Duke Kahanamoku took surfing from Hawaii to the world
The history of a sport is usually embedded in buildings - a hallowed stadium, the clubrooms where legends were created, the family home where a star lived.
The history of a sport is usually embedded in buildings - a hallowed stadium, the clubrooms where legends were created, the family home where a star lived before greatness changed his or her life forever.
Visitors can easily be moved by the triumphs, traditions and even philosophies that seem to seep from the bricks, steel and concrete at these places.
Visit Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach, the birthplace and spiritual home of modern surfing, and the only significant man-made structure you will see is a statue. The rest, on the surface, is like any other urban beach in the world – a few stretches of neatly clipped grass, clean white sand, concrete piers, lifeguards, lapping water.
But you don’t need to linger long to feel a deeper vibe going on here, one that resonates the past even stronger than, say, Wimbledon, the MCG or Yankee Stadium. For more than 200 years, surfing has been part of the daily rhythm of life here, and its joy infects the promenade like no other beach in the world. The cops smile and greet you as you pass the Waikiki Police Station. Three generations of one family walk past carrying surfboards from three different eras, looking as comfortable as only families with strong cultural roots can. Parties gather around a solo guitarist or ukulele player, listening to folk music that moves to the rhythm of the breeze through the ancient, shady banyan trees. Even the vagrants who spend all day sleeping surrounded by their possessions in plastic bags under the palm trees look languidly content.
This is part of surfing’s charm. It doesn’t need grand architecture to seduce you. Wherever it has spread, surfing has usually brought with it some of that invisible Waikiki magic. But then it goes pear-shaped. Crowds make catching waves more difficult, locals assume priority in the water, competitive machismo poisons the attitude of the best surfers, and an undercurrent of resentment begins to flow like a rip into darker, more turbulent water. These days, a lot of surfers forget they are doing it for fun, let alone how lucky they are to surf at all.
There is one good reason why this has never happened at Waikiki, and it is directly related to that statue. Duke Kahanamoku is not only the man who helped introduce surfing to the world, but he is also the embodiment of the “aloha spirit”, the concept that to receive, one must also give. To neglect the aloha spirit here would be to undermine the idyllic heritage of the place. It’s too sacred, and surfing is too enjoyable, to let that happen.
Kahanamoku’s statue, at the most prominent spot on Waikiki, is tall and physically imposing, like the man himself, but his gesture, of arms outstretched in welcome, is the opposite. His legacy here is positive and palpable.
As a surfer of 40 years, and an occasional writer on the topic, it is heresy that I know so little about Kahanamoku. But it’s also understandable, in a way. Surfing has been a young person’s culture since Gidget exposed it to the masses in 1957, five years before I was born. Surfing became the perfect backdrop for Hollywood films about young romance and rites of passage: throw some half-naked kids on a beach and watch them fumble through teenage love while testing their limitations in the growing waves off the adjacent sandbank or headland. You can see elements of the same formula in Hollywood’s more recent successful efforts, such as Point Break (the sequel to which is now being shot) and Lords of Dogtown.
Duke Kahanamoku is not only the man who helped introduce surfing to the world, but he is also the embodiment of the “aloha spirit”, the concept that to receive, one must also give.
The arrival of the pro tour in the mid 1970s, with its endless succession of hot new teenage contenders, financed by an industry peddling fashions that supposedly captured the same youthful Gidget dream, helped ensure that most people who took up the sport were, like me, unlikely to be interested in this Duke dude, with his high-waisted trunks and his uncool, primitive wooden equipment. The guy never got barrelled, inhaled a pre-surf joint in the car park or ran off with the hottest babe after singlehandedly fighting off a gang of greasy-haired gatecrashers at a beach party. What would he know about surfing?
Waikiki is seldom on the itinerary for surfers visiting Hawaii. Most fly into Honolulu, hire a car and head straight to the North Shore, on the other side of Oahu, where the waves are much bigger, the locals more competitive and the standard of surfing far higher. Indeed, it’s where the world title is often decided, at the Pipe Masters, which is the traditional final stop of the annual pro tour.
The waves on the south-facing Waikiki side are smaller and gentler, and about 80 per cent of the people in the water are tourists on hire boards. On my previous two visits to Hawaii, I barely gave the place a second look. There are five-star hotels on the beach? Eerrgghh. Get me out of here.
Yet here I am. And it’s Kahanamoku who, after all these years, drew me here. I should have known that one day he would.
