CHAPTER 6
Going Vertical
The Parallel Ascent of Kelly Slater and the Surf Industrial Complex • The 1980s and 1990s
Kelly Slater: The champ bends around the falling lip of a South Pacific reef-pass wave. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
Kelly Slater: The champ bends around the falling lip of a South Pacific reef-pass wave. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
U.S. Surfing Association Decal, 1962 (Voyageur Press Archives)
In the past, surfers rode waves in a variety of ways. Long, smooth turns cut across glorious green walls. Hanging ten and hotdogging it. Muscular drives down ever-bigger waves.
Then, at the dawn of the 1990s, Kelly Slater went vertical.
Within pro surfing, several performance schools emerged in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Surfers such as Tom Curren represented the Power School of grand, flowing turns with lots of splash but less flash. Meanwhile, Martin Potter and Christian Fletcher were the very visible leaders of the Aerial School, turning the old Jan & Dean skateboarding song “Sidewalk Surfin’” on its head. The golden duo sang, “You can do the tricks the surfers do.” Now Fletcher, Potter, and a slippery squad of surfers were doing the tricks the skaters could do—ollies, kick flips, lien airs, 360s.
In fall 1989, Fletcher’s aerial surfing won him $31,725 at the Body Glove Surf Bout II at Lower Trestles. Interviewed in Surfer, Fletcher said he practiced by skating a half-pipe in San Juan Capistrano and playing Skate or Die on Nintendo. Soon after, he appeared on the cover of the skaters’ bible, Thrasher magazine, and made the covers of Surfer and Surfing. All in the same month.
Kelly Slater was inspired by both the Power School and the Aerial School, and he sought to take the best of both and meld them into his own: “There were two surfers whose styles impacted me the most: Tom Curren and Martin Potter,” he wrote in his 2003 autobiography Pipe Dreams. Slater admired the smooth, powerful rides of Curren: “He had the ideal mix of flow, radical moves, and a perfect style honed on long, California pointbreaks.” Slater was also stoked by Potter, and wrote simply that “Seeing Martin Potter blasting an aerial on the cover of Surfing magazine in 1984 when I was 12 changed my life…. He was someone I could relate to, and right away, I wanted to fly.”
In 1992, a twenty-one-year-old Slater solidified all the hype by claiming the World Pro Tour—the youngest surfer ever to do so.
But more than that, Kelly ignited a revolution. Combining Curren’s flow with Potter’s flair and exposed to the world by videographer Taylor Steele’s Momentum flicks, Slater ushered in the New School of surfing.
Gone were the days of letting the wave dictate the ride. Kelly Slater drew lines never before imagined—not even in the drawings scribbled on your high-school notebooks.
Kelly’s ascent came in a new era, and he rose higher than any other surfer before him. His ride paralleled the rise of the modern surf industrial complex of competition, media, and marketing that reached full speed during the 1980s and 1990s. Competitive pro surfing tours and companies like Ocean Pacific, Rip Curl, O’Neill, Body Glove, Billabong, Gotcha, Quiksilver, and more reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and profits. Their marketing forces launched Kelly Slater as the poster boy of the New School.
Between the competitive pro tours, major sponsorship dollars, and huge hype, surfing would never be the same.
My beach! My wave! My chicks! Go home!
— The Surf Punks, “My Beach,” 1980
Surfing Travel Decals, 1960s–1970s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Kelly Slater and the surf industrial complex were born the same year: 1972. Kelly was born in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to Judy and Stephen Slater, while the surf industry was multicultural and had many parents—American, Australian, South African, South American, Hawai’ian.
According to Judy Slater, her second son, Kelly, arrived pretty much as the world came to know him: brown and light and strong, broad-shouldered and determined.
Cocoa Beach was a small town on the Space Coast, dubiously semifamous as the setting for I Dream of Jeannie. It was best known around the state for being Partyville, where long-haired youngsters rubbed elbows with buzz-cut Apollo astronauts. While it wasn’t much of a surf town by California standards, during the 1960s a hot crew of East Coast surfers hung out there, including Gary Propper, Dick Catri, Claude Codgen, and Mike Tabeling.
Stephen Slater moved to Cocoa Beach to surf and party and work construction and in 1967, he was serving as a bouncer in a bar when he rescued Judy from an unruly date. They soon married, and Robert Kelly Slater was born five years later.
Kelly had a normal Florida childhood, competing relentlessly with his older brother Sean, nearly getting killed numerous times by alligators and his own wiles. He rode a skateboard, then a bike, then a minibike. At five, he began riding waves on a Styrofoam bellyboard. “The waves in Florida suck,” he wrote in Pipe Dreams. “I hate to put it so bluntly, but compared to most places around the world, it’s true.” Still, they were all the waves he had.
