Sweetness and Blood: How surfing spread from Hawaii and California to the rest of the world, with some unexpected results
Sweetness and Blood: How surfing spread from Hawaii and California to the rest of the world, with some unexpected results. By Michael Scott Moore. Rodale; 336 pages; $25.99.
Michael Scott Moore’s book on surfing is a more contemporary and compelling tale than it’s glibe, ‘50s-inspired cover art suggests.
Mira Costa grad Michael Scott Moore (class of ’87) has written the book every writer who surfs wishes he had written, and every surfer who writes wishes he could have written.
Sweetness and Blood follows in the tradition of the best travel writing, which is a good thing because there is so little good surf writing. And what little good surf writing there is, this book surpasses, at least among my limited readings. Moore’s meditations on surfing are more insightful, and less ponderous than Daniel Duane’s Thoreau-inspired Caught Inside; and his style less worshipful and more entertaining than William Finnegan’s New Yorker story about San Francisco’s surfing doctor Mark Renneker, to cite two of surfing’s most critically admired stories.
Moore puts his reporter’s training to good use by tracking down the details that make his book something more than a travel book. He lives in Berlin, where he is a reporter for Miller-McCune magazine and an editor for Spiegel Online.
“It’s conventional surf wisdom that the first pioneers in continental Europe climbed to their feet in 1956, starting with Peter Viertel, a German-born novelist and screenwriter from Southern California who paddled out in France,” Moore writes.
But in his research, Moore discovered 80-year-old Uwe Drath, who began surfing in 1952 when he was a lifeguard on the German island of Sylt, near the Danish border. The French, who take pride in their country as the “Surf City” of Europe, were so outraged when this claim was posted on a French web site that they banned the friend of Drath who made the post.
In Cuba, Moore learned, the island’s first surfer was an American soldier posted at Guantanamo Bay in the 1960s, judging from the design of a longboard in the base’s museum. Today soldiers stationed at the prison base can rent surfboards and buy wax and leashes at the PX. QuikSilver puts on regular clinics there, Moore reports.
Moore writes, “I wonder if President Kennedy knew that by signing the blockade order in 1962 that he would slow the spread of surfing to the island by several decades.” Moore points out that traveling surfers brought their sport to far more remote areas of the world, such as Morocco, decades before Cuban surfers began shaping boards from refrigerator foam in the early ‘90s.
“It still mystifies me that British, French and Australian surfers seem to have missed Cuba….I’ve heard no stories of foreigners leaving surfboards on the island in the first 30 years of Castro’s revolution,” he writes.
Moore bolsters his reporting with a judicious selection of research sources, among them Mark Twain on Hawaii, Paul Bowles on Morocco and Saul Bellow on Israel, as well as lesser luminaries who have made important literary contributions to surf history, such as Encyclopedia of Surfing author and fellow Mira Costa grad Matt Warshaw (see related review, page 41), and El Camino history professor Arthur Virge. Virge authored the definitive history of George Freeth, who introduced surfing to California and whose bronze bust was unveiled two weeks ago on the Redondo Beach pier.
Michael Scott Moore researching surf culture at the Manhattan pier.
For many South Bay readers, Sweetness and Blood’s favorite chapter will be chapter one, featuring Mike Purpus, another Mira Costa alumnus.
Moore portrays Purpus, the greatest competitive surfer ever to have come out of the South Bay, as a reclusive keeper of the flame with a tribal storyteller’s command of the South Bay’s seminal role in surfing, both noble and profane.
“I got all pissed off when Huntington Beach and Santa Cruz were fighting over the rights to call themselves Surf City. They don’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with Surf City. The first guy that ever waxed his board, used paraffin on his surfboard, was from Palos Verdes. The guy who invented the wetsuit was Bev Morgan [who sold Dive N’ Surf to the Meistrell twins]…The first commercialized surfboard manufacturer was Dale Velzy. He was from Manhattan Beach. George Freeth caught the first wave – well almost the first wave on the continental United States – right here. Everything started in the South Bay,” Purpus tells Moore.
When Moore asks about a board with an airbrushed nude in his apartment, Purpus recalls, “That’s my ex girlfriend ‘No Pants Nance.’ When I tried to get that board into South Africa, I had to cover up her beaver with a sticker, ‘cause they said it was pornography.”
Moore finds characters almost as interesting as Purpus in all of the countries he visits. His quest takes him to Germany, Indonesia, Morocco, the United Kingdom, Israel, Cuba, Sao Tome and Principe and Japan.
Moore may, as he claims, not have been a very good surfer at Mira Costa. But if, as he also claims, his Mira Costa geography and history teacher Elroy Lang and his AP English teacher Gerry Wadhams, inspired him to write, they deserve at least a footnote in the literature of surfing. B