This December and January mark the centenary of his famous demonstrations at Freshwater Beach, Sydney, among the many he did around the world as he travelled to various swimming races after winning gold in the 100m at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games.
Kahanamoku was the original “waterman”, a term that these days usually applies to big-wave surfers, but more broadly signifies surfers who are supremely fit and confident in all kinds of conditions, using all kinds of surfing craft. It’s a state of mind as well as body, and you don’t acquire it over one summer. It takes half a lifetime, although slightly less if you are born Hawaiian or Polynesian.
Kahanamoku, a “finely built Hawaiian, with his powerful frame showing elastic muscles”, rode the waves with “astonishing speed and marvellous balance.”
Kahanamoku wasn’t the first person to ride a floating object on the waves in Australia, but he was definitely the first to make it widely reported. His demonstrations, on a solid wooden board he had specially made while he was here, attracted large crowds. Newspaper reporters at the time were effusive. The Sydney Morning Herald called him “wonderfully clever”. The Sun said Kahanamoku, a “finely built Hawaiian, with his powerful frame showing elastic muscles”, rode the waves with “astonishing speed and marvellous balance”.
These observations are remarkable for their conspicuous lack of mystique. Those Sydney journalists a century ago were impressed, but unlike some who would later try to describe surfing to the masses, they conveyed the spectacle as if it were less no appreciable than, say, football or swimming.
Little did Kahanamoku know what beast he was unleashing that day, that the joyful pastime he was demonstrating would soon evolve into a subculture as impenetrable to outsiders as astrophysics is to astrologers.
My trip to Waikiki coincides with two things: Duke’s Oceanfest, an annual celebration of surfing history and Kahanamoku’s legacy; and the arrival of a contingent from the committee organising Duke’s Day, a celebration at Freshwater to commemorate the centenary of Kahanamoku’s visit in January. The Freshwater contingent have brought with them a replica of Kahanamoku’s Australian board, which still hangs in the local surf club’s rooms. They are looking for a Hawaiian surfer to ride it during the re-enactment. In other words, to play the role of Kahanamoku.
A shortlist of two is provided by elders of the Hawaiian surfing community. “The Hawaiians hold Duke in such reverence that they were more than happy to help us choose the correct surfer,” committee member Tim Hatton says. “They don’t take this re-enactment lightly, and wanted the best person for the job.”
Eventually, it is decided that 2010 world longboard champion Duane DeSoto will play the Duke. He’s humbled by the decision.
“I am not even close to par,” he tells me. “It’s not that I would feel I would be replacing or close to replicating what he (Kahanamoku) did, but just trying to come close and humbly put on a good show that he would like to have seen.”
Interview with Duane de Soto1:16
Former world longboarding champion Duane de Soto explains what it means to him to represent Hawaii at the forthcoming re-enactment of Duke Kahanamoku's famous surf at Freshwater, Sydney, in 2015.
De Soto then throws the 38kg replica board over his shoulder and strolls effortlessly into the water.
When a young Kelly Slater came to Australia in 1992, blowing the minds of everyone who saw his futuristic flair, Australia’s Surfing Life magazine headlined its feature on the Slater phenomenon with the line, adapted from Star Trek: “It’s surfing, Jim, but not as we know it.”
Ironically, that is how I feel about de Soto’s turn on the replica of Kahanamoku’s board. Even among the sea of longboards at Waikiki, it is an alien-looking craft - dark, wooden and, by modern standards, barely buoyant. Nevertheless, de Soto is conspicuously nonchalant with it. The crowds of tourists around him are blissfully unaware of the historical significance of the solid board in their midst, let alone how dangerous the thing is. Make no mistake - this board could easily kill anyone whose head got in its way. De Soto catches a couple of waves and rides them with aplomb, switching feet (riding left foot forward, then right) and generally toying with the board. Then he paddles in and collects his daughter Pua, 9, for a display of classical tandem. It is brilliant to watch, even if it is as far removed from the modern version as surfing can get.
Tandem, Waikiki style2:00
Hawaiian Duane de Soto and daughter Pua put on a timeless demonstration of tandem surfing on a replica of a 100-year-old surfboard.
The replica of Kahanamoku’s board glides with visible momentum. Unlike modern surfboards, its bottom is curved like a hull, creating a wake along each rail and setting its line with purpose and drive. The flatness of the deck gives the impression that the board is creating the moment for the rider, not the other way around. It’s a glimpse of what brought the ancient Hawaiians to surfing in the first place, a glimpse at something modern surfing often forgets. It’s surfing all right, Jim, but only as the Hawaiians know it.
