The Big Boogie

Part of the wave-riders’ essential equipment were Wellingtons, rubber waders they wore to cross fields so soggy that the mud would pluck off any regular shoe or boot. The farmers in the area didn’t really endorse the younger men who crossed their land, but they didn’t stop them either. From his tractor, one farmer simply asked, “Are you married?” The answer to which was meant to give a guy a clue as to whether or not he should be doing what he was planning on doing.

There was time to think about this, because even getting to the wave required a great deal of slow-motion risk. The fields tilted toward a notch in the top-land that led to the only access point in a series of cliffs staggered around a small bay. The cliffs were so shear, in fact, that the sea was hardly visible from the farms above. As an interloper, I’d wondered if the locals were inured to such drastic escarpments, such elemental conflicts between land and sea. For me, each encounter with the vertical walls inspired awe in the original sense, as in a feeling of diminishment in God’s presence. 

Once below, a traveler couldn’t easily look up, however. The only path lay along a shelf of slate rock that followed the cliff’s base. Groundwater from above seeped through the cliff and then froze on the shelf as it met the Atlantic breeze. This was a tricky proposition under foot. Grown men regularly slipped on the black ice and fell down like toddlers. And the walk was not short. Rocks sometimes spilled from the cliff face. Sometimes just a silent projectile sailed down and pinged a few yards ahead or behind. At a certain point, the shelf fell away entirely, and the surfers were forced to cross a foot path that was just wide enough to stand on. A cauldron of seawater boiled below. The sound was terrible. But by then one could see the wave ahead, and concentrating on each forward step came as a way to tamp down both excitement and fear. 

Anyone who was going to show up arrived at the same time because, even at a mid-tide, this slab of a wave did not present. It was forced into existence by the meeting of a single tongue of volcanic rock that lay dark and dry more hours than not, and the pull of the moon on the ocean surface. I guess it was just lucky timing for bodyboarder Mickey Smith that he came up on the wave during a full tide the day he first set eyes upon it. He’d been walking the land looking for such a thing, so I guess it’s true that believing is a head start on the way to being. 

The days I visited Riley’s in Ireland in the months of February and March in 2012, of the nine or so surfers out on any given day, only two to three would have been stand-up surfers. The rest rode bodyboards. The fact that the latter group didn’t stand didn’t mean it was easier, only that they were able to surf places on the wave that stand-up surfers couldn’t. I’d rarely seen surfing that heroic, no matter the vehicle. One day, Fergal Smith, a professional stand-up surfer who had his pick of any wave on any day at Riley’s, surfed his heart out until, as the tide ebbed out, his thruster fins just couldn’t make it over the reef. Then he did something no self-respecting California professional surfer would do. He picked up a bodyboard, and began to catch waves prone. It was like swapping a fork for a spoon when the stew was that good. 

The scene sparked a number of insights for me. One, that I hadn’t witnessed such a vibrant gathering of boogers, well, ever, and that actually, I hadn’t set eyes on more than one lid-rider at a time in years. Two, that this was the kind of place they assembled, in a landscape catalyzed before time, at a wave so treacherous, few stand-up surfers cared to mess with it. And three, as demonstrated by Smith and the boys, that malice between stand-up surfers and bodyboarders was not universal, or even rational. Everyone present felt so lucky to even exist then and there that the tiny differences that defined others simply fell away.

*

“You can’t talk about bodyboarding without talking about the struggle, especially in Southern California,” said San Diego bodyboarder Casey Allred. “For an average sport, there is a big-time social struggle to it.”

Dick-draggers, boogers, half-men, lid-riders, spongers…these terms used to be everyday epithets stand-up practitioners applied to surfers who paddled out on flexible hunks of packing foam. Traditionalists verbally harassed, dropped in on, and did their best to intimidate bodyboarders. Through the 1980s and 90s, this bias was taken for granted, like something handed to you with the purchase of a leash or a bar of wax. South African bodyboarder Boots Crossley summed it up as: “You don’t stand, so you are less.”

