Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers: Craft, Creativity, and Cultural Heritage in Hawaii, California, and Australia

Chapter 6: Global Stoke: The Commercialization of Surfing

174 [ 6 ] Global Stoke THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF SURFING THE GLOBAL BOOM IN SURFING HAS dramatically transformed its industries, from backyard operations to corporate giants. This chapter tells the story of this phenomenal global growth in the surf industry and considers the broad effects of the shift toward automated production in surfboard manufacturing. Some measure of globalization was apparent even before the surf craze of the 1960s. As early as the opening years of the twentieth century, the governors of Hawai‘i, plantation owners, and hoteliers were using surfing to promote tourism, with surfing imagery “soon printed, stamped, embossed, and etched onto pretty much anything connected with the islands—from postcards and travel brochures to China teacups and hotel wineglasses.”1 Surfinghasfollowedacomplicatedpathwaytocommercialism . At times surfing has boomed and commodified intensely. At other times, surfers have railed against commercialism and greed. Emerging from countercultural roots in the 1950s to become a part of mainstream popular culture, surfing can be hedonistic, anticapitalist, apathetic, as well as corporatized and competitive. Surfing, the pastime of beach bums and dropouts, is now also a lucrative, competitive international sport. Its geography has expanded from a few local surf breaks to a global corporate business. Surfing is sold across diverse product types, some wholly unrelated to riding waves, and surf-branded sunglasses and T-shirts are popular in places nowhere near the ocean—the American Midwest and in central Europe. This chapter takes us back to the 1960s, to when the mass popularity of surfing began, to uncover the other side of the surfboard story: its commercial, competitive , corporate face. Global Stoke 175 Popular Culture, Surfing Subculture The commercial growth of surfing reflects the post–World War II idolization of the beach lifestyle and culture and the popularization of the hedonistic image of surfing. The surf craze of the 1950s and early 1960s spawned hit motion pictures—Hawaiian Surfing Movie (1953), Gidget (1959), Blue Hawaii (1961), Beach Party (1963), and The Endless Summer (1964)— and inspired a unique guitar-based instrumental music style from cult surf groups such as Dick Dale, the Chantays, and the Challengers. The Beach Boys (who were not surfers) turned multipart harmonies, adolescent beach themes, and West Coast production standards into a potent, if sanitized, commercial evocation of the surfing lifestyle. According to sociologist Kristin Lawler, the surf craze went on for most of the 1960s and was characterized by a popular obsession with all things surf and California. Surf music, surf clothing, even surfboards on the roof of cars in landlocked middle America—the kids couldn’t get enough of the surf lifestyle, and Hollywood, the music industry, and the new surfboard and surf wear companies couldn’t serve it up quickly enough. And with every magnification of the surf image in American pop culture, the number of actual surfers increased exponentially.2 While surfing in the 1960s was exploding in popularity in both California and east coast Australia, it was also provoking broad social controversy . According to prevailing social norms, surfing was a lazy, self-indulgent pursuit that denigrated the esteemed role of traditional lifesavers.3 Surfing also went against traditional values of hard work and a stable job. By the late 1960s, print media across the Pacific (from Time magazine to the Sydney Morning Herald) were associating groups of California and Australian surfers with such wider social problems as crime, drug use, partying, and anticapitalist and antisocial behavior. Surfers were labeled dole-bludging troublemakers and jobless junkies because of their participation in an “oppositional cultural practice.”4 According to sociologist Douglas Booth, countercultural surfers in Australia sought to construct their own identities away from those of the Surf Life Saving organizations but in so doing fueled a conservative moral panic.5 As a result, surfing struggled for legitimacy, and surfers had to work to establish their own cultural space apart from mainstream orthodoxy. As Australian surfer and board maker Bob McTavish recalled, 176 CHaPter 6 Surfers were a small minority in the 1960s on the beach in Australia and it was a bit of a brotherhood. Right along the Sydney coast from Cronulla to Avalon, most surfers knew each other. . . . Surf clubs ruled the beach at this stage and considered it their territory. Surfers really had to quit the clubs and started to travel around to find good surf.6 This was a key period in which one of the surfing subculture’s most persistent contradictions emerged. On the...