of synch. (For context, here is Wayne Lynch in Evolution.)

But it didn't matter. Nuuhiwa was bigger, at that point—to us Americans, at least—than what he did in the water, and what he did in the water was certainly more than good enough for us to be tractor-beamed into the larger Nuuhiwa presence, the aura, the Brando-Hendrix blended charisma.

Paul Holmes once said of David Nuuhiwa, "His style of star quality has never been duplicated, nor matched." Reading that again here in 2024, my first thought is that Kelly Slater's star-power was (maybe still is) 10x that of David's at its peak. But Holmes is clever. "Style of star quality" is what we're aiming for, and Paul is 100% right. David is not the biggest star the sport has produced. But in the surfer-as-rock-star category—and for 20 or so years, starting in the late '60s, this was the category that mattered most; more than ratings, more than money—he remains and always will be on top. 

We're in the middle of a Sunday Joint, so I'm running and gunning like usual, but the first half-dozen surfers who come to mind when I think of "surf icon" are Duke, Dora, Eddie Aikau, Lopez, Tom Curren, and Nuuhiwa. (Maybe Gidget, too, but let's keep it to real people.) Of those six, David was the person who most clearly understood the icon-crafting assignment, the mystery-building process, which means being at once unforgettable and unknowable, seen and unseen. Many of David's peers went hard in the other direction. Corky Carroll did Merv Griffin and the Gong Show. Mike Purpus practically rented a chair on the Dating Game. The game, as they played it, was to be everywhere, always. (Slater did the same, except on a scale many orders of magnitude greater; he's been out there nonstop, in full view, all platforms, for 40 relentless years.) Nuuhiwa meanwhile wasn't hiding out, exactly. And we shouldn't rule out the idea that he was maybe just lazier than the others—surfing greatness came easily to him; not so with surfers like Corky and Mike. But by luck or design, during his peak years, 1965 to 1972, Nuuhiwa presented himself sparingly and quietly, which in turn only made him more compelling.

The face didn't hurt. In fact, Nuuhiwa's high-cheekboned and slightly-pocked visage, with its lofty shroud of black hair, eyes behind mirrored shades, optional cigarette dangling from his mouth, is where the icon thread eventually comes to rest. For me, anyway. David's face—which at age 15 was kind of a mess, with missing teeth and the sharp, slightly feral high-alert gaze of a dropout-runaway—morphed into something still and imposing. Carve it in stone and put it on a plinth on Rapa Nui, and the lesser moai would gather below and await instructions. And it wasn't just us surfers who leaned into Nuuhiwa's dark appeal. "Halfway through the film," Rolling Stone writer Eve Babitz said in her Five Summer Stories review, "we were dazzled by a face so abrupt in its savagery and its vestigial traces of paradise that I figured the audience uproar was a simple reaction to [its] jagged beauty. [Nuuhiwa's] posture on land recalls the diffident spare way that Manolete must have looked, or how TS Lawrence must have listened." 

But the thing about icons, or pop culture icons, anyway, is that most of us can't leave well enough alone. We always want more. So we dig into the Nuuhiwa story, looking for more of what we get in print or onscreen.

His early life is interesting, tragic at times, and relatable to many in general, not specific, ways. David was born in Hawaii, his mom died when he was four, his father was mostly absent. At age 13, he flew alone from Honolulu to California, where he hustled and bootstrapped his way to a career in the sport he loved. For six or seven years he made himself into the person I've been raving about here all afternoon. But set that part off to one side for a moment. Later on, Nuuhiwa had addiction problems, got better, took a pension-paying union job doing set-up at trade shows, and as of two years ago, age 73, was an Orange County Uber driver. The point being that 90% of Nuuhiwa's life has been very much non-iconic. I would bet that the David himself, after his star phase and maybe even during it as well, was so far removed from the billboard-sized "surfing pharaoh" (Reno Abellira's brilliant phrase) version of himself that he might as well have been in the audience, with the rest of us. Which reminds me of the best-ever quote about icon-level stardom. "There is no one quite like Greta Garbo. She was incomparable." Said by Garbo herself.

David Nuuhiwa surfed in a way that seemed both offhand and magical, like something you'd see in a Harry Potter movie. His 1972 face would have brought a stifled gasp of appreciation from Helmut Newton.

This is enough, I think. More than enough!

Thanks for reading, everyone, and see you next week.

Matt

PS: I just posted two interviews with Nuuhiwa, this one from 1966, and this one from 1968. Both are short, and worth a few minutes of your time. The first, recorded when David was just 17, shows him in full young buck swagger, confident enough to admit he doesn't like big waves ("I see no point because you can’t do anything but stand there"), and looking forward to a year of taking all the scalps on the 1967 WSA circuit. The second interview, after what turned out to be a rough 12 months competition-wise, has him way on the backfoot, second-guessing and apologetic and even a bit paranoid, before going all peace-and-love at the end. It's a strange read. David says he went through "a few hangups," that his "attitude wasn't good," and that he's now "going to start all over"— and that's just what he did. But for the moment he's clearly at loose ends, and it is impressive in its own way for him to lay it all out there. Also, in case you missed the link above, this Nuuhiwa video goes a long way, in just three minutes, toward illustrating why David Nuuhiwa made us lose our collective minds.

[Image grid, clockwise from top left: Greta Garbo, 1930; David Nuuhiwa, Rocky Point, 1972, photo by Dan Merkel; Nuuhiwa at the 1971 Expression Session, photo Jeff Divine; Nuuhiwa in a 1967 Slip-Check ad; wall painting from the tomb of Nebamun, 1390 BC; Nuuhiwa noseriding at Huntington, 1966, photo by Ron Stoner. Nuuhiwa at the 1966 World Championships, Ocean Beach, San Diego, photo by LeRoy Grannis. Nuuhiwa at the 1971 US Championships, Huntington Beach. Nuuhiwa on the beach at Makaha, 1965. Dressed up for the 1966 Surfing Hall of Fame Awards. 1972 portrait by Brent Lieberman. Interviewed by Greg MacGillivray, Huntington, 1971. Nuuhiwa surfing in Puerto Rico, 1968, photo by Grannis. Paddling out at San Miguel, mid-'70s, photo by Warren Bolster.]