Mickey
Dora :
The Angry Young Man of Surfing, 1963.Mickey
Dora : The
Angry Young Man of Surfing. Surf Guide Interview, October, 1963.
Introduction In a wide-ranging
interview, Dora recalls his early days, reflects on saturated
Malibu, and discusses the making of Ride the Wild Surf
(1964); unfortunately the transcription is incomplete. Conrad Canha is Conrad Cunha.
Rincon
waves were just as good as good sixteen years
ago as they are today. There just weren't so many
people to clutter up the place. Matt Kilvin out in front of
the break, on this "perfection" wave, looks
surprisingly modern. Its easy to see the results
of his tremendous influence on style; just watch
surfers like Mickey Dora, or many of the
others who were learning in the old days, and
it"s obvious. Compare this photograph,
taken by Joe Quigg in 1947, with those
supplementing this month's feature story on
Mickey Dora, if you're curious.
Conrad
Canha, was actually one of the greatest
hot-dogging
innovators in the development of surfing. Here he performs brilliantly
at Ala Moana. This photograph gives a good
idea of the manner in which
Ala Moana waves leap up when they hit the reef. Note how much larger the wave
appears immediately over Conrad's head.
Page 7
MICKEY
DORA: THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN OF SURFING
Mickey Dora is too strong a personality for many
people to admire or approve of. To say the least, he's controversial. He's been around the sport for a long time-
ever since the early fifties, and began with others
who have since become famous in their own right. He's a purist. He loves the sport intelligently and lives his
own life. He's not locked-in. Mickey has surfed more than half his twenty
seven years and, perhaps, he has grown more with the
sport than most . . . but in a slightly different
direction. At least this was the impression we
retained after having interviewed the angry young
man of surfing.
Mickey
performs at Rincon.
Just a few inches
from the nose, he trims his board and picks up speed to make the long wall ahead of him,
and chances are- knowing Rincon- he made the wave.
Mickey, how did it all begin; what was
your early life like and what made you begin surfing; who
were some of the others who were surfing then?
"When I was
pretty young we went to to live in South America for a
year or so- my father was in the import business there. We moved back here, but I spent most of my early life
locked in boarding schools. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the
counselors had all the fun and the kids did all the work. We always lived e in town, but when my mother married
Gard Chapin- who had a fairly big name of his own in his
generation of surfing- we used to hit the beaches
during the summer and I began surfing. But I was still sent to one private boarding school
after another and I didn't have much freedom or time for
surfing. My stepfather had strange ideas about raising kids
and devised some pretty stiff disciplinary programs for
me. Still, between schools, he would take me around to
Malibu and some of the better spots. It wasn't until 1950 that I got the first board of my
own.
In 1954 several of us, including Rick Grigg, Greg Noll,
and Bobby Patterson, began to take off for Windansea and
San Onofre pretty regularly.
Simmons was working tor my step-father who had a honeycomb
lamination company.
Bob spent all his spare time there working on his
"concaves'; he lived like a pig, but what a craftsman!
Kilvin was probably the top surfer.
After he went to the Islands he came back with a modified
Hawaiian stance.
Every move Matt made was functional, there was a purpose
to everything he did.
He made waves and was smooth- which is amazing tor a guy
his height.
But I never learned from or imitated any one surfer's
style.
In any sport, you copy to learn.
I'm guilty of it- we all are.
I picked up a lot about turning from Kivlin and I guess
there were other influences.
When I went to school, damn near everything was organized.
Little league baseball, stoop-tag the three 'major' sports
. . . everything was concocted around the
buddy system.
They never left you alone.
But with surfing I could go to the beach and not have to
depend on
anybody.
I could take a wave and forget about it ... when I wasn't
in school.
But don't get me wrong.
Living at the beach isn't the answer.
I like waves; the water is clean but I hate sandcrabs.
Hollywood is a tremendous town.
I live here and I'm not saturated
Page 8
All photos
accompanying this month's story of Mickey Dora are from his
personal collection and used with his permission.
Page 9
... I still get jazzed when there
are waves.
Guys who live at the beach get waterlogged and their
brains get sick.
It's just like living in a ski resort: if you're
there, you ski your brains out.
In the old days before the Valley cowboys
and aircraft workers entrenched themselves at Malibu, it was
uncrowded and you actually got tired doing the same thing on
every wave.
So you took off in positions that were damned near
impossible.
Now it's saturated.
If you want to get into the curl at Malibu, you might as
well forget it.
Its a thing of the past.
But we used to get so bored that we improvised and developed
things like 'el spontaneo'.
Bending over and putting our hands behind our legs, we'd
look between our ankles with our tongues hanging out.
But when a certain kind of wave came through from the south
it'd catch you in a pocket, coming down so hard that you'd
damned near bite your tongue off.
You don't do things like that anymore.
Malibu is like a bloodbath, the accident rate has climbed so
high."
You've talked about "old"
Malibu- how can you still surf there with two hundred guys
in the water when in the old days ten surfers was a crowd?
"The crowds have added another
dimension for me.
I've merely repatterned my technique.
