LOS ANGELES (1963). What we are talking about here is far more than a sport, or a lifestyle, or a facet of regional pop culture. This is a view of the world at large from the p.o.v. of punters weary from the banality of the most idyllic reality in God's wide world. You have a flourishing clutch of like-minded kids inhabiting the southwest coastal region of this most prosperous and otherwise four seasonal nation. Well-toned strongmen carrying 100-pound wooden planks into the water are being joined by a more diminutive species using the lighter foam surfboards just invented. You've got teenagers, disposable income, health, energy, and restless natural surroundings, an environment where a creeping sense of the stress and burdens inherent in the outside world is to be held off for maybe the last time.
I'm talking about surfing waves, surfing boards, surfing trunks, surfing hair, surfing wagons, surfing language, surfing music, surfing dances, surfing magazines, surfing comics, surfing films, surfing exploitation movies, surfing products and surfing bandwagons. That's where it was at in the late Fifties and early Sixties in teenage Southern California.
The sport is for young people. There are thousands of these kids, millions of them, all over the world like polliwogs. It was different in my day. It was a small community and everyone respected each other. Now that world and life are gone forever. Off the face of the earth. What's to discuss? - Mickey Dora, California magazine 1983
This doesn't exist in the here and now. No more can one live in that simple world defined by Rick Grffin's "Murphy" art, the crude lunacy of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's etchings, or countless 45's by the Chantays, Surfaris, Lively Ones, etc. Publisher John Severson long ago sold out Surfer magazine and left his primevally perfect surf filmmaking behind. But all the Beach Party's, Surf Party's and Swinging Summers could never cover up or rub out the most enigmatic representative of this billboard and advertisement inspiration: The Surfer. And no one better spans the birth and death of this lost creature better than Mickey Dora.
It was around 1955 and Dora was quickly becoming the local legend in Hawaii's sport of kings. It was essentially his trailblazing and unique style of manipulating a wave that accounted for the essence of surfer cool from which all other action emanated. The theater for his inimitable brilliance was Malibu, the site of Jan & Dean's Surf City promotional film, and the namesake of Chevrolet's new '65 fastback... Malibu Beach. The terrain of this particular stretch of beach was singularly special, and spots discovered around the world were appropriately judged by how much they were "like Malibu." To match its flowing grace and consistent break, Mickey Dora developed a style that conformed to, rather than fought against, nature's perfection. His genius at wave riding, presenting himself at the perfect spot on a wave in a manner unimaginable to even the most skilled riders, gave rise to the perpetual question: "How did he think of that?" The answer, of course, was "He didn't... He's just 'there.'"
My whole life is this escape, my whole life is this wave. I drop into 'em, set the whole thing up, pull out the bottom turn, pull up into it, and shoot for my life, going for broke, man. Behind me, all the shit goes over my back. The screaming parents, teachers, police, priests, politicians, kneeboarders, wind-surfers, they're all going over the falls into the reef -- head first into the fucking reef -- and I'm shooting for my life, and when it starts to close out, I pull out the bottom, out to the back, and I pick up another one, and do the same goddamn thing. - Mickey Dora, Surfers: The Movie, 1989
Many believe that Mickey Dora singlehandedly began the whole mystique of the surfer lifestyle. His unique West Coast surf dialect will forever be misrespresented by advertisers of contemporary T-shirt logo design, despite the plethora of "surfing dictionaries" thrust upon the public since the early Sixties. Dora used this pointed slang in communication with peers and as a foil in confusing outsiders. He was different, one step ahead of the rest. His style, the way he lifted his sunglasses, the way he moved, the way he surfed, the way he liked to ride the nose, everything he did was uniquely Dora and young impressionable kids around Malibu began copping his style, his phrases becoming their own.
Such charisma eased Mickey Dora into a fleeting association with the film industry, as a technical adviser on scores of beach movies, standing in as an extra and surf stunt double. It was naturally assumed by the producers of Columbia Pictures' Ride The Wild Surf that Dora was a big-gun wave rider, when he actually had no experience handling Waimea's 25-foot monsters. The normal tactic for riding such waves is to beat the white water crunch by reaching the bottom of the wave as quickly as possible, far out ahead of the imposing danger. Dora, on the other hand, shot straight through the middle of Waimea's tumultuous sweep as if it were the four-foot perfection of Malibu, inventing a whole new way of riding big waves that winter.
