surfing

surfing, sport of riding breaking waves toward the shore, especially by means of a surfboard.

History

Surfing’s roots lie in premodern Hawaii and Polynesia, where the sport was practiced by both men and women from all social strata from royalty to commoners. Early European explorers and travelers praised the skills of Hawaiian surfers, but 19th-century missionaries assigned to the islands disapproved of the “constant intermingling, without any restraint, of persons of both sexes” and banned the pastime. Surfing was practiced only sporadically in Hawaii by the end of the 19th century.

In the early 20th century, however, concomitant with the development of Hawaii as a tourist destination, surfing underwent a revival, and the sport quickly spread to California and Australia. Key to this diffusion were the American writer Jack London and the Hawaiian surfers George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku. After visiting Waikiki, London published several accounts of surfing in popular American magazines; in 1907 the American industrialist Henry Huntington hired Freeth, whom he billed as the “man who can walk on water,” to help promote his new railway line to Redondo Beach. Surfing thus took hold in California. A few years later, after Kahanamoku won the 100-metre freestyle event at the 1912 Olympic games, swimming officials from New South Wales invited him to Australia to demonstrate his swimming and surfing styles. In 1914 and 1915 Kahanamoku thrilled crowds in Sydney with his wave-riding skills, thus helping to establish the sport in Australia as well.

Early board design impeded the development of surfing. The typical surfboard ridden by Kahanamoku’s generation was solid wood, was 8–10 feet (2–3 metres) long, 24 inches (61 cm) wide, and 3 inches (8 cm) thick, and weighed 100 pounds (45 kg). Rudimentary designs and a lack of fins made the boards extremely difficult to maneuver. Most surfers simply pointed their craft shoreward and made no attempt at steering.

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In the 1930s American surfer Tom Blake attached plywood over crossbeams to produce a “hollow” board. He also added a fin under the tail, which enabled surfers to better steer their craft. Blake’s primary aim was not to produce a more maneuverable wave-riding board; he wanted a faster board to compete in the then-popular paddling races. Nevertheless, Blake’s lighter board, which weighed between 60 and 70 pounds (27 and 32 kg), proved much easier to ride in surf. New materials such as balsa wood, fibreglass, and polyurethane further revolutionized board design and manufacture in the 1940s, producing still more maneuverable wave-riding craft. Called “malibus,” for the California beach on which they were introduced, and weighing a mere 20 pounds (9 kg), these boards allowed surfers to “trim” (adjust their position and weight on the board to allow it to travel at the same speed as the breaking wave), “stall” (slow the board to allow the breaking wave to “catch up”), and change direction on the walls of breaking waves.

While Hawaii remains the spiritual home of surfing, surfers appear wherever waves break, from Norway to the Antarctic, from the Mediterranean Sea to Lake Michigan.

Equipment and techniques

Contemporary surfboards are still made from polyurethane and fibreglass. However, they are shorter (6–6.5 feet long [1.8–2 metres]), narrower (17–19 inches [43–48 cm]), thinner (2 inches [5 cm]), and very light (5–6 pounds [2.3–2.7 kg]). Carefully shaped rails (edges of the board), noses, and tails, together with three fins, allow riders to move their craft freely around the wave and have transformed surfing into a gymnastic dance. Today the wave is the apparatus upon which surfers perform spectacular maneuvers such as “tailslides” (withdrawing the fins from the wave and allowing the board to slip down the face of the wave), “floaters” (“floating” the board along the top of a breaking wave), “reverses” (rapid changes of direction), 360s (turning the board through 360 degrees on the face of the wave), and “airs” (flying above the face of the wave).

Surfing culture

Because they were lightweight, easy to transport, and easy to ride, malibus popularized surfing and sparked a unique, hedonistic subculture. This subculture originated in Southern California but spread around the world, from South Africa to Australia, by surf-film cinematographers, surf magazines, and the travels of the peripatetic California surfers. By the late 1960s a distinctly Australian way of surfing had emerged; based on more aggressive maneuvers performed on shorter boards, it quickly dominated and influenced the global surf culture.

At the heart of this worldwide culture, which was loosely based on free-spirited beatnik philosophies of the 1950s, was the “surfari”—a wanderlust trip in search of perfect waves. This culture was reinforced by its own unique language: “like wow,” “daddy-o,” “strictly squaresville,” “dude.” “Surf’s up!” meant the surf was high enough to ride; “Wipe out!” meant to fall off the board; and “Hang 10” meant surfing with all 10 toes over the nose of the board. There was also a “dress code” (T-shirts, striped Pendleton shirts, narrow white Levi’s jeans, Ray-Ban sunglasses) and de rigueur bleached-blond hair and goatee. This surfing culture was predominantly male-oriented, with long-haired women in bikinis serving mostly as admirers on the periphery.

The culture rapidly diffused into the mass consciousness of the baby-boomer generation, assisted by Hollywood surf films (romantic beach musicals and comedies: Gidget [1959], Ride the Wild Surf [1964]), surf music (a thundering guitar-based sound played as single-note riffs: Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” [1962], the Chantays’ “Pipeline” [1962], the Astronauts’ “Baja” [1963]), “pure” surf films (“travelogs,” with footage of surfers riding waves: The Big Surf [1957], Slippery When Wet [1958], Surf Trek to Hawaii [1961], The Endless Summer [1964]), and specialized surfing magazines (Surfer, Surfing, Surfing World). The nonconformism of surfers did not endear them to the public, and social commentators branded these youths as itinerants, nomads, and wanderers and characterized surfing as an indolent, wasteful, selfish, and institutionally unanchored pastime.