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"The History and Culture of Surfing."
From a talk in Dennis Phillips’s Design Theory class
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the legend
volume5: I noticed one of the teachers came up to you and said, “Mickey Munoz,
Quasimodo”. Is that an image that haunts you? What is the story behind that image?
Mickey Munoz: I was doing the right thing at the right time and it was pure luck. Actually, I was on my way back from Rincon and we would surf Sacres, which by the way was really incredible. The guys were taking off way beyond the rock, very good surf.
John Severson was on his way back from Rincon, saw us out there and set up his camera and took some photos of us. I just happened to do that thing at a shore break. In those days when you checked the film out, they had an older movie camera, which you reeled the film through a little screen. We then looked at the footage and we stopped at that image, going back and forth between that image and two or three frames and then froze it. So we made some eight by ten black
and whites off the color 60-millimeter film. For some reason it was graphically interesting and I credit John with the artistic eye to freeze that frame and it has kind of lived on. I use it for my surfboard and snowboard logo now.
v5: Was that a conscious pose or where you joking around when the picture taken?
MM: Well, we were riding a sort of mechanical wave, such as you get in Malibu. A perfect point break, it was in the days when were equating surfing to bull fighting. (laughs) Coming as close to the horns as possible without getting gored, basically getting into the tube and making the wave. So we adapted some of the bull fight poses such as the El telefono and the espontaneo, which was when you
spontaneously jumped into the arena and pulled out a muleta and made some
passes until either the bull gored you or they took you to jail. (laughs) So the espontaneo was a clue to do anything that came into your mind and you were always putting each other on. There was a bit of humor and fun in doing these various poses in the most critical part of the wave. I don’t know, that just sort of happened, it was an espontaneo! (laughs)
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“toes on the nose” Old School speed and trim
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v5: I think about the contrast of that with the famous story, which I have already asked Mickey if he minded talking about it since everyone must ask him, in which no one had surfed Waimea. Basically there was that accident where Dickie Cross was killed and apparently have never surfed it before this day. Mickey and Greg Noel and who else was there?
MM: Todd Kern, Del Cannon, Mike Stang, and a guy by the name of Harry Church
and two or three other people who went out.
v5: Can you tell us about that day?
MM: Well, we were all living on the North Shore by Holieva in a sort of barracks. Our room was sixteen dollars a month, split two ways, of course. (laughs) There would be one car between ten people, so we would surf Holieva quite a bit. It had good waves, both lefts and rights. When sunset was happening, we would surf Shansur and most of the known spots. We had kind of talked about Waimea Bay and thinking about it since we had seen it break a couple of times. Waimea was then one of the last places what looked like the you could surf when the swell would come up. The swell on the North Shore can come up bigger and bigger each set as you paddle out. (laughs)
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The First Day Waiamea Bay was ever ridden 1957.
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That’s the story of Dickie Cross and Woody Brown, they were out at Sunset riding with the sets getting bigger and bigger and then Sunset closed out. It was breaking on all the phantom reefs way outside and they didn’t know what to do, they figured couldn’t get in at Sunset. So they figured Waimea was their last option, so they paddled from Sunset to Waimea. Woody saw a set coming and paddled out and Dickie thought he could make it in since he was a really good surfer and paddler. Woody said that was the last he saw of him, the set broke and he knew he didn’t make it through. Of course this was in pre-leash days and I believe they found part of his board.
Waimea was one of the last places that holds a wave when it’s that size. So one day Sunset was closing out and we were toiling around in the car with all our boards and said, “Hey, let’s try it.” We paddled out and started riding waves. I was so dumb because I had a Malibu style board, which looks like a typical long board today, balsa board with no kick or points. Those are steep waves and heartbreaking and I probably only made two or three waves the whole day.
I’ve been brought up with Buzzy Trend, who was one of the great, big wave
riders of that era. He would tell me, “You can’t take off in front of anybody, you always take off further over.” Always, always, always from the time I was a little kid, he kept me over as far over as you could get. That was ingrained in me! So I paddled right over as far as I could, and shoot, from there I was…(laughs) well, you can make it there now with modern equipment, but then I was just eating my lunch most of the time!
v5: Were they the biggest waves you had ever encountered at that point?
MM: Well, it funny because we went out about eight in the morning and got in
about noon and I am on a beach and see a set and I start screaming, “My God,
look at that!” Then they said, “Shoot, you were in waves that big easily.”
(laughs) I had no concept of the size; I was too young and dumb! (laughs)
For me that was a kind of real passage to manhood, even though I didn’t realize historically what it would mean today. I guess it’s a pretty big deal, but then we were just crazed. (laughs) I was in about the tenth or eleventh grade, it was 1957, so when I went back to school it helped me. Waimea was a peak experience and I figured that it was a big deal. I was a little guy and all the football players were getting all the girls; I felt that experience helped me to stand up taller and get to a different level in my thinking.
v5: You were fourteen or fifteen?
MM: Seventeen I think. We were “charging it” and Jeff Hackman won the Duke at fifteen. I don’t put myself in his league by any means, but my teachers were macho and most of them rode big waves, which they loved to do. I was a competitive swimmer and felt confident in the water, so that helped a lot. That’s all I did was surf, I never graduated from high school. In fact, I learned to forge my mother’s name to the point that when she actually signed something, they called it a forgery. (laughs) My last year of high school was a disaster.
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Duke, Butch, Fred and Mickey
Makaha 1964
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v5: Was that your first season at North Shore?
MM: My first trip to Hawaii was in 1954 and I lived in Waikiki that year. Jimmy Fischer, Mickey Dora, Mike Donovan and myself went to Hawaii for the first time. That was another interesting experience. There was a famous place to stay in Hawaii on Lily Oki Wani Street, almost directly up from Queens. We lived on that street, which you can’t even recognized now with all the high, rises, but at that time it was funky, little cottages and motels. So four of us had this place for twenty-five dollars and month, split four ways! (laughs) I’ve always considered Hawaii my second home; I have two brothers and a son who live there. When I was in high school, there were only three of us in the whole school who surfed. Now it’s the other way around, if you don’t surf, something is wrong.
V5: What was the social attitude in high school towards surfing at that time?
MM: Surfers then were an eclectic group. They were weirdoes attracted to
the sport for some reason. I think it’s the same thing now, only the pull
is more diluted. There wasn’t a lot of emphasis; most people didn’t have a
clue about surfing. I went to school with Ricky Gregg, who ended up attending Scripps and getting his doctorate. We met in third grade. He really pushed me into surfing; he lived in Ocean Park and started surfing the year before. I was bodysurfing and mat surfing and I think the first time I stood up was in 1947 and Ricky was instrumental in that. He really pushed me. Towards the end of high school there seemed to be more starting to surf, probably because it was getting into the late fifties and it was just starting to catch on. Then in the early sixties surfing as a life style really began to blossomed.
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