I saw the documentary Riding Giants last week, and that film represents pretty much the sum total of my knowledge about surfing. So if this is a stupid question, well, that’s why.
The documentary covers the history of big wave surfing, mentioning the sport’s invention in Hawaii over 1000 years ago.
But most of the film covers the 1950s - 1990s. Most of the footage and photos showed a few Hawaiian natives among groups of white surfers. Most of the big names in the sport throughout that time period seem to be caucasians, even though the sport was reinvented and practiced in Hawaii. Laird Hamilton, the most recent best surfer in the world, even comments on how he faced some discrimination growing up as a blond white boy among his native classmates. But he’s the top dog in surfing now, not one of his native contemporaries.
Is my impression of caucasian dominance in the sport accurate? If so, why? Economic reasons? Less interest in surfing as sport vs. recreation among the native population?
I know this is a pretty old question to resurrect, but I just caught Riding Giants on DVD and I wondered, too. (Great movie, by the way.) There were always a few Hawaiian-sounding names and brown faces in amongst the white guys, but modern surfing seemed consistently dominated by white males. Do many native Hawaiians surf recreationally? (Were they just unwilling to sit around surfing and stealing chickens all day in the 50’s?) The film did make it clear that most of the Hawaiian surfing culture in the 50’s and 60’s had literally hopped a plane from California to get there.
My guess: White people, on average, have been wealthier, and therefore were more able to spend time & money on such luxuries as trips to Hawaii or California.
Er… by “white people” I meant not only not black people but really non Polynesian people, as you guys would know if you’d actually read the OP and my post. The Polynesian people are, you know, already there.
My impression is that while surfing was invented in Hawaii/Polynesia, the modern sport was started by a bunch of Southern California beach bums in the 1920s. They were white, but like most bums they weren’t rich. They carried the sport until the surf music craze of the early '60s, and most of the people who listened to Dick Dale and the Beach Boys at that time (and who took their advice, grabbed a board and hit the surf) were white.
Wealth and leisure time may have something to do with it, but so does marketing. in general, European Americans have focused on themselves for selling and buying products and services, often to the exclusion of other groups. To create surfing contests and sponsorships, someone would have to acknowlege a market–in this case, a European American market–and find people who represent that market to act as icons and role models who could both draw in a European American audience and hawk products and services to them. Thus, like rock and roll and other industries that were created/populated by “minorities,” non-whites replaced other and dominated the sport, probably with the help of various barriers placed in the path of non-whites to compete.