World's most authoritative history of surfing has been reissued in a beautiful, completely revised, and updated edition! An excerpt from:

Stoked
by Drew Kampion

Dueling for Dollars

Except for the hundred or so years of venereal holocaust and missionary suppression, there has apparently always been competition in surfing. Although paddling anchored the competitive format in the 1930s, and most competition was displaced in the '40s by World War II and its aftermath, when the sport regrouped at Makaha in the early '50s, wave-riding performance had moved onto center stage. The goal was to reward and honor the well-rounded waterman or woman, with surfing as the most prestigious of the disciplines. Cumulative scores for surfing, paddling, tandem surfing, and so on determined the championship.

More recently, surf contests have essentially become surfing contests. Competitors are generally divided into divisions by age, sex, and activity-menehunes (small children), boys, juniors, men, masters, seniors, girls, women, tandem, paddle race, professionals-and any other divisions that make sense. As in other sports, there are also divisions by level. Surfing in 2002 has a complex structure of local, regional, state, national, and international competitions. This system was fairly well developed in the '60s, weakened or disintegrated in some areas in the '70s, and reformed and intensified in the '80s and '90s, with forums for the contemporary surfboard and its reemerging polar opposite, the modern longboard.

In the late 1960s, nature-oriented soul surfers were advocating a slow-growth philosophy for the sport and a no-growth philosophy for their own favorite surf spots. They resented the intrusion of contests and outsiders into their areas. In a 1969 interview with Surfer magazine, Mickey Dora, already living much of the year abroad, reportedly scamming a living and on the verge of imminent full expatriatism, said: "The advent of 'professionalism' to the sport will be the final blow. Professionalism will be completely destructive of any control an individual has over the sport at present. These few Wall Street flesh merchants desire to unify surfing only to extract the wealth." "Professionalism is black," chorused Santa Cruz local John Scott in Surfer. "Contests only display the hostile commercial polarity."

Surfing definitely changed as the money started coming into competition, a little at first ($28 for "best ride" at the '62 Bells Beach Classic), then more and more-$2,000 for Terry Jones' first-place nose-time at Morey's second noseriding contest in '66; $300 for Corky's win at the first Smirnoff Pro-Am in Santa Cruz in '68, $2,000 for Nat's first place at the Makaha Smirnoff in '70 and $3,000 for Michael Peterson's win at the '74 Coke Surfabout in Sydney; $1,000 total purse for the first Pipeline Masters in '71, $130,000 in 1996 with $20,000 going to the winner, Kelly Slater. There were livelihoods at stake in the business of riding waves; it wasn't just all fun and games anymore.

Rare Copies of the 1st Edition of Stoked!

Though now out of print, I have a few copies of the 1st edition hardcover edition of Stoked available at $75 per copy (inscribed & signed), plus $10.00 Priority Mail in the USA; $15 outside USA