A shorter version of this oral history, compiled by Ben Marcus, ran in the February 2011 issue of Surfer's Journal, and was titled "Flashpoint: the Op Pro Riot."


I was there all day but at some point I said to Matty Liu: "This crowd is turning ugly and it's only going to take a spark to set it off. I'm getting out of here before it blows." So I worked my way through the hordes and escaped. It was only after I got home and turned on the TV later that evening that I learned what happened.


I was 14 years old, away from home, staying with Sam and Matt George for the summer. What a great time that was. I remember watching the Op Pro that day and getting to hang with guys like Tom Curren and Dave Parmenter. It was super cool. I remember Sam saying he was going to take off because it was getting too crowded for his liking, so I told him I would hang in the contest area with Dave and get a ride back to San Clemente that evening.


I had been running the Op Pro since 1982 and it was now in its 5th year and every year it had grown in terms of prestige, site setup, and crowd. 1986 was the biggest ever.


I was the director of the television production for the OP Pro in 1986. Alan Gibby of DynoComm was the producer. I had six cameras plus the Goodyear blimp. I was also feeding live shots to MTV—but every time MTV cut to us it seemed no one was actually surfing, just waiting for waves. The MTV director couldn't figure out why they weren't surfing if it was a surf contest. I started "banking shots" of actual surfing so when the MTV director called for a bumper shot I'd roll one of the ISO machines with the surfing and he was very happy.


I was the announcer at the 1986 Op Pro. We held it on Labor Day weekend, something we had avoided in the past. So we had lots of yahoos in the crowd getting disorderly. During the Miss Op contest - which I also emceed - the crowd was getting rip-roaring drunk, horny, and ornery. It was your basic Raider Nation deal, all the way. Football hooligans, except on the beach.


The trouble started on the sand, right behind the south grandstands.


The finals were in the water and at the same time there was a disturbance behind the main bleachers; apparently, it was about a girl flashing her boobs, a crowd of guys encouraging her and the cops getting involved. It turned ugly when the cops tried to arrest the guys and the crowd turned on them. The cops were forced to pull back towards the lifeguard headquarters.


The riot started because of stupid US laws banning topless bathing. A girl flashed her tits on the balcony of what is now Dukes and the crowd wanted more. Cops stopped it and all hell broke loose.


It is funny that so many people remember it so differently. How it started—I was 18 and at Huntington with two of my girlfriends. We were all from Westminster. We were at the beach that day, hanging out with the "Rockers." The crowd was huge, but I don't think they were restless, not at first. It didn't get real intense until the girl confronted me about flashing. Up until then it was all in good fun. Anyway, we were in the parking lot next to the Green Burrito. Some guys were egging us on to flash: ‘Show us your tits!” After some coaxing we did. They wanted us to flash more, so we did, the crowd grew, pictures were taken. A girl walked over and started trying to steal our thunder. So we flashed more and this angered her and her friends. They started to tell us we were not locals and not to flash at "their beach." In the heat of this argument the singer of a local metal band "Jekyll and Hyde" whispered in my ear: "Flash her right to her face, she'll be speechless" He was right. She hit me in the face and then my friends joined in the fight. It escalated, then just erupted down the beach.


My recollection is the scuffle beginning behind the southern-most bleachers, NOT near the Green Burrito, like those girls say. I think I have photos to back that up.


I was in the judge’s stand with Huntington Mayor Don MacAllister, watching the semifinals. Just as the judges finished the scoring, we noticed a loud commotion behind the grandstands south of the main compound. This is the grandstand area where MTV had set up. We observed police on ATVs in the crowd attempting to take someone away; we were astounded to see the crowd turn on the police who almost immediately made a hasty retreat toward lifeguard HQ. As MacAllister and I watched, we were further astounded that the crowd chased after the PD and began throwing bottles, cans and anything they could at the building.