His ambition was to get off that bellyboard everyone teased him about and onto something serious. In 1973, Malibu surfer Tom Morey trademarked a sophisticated bodyboard design called the Morey Boogie, which started a slew of copycats and a sub-craze for people who wanted to get in the ocean but not go through the rigamarole of buying a surfboard and having to learn to stand up. The Morey Boogie helped fuel the second surf explosion by putting more people in the water. Some surfers resented the intrusion, looking down—literally and figuratively—on “boogers” as second-class citizens. Kelly didn’t care. A bodyboard was a step up from that Styrofoam thing, and he took it. On his skateboard, he was spinning 360s and doing other tricks; now he tried those tricks in the ocean, standing on his bodyboard. And he got a lot of opportunity to do it, because his mom loved the beach and taking her kids surfing was a good excuse to do some bronzing.
Kelly and his brother spent a lot of time at a burger joint called the Islander Hut, listening to the jukebox. The number one song in 1977 was Queen’s “We Are the Champions”; Slater must have heard it a zillion times, and who knows what impression that left on his psyche. And then there was the sight of all those spaceships launching into the stratosphere from Cape Canaveral—visions of vertical freedom.
Surfing was fueling Kelly’s dreams. He and his brother rode waves all day, read all the magazines, and watched all the movies: “The surfers in those movies were even better than the guys at home, and my favorite was Buttons Kaluhiokalani,” he remembers. “He and fellow Hawaiian Larry Bertlemann could do anything on a wave—doing 360s in the barrel, sliding the tail, even hitting the lip and switching their stance—tricks that guys are still trying to do today. There was no limit to their imagination. I swear I saw Buttons go upside down and make a complete flip in one of the movies.” Hawai’ian surfers Ben Aipa, Mark Liddell, and Larry Bertlemannn were also pushing the limits of performance surfing with their skateboarding-influenced, anything-is-possible style of super-loose hotdogging. Kelly was still just a kid, but it all left an impression.
He entered his first surf contest in 1980—the Salick Brothers Surf Contest held in front of the Islander Hut at Cocoa Beach. There were four other kids in his division and he was still riding his bodyboard, but Islander Hut was his turf, he knew the wave inside out and backwards, and he blew everyone away, doing standup, backside 360s. He attracted attention, including catching the eye of the Salick brothers and local surfboard shaper Matt Kechele, who was about to turn pro and would become one of Kelly’s mentors.
Kelly was eight when his parents broke down and finally bought him his own, real surfboard. Yet even this new, albeit dangerous, single-fin was behind the times, as Australian Simon Anderson was winning three world tour events in 1981 on a new-fangled three-finned innovation he called the Thruster. Kelly’s first board was exactly five feet long and airbrushed with an image from the film Jaws of a shark lurking for the attack.
In 1981, nine-year-old Kelly took his first trip out of Brevard County to compete in the Eastern Surfing Association Menehune Division Championships. He had never confronted anything other than the placid, continental shelf–protected breaks of Cocoa, and Cape Hatteras was a brave new world. Kelly couldn’t make it past the shorebreak and finished seventh out of seven.
That same year, he was the youngest and smallest of a Menehune group organized by Dick Catri to tour Brevard County. Kelly was there because he was Sean’s little brother, but by 1982 he was winning most events and earning prize surfboards and free stickers. Catri then took his wards to a Florida trade show, where Kelly shyly said hello to Tom Curren, and also met Quiksilver’s Danny Kwock and Jeff Hakman, who gave him a pair of Quiksilver shorts. Catri picked up sponsorship for his Menehunes from Arena, a maker of sweat suits, and also Sundek, a Florida manufacturer of beach clothing. Now, Kelly had all the free gear he could handle. It was the shape of things to come.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Kelly watched his family fall apart due to his father’s drinking: “Many of the greatest athletes, artists, and overachievers of any kind come from imperfect families,” he wrote in Pipe Dreams. “It creates character. We can’t choose what sort of home life we are given as a child, but it plays a big part in making us who we become. The more difficult things are, the more likely we are to latch on to something outside the home. My something was surfing….”
Some people let personal problems drag them down; others use it as fuel. In 1982, Kelly was back to win the Eastern Surfing Association Menehune Division Championships, but family problems forced him to give up his slot in the United States Amateur Championships. Kelly and his brothers were being raised by their mom. Money was tight and got tighter, but Kelly had his surfboards and the ocean and enough support to keep it rolling. He was not the first champion surfer to drown his problems in the ocean, and he wouldn’t be the last.