To get a firmer grip on Duke’s legacy, I arrange to meet Fred Hemmings, 68, who was one of the four-man Duke Kahanamoku Surf Team from 1964 until Kahanamoku died, aged, 77, in 1968. (Despite his lifelong fame as a swimmer, surfer and later bit-player in Hollywood movies, Kahanamoku was never independently wealthy, and, like most surfers, sometimes worked menial jobs to get by; the surf team was part of a business run by an associate to sell official Kahanamoku merchandise.)
I arrive for the meeting at the Outrigger Canoe Club, a private members’ club at the eastern end of Waikiki, discreetly beyond the passing parade of holidaying mainlanders, and adjacent to Castles, the reef that juts out further than the other Waikiki reefs and picks up the most swell.
Sitting at a beachside table, I watch an outrigger catch a wave from out the back, then hug the edge of the channel for 200m. There are three people aboard – two paddling and one standing at the back, steering. When they row the boat up to the sand, I realise that the man standing is Hemmings himself. By this stage I’ve been in Waikiki for three days, and the beach’s old-fashioned charm is steadily disarming my modern cocky attitude. I can’t help noticing their smiles as Hemmings and the tourists jump out and pull the outrigger up to the sand. For the first time in my life I see an outrigger, which Polynesians have used for centuries, as a giant surfboard, and imagine how cool it would be to catch a wave on one.
Hemmings was one of the first people to surf the treacherous Pipeline on the other side of Oahu (in 1960, aged just 15). He then went on to win a load of contests in the 1960s, including in the World Championship contest in Puerto Rico in 1968. He retired from competition and in 1976 co-founded International Professional Surfers, which for the first time brought the world’s surf contests under a world-title rankings system. He has been elected to the Hawaiian House of Representatives and US Senate (as a Republican), been on the board of the Denver Broncos, and has received dozens of other sporting, business and political awards. But “one of the great treasures” of his life preceded all that: getting to know Kahanamoku.
For the four years he spent in the surf team, Hemmings was also a kind of personal assistant for the ageing Kahanamoku, spending most days with him.
[Duke] taught me that the real valuable things in life money can’t buy, and have to do with character, dignity and honour. But he never would teach you that. He lived it, so you kind of absorbed it.
“I got some wonderful lessons in life,” he says. “He taught me that the real valuable things in life money can’t buy, and have to do with character, dignity and honour. But he never would teach you that. He lived it, so you kind of absorbed it. By seeing how he handled other people you would absorb what kind of man he was.”
Hemmings recounts a time when, signing photos with Kahanamoku for fans in Waikiki, a man aged in his 40s approached and said, “Duke, do you remember me? I met you when I was four years old!” Instead of ridiculing the guy for suggesting that Kahanamoku might recognise him, Hemmings recalls, Kahanamoku smiled and simply said, “It’s nice to see you again.”
Not everyone who reveres Kahanamoku sees him as infallible, though. Australian surf journalist Phil Jarratt’s new historical book, That Summer at Boomerang, paints a portrait of a handsome, talented man with a charming streak who was associated with “a stream of glamorous women over the years, both in Hawaii and California”. His most notorious alleged affair was with Doris Duke, a tobacco heiress who moved to Honolulu soon after getting married in 1935. “Above everything else Doris loved sex,” Jarratt writes. “She had installed Duke as a permanent fixture at her (home), even when her husband was in residence. The affair was an open secret in Honolulu.”
Jarratt doesn’t provide a source for the story. I leave two messages for him, asking for a comment, but he doesn’t reply.
Hemmings is not impressed. “That is irresponsible,” he says. “I imagine he (Kahanamoku) had a healthy sex life, like every man. But that (the Doris Duke story) is hearsay; there is no way of proving it.
“I don’t know what Phil Jarratt’s intentions are, but the book brings up things that are regretful and misleading. Duke was a man of great honour. This book is bad for relations between Australia and Hawaii. I’m very protective of Duke.”
The next night, I meet Jim Fulton, the co-chair of Duke’s Oceanfest, at a luau on the beach near the Outrigger Club. After the luau, we and a few others stroll back towards the bars at Waikiki with the intention of kicking on for a while. It’s a warm, tropical night after all, and it’s only 9pm.
