“Bad Karma at Huntington Beach,” by Drew Kampion, SURFER, January 1969

“This is a bad Karma contest,” Steve Bigler was saying. “The surf was good on the north side of the pier early in the week. This place used to be packed from the water’s edge to the stands. The booths aren’t filled. Television’s scratching at the last of the money. You can’t change surfing from what it is. Putting lights up, that’s part of the bad Karma, too.”

Standing in the sand at the tenth annual Huntington Beach United States Surfing Championships, it was difficult to disagree. There was a feeling in the air, a mood of irrelevance, of commercial carnival mixed with superstition. Of people trying to salvage what they could. People out to do somebody else’s thing.

“Herbie Fletcher, Rusty Miller, Mike Doyle, Dru Harrison; we all think it’s a bad Karma thing,” Bigler was saying. “Nuuhiwa? He likes it; he’s on top.”

The Huntington pier itself was fairly crowded, and the edge of the water was rimmed with people, but the mass turnout of previous years was not evident this year. And the crowd was fragmented, unenthusiastic. The contortions of the surfers in the water was seldom reflected in the faces of those on shore. The surf was small at three and four feet; the camera cage hanging from the pier was safe this year, where two years earlier it had been inundated by a clean-up set. The gray giraffe’s neck of the TV camera crane poked its nose out over the water’s edge, waiting to feed on disaster. It was a gray day, and the sea was choppy.

Fain had just turned in a third in his prelim heat and was speculating in his depression. “I'm not used to these hurricane waves,” he said. “I’m more of a river man.”

“I tried asking them to check my score,” Mike Doyle was saying, “but they had to go through the memory bank in Long Beach.” A female computer operator, headphoned and wired for sound, sat at her machine in the sand, sending coded responses to the gigantic cylindrical memory banks in Long Beach where all the facts could rest in coded security until they were called on to take part in the final tabulation.

On Sunday, the waves north of the pier were far superior to those south of the pier. It seemed logical that the major final heats be held to the north. “The city’s trying to make money off the bleacher seats on the pier,” said WSA competition director Les Williams, “and they don’t want to defeat their purpose. The bleachers face the south side.”

The contest was, in the eyes of many there, a question of strange priorities. “There aren’t any surfers on the Executive Committee. We’re captives of the responsible agencies,” Williams went on. “If I had run this contest, I probably would have postponed it to next weekend. That’s dreaming, I suppose.”

Like all other officials at the contest, Williams wore his bright orange jacket and matching tennis shoes. These were obviously designed to make the officials more recognizable. The colors are changed every year for some cryptic reason.

Midway through Sunday’s activities, a nicely organized team of evangelists filtered into the crowd to bring them the Word. “The Jews became a nation in 1948. They entered Jerusalem last year . . . Heaven or hell, it’s your choice. Me? I’m going to heaven! How about you???” They even brought their guitars with their crosses, and music sprang up beneath the cement pier:

Skip Frye stood beside his board beneath the cement pier. “For me, the waves weren’t right,” he said. “I’m looking for new horizons; I’m ready to move to the Islands. I feel I’m in a transition now. I was in a groove and stayed in it until I grooved right out of it. I’m dead right now, dormant.”

Jim Blears, a member of Hawaii’s World Contest team, won the Hawaii Surfing Association men’s trophy at Huntington (highest Hawaiian finish). “I know I expected it to be like this,” Blears said, “so I guess I’ll have to make the best of it.”

In the water, a heat was in progress. However, the shrill accompaniment of the announcer’s shrieks resembled nothing that was happening in the water. The air of irrelevance was maintained as the surfers did one thing and the announcers described another.

“It’s been getting worse every year,” Dale Dobson summarized. “This is all supposed to be for the U. S. Championships.”

Bruce Valluzzi was there from the East: “Too bad they don’t have any waves here,” he said, “though from the way the thing was judged at Pacific Beach, waves wouldn’t help.” Valluzzi was an East Coast alternate for big waves on the World Contest team.

Then, somehow, the finals began during one of the longer lulls in the surf. Beneath the shaded gray of the pier, the tandem riders performed dry runs among the pilings, standing out in bold silhouette against the light beyond them. As the finalists waited for the waves, a TV helicopter swooped low, flattening the water around Corky Carroll and David Nuuhiwa. A small set came through, and Mike Purpus, Mike Tabeling, and Corky rode. The helicopter swooped low for the best angle; a prime shot for prime time. Corky was blown out of the wave, protesting silently beneath the chopper’s swarming, droning blades.