John Severson and the Birth of Surf Culture
Scrape away all the layers of experience that time has laid on John Severson—father, husband, painter, golfer, sailboarder, traveler, architect, environmentalist, writer, editor, moralist, publisher, filmmaker, square, hipster, baseball player, surfer—and on the bare canvas, you will find an artist.
John enriched the world by introducing it to the pursuit of surfing—first with paintings, then film, and then, in 1960, with his magazine The Surfer. He took surfing public with a combination of talent, commitment, courage, and pure surf stoke that laid a firm foundation for this thing we call the surf industry.
John was in love with art, and by tracing the course of his life, it’s obvious that luck was in love with John Severson. His life has seen a number of turning points, some self-induced, some caused by forces that, in retrospect, can only be called fate.
The first was a move when he was twelve from Pasadena to San Clemente. Orange County was pristine, and so was the act of riding waves. Severson graduated from mats at San Clemente pier, to paddleboards at San Onofre, to ten-foot six-inch Malibu chips at Cottons Point.
A first-grade teacher, Mrs. Lane, encouraged young John’s artistic talent. His mother also helped, enrolling him in correspondence art courses and buying him cameras. In high school, teacher Doug Hammond guided him on the school newspaper and other art projects. But as he explored all the facets of art, he kept coming back to the ocean, and surfing was his muse.
He received a degree in art education from Chico State, then a masters in art from Long Beach. In 1956, he was drafted into the Army, and in a twist of fate he now recognizes as a turning point, he was stationed in Hawai’i. “All these other guys were saying, ‘Oh no, the worst duty in the world.’ Everything was expensive. The locals hated the haole, but I was just delivered to heaven.”
John lived in Haleiwa, often surfing the North Shore alone. Then he was ordered to join the Army surf team and practice at Makaha.
Fred Van Dyke was another who spent time in Hawai’i, and would later become a partner in John’s first surf movie. An accomplished big-wave rider himself, Van Dyke had good things to say about Severson the surfer: “Regardless of what anyone else says, John Severson was the first person to hotdog big waves,” Van Dyke says. “John touched me very deeply one day at Haleiwa. It was about 10 to 12 feet, almost bigger than you want to ride Haleiwa, and he went out and did turns and climbs and kick outs and things of that nature that took my breath away.
“John went on to ride bigger waves and he was able to do the hot dog maneuvers on them. John was just voraciously in love with surfing and he wanted to do something to move it ahead. He was extremely well-coordinated and an outstanding representative of what surfing could be. Most of us dreamed of climbing and hotdogging on a wave. He went out and actually did it.”
In January 1959, John nearly died—blacking out twice—after getting creamed by the Makaha Bowl on a big day. Adventures like this in Hawai’i inspired his paintings—whimsical renderings of small, fearless men riding huge, fearsome Hawai’ian waves. John sold his paintings on Waikiki Beach, and with the proceeds invested in film for his Keystone 16 mm movie camera. What began as a hobby turned into a semi-career as his first film, Surf, played to hungry audiences in Hawai’i and California.
Released from the Army in 1958, John made more movies—Surf Safari, Surf Fever, Big Wednesday, Going My Wave. Unfortunately, time and overuse have worn away these movies, and they no longer exist—except in many a surfer’s memory.
While touring his movies, John found an audience with an appetite for any surfing image. He sold photographic prints for a dollar, inspiring the idea for a pamphlet for his third release, Surf Fever: “People tried to talk me out of it,” John says. “But I’m a surfer, you know. Sometimes I’ll see an opportunity and I’ll just go for it: forget the consequences. We printed up 10,000 copies of The Surfer and it all looked good, but when I went to the printer and loaded all those magazines into my VW van, I thought: ‘What have I done?’ I was going to charge $1.50 for these things, and I didn’t know if I would sell a hundred. Well, the first place I went to there was a riot going on and I thought, ‘Just my luck.’ But they were all there for the magazine.”
The Surfer was originally a quarterly canvas in which he could express himself through cartoons, words, and photos. But the demand turned The Surfer into a full-time magazine, blossoming from a quarterly to a bimonthly. John had the good taste to hire the likes of Rick Griffin, Hyatt Moore, Drew Kampion, and Ron Stoner—young, talented, stoked surfers who added their energy to one of the most unusual magazines in America. As Kampion, who came on as The Surfer editor in 1967, remembers John: “He’s a great artist. Not just on canvas, but in whatever he touches.”
