SUNDAY JOINT, 3-2-2025: IRONMAN SURFER DALE DOBSON HAS ADVANCED TO THE NEXT ROUND

Hey All,

I spent last week out of town and returned Saturday evening to find out Dale Dobson of San Diego died on Friday, age 78, after a years-long period of failing mental and physical health—ironic in that Dale in his prime was among the fittest, most disciplined, least-vice-ridden surfers of his or any other generation. I only met Dobson a few times; we both competed in the 1982 Op Pro, and he visited SURFER Magazine now and then when I worked there. He was reserved, stiff even, on land. Quick to smile but watchful and solitary. Massively and justly confident in his own ability while at the same time not quite comfortable in his own skin. If Dobson had any interests or hobbies or passions besides surfing (and, during the 1970s, skateboarding), I didn't know about them. "I'm really me when I'm out in the water," he told a San Diego newspaper in 1971. 

For pure athleticism, is is impossible to overstate how gifted Dale was. NASA-level gyroscopic balance. Reaction times like Sugar Ray Leonard. I was going to say that if the shortboard revolution had started a year later, Dobson would've been a dark-horse contender for the 1968 world title—but I don't even think it's a dark-horse situation, you'd just bet on him, and cover with side bets on Nuuhiwa and Young. Jump ahead four years, and Dale could have easily won again at Ocean Beach in '72. Everybody in the sport knew how good Dobson was, but there was a slight hard-luck aura about him during this period.

A few years later, Dobson was among the first to get back on a longboard—Nuuhiwa, Herbie Fletcher, and Lance Carson were in there as well—and for a long time he drove up and down the coast picking up trophies and three-digit winner's checks like the fastest kid at an Easter egg hunt. The breaks, now, were all in his favor. Except none of what Dobson accomplished in the 1980s and '90s had anything to do with luck, he was the hardest-working surfer in any lineup he paddled into, and if that meant he rode not just his share of waves on a given day, but half of your share, and everybody else's too, that's just the way it went. The man was in training, always. And in truth, the rest of us were fortunate just to watch.

Dobson, with his anvil-shaped jaw and upright bearing, was not an uncanny soul-stirring rider of waves, like WSA sparring partner Nuuhiwa—angels did not sing when Dale surfed. But they were as astounded and amazed as the rest of us at his footwork, his synaptic spark, his repertoire. "Once while judging a contest at San Onofre," Jim Kempton wrote yesterday, "Mickey Muñoz and I both scored Dobson a perfect 10 after watching him flawlessly execute nearly every maneuver ever invented in longboarding."

I last wrote about this compelling and hard-to-categorize surfer in a 2019 Sunday Joint:

Dale Dobson is a lesson in the vagaries of timing. During the first half of the 1970s, he all but rented podium space at the US Championships (4th in ’71, 1st in ’72, 3rd in ’75), but for me Dobson always comes to mind as the slightly tragic figure of 1968, when he became the world’s best longboarder—10 minutes after everybody else went short. From a distance, it almost looks like he got pranked. First big contest of the year, the Santa Cruz AAAA, at the Rivermouth, and here comes Corky and David and Skip with their brand-new 7'10" miniboards dripping amniotic fluid all over the beach, and there’s Dale over there with a 9'6" noserider in one hand and a buggy whip in the other.

But a twist! Dobson wins the contest! Great waves, no judging mistakes, and Dale takes a clean victory over David Nuuhiwa, who at that point could have built an ashram next door to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and filled it with two-thirds of the American surfing population and a Beatle or two.

And another twist. At that point in time the short surfboard apparently was not yet fixed in everyone’s pot-hazed minds as a sure thing. Or at least not in America, anyway. Keep in mind that the Santa Cruz contest was held more than a year after Bob McTavish made his first deep-vee Plastic Machine, six months after the Windansea Surf Club went to Sydney and got rolled by the shortboard-riding Aussies, and three months after McTavish and Nat Young famously rode their vee-bottoms at Honolua Bay. Done deal, right? That’s what I always thought. But no. Drew Kampion, in his SURFER coverage of the AAAA, tells us “this contest would either cement or shatter the surge of surfers to the banner of the Mini,” and that “there was still doubt,” and that “few surfers in Santa Cruz were sure that the shortboard was a real and functional thing.”

Then I realized that American surfers hadn’t yet seen Hot Generation (with Nat and Bob in their hypnotic Come to Jesus finale sequence at Honolua), and hadn’t read much at all about shortboards beyond the fact that McTavish had recently been shaded by soon-to-be world champ Fred Hemmings as the “spin-out king” after his wipeout-filled deep-vee debut at Sunset during the Duke contest in late 1967.

When Kampion was on the beach that weekend at Santa Cruz for the AAAA, SURFER had yet to run a single feature on the new short sticks. On the second and final day of the Santa Cruz contest, however, Drew comes around—sort of. “It was now evident,” he writes, “that the shortboard was the innovation of the year and perhaps of the decade.” And this for the closer: “Dobson’s win over the shortboard is pyrrhic. He has won the battle; he may lose the war.”

But did you catch that “perhaps,” followed by the “may”? That’s Drew creating some wiggle room for himself—just in case, I don’t know, it turns out shortboards cause cancer or baldness and everybody runs back to the safety of their noseriders.

Dobson spent the next 10 or so years on shortboards, then went back to his 9'6", and through the ’80s and early ’90s won about three-quarters of every longboard contest he entered. So you might say that, during that epochal weekend in Santa Cruz, rather than being a step behind the curve, Dobson was in fact way ahead.

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

Matt

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Dale Dobson, 1969, photo by LeRoy Grannis; 1968 Dobson portrait; skateboarding in the mid-1970s; hanging ten in 1967; Baja in '69 with Skip Frye, Dobson, and Mark Martinson, photo by Brad Barrett; trophy-winner in 1968. Reverse nose-walk in 1968. Dobson in robe, '68, photo by Drew Kampion. Cutback at Malibu in 1973, photo by Craig Fineman. Santa Cruz 1968 AAAA contest, with Dobson on the left, Neal Norris, center, and David Nuuhiwa on top right, photo Barrett. Noseriding to a win at Santa Cruz, photo Barrett. Peace out, photo Barrett.]