SUNDAY JOINT, 7-14-2024: STAY TUNED, WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK!
Hey All,
Tom Curren and I spoke by phone in early 1996, five years after his third and final world title. He’d been traveling hither and yon that whole time, as headliner for the Rip Curl Search campaign. Perfect waves, no more chasing scores and rating points. Everybody assumed Curren was now finally living his purest surfing life—myself included.
Does traveling better fit your idea of what a pro surfer’s life should be like?
No. Competition is really the pure form of pro surfing, to me. Because it’s not trying to be anything more than it is. Contests are the most honest way to make a living in surfing. The whole point is, who’s going to win the contest or the world title? Once you bring money into it, that’s the way it ought to be. It’s more of a source of pride, to me, to make money from contests rather than endorsements.
He described sponsorship in general as “a bit of a scam,” then went a step further, saying, “We’re all polluted and perverted to one degree or another by being pro surfers. It gets uncomfortable at times. It’s kind of like a big polyp. You have to ask, ‘Can I live with the polyp?’ If you can, and lots of people can, that’s fine.”
Setting up the big well-placed cutback: “Not that I can really cry about it. I’ve got money, and money is good.”
Because my own surfing idealism has contracted over the years, and because we can only guess at the moral and financial calculations that go into a person’s decision about making a living from riding waves, I’m less and less inclined to point the staff of righteousness at anybody and declare, “SELL OUT.”
Money is good. Or necessary, anyway.
But I am not so tolerant that I fail to see gradations. Here we have Gerry Lopez in 1972 selling Lightning Bolt Surfboards (tagline: “The Most Frequently Tubed Surfboards in the World”), which seems so correct and in-flow that the polyp is invisible. Then we have Gerry Lopez selling Costco soft-tops with simulated balsa panels ("the perfect size and shape for both beginners and advanced riders!") and the polyp is a goiter filling up the space between chin and collarbone.
Another set of examples:
Tom Morey gets the call-up from top NYC ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, who just landed the International Paper Company account. They want Tom to shape and ride a board made from IPC’s new semi-waterproof cardboard. This is 1965 and Morey is famous in the surf world but otherwise broke as just about every other boardmaker not named Hobie or Weber. He takes the gig. What follows is a weeks-long parade of setbacks that nonetheless winds up as a one-minute TV spot and a magazine ad campaign. Morey pockets a few thousand well-deserved bucks and gets to keep surfing and designing and thinking all his fizzy (literally! read here) Tom Morey thoughts. Win-win. Again, a polyp we can all live with.
Cheyne Horan’s 1982 Sunkist soda ad gets us back to okay-take-the-money-but-we’re-gonna-eye-roll-you territory. Horan’s most fully mystical years were still to come, but by ’82 he was already more than happy to drone on about the I Ching and yoga and herbal-this and organic-that. On TV, though, he latched on to that bottle of fluoro-orange carbonated enamel-acid like it was mother’s milk.
He attacked that Sunkist the way I will attack an open bag of Fritos, which brings us to this 1972 four-minute short, an advertorial I guess it’s called, with Mike Purpus, as part of the Fritos Sports Club series, offering tips to a beginning surfer. We are back in the dissonance-free zone. This makes total sense. Not only was Purpus an unapologetic self-promoter and flogger of products, surf or otherwise, he would glue your I Ching dice to the nipples of the life-size Raquel Welch poster hanging over his bed, just for laughs, then spike your herbal supplements with oregano. Purpus and Fritos, in other words, are a match made in advertising heaven.
What about Joyce Hoffman and her famous Triumph Spitfire ad? Another seamless pairing, right? Especially since Triumph, just a year earlier, viewed women not as a consumer demographic but as an after-market accessory. “Hairpins never trouble the Spitfire owner,” the tagline on a ’66 Triumph ad reads, just below a photo of an MK2 on a twisty hillside road. “Though he may have to sweep them out of the cockpit.” (Just a short hop from there to Spy Who Shagged Me. Vanessa Kensington: “Do you smoke after sex?” Austin Powers: “I don’t know, baby, I never looked.”) So you're thinking that Joyce, with her yellow Hobie and blonde hair, her bright smile and coiled cocoa-butter arms, is not just having fun in her new British convertible but striking a cheerful blow for justice.