How to describe the sixties? How to describe the changes surfing underwent? How to describe what it was like to be the shepherd and policeman of those changes? John had transitioned from a square, golf-playing country-club guy to angry counterculture spokesman. America was at war with Vietnam, and with itself. Orange County was being transformed from rural paradise to suburban jungle. And to top it all off, fate gave John an interesting new neighbor—Richard Nixon, one of the most paranoid presidents in American politics.
Living next door to Nixon was the ten-ton weight that broke John’s will. In 1970, he made one last movie, an environmental statement called Pacific Vibrations, and then he was gone, off to Maui.
Since John left The Surfer in 1971, he has been involved in projects at his leisure—painting, helping launch other magazines, publishing books, traveling, designing textiles, and of course, surfing. But still, at heart and at the canvas, John Severson is an artist: “Sometimes when an artist gets successful he gets trapped into a certain kind of art, like landscapes, or portraits, or clowns with big eyes. Well, I started off painting surf scenes and all along I’ve wondered if maybe I should do something else, maybe landscapes or portraits or clowns with big eyes. But you know I would have trouble painting cows in meadows or something and I think I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I’m a painter of surf scenes. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve come to terms with it.
“I paint surf scenes, and I’m stoked.”
Bing 1966 Foam Surfboard: Bing Copeland was one of the pioneers of the isophthalic foam board, ushering in a new era in lightweight, high-performance boards. Bing collaborated with Donald Takayama in building this triple-rail model. (© Malcolm Wilson)
Due to his 1982 ESA Championship and with help from U.S. Surfing Federation Director Colin Couture as well as Kelly’s sponsors Sundek and O’Neill, he now had a travel fund allowing him to jet to the best competitions and get back to school on time. In 1984, he competed in his first pro event, the Sundek Classic, held during spring break party time in Melbourne Beach, Florida. The surf was small, so twelve-year-old Kelly took out an Australian pro nearly twice his age and weight, only to lose his next heat.
He traveled to California that summer to compete for a slot on the national team heading for the World Amateur Championships in Huntington Beach. This was Slater’s first time in California; he didn’t weigh much more than a wet wetsuit, and the waves of Salt Creek were more than he could handle. Kelly and Sean both missed out on the team, but they got to surf a lot of good waves from Orange County to Ventura County and had their eyes opened wide to the possibilities.
A few months later, Kelly won a ticket to Hawai’i in a Florida event and in December 1984, he really got his eyes opened. After watching countless movies of Pipeline, reading about it in magazines, and staring at posters on his bedroom wall, he paddled over to Pipe on a small day. He caught a few waves and started to get cocky, then got caught inside and got pounded.
Still, if he’d learned anything from his family problems, it was how to pull himself back up. A week after getting trounced by Pipeline, Kelly competed against the likes of future friends and foes Shane Dorian and Keoni Watson in the U.S. Amateur Surfing Championships at Makaha. The surf was small but powerful, and Kelly was as shocked as anyone to find himself the U.S. Menehune Champion.
In 1986, Time magazine reported that total retail surfwear sales hit one billion dollars for the first time, with Hobie Sportswear and Ocean Pacific the market leaders. The new Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) Tour was thriving, with ten events in Hawai’i, South Africa, Australia, and California. In California, wetsuit-maker Body Glove was doing good enough business to underwrite the Professional Surfing Association of America (PSAA) Tour, a training ground for young pros intent on making it to the ASP. Down Under wonders like Simon Anderson and Mark Richards ruled the waves, while young Santa Barbara surfer Tom Curren became amateur champion and looked to be the one to regain the momentum American surfing had lost to the Australians and South Africans.
These were the roaring 1980s for surf contests, as a combustible mix of rowdy surfers joined forces with bikini contests at big-buck events. The combination of hot surfing and hot chicks overheated at Huntington Beach’s 1986 Op Pro. Thousands of contest-goers fueled by sun, sex, and booze went berserk, overturning cars, setting fires, threatening the overwhelmed police and lifeguards, and running wild through the streets. No one was killed but many were arrested and there was thousands of dollars in damage to beach facilities. The real damage was to the public image of pro surfing.
Kelly continued to compete as an amateur, yet during the Easter Surfing Festival 1986, he made it to a pro event final. He was now fourteen and still a pint-size kid, but his surfing was fast becoming a threat to other pros on the East Coast. Gaining confidence as a competitor, he still lacked experience in big waves. Hawai’i was too far away from school for quick trips, so Kelly and Sean traveled to Barbados and Puerto Rico to get used to size—and coral reefs. By the ripe old age of fifteen, Kelly was a seasoned traveler.