“We were so intolerant about bodyboarders in the 1980s,” said surf historian and former Surfer magazine editor Matt Warshaw, “that we gave Mike Stewart [nine-time bodyboarding world champion, 15-time Pipeline champ, and 14-time bodysurfing champ] a hard time. The most advanced wave-rider on God’s green earth got trolled in letters and columns.”

Allred wasn’t a professional, he was a friend of mine, just a regular surfer getting out as much as he could. And I leaned on him to be forthright about the experience in dealing with a pack of stand-up pricks as an outlier and underdog. “It was like combat,” he said. “Every day, I’d have to hype myself up just to paddle out.”

About the time I noticed that I wasn’t hearing and witnessing this type of antagonization so much anymore, I took a look around and noticed that bodyboarders had largely disappeared from average California surf spots. A baseline shift had occurred, one that few had noticed. The malice that the dominant culture had once held for bodyboarders migrated on to stand-up paddle-boarders (terms emerged for them as well: sea sweepers, custodians). And somehow, in the wave-riding vehicle smorgasbord that bloomed with the failure of Clark Foam, even mat-riders and hand-planers gained regard. That altered landscape begged questions I should have asked long ago: What, exactly, was it that fed the malice stand-up surfers held for bodyboarders? How was it that the simple choice of an implement used in a shared hobby had become definitive and conflict laden? And where has the “bodyboarding industry” (which historically out-sold bodyboards to hard surfboards by three-to-one, spawned slick national magazines, and supported championship tours and elite athletes) gone? 

Not long after these questions began to resonate with me I was out surfing my average beachbreak alone during a storm when a young bodyboarder paddled out. I hadn’t seen a sponger in the lineup in ages and I immediately paddled over, introduced myself, and peppered the kid with questions. Where did he normally surf? Was he a slab charger? And, where were his boogie brothers? Where did they surf?

The young man said that his friends were all stand-up surfers, and that he frequented a regular beachbreak just to the north. Then he paddled away.

*

The history of all surfing mounted on top of a vehicle intended for that purpose almost certainly began in eastern Polynesia, exemplified by the boards called paipos in Hawaii, and it was largely practiced in the prone position. In the great expanse within which ancient surfing spread—from Peru to New Zealand—only along the Hawaiian Island chain was stand-up surfing honed into its own discipline, largely defined by the board required for stages of the same shore-bound feat: paipos, alaias, olos. Even as Western-borne viruses devastated Polynesian societies in the 19th century, and American Calvinist missionaries sought to eliminate indigenous pastimes, pockets of belly boarding remained throughout Oceania like a species of mollusk too hardy to yield. 

It’s an often-repeated claim that the advent of Tom Morey’s Boogie got more enthusiasts into the ocean than any device aside from the boat. And it’s important to note that this accomplishment occurred in the lee of historic booms in the stand-up surfing population, and aside from the fact that Tom Morey had been a world class surfer himself. But Morey was also a perceptive inventor, who had some keen ideas fail before their times had come. By 1971, it was pretty clear that Morey the shaper and thinker was bored with the trajectory of stand-up surfing as he saw it. In a Surfer magazine article, after proclaiming himself a “spaceman,” he wrote, “I am looking at your surfboards of today and thinking that they are junk.” The era’s blades reflected “very little imagination” he added. They were “basically the same as yesterdays’ board.”

According to designer and writer Paul Gross, who personally witnessed Morey develop the Boogie, the failure of previous stand-up creations to gain market share left Morey “no choice but to look beyond the constipated surf culture of the early 70s and turn his attention toward a larger, more open minded market—the rest of mankind.”

Soft, flexible materials had been used in belly boards before. And as mentioned, belly boarding was as old as surfing itself. Morey had worked as an aircraft engineer and knew space-age materials. But the magic he brought to the belly board was really about size and shape. 

Jimmy Linville is a modern bodyboard shaper working out of Oceanside, California, the turf of Morey’s original shop. “The board hasn’t changed a lot [from the Morey Boogie],” he said. “Materials have changed. Styles have gone in and out. But the crescent tail, standard 42-inch size—they all work for the performance of the board. And [Morey] invented it almost by mistake.”

“Tom Morey got pretty close,” agreed Mike Stewart, who owns Science Bodyboards. “The flex concept is still very futuristic.”

