Pro surfing pioneers"It was like Kill Haole Day," says one of the Hawaiian surf kings in
Bustin' Down the Door , a new surfing documentary rich in sports history and personal emotion that itself is struggling to bust down the door of US theaters (it's opened only in a few venues so far, but ought to take its place as one of the more significant recent statements on the subject like
Riding Giants and
Step Into Liquid ).
Kill Haole Day is the day when Hawaiian locals give themselves license to vent their rage against the white boys in their high school. But this was something more serious.
A group of hungry and brave and talented young Aussies and some South Africans from the rough coastline of Durban came to Hawaii in 1975 because Pipleline on the North Short of Oahu was the ultimate wave, and they'd torn things up, "busted down the door," aiming to put themselves on the map by surfing the hell out of the waves and showing off their audacious and aggressive style, winding up by making a showing in competition and as a group full of frank boasting and braggadocio, declaring themselves Number One in the world of tube-riding. It felt like colonizing to the Hawaiian surfers, used to a more mellow mindset and inwardly smarting from a history of being subjugated by white people on their islands. Native Hawaiians had invented the sport in olden times. It was theirs. How dare these "foreigners," these
haoles, come in, take over, and claim victory--without even really becoming big champions (they were to do so soon), just entering some competitions and getting filmed doing their dazzling stuff?
Chief among these interlopers were Aussies Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew, Ian Cairns, Tom Curren, Mark Richards and South African cousins Shaun and Michael Tomson. Ian Cairns had written something challenging to the Hawaiians for a magazine that was leaked before the surfers returned the next year. Before an impromptu mass "trial" in a hotel organized by surfing legend Eddie Aikau and his family led to a provisional release but no guarantee of safety, some pretty rough elements had put out death threats against the cocky Cairns, intense Bartholomew, and brilliant tube-riding innovator and matinée-idol handsome Shaun Tomson, and they'd been beaten, threatened, and chased and ordered to remain in their hotel rooms.
How this was and how it felt provide the dramatic center of this surfing history, which focuses on a moment when the Down Under pioneers set styles and paved the way for professional surfing, an organized system of competition, and a billion-dollar sport--developments that were to come in the late Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. This moment in the mid-Seventies, also the time when skateboarding took off, were the turning point, and these guys were the impetus. They were highly competitive, they dreamed of being pros, they wanted to be famous, and they loved what they were doing, but they hardly had it easy. Rabbit, Shaun, Cairns and the rest were broke--ironically, given the Hawaiian locals' resentment--and from pretty poor and disadvantaged backgrounds themselves in some cases. This is one of those stories of doing it all for the love of a sport where courage and determination were essential. And while international surfing pros like Kelly Slater have a polished image today, back in the Seventies surfers were looked on as layabouts, dopers, and hippies.
The film is narrated, sparingly and admirably, by Academy Award winner Edward Norton, but the heart of it is the talking-head testimonies provided by Rabbit, Shaun, Cairns, Tomson, Mark Richards, Californian champion Peter Townend, the editors of several surfing magazines, and a group of Hawaiian surfers and surfing impresarios who provide their perspective on the conflict. First documentary filmmaker Jeremy Gosch, who presents an absorbing and surprisingly emotional story here, has tracked down a lot of relevant archival surf footage from some of the myriad 1970’s surfer films including
Free Ride, Many Classic Moments, Five Summer Stories, Tubular Swells and others with commentary on the guys' styles and attitudes that amply conveys the astronomical adrenaline level that prevailed when these outsiders first visibly surfed Waimea waves. The electricity and compulsiveness (and even for non-surfers some sense of the technical innovations) are well conveyed without interrupting the tight narrative of this seminal two-year period and its context of surfing development before and since. But maybe the most interesting thing is how the clash of cultures and personalities when the Aussies and South Africans came to Hawaii just barely avoided tragedy. That gives some gravitas to the usual surf movie of chiseled bodies and flying spume.
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