Dora was well aware of media manipulation. He knew such cultural overexposure was ruining the sacred sport and, though he grabbed his cut, he all the while proselytzed the reality of the ridiculous. At one surf-flick premiere, he unleashed a jar of moths to converge on the projector light. His agreement with Greg Noll's surfboard company to design, model and advertise a signature "da Cat" surfboard is another example. Dora's sly ad copy for his boards said it all...
...For shaking up the status quo and stepping on the wrong toes at the right time, strange things begin to happen. When these things occur you know you're beginning to hit home and the foundation is starting to split. Da Cat was here before and will be here after. The more it's put down, the stronger it gets. The moons and the finks and the rest of you deadbeats will always be washed up because you're nothing and you stand for less and there are a few of us left who know who you are.
Such self-promotion soon turned into true surfing prophecy. Mickey Dora rode for pleasure only. Invited to enter contests for prize money, his reply was a flat "No thanks." This was in line with his "illusionary prosperity" theory, detailed in an elaborate graph he drew in a late Sixties issue of Surfer. At the time, such prosperity must have seemed like a far-off dream to the then-burgeoning surf industry professionals. But the glow boys of the neon wetsuit persuasion today are living proof of Dora's fatal vision; the essential concern of the contemporary surf thrasher is sponsorship -- recognition from manufacturers who churn out soulless product to landlocked America and coastal cretins alike, fashions as grotesque and murky as the East River. (The "rad" subversion of surf cool even extends to the music used in surfing films, which absolutely robs the action onscreen of its astronautical potential.)
Dora, as always, got it right.
Professionalism will be completely destructive to any control an individual has over the sport at present.The organizers will call the shots, collect the profits, while the waverider does all the labor and receives little. A surfer should think carefully before selling his being to these 'people,' since he's signing his own death warrant as a personal entity. Practically speaking, if any of this makes sense to someone, all my mail will be forwarded to my retreat in Madagascar. - Dora, Surfer magazine, 1964
With these words, Mickey Dora split from the face of Malibu and his inadvertent surfer godhood. As his prediction of the cataclysm of surfing came to pass, Dora's contact with the world at large receded. Realizing his peak had passed, Dora had the dignity to walk away. As time went on, sightings of Mickey Dora across the globe read like the legends of Loch Ness, Big Foot and flying saucers. Rumors of his exploits in exotic locales around the world occasionally surfcaed, including a scandal involving a major hotel in Buenos Aires being renamed The Gran Hotel Dora... or Dora crashing a $10,000-a-ticket governor's ball much in the same way he crashed a Beatles party in Hollywood in 1964. Over the next 20 years, Dora was in France, no, Dora was seen in Bali, Peru, Costa Rica, New Guinea, in Namaqualand, in Tybarao, anywhere his thirst for surf took him.
What eventually brought Dora back to California was the antithesis of such freedom: prison. Leaving a string of credit-card forgings and probation jumps behind him, Dora was arrested in France in 1982 and apprehended by FBI agents upon his return to California. He spent the Eighties haggling with various jails and legal systems, then, in July 1989, faced the surfing world again in a Surfer article wherein he explained his "absence"...
"From 1974 to 1981 I covered well over 200,000 miles over four continents, 90% of the time reconnoitering the coastal areas of India, Africa, the Far East, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and hundreds of islands. Only in Europe did Interpol or the Feds ever get close. Only after five passports and millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on the hunt did I, with a gun pointed at my head, volunteer to return to the USA (just visiting, thanks), thus ending the most extraordinary surfing odyssey in the history of mankind."
With his return, he appeared for a public interview for the first time since 1969, in the documentary Surfers: The Movie. The years and experience had vastly widened Dora's view of the planet, while leaving intact his distinct character and penchant for prophecy. Dora was the first in his field to scrutinize the behavior and temper of his environment, to react and report on the situation to a blissed-out public; a foretelling of surf rapture that will endure as long as his legend.