According to Gross, a third element might have been Morey’s enthusiasm for the Boogie. He chatted up any passerby with a rant Gross called, “boogies are bitchin.” The first boards were sold as kits for $25. The kits were not easy to put together. But the same people who built monstrosities from Morey’s handwritten instructions bought additional kits. Morey then went into production with the Boogie. By 1977 a toy manufacturer bought the Boogie. A bigger company purchased that company—and bodyboards began to out-sell stand-up boards furiously.

“Like a bicycle, the Boogie was a great equalizer when it came to style,” Gross wrote in TSJ. “If you could ride one at all, you were riding it correctly. And, like a bicycle, it had a way of transporting the rider both physically and emotionally—a quality not lost on the millions who have done it.”

Bodyboarders like to say that they perform their craft “in” the water, and not “on top of it.” This gives them a more connected, nuanced understanding of the ocean/land interface. Linville takes a broad view. “Historically,” he said, “a small percentage of humanity has been able to paddle out and look back at land, where they’ve come from, with a changed perspective, and the bodyboard is a great vehicle to do that with.”

*

A new performance device, created by a well-regarded stand-up surfer, and enjoyed by almost anyone. Why the hate?

“Surfers are equipment freaks,” said Warshaw, “and a bodyboard, right out of the gate, was such a lame-looking piece of board-craft compared to a surfboard. It’s almost a visceral response, wanting to dismiss, put down, anybody who would choose to ride a spongy mass-produced rectangle sold at Sears and the local sporting goods store.”

Stewart put the grudge down to a number of the boogie’s traits. Bodyboards can access waves more easily, the progression is much faster, and thus, the association with the beginner. One of the most damning traits might be that, “bodyboarding exists on its own merits.”

“Very quickly they were out in force,” said Warshaw, “floating and splashing around, maybe having too much fun, not suffering enough, not taking it seriously enough. Surfers went on the attack.”

“There were too many chickens in the coop,” said Allred. “You [bodyboarders] don’t get heat from pros, or beginning surfers. It’s this frustrated mid-level surfer. And when you’re frustrated, it’s really easy to take it out on the one bodyboarder.”

Bodyboarding may have been a victim of its own success. The surfing establishment saw that there was a buck to make off of this movement. When contemplating the founding of a dedicated bodyboard magazine, Peter Townend (an ad exec at Surfing magazine at the time), actually walked the beach talking to would-be readers to gauge their interest. As a spin-off of Surfing magazine, Bodyboarding magazine quickly grew to a circulation of 30,000. A prone division was added to the successful Bud Pro Surfing Tour, which was televised, and stars were born. The shapers who learned to build Morey’s boards went off to start their own companies, and a nascent industry was born.

“Those were the golden years,” said Jay Reale, who’d migrated from Maryland to California to take his shot at the big time. “Being a new pro from the East Coast, it was not hard to find sponsorship. Granted, it wasn’t much [$600 per month], but for me, it was a dream come true.” Reale points out that the largess was fueled by a boom in surf fashion, that “places far from the beach were enamored with it.” 

And this was a fatal weakness. A recession in the early 1990s happened to coincide with a distinct change in fashion sense. Surf was out, grunge was in, and the clothing companies felt that first. “There was always an undercurrent of distaste for bodyboarding in these surf companies,” Reale said, “and the surfers running them did not hesitate to clip their bodyboard riders. It was like, ‘Great, now we don’t have to deal with them [bodyboarders] anymore.’”

“And then,” said Peter Townend, “all of those companies stopped advertising in Bodyboarding magazine.” The publication began a death spiral. And by 1992, the Bud Tour dumped its bodyboarding division. “It was a smoldering mess,” said Reale. “In America, competitive bodyboarding has never recovered.”

*

Though surfers invented a slew of tags for their boogie brothers, Stewart points out that vocabulary is indeed at the heart of the matter, especially because the experience of riding a bodyboard hatched terms that many stand-up surfers may never fully understand. “It is such an intimate experience, a different view, you’re very connected, you can see what the lip is doing at all times . You’re so far back there.” 

Pits, slabs, trenches, riding the foam ball, shock wave, shocky jockey—all of these were coined by bodyboarders and, said Stewart, “the language changed the culture.”

