By Jim Kempton / Surfer / Sept 30, 2024
The 1966 World Surfing Championships in San Diego was a watershed moment in surfing. Organized by an international cadre of visionary contest directors, led by Peruvian maestro Eduardo Arena, the event was attended by more than ten thousand spectators, showcasing the budding sport to the nation in real time. Held in the city’s coastal enclave of Ocean Beach, it was the first world contest ever hosted by the United States and helped put San Diego on the map as an attractive tourist city in America.
Under a sliver of a new moon, with the great Duke Kahanamoku himself presiding, from September 29 to October 4, the world witnessed the first glimpse of surfing’s seismic shift in performance and design.
Although the competitive field was full of the top surfers from seven nations, the matchup between California’s David Nuuhiwa and Australia’s Nat Young was considered the ultimate test of both skill and style. Nuuhiwa was generally acknowledged as the best nose-rider in the world, and a supreme stylist of the smooth, elegant approach to wave-riding. Nat Young was at the opposite end of the spectrum, explosive and intense.
It was a study in contrasts: horizontal flow versus vertical slash. the apex of conventional performance was dueling with the embryonic but avant-guard power approach.
Inspired by Santa Barbara native kneeboarder George Greenough’s radical vertical speed carves in the point break headlands of Alexander, Lennox , and Byron Bay, the Aussie elite crew were both astonished and then determined to find surfboard designs to achieve his groundbreaking performances.
The Australians had already begun to attack waves differently. A teenage Wayne Lynch, Nat Young, and Ted Spencer, armed solely with longboard templates, were experimenting with thinner, shorter, sleeker surfboards and different bottom configurations to mount vertical assaults that were ahead of their time. But they needed proof on a international stage to lend proof to their foam and resin pudding. The ’66 World Surfing Championships was the perfect venue.
Young had brought a new surfboard with him, guided by Greenough and Bob McTavish the leading Australian shaper of the era who would soon become a massively influential figure in the design of the shortboard. Christened Magic Sam, Young’s board was a slightly shorter, more maneuverable shape which he boldly claimed to be a secret weapon.
Although the two never faced off against one another man-on-man, the result was just as significant: despite an astonishing ten-second nose ride early in the event by Nuuhiwa, Young’s new techniques throughout the contest convincingly persuaded the judges to crown him the undisputed champion.
The event became the defining moment when stylized, poised precision was replaced by pivoting, punchy power maneuvers — relying on the tail of the board instead of the nose to accent the performance.
This dominating exhibition ushered in the first revolution of performance and surfboard design since the 1950s advent of the fiberglass and foam board. It brought Australia onto the world stage as a top surf nation and San Diego as a new tourist destination. After the 1966 Championships nothing in the world of surfboards would ever be quite the same.
Nat Young, one of the key people in the start of the shortboard revolution and later one of the key people in the resurgence of longboards.
I’m only a lowly, now-way-too-old, body surfer, haha, but this a great story! As a marine biologist, scuba and snorkeling were my livelihood, so I never really crossed over to having a board, in spite of 11 years in Hawaiian waters haha! But often, after collecting samples, when there was surf in whatever fringing reef, we’d catch waves for awhile, just with our duck fins. Moving thru the water with a wave, however you do it, is pretty sublime! :-)
And honestly? For me? The presence of surfers is like code for, ” These waters are good”. Anyway, thanks for a fun read, so glad OB is on the map in this cool history!
Hi:
I surf, and thought what a nice message yours is. Thank you for sending it!
/s/ Chris Kennedy
You said it perfectly, retired:
“Moving thru the water with a wave, however you do it, is pretty sublime! :-)”
I was fortunate to witness a super inside ride near the end of the contest. Not sure who the rider was, but the crowd let out a cheer. This was the summer of our high school graduation.
I grew up in a Navy family and because of that, I missed two amazing opportunities to become a surfer, something that I finally did in my 20s.
My first opportunity was living in Hawaii from the age of five to 10. I was a water kid comfortable in all kinds of surf but surfing was not yet on my radar. It surely would have been had we stayed but we left for Virginia just before my 10th birthday in 1961. I often imagine what I would have experienced surfing had we stayed.
The second was when we were stationed in San Diego and we live in Coronado from January 1965 to June 1966. I first surfed a log a friend’s older brother gave us and loved it. In March of ’66, I made enough on a paper routed to buy a 9-6″ beauty. I’m unsure years later whether it was a Hobie or a G&S but it was amazing. Three months later, back to Virginia. That was just before the summer of 1966 and before this contest. Took me a decade to get back here and find OB. And, everyone was on little tiny boards. A lot had changed.
Hey retired, don’t put yourself down at all. Body surfing is the most pure form of riding the ocean’s energy, and I did a lot of it, too (but not on good surf days!). My younger brother never surfed, just wasn’t something he wanted to do, but he was always up to go bodysurf. He still does that now and then.
I think the lowest on the wave-riding totem pole were when sponges, those dang boogie-boards, were invented allowing tourists to get dragged out into deep water by rips because the things were so ‘floaty,’ then lose them and start drowning because they had no idea how to swim in ocean currents!! I rescued enough of them…and ran over enough of them, too. They were always in the way with no concept of wave riding rules. Zonies, inlanders, and tourists were always such a pain!
Hey Geoff, my ‘first’ board was a Hobie log also, a neighbor’s girlfriend’s board on Venice Ct. in north MB around 1962/63 so it was shorter…an 8’6″ if I remember correctly. She never used it so I could borrow it as long as I returned it, and of course I couldn’t even lift it at that age so I always had to scrounge up an adult to help the skinny little kid get it over the wall to the sand! Then I wouldn’t come home until dark, stay all day on the beach, and have to find another adult to help carry it back across Strandway Alley. I would manage to drag it up to the wall in the sand and lean it up. Weighed more than I did I think. I eventually bought it from her cheap when they moved (more like gave it away to me).
Then I watched Nat Young rip the ’66 contest and my granny bought me a V-tail copy in one of the surf shops in OB that came out immediately. An absolutely monumental shift in surfing!
By ’69(?) I had saved enough for a Ron Cunningham experimental squaretailed twinfin shaped out of the back room of Hamel’s, but I just couldn’t get it to work. Nobody had figured out the fin configuration yet and, of course, I was trying to surf it like a single fin. Next was a Hobie kicknose roundtail in 1970 for cutting my hair to my dad’s preferred length. Then came a Surfboards Australia squaretail in psychedelic orange and a couple of pocket rocket 7’2″ pintails like Lopez was riding in Hawai’i for bigger waves at the Cliffs, La Jolla, and Baja trips. Boards kept getting shorter.
By the time you got back to the West Coast the longboard was dead dead dead, and only ridden in the tiny junk waves of those hot summer doldrums! Real shortboards, twinnies!, had blossomed because we found that they were SO much better to surf in everything except paddling and tiny waves!
Well, yes you missed the revolution, dude, but you never lost your stoke. Something to be said for that, ya know?
Be glad you still get waves, Geoff. I haven’t managed to get to the beach since 2012 though I did surf the Bend river wave a few years ago. Surfing snow and concrete has been the substitute for a long time…
Back to cutting winter firewood. Big sigh. I hate cutting firewood because…I’d rather be freaking surfing!
sealintheSelkirks