Pioneers Of Big Wave Surfing
Buzzy Trent
Born in San Diego into old California money (mom's family owned Parkinson's Ranch, where Palomar Junior College now sits and dad was an engineer for a mining company), Buzzy was raised in Santa Monica. He bodysurfed as a tike and delivered newspapers along Highway 101 at age 12. On his route, he witnessed lifeguard Chuck King surfing, and the next day, he had procured a solid redwood board. He hitched the 127-pound plank to a wagon behind his bike and pedaled to Malibu. He enjoyed surfing, but never one to waste away his days at the beach, he enjoyed boxing and dreamt of becoming a bullfighter.
A star football player in high school, Trent received a scholarship to the University of Southern California, but broke his leg in a game against Ohio State. He returned to surfing after the injury healed and worked as a lifeguard in L.A. County. In 1950, he saw George Downing's surf movies depicting Hawaiian surf, and by 1953, he had to experience it for himself. As a deckhand on a catamaran, his crew unofficially won the First Trans-Pacific Yacht race (catamarans weren't recognized in the event). He continued on the vessel as it ventured throughout the Pacific before settling in Hawaii.
Holed up in a Quonset hut at Makaha with a handful of mainlanders, Buzzy became immersed in the Hawaiian lifestyle. In his spare time, he dove, read (mainly German war history) and rode the biggest waves he could find. Makaha was his ultimate arena, not the bouncy shorebreak photo gallery, but 20-foot point surf. He scoffed at spinners and head-dips, preferring to sit farthest out on the gnarliest days and wait for the entire horizon to rise and greet him. Intent on iron-legging though the heaviest sections imaginable, a Makaha lip once snapped his leg like a toothpick. Trent rode the first of Bob Simmons' foam prototypes, then settled into a long relationship with George Downing, whose surfing he admired as much as his shaping. Although surfing was nothing more than recreation to Buzzy, he trained vigilantly to counteract the ocean's fury. The much-ballyhooed practice of carrying boulders along the ocean floor was something he pioneered in the '50s. As the Waimea curse was lifted in 1957, he shot to the forefront of the big-wave frenzy, earning a heavy reputation among the heaviest in the business. No one sat deeper or farther out than he; while most scratched for their lives, he stroked into the pit.
Trent married a West Side girl named Viola in 1955. The couple had two children -- Anna, a former surf shop owner living in Santa Barbara, and Ivan, a big-wave surfer/retired Navy Seal in Virginia Beach. Buzzy supported the clan first as a fireman, then as a construction worker for the Dillingham Corporation (formerly Hawaiian Dredging, the company that built Ala Moana). One day on the job site, a coworker accidentally knocked him off the 14th floor of a building while carelessly wielding a two-by-four. Buzzy fell about 50 feet, grabbed onto a 12th floor girder and pulled himself back up to resume work. "He came home and talked about it real casual," remembers Ivan. "He was a caveman, just dust himself off and go surf."
When shortboards entered the picture in the late '60s, Trent was unimpressed. He called bullshit on hotdogging as well as competitive surfing, reasoning that surfing was purely a hobby and judging who's best is impossible. His own surfing career ended abruptly in 1973 purely by choice. "I asked him, 'Why did you stop?'" said Ivan. "He told me, 'I went for this wave and backed off. I knew what was going to happen to me. It was nature's way of protecting me.'" Buzzy left gracefully and never looked back. He became an avid hang glider and retired from the Dillingham Corporation in 1980. Viola passed away in 1988, and Trent has since remarried a woman named Gladys. Now residing in Oahu's Aina Hina section, he has six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Walking provides his major source of recreation, but he still enjoys diving. He doesn't much like to discuss his surfing days.[Back to Top]
Greg Knoll
Known as Da Bull, Greg Noll is the most famous of the big-wave surfers. Born Greg Lawhead in San Diego, he moved to Manhattan Beach at age three. As a boy, he worked as a bait-disher at Manhattan Beach Pier, where he came under the influence of Dale Velzy, who was building short, lightweight balsa boards for the kids. Velzy tagged the young mischief with the nickname "gremlin." Beginning with ding repairs, the original gremmie developed under Velzy's tutelage into an excellent shaper.
