The History of Surfing

497 Pages·2010·54.411 MB·English

by  Matt Warshaw

The Histor y
of Sur fing
Matt Warshaw
contents
Introduction: page 10 Chapter 6: page 296
The Fortune Seekers: Early 1970s–1980
Chapter 1: page 14
Out of the Blue: Pre-1900 Chapter 7: page 346
The Long and the Short of It: 1981–1991
Chapter 2: page 38
Gliding Return: 1900–1945 Chapter 8: page 412
The Ride of Your Life: 1990–2009
Chapter 3: page 90
Malibu Swing: 1945–late 1950s Acknowledgments: page 478
sources: page 479
Chapter 4: page 152 Photo credits: page 488
Boom Years—A Massive Swelling: index: page 490
Late 1950s–1967
Chapter 5: page 234
Barefoot Revolution: 1966–1974
SIMMONS
IntroductIon
By Matt Warshaw
his was always going to be a big double-thick slab
of surf book. By definition, it had to circle the
world and move through the centuries. I wanted to clean
and jerk the entire gorgeous sprawling mess of a sport—
hoist it up where surfers and nonsurfers alike could see it
anew and in full—and that wasn’t going to happen in any
kind of abbreviated form.
Nonetheless, the list of goals I set out with (and
held to) was fairly short. First, I wanted to insert the bits
and pieces of data that usually go missing from the sport’s
historic record. This meant a lot of sifting through the archival
alluvium, but the information was all there: sales records and
board specs, production costs for a first-generation surf movie,
the number of annual surf-boom-era “graduates” at a Sydney
surf school. The sport’s history doesn’t live or die on these little
pushpins of information. By fixing them into place, however,
the story doesn’t flap around so much; it’s better grounded.
Here’s what I mean. Remember those beautifully lacquered
solid-wood Depression-age surfboards? For decades, received
wisdom was that they weighed a knee-buckling one hundred
pounds. Pick up a hundred pounds of anything and walk from
one end of the block to the other. Now imagine doing the same
thing before and after every surf session. Equipment that
heavy might not have killed the sport outright, but it would
have dragged things down considerably. As it turns out, the
average board made in the 1930s weighed about fifty pounds.
Does it change anything, or lessen the narrative zing, to
deflate little surf-world myths like this? Maybe, sometimes,
but it’s the truth. And even so—fifty pounds is still pretty
damn heavy.
Demythologizing the sport, in fact, was another goal of
mine. I couldn’t wait to sledge away at the cheerleading and
boosterism and perjured nobility layered onto most works of
surf history. Pulling down shoddy historiographic handicraft
is, by itself, I admit, pretty satisfying. But the real purpose—
and the real pleasure—comes from the fact that the mortal,
ground-level version of events is, almost without exception,
more compelling than the legend or the myth. Surfing history
10
INTRODUCTION