In 1966 I was a precocious yet still wide-eyed Waikiki gremmie when I anxiously flew to the mainland for the World Contest in San Diego. It was a last-minute decision, complicated by the knowledge that the roster for the Hawaiian team had already been carefully selected and that the event itself was starting in just three days. Funny, though, how those odds were slight deterrent to me then. I had a gut feeling, an intuition perhaps, that something large loomed on the horizon. I was, after all, fresh from my very first professional win at home (600 bucks!) for the longest tip times in a pure noseriding contest fashioned after the recently held Morey challenge in California.
I was going to have to borrow a board when I got to San Diego, and that would be if I even got my chance to compete. But the sense of destiny I was experiencing overshadowed any echoes of logic in my head. It was a gamble, of course, an early exercise in the calculations of risk every surfer must adopt sooner or later. As it turned out, I didn’t need to find a board to ride. I would be on the sidelines for this show as all the Hawaiian team riders kept their slots. It was hard to hide my boyish disappointment, but as I witnessed that week of competition I came to realize that what had really drawn me there was an epic, symbolic struggle unfurling before me. It was here that surfing would take a sweeping surge toward a shimmering yet uncertainly mapped future.
Even in the less-than-formidable slop of the closing rounds at Ocean Beach, the trumpet call had sounded. Executing his incendiary forehand bottom turns, rhythmically cinched tight to high-compression roundhouse cutbacks, Nat Young convincingly ripped away the World Title. To his credit, and in a credible reflection of Hawaii’s pool of talent, only Jock Sutherland’s switch-stance hot-dogging repertoire and respectable runner-up result came closest to halting Nat.
It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. David Nuuhiwa was widely considered unbeatable in these waves and was expected to be crowned king. So when the surly young upstart from down under athletically slashed his way through the pack of competitors wielding “Sam,” a shorter, rather crude-looking blade with a wickedly foiled fin, we were also taking in a new, almost angry, dimension to the surfing approach, strategically dispatched like punishing blows to the body in a boxing bout. It was called aggro. It would have generations of conscripts with different egos and degrees of application: Drouyn, Petersen, Fitz, Andersen, Cairns, Bartholomew, Carroll, Occy, et.al., and nowhere will we ever find a more definitive term than “aggro.” Aggro became the provocative badge of Aussie ability and attitude over the waves, spawning a slew of rather rapacious adjectives that became a permanently acceptable part of modern surfing vernacular: “Ya bloody, thrashed, ripped, shredded, and killed it, mate!” At that seminal moment, no one personified these attributes more than Nat.
It wasn’t that David surfed poorly in the event: indeed, some of his performances were showcase Nuuhiwa. He did exactly what we wanted him to—that is, he pulled off the most stylistic renditions of noseriding ever seen. (His epic, orgasmically arched, nearly-11-second nose flight on that one wave in the early rounds on the lefts at Mission Beach jetty still gives me chicken skin to remember.) Surfing had erected a temple to hanging ten and made David its god-supreme, and in so doing, it also made him an unwitting slave. It wasn’t hard to see why he was reluctant to change strategy and alter the path from his patent-polished struts to the tip. Quite simply, we were all very, very hung up on noseriding. Posing there became the epitome of the surf act itself. We literally couldn’t see past our noses yet. That is, until Nat’s win called BS on the posing and forced us to examine the alternatives. What followed was nothing short of the famed revolution. And though it would fuel shared visions, it would also haunt our individual sleep, driving us to the brink of an elusive ground zero for the truths we sought. Even so, these watchwords became very clear to us: shorter, lighter, faster.
In truth, though, really short, very fast boards had always been around, especially if you grew up surfing in Waikiki where an almost required progression into full standup status began at the Wall—that junction of asphalt and sand where Kapahulu Avenue spills across Kalakaua Avenue and juts out as a concrete barrier/walkway over the water. All manner of home-crafted plywood paipo boards zip shoreward to the screaming glee of the local keikis. Popularly referred to as bellyboards, because they were primarily ridden lying prone with the aid of swim fins, these versatile boards also served double duty as shorebreak sand sliders. Paipo pilots had a penchant for tucking easily and intimately into the crisply defined curls, but the abiding impression is simply how fast these buggahs accelerated—very much like the present-day bodyboards.
Back then, one could look down from the wall promenade and see Mr. Valentine Ching Jr. dominating the lineup, threading past the corner of mossy concrete the instant before the wave slammed full force into the wall’s face: KAWHOOMPH! With perfect edge work, he’d swivel sharply into a cutback to milk the reform, rebound nonchalantly off the soup into a controlled tail slide stall, then pump his board, accelerating down the line going past, in front of, behind, or harmlessly over any of the oblivious riders in his path, before a final flying pull-out landed him clean a good 30 yards from the ewa-side of his takeoff point. Near the beginning of his next ride, he ramped off the backwash to pop an aerial and successfully land it to continue and replicate the dance through the sections of the tricky reef. Yet, what really separated the quietly self-possessed Val from the aggressive pack of local-boy, “cut slack to nobody” Wall regulars (Victor Palakiko and a youthful Eddie Aikau among them), indeed, what placed him firmly on a pedestal, is the impressive fact that all of these moves on his paipo were done standing up! A key to his technique was that he did not use swim fins, which made it infinitely harder to catch waves yet easier for him to stand. Considering the era of Val’s paipo mastery (mid- to late ’50s, early ’60s) the future of surfing’s shortboard potential could well have been set right then.
To the unseeing eye, other than the layers of paint or varnish applied, these paipo boards held no hydrodynamic gimmicks. Roughly shield- or bullet-shaped, about three-and-a-half feet long by two-and-a-half feet wide, with wide points well forward, typical paipo templates were, from the get-go, all about forward projection and the pure planing area to maintain it. They had to be since they offered nearly zero floatation. Edges in the nose were shaved up, edges in the tail shaped down. Cut from standard five-eighths- or three-quarter-inch marine ply, these paipos had dead flat decks and bottoms. However, through repeated heavy usage, Val’s favorite paipo had warped into an s-curve. The scarred bottom also had noticeable concave. Was this the key to its phenomenal speed or his extraordinary talent to coax velocity from it? Both probably, but in sad retrospect, none of it—Val’s talents nor the important attributes of paipo design—was ever clearly recognized, fading into obscurity like much of the early beauty of Waikiki itself.
Maybe paipo boarding was by its very nature a novel pastime for the mostly impoverished local kids to outgrow, progress on from. Or more darkly perhaps, like Boogie boarding, respect and serious considerations weren’t given paipo boarders because arrogance characterized those who stood up exclusively on normal, longer boards. Certainly though, Val’s unsung prowess and paipo boarding’s contributions stand in evolutionary significance with the ancient, short alai’a boards, Rabbit Kekai’s early mastery of the redwood hot curl boards, and Nat Young’s history making performance in 1966. Still, Valentine Ching’s impact on me with what to do on a wave when speed is in your hip pocket implanted important reference points in my head later on. Thanks ah! Bruddah Val.
[Feature image: Reno Abellira, 1972 World Surfing Championships. Photo by Jeff Divine]