David dropped in on a medium wave, drove up under the lip of the green wall, and in the silence of the helicopter's roar cat-footed to the nose, while on the beach nostalgia loomed like a soft cloud. David’s trim was flawless as he traced the wave’s furthest hollow to the sand. A cheer rose from the crowd.

A set piled larger than any other waves that day. Tabeling turned and dropped in, working the wave well, pushing towards the pier, compressing himself between the heaving wave and the approaching cement columns. He threaded his way through pilings as the crowd responded in concert with the chopper.

Rolf Aurness took advantage of the next wave, drawing out his turns and snapping his board around on its rail, then dropping again and then onto the rail and then off; he’d fallen. Purpus took the last wave of the set, while to his right, Corky dropped in on the southern peak. They worked towards each other. The wave backed off, mushed, their rides ended. David, paddling out, turned into an inside lineup, catted to the nose, paused, sideslipping, then weighted aft and wheeled his cutback, bottom turn, climb, and nose again. Flawless. His best this year. The crowd again responded,

Tabeling turned to the shore outside and slithered across the face of the longed wall of the contest. Straightening out, announcer’s running narration approached hysterical proportions: “Yes! Ladies and gentlemen, there he is, Mike Tabeling (accent on second syllable), still on his board as tons of white water cascade over his head. Did you see what I saw, ladies and gentlemen??? A one-eighty-three-sixty, and he’s still on his feet; he’s still standing (Mike falls off), and ends his ride with a whipping pull-out. Yessir, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all happening here on these fantastic waves with all these really fantastic wave riders, the best from all over the world, all here to perform for us in this fantastic Huntington Beach surf!” And so on.

Earlier, Linda Benson put the dumps to Margo Godfrey and Joyce Hoffman in the women’s finals, as Shelley Merrick turned in a surprisingly steady and creative second-place finish. Margo was hit by her own board two-thirds of the way through the heat, and finished with a bruised arm and a dented helmet.

The junior final was marked by some of the best white-water control of the contest. Brad McCaul, who won the heat, worked his way through the churning confusion is if he were trimming on an oily glass wave. Fourth-place junior finisher Roger Addams rode a disturbingly novel board: foamless, with an inner core of honeycombed plastic and standard fiberglass exterior.

On the whole, everything ran quite well. Several dories smashed into the pier pilings during the dory race, eliciting the greatest enthusiasm from the crowd all day when it looked as if one doryman would be crushed in the pilings. Corky outpaddled the other paddlers, but missed out on wave selection as Billy Mount dropped in and overtook the still paddling Carroll, beating him to the wire. The senior men turned in another stirring reminder of their brilliance as Phil Vedder narrowly defeated Bob Holland of recent Virginia Beach fame.

This year, the concessions were a little less crowded and the mobile tram was depressingly empty. There were even several vacant parking spaces near the beach. ABC had to hire a herd of bikini beauties at a dollar a head so that the nationwide TV audience could revel in its plastic ideal of what surfing was. The Huntington Beach police did a fine job cordoning off all those little things that need cordoning (i.e.: the beach, the access roads, the bandstand) and showed exceptional restraint in clubbing only a handful of people over the weekend. Still, in spite of all these reminders of hard-edged reality, the aura of irrelevance was pervasive and entered into the feelings of many there.

“I think I rode poorly,” Nuuhiwa said after the finals. “But I don’t really care; I just had fun.” Valluzzi: “Instant replay: Virginia Beach.” Carroll: “Machine-run contest, but I had a lot of trouble with the helicopter blowing me out of waves.” Bigler: “It’s finally happened.” Weber: “There weren't any waves in my heat. It was a typical thing. . . .” Skip: “I’ll have to make everything up at Ocean Beach.” Al Coen, mayor of Huntington Beach: “Although the surf wasn’t up to our expectations, according to comments I heard on the beach, this was another successful contest.” Then Queen Tina passed out the awards.

Two weeks earlier, David Nuuhiwa had put together his first win of the year at Pacific Beach, followed closely by Corky Carroll and Rolf Aurness. Mike Purpus was fourth. Then, two weeks after Huntington, the Ocean Beach finals matched Corky and David once again, and a duel ensued in which each shot down the other, and Mike Purpus won the honors and a place on the World Contest team.

1968 United States Surfing Championships

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