“Like any sport, [bodyboarding] goes through peaks and valleys,” he said. “For me, it’s incredibly technical when it gets heavy. It’s the most progressive wave-riding going on right now. The things surfers are doing now, we were doing 20 years ago.”

In particular, any maneuver in the air was nailed by a bodyboarder years before: 360s, inverts, air roll spin, air reverse 360, air forward 360, front flip, backflip, invert to reverse, “devert,” reverse 720, and more versions of the “el rollo” than can be comprehended.

Some say that bodyboarders were actually pushed to the edges by lineups that disdained them. They turned to waves hardly recognizable as successful surf spots. But even if pushed, it was here that the sponge excelled—pioneering waves, that today, are synonymous with the heavy water realm: Teahupoo, Tahiti; Nazare, Portugal; Riley’s, Ireland; El Fronton, Canary Islands; as well as, The Right, Ours, and Cyclops in Australia. Surfer magazine staff photographer Todd Glaser said that when he runs into his former pro bodyboarding compatriots, he gives them a big hug and says, “I’m glad you’re still alive.”

Maneuvers, language, discoveries—bodyboarding acts as an incubator, driving the progression of wave-riding in a manner that goes largely unrecognized. In fact, almost to a man, the most prolific water photographers in print and film trace their roots back to a boogie: Scott Aichner, Chris Burkard, Ray Collins, Jeff Flindt, Todd Glaser, Tim Jones, Ross McBride, Daniel Russo, Mickey Smith, Seth Stafford, and Scott Winer, to name a few. Stewart has some impressive film credits on his resume as well, including work on Thomas Campbell’s The Present. Not only are bodyboarders leading progression by example, they’re contributing to the dominant culture by capturing stand-up surfing from perspectives and angles no other discipline could—often for companies that scrapped bodyboarding off the books long ago.

*

“I came from a broken home and it wasn’t easy,” Stewart said. “Bodyboarding kept me off of the streets. Wave-riding was transformational. You can get out, have fun. There’s no rules. You can do your thing.”

This bit, about no rules—in the spirit of play in the ocean—struck a chord. I happened to catch some aspects of the bodyboarding scene abroad that spurred questions, and eventually, some dark opinions about the dominant culture of which I’d been a part. 

It seemed to me the lamest aspect of this so-called lifestyle was that it focused on such tiny differences. Lineups hen-peck those who don’t conform. Even the scrappiest character gets tired of it, and either conforms or moves on. And, this goes a long way in explaining how a decade of surf fanatics in the 1990s relegated themselves to surfboards that have been described as “glass-slippers,” volume negative effervescence—vehicles that did everything but aid in actual surfing. But that exclusivity went beyond restrictive engineering. Female surfers were openly denigrated. Longboarders maligned. Homo-social relationships were placed before work and family. Dudes splashed water. They threw rocks.

In looking at the non-commercialized world of bodyboarding I saw a different take on play in the ocean. A boogie could at once be a toy, or an implement used in the most artful wave-riding on the planet. The other day I saw one used as a garage sale sign. It didn’t matter. There’re no rules.

On the day that I watched Fergal Smith pick up a bodyboard where his thruster left off, I noticed a lid-rider in their crew, partly because of his style. The guy looked like a young Keith Richards, just dripping cool. And on a day when Riley’s fluttered on the edge of impossible, he also happened to be one of the best bodyboarders I’d ever seen. “Yep, right, boys, I’m off,” he said when the session was over. He had to race back to Dublin where his shift as a pizza deliveryman waited. There was something cool in this too. He wasn’t working at a lifestyle. He was just heading off to work.

[Feature image: In my eyes, this is one of (if not the greatest) bodyboard images of all time. There have only been a handful of fisheye shots of The Right, and for good reason. This was Michael Novy’s first time surfing the infamous slab. He got the call from a local videographer a few days before [the swell] and, rashly, booked a ticket. Strapping on a discount sporting goods store jet-ski vest, he charged into what big wave legend Mark Mathews called, “some of the biggest bombs I’ve ever seen.” Photo by Russell Ord.]