Revolution is not a Dinner Party

The Tao of George

Getting Slippery with Bob McTavish

Bismarck with a Tan

Plastic Machine

Enlightenment at Honolua Bay

Panic on the Showroom Floor

Style Takes a Dive

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Surfer Goes Electrical Bananas

No Contest

There Will be Slaps

Kook Straps, Cadillacs, and Sex Wax

Blame it on the Boogie

Country Soul

Higher and Brighter with Alby Falzon

Fresh Blood on the Newsstand

Long Road to Bells Beach

Speed Freaks

Gods of Thunder

The Impossible Wave

Into the Vortex

Gerry Lopez, Pipeline Firewalker

The Rubberman Cometh

Barefoot Revolution

, a Santa Barbara kneeboarder named George Greenough rides one of the finest-looking waves in the picture—a small but incredibly long peeler at a break called Sandspit. Filmmaker Bruce Brown offered the wave as a kind of novelty (“a short board and a long ride”) and moved on. Brown didn’t know it at the time, but what he'd captured at Sandspit was the shortboard revolution in its prenatal stage.

Greenough was both an inspiration and architect for the upcoming design change. While his biggest hands-on contribution was the development of a much-improved fin, the original shortboards were built specifically so that stand-up surfers could ride in the same plunging, banking, high-low cursive style that Greenough had already mastered while working from his knees. Furthermore, Greenough swam out and photographed the tube 

. This was a part of the wave that stand-up surfers almost never accessed, and to first-generation shortboarders, Greenough’s images were nothing less than visions of the promised land. Finally, Greenough, better than anyone in the sport, reflected the period’s best ideals: he was creative and open-minded, generous with his time, glad to share his latest ideas on photography and board design with anybody who asked.

Greenough was 22 when Brown filmed him at Sandspit; a thin-faced, narrow-shouldered scion of a wealthy Old California railroad family, a nephew by marriage to opera legend Beverly Sills, and a direct descendent of sculptor Horatio Greenough, whose oversized toga-draped marble of George Washington stood briefly in the Capital rotunda. Like Bob Simmons before him, Greenough was an oddball of the first order. Open-heart surgery at age ten, and the long recovery period that followed, likely affected his social development. He seemed to enjoy meeting people, and with only mild encouragement he could ramble on for 20 uninterrupted minutes about his latest project in a voice both enthusiastic and monotonous. But he didn’t tell jokes, or muse, or lament. He wasn’t political. Nobody, not even Simmons, could match Greenough for lack of grooming: always shoeless, often shirtless, resin-stained Levis clamped onto his nonexistent hips with a length of rope, stringy blonde hair cut straight across at eyebrow level and flapping down over his ears. He didn’t date and, like Simmons, never married. The original trust-fund surfer, Greenough never had to enter the job market; he lived at home and spent his days working on an endless series of garage-workshop projects, most of them involving surfcraft, boats, and heavy-duty wave-proof cameras.

Greenough was a stand-up surfer in the late 1950s, like everybody else, but by 1961 he was alternating between his kneeboard and an air-inflated surf mat; he liked the heightened sense of speed that came from a close-to-the-water body position. The smaller equipment was also easier to carry. In 1962 Greenough made his first “spoon”—a blunt-nosed balsa kneeboard, 5 feet long and 23 inches wide, with a dished-out midsection and tail that slimmed down to a mere half-inch thickness. He replaced the standard fin—a boxy and rigid 10-inch-by-10-inch protuberance stuck like a flagstone to the end of the board—with a flexible swept-backed model he’d traced from the dorsal fin of a dolphin. This reduced the fin area by roughly half and greatly opened up the board’s handling. This “high aspect ratio fin”—to use the kind of engineer-speak Greenough favored—was the boom era’s most elegant and functional piece of equipment; amazingly, three years passed before it caught on.

The flex fin was such a big improvement over its predecessor that Greenough, after a brief visit to Australia in late 1964, took what he felt was the next logical step and began working on a flexible board. “A fish moves when he swims,” Greenough explained, “so why not make a whole board that moves when it’s on a wave?” He sandwiched together a dozen layers of fiberglass in the shape of his old balsa kneeboard. Then he glued a U-shaped ridge of polyurethane foam to the deck, but only along the rails and nose; the back section of the board was fiberglass only. After attaching his latest narrow-based fin—this one in the shape of a tuna tail—Greenough sealed the whole thing in one last coat of fiberglass. The final product weighed just seven pounds, and the all-fiberglass hull was thin enough to be transparent.

His first trial runs were inconclusive. The board hardly floated—Greenough was only able to catch waves because, as a kneerider, he used swimfins—and it dragged horribly in small waves. But when the surf came up to a point where Greenough could get the board up and planing, it worked like an expensive sports car—twitchy and high-strung but solid as a rock when handled correctly. The back section flexed under the compression of a hard turn and propelled the board forward as it snapped back to true. The maneuverability was a thrill, as was the speed. “No matter how fast you were going,” Greenough said, “you could bury the forward rail and it would jump into the next gear.”

By the end of 1965, Greenough was riding like a visitor from ten years in surfing’s future. He did turns where his board tilted up almost 90 degrees, and his hip and thigh skimmed flat along the water surface. Midway into a figure-eight cutback, he would cross his own still-simmering track before caroming off the whitewater. Operating from his knees, he could grab the edges of his board with one or both hands, which greatly increased his stability; because his board was so small, and because Greenough’s riding profile was so low, it was much easier for him to get inside the tube—until the early 1970s, he spent more time in what people were calling “the green room” than the top one hundred surfers in the world combined.

Greenough built a second fiberglass spoon in 1966, narrower and a bit lighter, trimmed out with bright-red rails. As a final touch, he hand-lettered the word “Velo”—short for velocity—near the nose. Later that year he eagerly packed his new board, booked a first-class ticket with Qantas, and again flew off to Sydney.

Greenough already thought of Australia as a second home. The California surf scene hadn’t wronged him in any way. But the sport in America was going in one direction—clubs, competition, noseriding—while Greenough was going in another. Also, he refused to surf in a crowd. All those high-density surf breaks in Los Angeles County—Greenough avoided them completely. He rode alone, or with a small group of friends, mostly on the privately-held Hollister Ranch, just north of Santa Barbara. Occasionally he’d throw himself into the pack at Rincon, California’s best point wave. If Rincon was really firing, he liked to paddle out after the sun went down, let his eyes to adjust to the dark, and have the entire point to himself. Apart from his 

 cameo, few people outside of the Santa Barbara area had ever seen Greenough surf.

In Australia, Greenough reveled in the uncrowded point surf of Queensland and northern New South Wales—much of it as good as Rincon. He also got along well with the locals. The Aussies seemed to push a little harder and were more open to new ideas. California surfing, after two decades as the sport’s dominant power, had grown a bit indolent and entitled. Even after Sydney's Midget Farrelly won the 1964 World Championships, few Americans accepted the fact that Australia was now a major surf-world player. Fewer still understood the momentum that had been building since then among Australia surfers and boardmakers.

Greenough understood perfectly. The shortboard design seed was his to plant, and he chose to plant it Down Under.

By the end of 1965, Greenough was riding like a visitor from ten years in surfing's future. He did turns where his board tilted up 90 degrees, laid down figure-eight cutbacks, and spent more time in the tube—or “the green room,” in the going lingo— than the top 100 surfers in the world combined.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

The Tao of George

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