For all his later success, Kelly never really had a good result at the World Amateur Surfing Championships, held every two years. In 1986, he went to Newquay, England, and was the second youngest in the hyper-competitive Open Division. Despite the cold water and big waves, he made it to the final and came up against fearsome competition in the form of Australian Nicky Wood, Tahitian Vetea “Poto” David, and Hawai’ian John Shimooka. Kelly fell on two waves and finished third in the world. An accomplishment for most, for Kelly, it felt like failure.
In 1987, North Shore hit national movie screens, telling the tall tale of a surfer named Rick Kane who wins an Arizona wavepool contest, sending him to Oahu’s North Shore to battle villainous locals, huge surf, pretty Hawai’ian girls, and treacherous surfboard shapers. As corny as the movie was, it remains a timepiece of 1980s surfing, and the fiction of that film mirrored Kelly Slater’s reality.
Dale Velzy 1960 “7-11”: Several years before the arrival of the short-board revolution, Dale Velzy crafted his high-performance 7-11. Kinda ugly—but not! he remembers. These were fun…cherry-red rails, they floated good, they rode the nose, they spun out pretty bad, but… (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 7' 11" LONG; 23 1/2" WIDE; 3 1/2" THICK; 35 POUNDS
That same year, Kelly won a wavepool event on the PSAA circuit in Irvine, California. That victory got him on the cover of Surfing and the buzz grew. “The magazines started calling me the future world champion,” Slater says in Pipe Dreams. “Since I had won six East Coast Titles, four U.S. Championships, and two NSSA Nationals, all eyes were focused on me. While the attention and faith in me was nice, I still had to prove I could do it. Before I could even think of turning pro, I had to win as an amateur at the highest level.”
So, just like in North Shore, he went to Hawai’i. There, Kelly tucked under the wing of surfboard shaper/big-wave guru Ken Bradshaw. Originally from Texas, Bradshaw had made a name for himself as one of the best at Sunset and Waimea Bay. Now, he showed Kelly the ropes along the Seven Mile Miracle.
Still, 1988 was a disaster for Kelly. Determined to win all there was left for him to win—the World Amateur Title, held on familiar turf in Puerto Rick—he bombed out of the qualifying team trials. The water was cold, the surf was bad, Kelly was wearing a thick wetsuit, and he couldn’t get his freak on.
Despite his jinx, the buzz continued to build. Surfer did a nine-page feature in 1989 calling him the Next Big Thing, the Great American Hope. Heady stuff for a seventeen-year-old, but Kelly ate it up: “After that, I was no longer thinking of surfing as mere recreation,” he writes. “I was beginning to realize it could be my career. It was my opportunity to set myself up for life, and I wasn’t going to blow it.”
In 1989, Kelly finally got to surf in the Op Pro, an event he had admired from land for many years. He rode in the amateur Op Junior against friend and foe Rob Machado. Injuring his hip doing the splits on a blown turn, Kelly still won in a rousing finale, giving the world a taste of the epic Slater-Machado heats to come.
Kelly also had new deals to surf for Rip Curl wetsuits and Ocean Pacific clothing, all part of the promotion machine of the blossoming surf industrial complex. “I was still an amateur but must have made at least as much as my high school teachers,” he remembers. He had the juice to buy his family a house in Cocoa Beach, and for the first time in a long time, the Slater family had a permanent base. He spent some time in France with Tom Curren, learning the secrets of his sensei. Back at Cocoa Beach High, he resumed the abnormal life of a teenager, but as soon as the bell rang for winter break, he was off to Hawai’i, determined to make his way farther outside and deeper into the lineup of those giant waves.
Bing 1968 Foil: The short board revolution arrived in the late 1960s, characterized by surfboard’s such as Bing Copeland’s Foil. (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 7' 8" LONG; 22 1/2" WIDE; 2 3/4" THICK
Dewey Weber 1969 Pig: Dewey Weber’s Pig short board was innovative, fast, and an ideal hotdogger. (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 5' 9" LONG; 20" WIDE
Kelly’s World Amateur Surfing Championships jinx continued in 1990, when he was jumped by three Brazilians in the semifinal and failed to advance. In July 1990, he surfed his first pro event as a true pro, the Life’s a Beach Klassic in Oceanside, California. He made it to the second round, where he met his hero Martin Potter in a man-on-man heat. Kelly lost and Potter won, but on the podium, Potter gave the upstart his highest accolades: “I knew after I beat Kelly that I could win this contest.”