Young Noll developed prodigious water skills, became a Los Angeles County lifeguard, and was a tenacious competitor, all of which contributed to his later success in the big-wave arena. He took third in one Catalina crossing (26 miles), even after getting lost in the fog and landing six miles up the coast.
Riding the shorter, lighter, radically more maneuverable balsa "Chip" boards Velzy had taught him to build, Noll was one of the hot Malibu stylists of the mid-'50s, but it was his paddling that earned him a spot on the U.S. lifeguard team that went to Australia for the 1956 Olympics at Melbourne. "Mike Bright, Tommy Zahn and I brought our boards down there to Torquay," Noll remembers.
The Aussies hadn't seen an outsider surf since Duke Kahanamoku introduced the sport there in December of 1914. The fact that Noll and his friends like to have a good rowdy time also made an impression. "Surfing had a liberating effect on the culture," he says. "Our surfing hit 'em like a comet -- took 'em from horse and buggy straight to Porsche."
Noll started making annual treks to Hawaii during his high school years. He found in the challenge of giant surf an arena in which he was limited only by his own fear, and each year he pushed himself further. On November 7, 1957, he and a small group of big-wave riders surfed Waimea Bay for the first time. Mike Stang was one of them. "That first day at Waimea," says Stang, "no one would even have thought of it except for Greg." Whoever got the first ride (and Noll certainly claims it), Noll found definitive star billing in the pursuit of big waves.
In December of 1964, Noll took it to the outer limits, paddling out on a huge day to ride one of the great waves of all time at Third Reef Pipeline. By then his black-and-white striped trunks were a cultural icon, emblematic of big surf and fearless commitment. He parlayed his reputation (and his considerable shaping skills) into a big, state-of-the-art surfboard factory in Hermosa Beach, where he succeeded in forming a business alliance with Miki Dora to manufacture and sell Da Cat surfboards, creating one of the most successful ad campaigns in the sport's history. "I was making up to 175 boards a week, 60 to 70 employees, advertising, dealers, up to my neck in shit and sinking," he says. Nonetheless, Greg starred in the boom era of surfing.
Along the way, he dabbled in surf films, shooting the action from Mexico to California to Hawaii in the late '50s and producing four Search for Surf epics. He even made a stab at a surf magazine; his 1961 Surfer's Annual featured the first published illustrations of young Rick Griffin.Noll bailed the surf scene when all the cultural rules changed back in the '60s. But before he did, he caught that one great wave that would etch his name in surf history. One afternoon at Makaha in December of 1969, he took off on as big a wave as you could paddle into, rode it to the bottom and gave up surfing.
He moved to Alaska and got into commercial fishing, but with the reemergence of the longboard, the rediscovery of surfing's history and the boom in collecting, Noll was soon shaping again. He organized a series of "Legends" events, pulling together some of the sport's greatest surfers at great surfing areas around the world.
Today, Noll lives in Crescent City, California, and still shapes 12 boards a year out of old-growth redwood -- replicas of Duke Kahanamoku's olo and other exotica for collectors. His biography, Da Bull: Life Over the Edge, is half the Bull's own words (buffed and tooled by coauthor Andrea Gabbard) and half the recollections of many who've known him. He recently teamed up with John Bernards (who made Ocean Pacific a huge national brand) in a new clothing company -- Greg Noll Oceanwear -- based in San Clemente, California.
A winner of the SIMA's Waterman of the Year award in 1999 and an honoree of the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, Greg Noll counts himself as "the luckiest guy on the face of the earth" for being able to do "just what I loved to do."[Back to Top]
Woody Brown
The New York-born Brown came west at the age of 23 and settled in La Jolla with his first wife in 1935. In 1936, Brown, tired of the bulkiness of the heavy redwood planks he learned to surf on, developed a hollow, plywood box surfboard and fastened a rudimentary keel fin to the bottom to increase performance. The board was well ahead of its time and integrated obvious elements from what Brown saw as a natural marriage between gliding, surfing and sailing -- his three passions.
