Corky Carroll: Memorable moves of the 'hotdoggin'' era

The surfing world is a much different place now than when I was a young gremlin growing up along our Orange County beaches.
We live in a high-tech surfing environment with surfboards that weigh almost nothing and instant access to surf media that includes live coverage of every surfing event on the planet and video feeds from just about every beach on the planet.
Surfing has risen to extreme levels of performance.
Just the fact that the term “aerial” is part of every wave ridden by about every surfer above the intermediate level should tell you something.
Which brings me to today’s little adventure – forgotten surf moves from the illustrious, great golden surf era.
To be more exact, I am talking about the time before shortboards and just after the dinosaurs – the era of “hotdoggin’.”
Back in those days, people knee-paddled a lot.
There was also a move that was popular called the “head-dip.”
This was done by the surfer bending over and sticking his or her head into the wave.
A really clean head dip was usually accompanied by a really cool flip of the hair making the water fly off in the process. It looked really cool.
For one of John Severson’s surf films he enlisted Mickey Munoz to go out and make up a series of alternate versions of this move.
The results were the “El Telephono,” the “El Mysterioso” and the famous and very popular “El Quasimodo.”
I would bet money that Kelly Slater hardly ever uses a Quasimodo in a surf contest these days.
There were also a variety of artful “Hood Ornament” poses that some surfers – Owl Chapman in particular – liked to use. Probably the most well-known of these would be the classic “Soul Arch.”
The best one I ever saw was performed by David Nuuhiwa in the finals of the Junior Men’s Division of the 1966 U.S. Championship at Huntington Beach.
Photos of that one are still around today; it’s like the pinnacle of surfing hood ornament poses.
Longboarders still do these to some degree, but for the most part, it’s a lost art.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/one-654984-surf-board.html

David Nuuhiwa, 1966 US Championships from ENCYCLOPEDIA of SURFING videos on Vimeo.