In the Pipeline
A man rides the Pipeline, a famous surf reef in Oahu, Hawaii.
Surf’s Up! 12 Pictures Capture the Thrill of Riding Waves
It’s endless summer and from Malibu to Melbourne, everybody’s gone surfin’.
For most Americans in the 1960s, surfing was the subject of a Beach Boys song, a setting for teenage romance in movies like Gidget and Beach Blanket Bingo, and a sport practiced by young, tanned, well-muscled youths with toothpaste white smiles, in California.
But surfing didn’t start with teenagers in California. It began hundreds of years ago in Polynesian islands, in Hawaii. It spread to southern California in 1907, but didn’t become widely popular until the 1940s.
Since then, surfing has spread all over the world, to Morocco, Japan, Germany and Iceland. How did an ancient Hawaiian sport make its way to Hollywood, and then the world? According to Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul, authors of