With more success came more interest from the surf industry. Kelly was represented by agent Bryan Taylor, who stuck him in a bidding war between Op, Gotcha, and Quiksilver. As things got intense, Kelly famously escaped to Mexico, surfing the tip of Baja with the words “I Don’t Even Care” stenciled to the butt of his trunks.
When Kelly returned home, he began a beautiful relationship with Quiksilver, signing a multiyear agreement for six figures annually.
Christian Fletcher: Out of the 1980s and into the 1990s, a tattooed, shaved-head, nose-pierced surfer from San Clemente shocked everyone with his look on land and his antics in the water. Christian Fletcher and his skateboard-influenced aerial surfing were reviled by many, but he proved to be ahead of his time with his look and his moves, which are now standard in the twenty-first century. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
Kelly picks out one day and one wave—December 3, 1991, at Pipeline—as the turning point in his life. He was just nineteen, fresh out of Cocoa Beach High, and a freshman on the ASP Tour. He was the only rookie remaining in the Pipe Masters, where he’d made it to the quarter finals to face Australians Damien Hardman, Simon Law, and Mike Rommelse. Only two guys would go on to the semis, and Kelly wanted to be one of them.
Seven years had passed since punk-kid Kelly had paddled into Pipe and got worked. Now, he had grown into himself and was the very model of a modern surfer. If you took the top forty-four pros at the time and averaged their height and weight, it was Kelly exactly: five foot nine and 165 pounds. He was the mold of the New School surfer—short, light, built like an Olympic gymnast, riding incredibly thin, light surfboards at new speeds and in new places on waves.
He had proven a lot in other venues but had everything to prove at Pipe, in serious surf, in serious competition, in front of the world. As the clock ticked, Kelly could hear the judges and knew he was behind. He was sitting away from the competitively voracious Australians and was in position for a mean, wedging, inside wave that everyone but he could see was evil incarnate. This thing was black and mean, even by Pipeline standards—the kind of wave that can pitch a surfer headfirst into a deadly coral reef only a few feet under the surface. This wave needed an exorcist, and Kelly went for it.
“From the top of the wave, I dropped about 15 feet straight down,” he remembers. “I barely stayed upright through the drop but somehow managed to redirect my momentum back up the face under the thickest pitching lip that came through all day…. One second I was staring out of a massive cave swirling around me, and the next I came shooting out in a cloud of spray. I raised my arm in a victory salute for a split second, before a cross chop separated me from my board.”
Tom Carroll won the Pipeline Masters that year and Damien Hardman took the 1991 ASP World Title, Kelly finishing forty-sixth. Yet, as he wrote in retrospect, his ride at Pipe delivered him from his demons: “Up until that moment, I had spent my surfing career running from big waves, but making it through that one gave me the confidence to ride anything.”
Shea Lopez: Surfers from Florida are forced to make mountains out of molehills. Shea Lopez is from the Gulf Coast, a place that only gets surf when the Civil Defense is telling homeowners to finish putting up hurricane windows and move inland. Lopez has learned to do a lot with a little and he was in the wave of hot East Coasters to follow the trail blazed by Slater. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
From the 1960s to the 1970s as Drawn by Rick Griffin
From the 1960s to the 1970s, Rick Griffin’s surfboard shrunk by three feet while his hair grew twelve inches and his art morphed from pen-and-ink sketches of surf-stoked gremmies to full-color psychedelic explosions of mystic eyes and flesh-colored Jesuses.
Griffin was a surfer and survivor in those potent, transitional years. He doodled and drew his way through youth, adolescence, and maturity, his life’s arc following the same trajectory as surfing, but shooting him into the stratosphere of not just surf culture but popular culture. Griffin nearly didn’t survive—but he still thrived, drawing all that he saw, and in the process, becoming one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.
Surfing went from jazzed in the 1940s to rock’n’roll-stoked in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, in the 1970s, it went psychedelic. Shorter boards and expanded minds were the new wave, and many pioneering surfers who were prominent in the early years did not survive the transition.
Greg Noll, for one, went out with a bang. On December 4, 1969, Noll was the last man standing during the biggest swell anyone had ever witnessed at Makaha. Against all odds, he stroked into a monster wave, made it to the bottom, and then got destroyed. After that, Noll saw the writing on the wall—the dawn of the shorter boards and younger guys and drugs and revolution. He came in from that giant wave, returned to California, gathered up his family and, like Odysseus, moved as far north in California as he could, retiring from surfing to become a commercial fisherman.