It was surreal. After the first girl punched me, her friends were real quick to jump in and so did my friends. Let me say that we were as much locals as they were. The people in the Green Burrito knew us, and when I got near the side door one of the managers grabbed me and pulled me in.


I had left the contest right when they started having the bikini contest. I'd been shooting all morning and was hungry so I walked up to my house for a late lunch. Just as I am about to sit down to a tuna sandwich my roommate comes running in breathless and says there is a riot going at the pier. I grabbed my camera and my girlfriend’s Radio Shack police scanner and ran down to check it out.


I was at the top of the scaffold, one eye on the final heats between Occy and Winton and the other on the melee heading towards the lifeguard headquarters. I was standing with the police sergeant in charge of event security and he was calling in police to manage the disturbance and then directing a police helicopter that was flying low enough to kick up a hail-storm of sand at the rioters. It had gotten that bad by now as the original police presence had pulled back, leaving the lifeguard headquarters totally exposed.


I vaguely remember a police helicopter coming in and "dusting" the crowd by flying low so the sand would swirl up. They must have thought that would help disperse the crowd but it just seemed to make everybody angrier.


There were beer bottles thrown at the helicopter which chased it off. Had it crashed there would have been dead on the beach.


I do recall the helicopter dropping low over the mob, between the bleachers and the boardwalk, and seeing a beach umbrella lifting skyward in the prop wash. Shortly thereafter the riot moved off toward the lifeguard HQ, where the vehicles started getting beat on and torched—and once you have fire, then it's a real riot. I don't think the Green Burrito area really got going until much later in the festivities.


When I got there the rioters had just turned over the police car in front of the lifeguard headquarters. Flares had fallen out of the trunk of the overturned police cruiser and the crowd had latched on to them, lit them and set the police car on fire. I positioned myself between the burning car and the lifeguard building and started shooting photos of the rioters with the burning car in the foreground. The crowd saw me taking photos and swarmed me trying to get in the pictures with the burning car. There were maybe a thousand people lurching toward me and it freaked me out so I ducked into the crowd and made my way through to the beach.


The cops had deserted the beach and the crowd sensed this. They seemed to understand there was no one to stop them and you could see a mob mentality take over. If you've ever seen the Lakers win a championship and fans start to burn cars and break windows downtown, then you know what I'm talking about.


In the water, Occy and Winton were blazing their second heat, with Occy already having won the first heat. Behind us there was chaos, with thousands of people raging near the lifeguard headquarters, four or five police cars on fire, people climbing the building, and just behind all that you could see a huge contingent of police in full riot gear. It was about to get worse. I decided to keep the surf crowd out of trouble. I spoke to Occy and Winton and sent them out for a third heat, even though Occy had already won in two. Both surfers were cool and we bought another 30 minutes for the cops to handle the chaos. I knew the contest had gone to shit, but didn't want the dedicated surf fans to be caught up in the madness.


As I recall it was Ian Cairns who brought the decision for a third heat to the announcers’ booth. I think the sheriff forced him to do something to protect the innocent. I was doing play-by-play, and Rabbit [Wayne Bartholomew] was doing color. We all knew that Occy had won the second heat and won the contest, but it was too damn dangerous to turn our surf-loving crowd out to face a riot going. Ian said, "Stretch it one more heat." There was no debate. So for the first time in my 10 years of announcing professional surfing, I had to lie about the outcome of a heat, saying that Glen won, and force a bogus heat to buy some time.