Except, what on earth is a surfer doing with a two-seat sports car? There’s Joyce tooling down PCH with her board in the passenger seat—one speed bump and that thing is lifting off the seat and spinning into traffic. This car, this ad, is so insane, so impractical, that it almost doubles back into being cool.
Not really, though. You don’t buy a Spitfire unless you’ve already got a VW minibus or the like parked in the driveway back home, and good for Joyce if she did. For the rest of us, this is just a nice hit of top-down automotive sugar.
Love Joyce’s bathing suit, by the way. Everyone thinks Roxy and Lisa Andersen invented those boy-cut bikini bottoms, but Joyce and other ’60s surfer girls had this look down way back when. That’s another topic for another Joint.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Matt
PS: Walter Hoffman, Joyce’s father, died last week at age 92, following a massive stroke. Hoffman is best remembered as the force behind Hoffman Fabrics, which for a long while supplied textiles to virtually the entire American surfwear industry, and as the patriarch of a surfing family that, besides Joyce, includes grandsons Christian and Nathan Fletcher. But before that, Hoffman was both the happiest and gnarliest Mainland-born big-wave surfer. The phrase itself—“big-wave surfer”—would not have registered with Hoffman at the time. He loved surfing, did it well, spent his Navy years during the early 1950s stationed in Hawaii, and sent word back to his surfing pals to join him on Oahu. Older brother Flippy came, as did Buzzy Trent, and while local boy George Downing was setting the pace on big days at Makaha, Walter and Buzzy soon proved themselves fearless. The photo of Walter you see below, on a big Point Wave day, was shot in 1952. Trent wasn’t at that level yet, not even close.
But it was Buzzy, a few years later, with his square jaw and leatherneck vocabulary and grimacing death-on-my-shoulder “Ride of the Valkyries” attitude that became the big-wave surfer’s default setting and, intentionally or not, turned big-wave surfing into a brand. Probably that was inevitable. We love the drama. But Hoffman deserves more attention for going just as hard as Trent and Downing, and I’d like to end here by saluting Walter for choosing to not lean into the drama. Brock Little once said, of his attraction to big surf, “It’s just the funnest thing ever.” Such a ridiculous statement—what was fun for Brock was nothing of the sort for me and you. But Hoffman, with his easy smile and well-padded midsection, felt the same way. Big-wave surfing was fun, it was amazing—and lots of other things were as well, so he went out and did those too. Because Hoffman never boxed himself in as a “big-wave surfer”—because he never pretended that riding waves was in any way comparable to war and battle; because he was just basically too good-humored about it all—he was never properly credited for what he did at Makaha before he was a surfwear tycoon and a genial surfing family Godfather. Twenty years ago, in a short Surfer’s Journal essay, Gerry Lopez caught the casual fullness of Hoffman in his early years: “Although he was a Mainland haole, Wally became a beachboy in every sense of the word: surfing heavy when the waves were good, eating big when the food was available, and lounging plenty in between, playing the ukulele, dancing the hula, and singing with the gang.”
More ukulele, less Wagner. RIP Walter Hoffman.
[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Walter Hoffman, far right, and friends at Makaha, around 1955; Joyce Hoffman by Bob Evans; Mike Purpus, 1975, by Joanne Purpus; Cheyne Horan at Cave Rock, 1983, by Paul Naude; Tom Morey, 1965; Costco promo for Gerry Lopez soft-top. Tom Curren, 1988, by John Seaton Callahan. 1966 ad for International Paper Company, featuring Tom Morey. Cheyne Horan in 1982 Sunkist ad. Photos from Joyce Hoffman’s ad for Triumph. Competitors at 1965 Makaha International, photo by Don James. Walter Hoffman at the Waikiki Surf Club in 1950. Hoffman at Point Surf Makaha in 1952.]