Rick Griffin was to surfing what Michelangelo was to Renaissance Italy. Starting as a gremmie in LA’s South Bay, he hooked into this surfing thing young, his artwork vibrating with surf energy and the stoke of the young men and women who were challenging the waves. His early work was subtle and funny, and true to the lifestyle as it progressed from the innocent days of Gidget and the Beach Boys through the complexities of the Vietnam War and the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll of a new era.
Richard Griffin was a war baby, born in Los Angeles on June 18, 1944 to a Southern California mother and a Navy father, who was also an amateur archaeologist. Boy Griffin accompanied his dad on digs, and Native American art and other western motifs sublimated into his psyche to surface in his art decades later.
Griffin grew up on a Palos Verdes peninsula still rural amidst a Southern California smaller and quieter than now. From certain spots on Palos Verdes, he could see almost all of the beaches of Los Angeles County and it was at Torrance Beach that he started surfing. As junior high buddy Randy Nauert remembers, “We were all basically beach kids, dressed alike in tennis shoes and white shirts, who were bussed inland to this school. Rick, however, had just moved into Palos Verdes from Lakewood and he had this totally different style from anybody else. Griffin was this rockabilly greaser with French-toed, spit-shined shoes and a waterfall pompadour haircut. Man, I was just amazed by those shoes, so I walked over to him and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to teach me how to shine shoes like that.’ Rick looked at me, kinda surprised and said, ‘Well, what will you do for me in exchange?’ I thought for a second and I said, ‘Well, I’ll teach you how to surf.’ From that point on, we were best friends.”
Griffin was also a natural-born doodler. He scribbled surf scenes on Pee Chee folders, school desktops, and any other available surface. But unlike most kids his age, Griffin showed real wit, talent, even genius. From copying Mad magazine cartoons, Griffin went pro, sketching custom cartoons on his friends’ T-shirts for fifty cents a shot.
Griffin became a local legend, catching the eye of Greg Noll, then running his Manhattan Beach surf shop. Noll has always recognized talent, and he became Griffin’s first mentor. Griffin drew up a pricelist for Noll’s surfboards that was a fun little masterpiece, and it led to a free board and bigger things.
During a screening of Surf Fever at Narbonne High School, Griffin was introduced to John Severson, the original surf artist whose surfing movies were insanely popular. Severson had just started The Surfer magazine, and now he hired Griffin straight out of high school.
In the third issue of The Surfer, Griffin introduced the cartoon character Murphy, and an institution was born. Murphy was every-surfer, a stoked gremmie who went through life equally brave and puzzled, enjoying victories and suffering defeats with every other step. Based on Griffin’s own experiences as a young Californian wave-rider during the boom years—getting scared by Hawai’ian waves, dodging Marine patrols at Trestles—Murphy tapped into the common experience of tens of thousands of young surf gremmies. Murphy became the surfer’s mascot for the 1960s, an essential ingredient of every issue and even gracing the cover in 1962. As Severson told The Surfer’s Journal, “He absolutely captured the surf stoke of that era.” Looking back, the The Surfer’s Journal publisher Steve Pezman agrees: “The surf stoke in his drawings was incredible. He drew waves that you could feel sucking out, the whoosh and awooo!—you could just feel the surfing sensation of those waves—those renditions of perfect, peeling tubes. No one had drawn them with such feeling before.”
Griffin and Murphy had a great ride until 1964, when the cartoonist and cartoon began to run out of wave. While hitchhiking to San Francisco to hop a freighter for the South Pacific, Griffin just barely jumped out of James Dean’s footsteps when he was involved in a car crash near King City. Griffin was nearly killed in the crash, which dislocated his eye and permanently scarred his face.
A new Griffin emerged. He covered his ruined eye and scarred face with an eye patch and beard. His art changed as well. From 1964 to 1967, Griffin drew a series of adventure cartoons in which he and photographer Ron Stoner spanned the globe, looking for waves and women and whatever else the road could throw at them.
Griffin then fell in with the Haight-Ashbury hippie crowd, and his art went psychedelic. Where Murphy had been a square, well-meaning gremmie who ran on natural energy, Griffin’s new strips included the Zig Zag Man and the Grateful Dead, hookah pipes and magic mushrooms. His new symbols let the world know the times were a changin’.