WAYNE BARTHOLOMEW — FORMER WORLD CHAMPION


I'd been teaming up with D David to do Op Pro commentary for several years, and that year we were joined by Joey Buran. As the riot intensified, Joey went up to check it out and came back just ashen-faced. So I went up, looked myself, and it was just carnage. The riot squad was in formation, shields up, batons drawn and marching forward. Bottles were bouncing off the shields. Meanwhile, the police had commandeered the PA system on the pier. At first we were ordered to shut down the commentary and vacate the beach, but Ian was concerned about 50,000 people walking into the danger zone and overruled, ordering us to keep announcing, which we did. And Ian was absolutely right. Occy had waxed Glen in the first heat, and during the second heat, when it looked like Occ was going to take it two-nil, Ian ordered us to announce that Glen won, forcing a third-heat showdown. The riot was still raging, although the police looked to be gaining the upper hand as they had now established a pincer movement and were outflanking the rioters. I remember, after the second heat, pleading with Occy to make sure he surfed hard and put in a winning effort so that it would all look legit. The surfers obliged, we wrapped it all up, the riot moved down the beach to the other side of the pier, and everyone watching the contest got out safely.


It helped. Of course, my job was to hype up the crowd to get into the surfing going on, to talk about who had priority, and let everybody know how much time was left, and just to get everybody cheering. But now Rabbit and I had to make sure we favored Occy in the final heat, while still pumping up everything Winton was doing, so that Occy would win the third heat and the trophy and no one would suspect. And no one did.


I remember asking Alan whether the finished TV show would include the third heat or we would end with the second. Who knew? I decided to leave three cameras shooting the third heat and put three cameras on the riot. Most of the "rioters" were just people standing there, watching. There was a core of 25 to 50 guys who were doing the real damage, turning over cars, setting things on fire, filling beer bottles with sand and throwing them.


I was on the middle of the beach, shooting photos of the police charging the crowd when one of the cops comes running at me. I was yelling that I was with the press but he grabbed me, threw me down, my camera flies off into the sand and he's screaming that I was under arrest and that I should have left when I had the chance. The cop’s knee is in my back and he's about to cuff me when both of us are suddenly showered by glass shards. One of the rioters had thrown a bottle that hit the cop right on his helmet. We both looked up to see the guy who threw the bottle start to run the other way. The cop let go of me and took off after him. I jumped up, got my camera and took off running in the opposite direction.


The crowd was about 1,000 people, which had the building half surrounded on the beach side, but only about 50 or 60 were real rioters.


Some people cheered as they turned over vehicles but most of the people just stood there watching. I had the camera operators slowly pan the faces of the people doing the real damage, figuring the tape might be used later by the cops. I was saying things like, “Camera 2, Red's up. Camera 5 tighten in on the guy torching the ATV.” It was surreal. I would think I'm the only director to shoot a riot using multiple cameras. I'm fairly certain I'm the only director to use the Goodyear blimp to shoot a riot. And I'm positive I'm the only person ever who directed both a major surf event and riot at the same time!

One thing I remember vividly is when the rioters attacked the lifeguard building. There were people on the roof of the two-story building. Somehow, one guy got a scuba air tank up on the roof, stood on the edge of the roof holding the tank above his head and then swung the tank down and through the second story window. He danced around, pretty pleased with himself for a couple of seconds, and then all the people on the roof started jumping off. I couldn't figure out why people would jump off a two-story roof.


This is when we, the lifeguards, got involved. I'd come down off the scaffolding and was on my way back to lifeguard HQ, via the parking lot. I'd taken off my uniform shirt to get through the crowd, discretion being the better part of valor. When I got near HQ, I observed several individuals on the roof attempting to break in through the windows. I went into the front door on the street side of the building, grabbed a nightstick and small taser-like device and went back to the roof to chase off the rioters. Until I became a target, most guys left of their own accord, having faced the first resistance from authorities. When I started back toward the building entrance I saw our staff leaving the building, having been ordered out by the Sergeant in charge of the beach detail. This basically made me even angrier. We still had lifeguards out there, in towers, performing rescues. Yet our dispatch center had just been vacated. So I took up a position at the dispatch center and handled our phones and radios for about 10 minutes.

Then I got a call from Tower Zero on the pier advising that the rioters had gotten into the north end of the HQ building. I picked up a gun we had for training our personnel (who do not carry weapons), and cautiously went to the north end of the building. When the rioters saw me with a gun they immediately left. I secured the doors and jammed them so they could not be reopened.