These guys take off in front of me and they're scared to
death; they know I'm behind them, but they never know what
I'll do next.
They run up and put their feet on the nose and I give them
a little nudge in the tail-block.
They start to corkscrew.
It never fails.
I messerschmtdt them- I dog-fight them- I go behind and
below them and they're so out of control, they simply
crack up.
There was this one guy . . . I did this all the way across
the point on the inside.
I never even touched him, but he dug a rail and took gas.
I found out later that he lost three teeth out of it.
But the worst part was that he had worn braces for four
years and had only had them off for a week when he got it. It used to be that when I went to
Malibu, I'd never know what was going tohappen-
whether I'd get robbed, rolled, or what.
But now that the County has its foot in it, it's
ditterent.
They used to have three or four punch-outs each day.
Now they have the aircraft workers, the Valley imbicites,
and the guys trom Palm Springs.
And the world thinks it's better ott with the
'Payola'-inspired organizations that have their hands in
the beach concessions."
What do you think of the younger
generation of surfers?
"They're all sheep.
When I was in high-school, they were called 'pachukos'
with their long hair and levi-jackets.
They still have their long hair, but they've traded their
levi-jackets for sweatshirts.
They buy a board, take it to the beach for a year and
they're a little setious about it . . That's not surfing!
A lot of these guys look good, eventually, but they're
phonies.
They don't make waves.
Malibu is an ego-builder, sure, but these guys don't make
it difficult.
They take off on the shoulder and come jamming left into
the peak, trying to make a wave
Page 10
out of the shoulder.
A section comes over and they don't get through.
They don't cut back, they only go halfway.
Most of them can go only one direction, anyway.
They're frauds because they can only do one thing.
They're too specialized.
The guys who ride Malibu all the time are in trouble when
they hit a shorebreack or go to Hawaii.
They do the same thing every tune and they're good at it.
If a guy goes over the same ski slope enough times, of
course he'll have it wired.
It's a good way to get a name.
Get yourself a photographer, your picture m a few magazines,
and you're known.
But, it's a lazy way of becoming famous.
Surfing contests are another cheap way of getting a name.
If you are good, you don't need to win phony contests to
prove it.
These guys have sold themselves ... they couldn't make it
any other way and I don't respect any of them.
Surfing is commercialized, but I don't ride anybody's
boards.
I pay cash.
I get stale if I ride one board too long, so I have a quiver
of boards and I ride a different one whenever I feet like
it."
Mickey prepares to drop down and blast
through a small Malibu section.
The surfing shots in this section clearly show the
stylistic similarities between Mickey and Matt Kivlin,
whom we see elsewhere in this issue.
Page 11
If you feel this
way about commercialism what's your attitude
toward the Hollywood pictures you been in
recently?
I'm surfing in pictures because I like to work in
them.
I've been in a dozen films so far, including 'King
of the Mountain', with Marlon Brando and
Davvid Niven; 'Gidget'; "Gidget Goes Hawaiian';
'Gidget Goes to Rome'; 'Surfing Wild'; Beach
Party", and 'For Those Who Think Young'.
Believe it or not I've been discovered six times
this year.
They give you this . . 'you're the greatest
... we'll make millions out of you ...'
They had these ideas and I figured they were right.
Mickey Dora
sits back and relaxes on the set during the
filming of "Beach Party." Mickey (behind candle)
and johnny Fain (facing camera at Mickey's left)
played
several parts in the movie.
Mickey also doubled for Robert Cummings in the
surfing sequences.
On one picture we went to Hawaii and lived on
the North Shore for two and a half months. We did something that had
never been done before. Big-wave riding was filmed in
35mm.
They were good people- and really wanted
to understand surfing ... to capture the atmosphere
surrounding the many surfers who make the annual winter trip
to the Islands to ride big waves.
I had faith.
I wanted to make this thing a success, not only for them but
for me, also. We had to leave for the
Islands so fast that I didn't have time to collect equipment
and all I could get when I arrived was a 10*4" hot curl
board with a pointed tail and round bottom.
It weighed sixty five pounds!
I rode the beast at Sunset, the Pipeline, and Waimea.
It was murder. When any group of
people is together as much as we were, there's
pressure.
After a couple of months, I began to get buggy' and
the pressure began to tell.
They didn't know the difference between kona winds
and offshore and I had to go through this surfboard
talk with them.
On top of everything, they put me on a metra-cal
diet because t had put on a little weight for the
big surf.
I had to lose about twenty pounds in one month.
Well, as we all know, they had one of the biggest
winters ever.
It scared hell out of me.
I couldn't sleep ... little things like their
snoring began to bother me.
Luckily the kona winds blew about every other day
and on those days I was able to sneak out into the
bush and catch up on some sleep.
But then the tanks from the army base would go
raring past in the night and I couldn't tell if the
surf was getting huge, or it was an just another
invasion.
Then I got up one ..
CONTINUED
Page X
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Surf Guide October,
1963. Special
Hotdog Issue Mickey
DoraInterview
:
The Angry Young Man of Surfing.