As we walk, Fulton tells me how the Oceanfest started with a celebration around Kahanamoku being honoured on a postage stamp in 2002, and grew into an annual week-long celebration of surfing and aloha. Like most people involved with Oceanfest, his contribution is voluntary.
Fulton too met Kahanamoku, in about 1966, when he was 16 and Kahanamoku was in his 70s, and tells me how awe-struck he was.
But you were 16! I say. Weren’t you a cocky young man, full of delusions about your own destiny and dismissive of old dudes whose best days were behind them?
“I was a surfer at the time,” he says. “My whole life was dedicated to it. I wasn’t very good, I’ll tell you that, but as a surfer you knew who Duke was. You had a sense of the beach, the ocean, and what came before because of Duke. I had read about him, and when I had occasion to meet him (on the street in Honolulu), it was, wow, this is the great Duke Kahanamoku!”
We walk past the statue. Fulton stops and says we should go on without him. We try to persuade him to join us, but he’s resolute. As we walk off, I look back and see he has turned towards the statue and is walking slowly, reverentially towards it, a solemn, almost sad look in his eye.
There’s another way of getting a handle on Kahanamoku’s legacy. For the duration of my stay in Waikiki, I harangue the Freshwater contingent for a ride on their replica board. They are resistant, for good reason. The board is dangerous, the ocean is crowded, and any mishap could not only damage their precious piece of timber, but also someone could be seriously hurt if I lost control of it.
Bah. I can ride a modern surfboard. Why shouldn’t I be able to ride this?
Eventually, they relent.
After decades of riding short, lightweight, disposable equipment, the excitement I feel as I struggle to carry it down to the water is proof that my cynicism about Waikiki has finally dissolved.
I glance back at Duke’s Day committee member Tim Hatton, standing on the sand. He looks deeply worried. “You’re in litigation territory now, Fred,” he says. “We haven’t got any insurance for this.”
I slide onto the deck and start paddling. It feels like a block of concrete. Merely paddling 150m to the line-up puts me out of breath. I paddle for a couple of waves, and sense the danger in its weight. It doesn’t have a fin, which means steering it will be difficult and probably counterintuitive. But first I need to catch a wave, which means getting some momentum into it before a wave arrives. That is not easy.
Most waves already have other surfers on them, or someone else paddling towards me, so finding one with some safe space takes a while. Eventually, a half-broken wave approaches. I turn and take a few strokes, but mostly the whitewater pushes me on without much help from my puny arms.
This is what surfing once was. I can sense the excitement of discovery the ancient Hawaiians must have felt.
I start to get to my feet, and see I’m heading straight towards a tourist about 50m away. I stay low, drag one hand over the right rail and subtly adjust my line out of harm’s way. I finally stand up, feeling the power of the heavy board and the delicacy of its line, unaided by a fin or keel. I am surprised at the adrenalin I feel from something so primitive. It is one of the most thrilling rides I’ve ever had.
This is what surfing once was. I can sense the excitement of discovery the ancient Hawaiians must have felt more than 200 years ago: “Wow, how cool is this - I’m standing on the water, and being pushed along, and if I keep my weight centred, I can ride this thing all the way to shore!”
Riding a piece of history1:11
Journalist Fred Pawle is given a rare chance to ride a replica of Duke Kahanamoku's surfboard from 1915.
It wasn’t just Kahanamoku who couldn’t have envisaged what it would one day evolve into - firstly a rebellious and colourful counterculture filled with eccentric outcasts and then a multi-billion-dollar industry and fringe sport featuring supremely talented, fit and aggressive athletes.
My ride on Duke’s board strips all that away, and reveals the pure stoke that many modern surfers seldom feel - the rush of commanding a dangerous and difficult yet simple piece of equipment, and feeling its unrealised potential, imagining what joy this basic, uninhibited exercise could bring to so many people.
The wave peters out, and I fall backwards into the water with a huge smile, as stoked as I’ve ever been in all my 40 years of surfing.
Story Credits
Words: Fred Pawle
Production: Grant Ayre, Martin Ilagan
Main footage: Jemma Pigott
GoPro footage: Richard Dusautel
Special thanks to: Eric Middledorp and Stephen Bennett of Freshwater SLSC; Duke’s Day committee member Tim Hutton; surf cinematographer Jack McCoy; and official Duke Paoa Kahanamoku biographer Sandy Hall. Warringah Council Library.
Fred Pawle flew to Hawaii courtesy of Hawaii Tourism and Hawaiian Airlines, and stayed at the Outrigger Waikiki Beach Resort.
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