After five years in San Diego and the untimely death of his first wife during the birth of the couple's first child, Brown sought out new beginnings in Hawaii in 1940. It was during his stint in Hawaii in the '40s and '50s that Brown carved out his most significant contributions to modern surfing next to names like Wally Froiseth, Fran Heath, John Kelly, George Downing, Buzzy Trent, Tommy Zahn, Joe Quigg and Rabbit Kekai in what can best be described as a perfect storm of experimentation in board design and big wave surfing.
Woody Brown was a storybook, big wave hellman. The first time I ever heard Woody Brown's name was when I overheard the infamous story of how in 1943, Brown and teenager Dickie Cross paddled out in a surging swell at Sunset Beach and, caught off guard by the size of the building surf, unable to get in, elected to paddle some three miles to Waimea Bay, where they thought they could better navigate a way to shore. After losing his board and trapped inside, Cross vanished in the thrawls of a mountainous set. Brown, as luck would have it, washed in naked, battered and beaten.
By all accounts and measures, Brown, it seems, was the type of person who, to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, went confidently in the direction of his dreams. He lived the life he imagined, while the rest of us enviably tell stories about his exploits and legendary bravado. To that end, his life was well documented in the film Of Wind and Waves and in the first volume of Malcolm Gault-Williams' Legendary Surfers.[Back to Top]
Laird Hamilton
There is no bigger set of balls in the universe than the pair in Laird Hamilton's shorts. He continues to amaze humanity by putting himself in the most harrowing situations imaginable and emerging unscathed. In contrast to the offspring of most famous parents who routinely fall short of expectations, he usurped his stepfather's lofty position in surfing history to become the big-wave charger by which all future entrants will be measured.
It's easy to see how Hamilton came to be the smug, aggressive, death-taunting waterman he is today. Born is San Francisco but raised on the North Shore, with the Pipeline beach as his playground, he experienced the last of the original big-wave pioneers -- Greg Noll, Butch Van Artsdalen and Jose Angel -- and inherited their bravado and all-around skills. Having the legendary Billy Hamilton as his stepfather afforded him a hall pass into surfing's elite. As one of the only blonds in his school on Kauai, Hamilton experienced racism at its worst. He had to be on constant guard as he was a daily target for abuse. The ocean became even more important, providing equality with its disregard for race.
Finally, the struggle for acceptance was abandoned, and Hamilton left school for California. Not only were his looks accepted, he used them to forge a living from modeling. He returned to his old playground for a stretch in the late '80s and made a statement with his aggression and tuberiding prowess. Formal competition has never interested him, but in daily duels at Backdoor and Pipe, he took on all comers. Like most things in Hamilton's life, this pursuit was discarded upon mastery, and he turned his sights to a bigger quest.
Along the North Shore's outer reefs, he began using a Jet Ski to tow in to waves that were too big to catch by paddling. Soon he took his mission to a place on Maui called Peahi. Now known as Jaws, the once unsurfable reef has been the setting for the most progressive big-wave experimentation in history. Hamilton and his "Strapped" crew, including Darrick Doerner, Dave Kalama, Pete Cabrinha and Rush Randle, have caused the biggest buzz surfing can remember. They redefined big-wave boards, trounced all over the Unridden Realm and ignited a debate between surfing's purists -- those who think Jet Skis should be banned and those who think PWCs are the link to a whole new level of big-wave surfing. One thing that cannot be debated, however, is Hamilton's place among surfing's elite. He is our most accomplished living waterman, equally adept at windsurfing, paddling the English Channel, longboarding or carving laybacks on the world's biggest waves. His relentless pursuit to design and alternative methods of waveriding is unmatched.
On August 17, 2000, he again raised the bar by towing in to what was indisputably the heaviest wave ridden to date -- a Teahupoo ledge that defies description. Living on Kauai with his wife, volleyball superstar Gabrielle Reece, Hamilton continues to redefine what is possible in the water. Considering the sort of waves it takes to rouse his interest, he remains active between sessions by riding motocross, mountain biking, hitting the occasional golf ball and performing any necessary tasks around his house. He has no doubts that he will ride even bigger waves in the future. "We haven't seen what we're capable of yet," he insists. "It's only a question God and Mother Nature can answer. As our equipment evolves, we're just waiting to meet the winter of '69. We're ready." [Back to Top]