I went back to dispatch and started handling calls again. Not five minutes later the light on the PBX lit up from the garage, an indication to me that someone was in there. So I took the gun, went back downstairs and looked into the garage from a service window we have in an adjacent kitchen. What I saw turned my stomach and really pissed me off at the same time. One guy was jumping up and down on the roof of a Parking Division truck. The windows were all broken out and the roof was nearly flat. There were about 50 people in the garage, some of whom had ripped doors off our cabinets and were pulling out personal property and equipment.

I yelled at them to get the fuck out of there. Two guys started toward me so I fired a warning shot into the ceiling. It was a 9mm revolver, and it was really, really loud even with the noise outside from the crowd. Made my ears ring! That set off a rush to get out. Everyone left garage the in a panic because there was someone in there crazier than they were.

During the time I was in the building, about 30 minutes, I saw maybe 1,000 people in a semi-circle on the beach side of the HQ. Some of these people were egging on the 50 or so “real rioters.” I saw those guys light vehicles on fire and continue to throw things at the building, including lit flares from the police vehicles. I saw one person trying to talk sense to some of the more violent perps, only to be hit across the back, shoulders and head with an aluminum fence post the rioter had pulled out of the railing in the parking lot.


I was told later that the guy who collected all the parking fee money was in there with $38,000 in cash—that was a lot of money in 1986. He carried a gun and when the tank came through the window he thought he was being robbed and started shooting through the roof. At least that's what I heard.


In the aftermath, I found $38,000 in cash on a table in the Parking Office. All the windows on the ocean side of the building were broken or missing, and some of the flares had missed the openings in the windows by just inches.


By firing one round through the ceiling, Bill Richardson single-handedly quelled the riot.


During the rioting, I remember looking at Alan, who had his head on the counter and was shaking it back and forth, unable or unwilling to watch the monitors, mumbling that this would be the last Op Pro. The last surf contest in Huntington. He thought the bad press would kill it. He was wrong about that. Remember, the big news story of the day was not the Op Pro, which was really a local story. The big national story of the day was the Cerritos air crash.


What saved the Op Pro in a way is that same day an Aeromexico DC-9 collided with a small plane and crashed in Cerritos, killing everyone on board and a dozen people on the ground.


The way it was explained to me was when the plane crash occurred, police and emergency services from Huntington were dispatched to the crash site, which left just two cops and a meter maid to control a crowd of 50,000, many who had been drinking. I'm exaggerating, but there weren't many cops left in town and they were relying on the lifeguards. That's why the police tried to use the helicopter to disperse the crowd, because that was all they had left.


I was in the kitchen of the Green Burrito. I could see fire, smoke, and just total chaos. I spotted two friends, Jim and Ziggy, coming down the stairs. I opened the door, Jim pulled me out and we ran about three blocks to where they had parked Ziggy's father’s delivery van. Jim then went back for my two friends. It took him about 30 minutes to gather them up. We then headed back to Westminster and caught it on the news.


The contest ended and the announcer told the people who were watching the event to leave the beach immediately by order of the police or they'd be arrested. Out of nowhere, the police had formed a skirmish line south of the event, that went from the parking lot to the surf line. The cops stood in a line about three feet apart, in riot gear and armed with batons. I don't know how many cops that takes but there was a shitload of them.


What I remember most is all the different uniforms. It wasn't just HB police, but cops from all different departments. Then they started moving north in slow, steady march up the beach. It amazed me that a lot of the people on the beach didn't leave, like they thought the police armed with batons were kidding. OK, a few of the rioters stayed to taunt the police, I get that. But what I don't get are the "watchers" who stood there like they were watching a stage play, fully expecting the cops to go after the bad guys and leave them alone.