Tales From the Tube, 1972: Rick Griffin’s artwork perfectly captured the vibe of the emerging 1970s surf scene. (Used by permission of Ida Griffin/Steve Pezman Collection)
Griffin created the poster for the 1967 Human Be-In at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, making him the artist for the Summer of Love. From there, he was hired to draw posters for Jimi Hendrix, Cream, the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, concerts at Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium, the original logo for Rolling Stone magazine, cartoons for R. Crumb’s Zap Comix, and album covers for the Dead’s Aoxomoxoa, the Eagles’ On the Border, and much more. In 1968, Griffin joined Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelly, Victor Moscoso, and Wes Wilson as the Big Five poster artists, founding the Berkeley-Bonaparte Gallery. Griffin explained, “In San Francisco, doing posters on a regular basis was like going to my own art school.” His work found fans, such as head Deadhead Jerry Garcia: “Rick, like the rest of us, was on a mission to turn on the world. It was like, ‘If you like that, you’re gonna love this!’ I dug Rick’s stuff because it related so well to my own psychedelic experiences. Everything he ever submitted to us always nailed it—boom!—like it grew out of the center of the earth.”
Through it all, Griffin never forgot his surfing roots. To return the favor for launching his career, Griffin penned the poster for John Severson’s Pacific Vibrations in 1969. His poster for MacGillivray/Freeman’s Five Summer Stories showed a changed, 1970s version of Murphy sporting sunglasses, long hair, and a turned-on vibe. Murphy was obviously now experienced.
In 1972, Griffin introduced some of his Haight-Ashbury friends to surfing. The result was Tales from the Tube, a comic book insert in The Surfer magazine featuring Griffin, R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Bill Ogden, Jim Evans, and Glenn Chase. With its psychedelic stoke, Tales from the Tube perfectly captured the 1970s surf scene.
Like a lot of others who overindulged in the 1960s, Griffin began searching for salvation in the 1970s. He found it in Jesus Christ, and his work, from Surfer to music took a spiritual turn. As R. Crumb remembers, “Rick Griffin was always one of those real dreamers. He made up his own hybrid mythology. Even when he was a Jesus freak, it was his own crazy romantic version. He wasn’t a jerk about it. If you look at his Jesus stuff, it has that kind of pure, beautiful rendering of the Catholic bleeding heart, all those dark warnings about the murkiness of the world, the archetypal religious symbols but he didn’t dwell on them very much.”
In 1991 Rick was riding his Harley-Davidson Softail when he had a fatal collision with a van. He donated his kidneys, heart, and good eye, and his ashes were taken to his favorite surf spot near Fort Ross, Mystos. Ever since, it has been known among the faithful as El Griffos.
The next year, Kelly won the Pipe Masters and his first world title. Hawai’ian Derek Ho won the 1993 title, but Kelly took it back in 1994—and won the world title every year until 1998, six overall. He also won the Pipe Masters in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 1999, inspiring a grateful Quiksilver to raise his salary to a rumored one million dollars annually. And along the way, he was voted to the top of the Surfer Readers Poll for eight years going.
While dominating pro surfing from 1991 to 1998, Kelly was deified as one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” in 1991. That odd honor had something do with him guest-starring on Baywatch in 1992. And that lead to an on-again, off-again relationship with Pamela Anderson, who was on the beach at Waimea in 1999 when Kelly competed in the Quiksilver Big Wave Event in Memory of Eddie Aikau—an event he won in 2002.
One of the problems with early success, with achieving all your youthful dreams, is what you do for a second act. In 2005, Kelly Slater was thirty-three, but going strong. He had largely retired from competition, but was still blowing minds as a surfer. He had a great segment in Chris Malloy’s A Brokedown Melody, towing into a gnarly right reef somewhere in Otaheite. And when young surfers weren’t trying to imitate him on the waves, they were being him on their PlayStations in the Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer game.
Kelly’s friend Jason Borte, cowriter of Pipe Dreams, summed up Kelly’s retirement on the www.surfline.com website: “After extremely limited competition in 1999, Slater returned to Hawaii for the season-ending event: the Pipe Masters. In maxing conditions, he greased the field—including new world champ Mark Occhilupo—for his fifth Masters crown, repeating the effort in 2000 at Teahupoo. Two years removed from the tour, his surfing is better than ever. But until a serious challenger emerges from the pack, he has no reason to return to competitive life. For now, he will relax with friends and family in Cocoa Beach, tend to promotional obligations for Quiksilver and occasionally show up at world tour events to see his friends and remind us who is king.”
Kelly Slater: When Kelly Slater appeared on the cover of Interview magazine he was billed as “Half Dish, Half Fish.” And that’s about right. Slater might have dolphin DNA somewhere in his genes, because he moves through the briney in ways that make even pinnipeds jealous. Part of the secret to his success is a compact, muscular body that can bend into yoga positions that would make a guru cry, “Oy vey!” Slater’s unique physicality—combined with his Shaman-like focus—molded him into the most successful competitive surfer in history. (Photo © Dan Merkel/A-Frame)