I don't think the cops could tell who was good and who was bad and I don't think they really cared. They wanted people off the beach. Now. They started marching slowly north, swinging their clubs at anything in their path. After a few people got hit, the crowd finally got the idea the cops weren't fooling around and ran away. There was some random guy holding his ground, saying something like, "I'm an American citizen and can do whatever I want. You guys can't make me leave." The closest cop gave him a couple of whacks with a baton. Hard. The guy starts bleeding from his head, and now he understood the cops weren't kidding around and wobbled towards town.

Ten minutes after they started the sweep, the beach was clear and it was over.


We never held the Op Pro on Labor Day weekend again.


I saw Bob Hurley afterward and was like, "Can I get a ride with you? This is spooky!" So that night I stayed at Bob's house, and I remember thinking to myself when I got there, "Wow your street is so peaceful, compared to crazy Huntington Beach."


The cops actually came to my house and wanted to review the photos I had shot to see if they could ID anybody for possible criminal charges. I let them have the photos. They returned everything once they were done.


It was probably the best and worst experience of my 30-year sports broadcast career. Worst, because I had to see human beings treating each other like that. Best, because I had 35 people working for me that day and $3 million in rented broadcast equipment on the sand. Right in the middle of the riot. All the equipment made it back, without damage, and none of my crew were harmed. We were very very fortunate. Later, a TV network offered me over $10K for footage that day. Another network offered me $5K. I turned it all down. I didn’t feel it would help the sport, the ASP, Ocean Pacific or the City of Huntington Beach. I walked from the money. I never released any of the footage until 2004, for a short documentary.


Of course, Op didn't want the riot footage to get out but as I expected, law enforcement was either given or subpoenaed the tapes, depending who you talked to, which were used to prosecute the rioters.


I believe there were eventually 45 felony arrests made, for inciting a riot, to assault with a deadly weapon. There were also 10 or 20 misdemeanor arrests for public drunkenness and failure to disperse. Of the 45 serious offenses, there were 44 convictions because of the video footage from the TV crews, and photos taken by citizens in the crowd. I wasn't asked to testify at any of the trials. There was so much video and photographic evidence that very little testimony was required. You couldn't really dispute real-time photos and video with your face right there doing the dastardly deed. Most just plead out. The ones who didn't paid for it with more time. There was no accounting for intelligence in that crowd. Truth be known, I honestly don't know what would have happened if the guys in the HQ garage had kept coming after I fired into the ceiling. I don't think I could have shot them. On the other hand, I was in fear of serious injury after what I had witnessed the crowd doing. Chief Earl Robitaille, of the HBPD, gave me a "Silver Bullet Award" which I still have. I later received the Medal of Valor from the Chamber of Commerce.

I totally support and congratulate Ian and his crew’s decision to keep the contest going and to aid in keeping the surfing crowd—the real surfing crowd—engaged and out of harm’s way.


Afterward, as I stood next to two destroyed cars, just yards from the lifeguard headquarters, I knew that a chapter of my life was over. I went home to my wife Pat and said that we were leaving in 30 days. I wrapped up my arrangements with the ASP, NSSA and the Op Pro, packed our belongings into a container and went home to West Australia to start a new life. We were able to spend valuable time with my grandparents before they died, which may have ultimately been worth the pain and angst.

 ran the riot story with photos. Op was our biggest advertiser. Op CEO Jim Jenks called me to his office. He asked why I ran the story, and then told me, “If a friend sees that you are standing on your dick, he doesn’t publish photos of it. He taps you on your shoulder and whispers, 'Jim, you’re standing on your dick'.”


The next day that my friends and I were in school, as we walked on campus, a group of football players were in a crowd. As we approached they all turned around and flashed us, and began to clap. It was just funny how we thought we could just walk away from that whole crazy thing and no one would know.

[Photos: Robert Beck, Paul Sargeant, Nick Waplington, Kevin Wilkes]

THE 1986 OP PRO RIOT: AN ORAL HISTORY BY BEN MARCUS

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