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EAST COAST SURFING LEGEND
GARY PROPPER
Introduction by Sam George
October 5, 2005
Life is a wave; every wave is a
life. Riding both well is the embodiment of style.
To ride through life with a vibrant medium of expression
that draws directly from the act: balance, spontaneity,
daring, judgment, courage and timing. Always timing.
And then to ride each wave as if it were your life: the
takeoff, with all its infinite possibilities, finding one’s
proper footing, and the all important first turn, achieving
optimum trim, negotiating sections both torrid and down
tempo, milking the flow of energy to the last drop. Finally
kicking out with a flourish.
To understand this…to know this…is the trick.
It’s the intangible yet oh-so-obvious thing that separates
the barefoot adventurer from what proto-Californian surf
legend Phil Edwards once called, “the
legions of the unjazzed”. The idea. The dream. Not
just to live a surfer’s life, but to live life as
a surfer. Gary Propper has been doing both for the entire
length of his ride…both in and out of the water.
On the beach during the birth of one of this century’s
most aesthetically potent, pervasive subcultures, he was
born along with it, carrying its spirit, its heart, along
with him. But unlike subsequent waves of the merely faithful,
Propper wasn’t satisfied with simple satiation…he
knew he could never get enough unless the ride lasted forever.
Unless the ride took him down paths that have never seen
the track of a surfboard. Unless he took that indescribable
feeling, that same heady rush of emotion, all that passion
welled up inside of him every time he took off on a wave
and applied not just to that ephemeral band of cosmic energy,
but to the Real World and his place in it.
His approach to the heretofore unrealized life? Look no
further than the 1966 East Coast Surf Championships
in Virginia Beach. In four short years he’d
had gone from a scrappy towhead whose single mom moved him
from Miami to Cocoa Beach to one of America’s top
surfing competitors…a Little Rascal in the
body of a world-class athlete. And in 1966, on
a single wave, he would show all the attributes that would
come to mark his every endeavor.
At the time the sport of surfing, once the sole province
of ancient Hawaiian kings, then fostered throughout the
first five decades of the 20th century by California’s
hybrid waterman/frontiersmen archetype, reserved little
of its vaulted passion for Atlantic surfers, despite the
fact that surfing hit these shores almost as early. After
all, Duke Kahanamoku, the legendary Hawaiian
prince of the surf, made little distinction between the
swells he rode off his ancestral home in Waikiki and those
in which he thrilled spectators along the Jersey shore in
1912. Duke knew what the following generation of East Coast
surfers learned as the years and Atlantic swells and changing
seasons passed: that passion came in waves.
And that not all the pioneers headed west. If the Californians,
those basking, preening sons of the Golden West, embraced
surfing as a pastime, it was the Eastern surfers who really
perceived it as a way of life. They had to. Given the Atlantic’s
capricious surf conditions…seasonal swells, continental
shelves and mercurial water temps…Eastern surfers
learned not to count on the motivation and inspirations
afforded their distant brethren. Their road to Nirvana led
down an inner path. Surfing wasn’t simply
something you did; it was something you were…24-7…for
life.
And nobody embraced that ethic more than Gary Propper.
Environment? Maybe. Consider his early tenure in Cocoa Beach,
growing up in the shadows of the gantries at nearby Cape
Canaveral, the surf and space race taking place simultaneously
in his watery backyard. Different mediums, different adventures,
same message: that anything is possible so long
as you keep shooting for the stars.
| - Photo:
Gary Propper Archive |
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But Gary didn’t just aim for the
stars, he became one. Throughout the early 1960s
the sole representative of the Eastern surf ethic,
bearing Atlas-like on his tanned shoulders the massive expectations
of pioneers who came before him and the spindrift dreams
of the sport’s next generation.
He didn’t disappoint.
Establishing himself as one of the sport’s first legitimate
pros, he was without knowing it taking his place in a time-honored
lineage that included George Freeth, the
Hawaiian-Irish beach boy who in 1907 was brought to Southern
California for a series of development promotions…history’s
first professional surfer.
With his surfer’s sense on timing
and commitment, Gary threw himself into the Game, and became
one of its best players. His signature model with
Hobie Surfboards…the era’s leading manufacturer…was
a first for an East Coast surfer, and for several
years the top-selling model on either coast. He appreciated
the value of brand promotion, especially when the brand
was Propper. His subsidized his affair with the sport and
the sea in a style 25 years ahead of the curve, setting
a template of success that would later pay dividends to
Eastern champions like six-time world champion Kelly
Slater and four-time world champion Lisa
Anderson, both from the shores of central Florida.
This was the fruit of Gary’s conscious
choices, counter-culture though they might have been. These
were quantifiable. His trip. Propper’s style,
on the other hand, was instinctual. And never more
in evidence than during the 1966 East Coast Championships
held in Virginia Beach.
Already qualified for a talent-heavy final
heat, fresh out of the junior ranks but already bearing
the burden of performance that may have justified a conservative,
cross-the-tees approach, Propper laid out his real rip on
a single ride. Taking off on one of the better waves of
the day, he trimmed his board then moved to the surfboard’s
nose, crouched in a speedy, low-center-of-gravity crouch
called a “cheater five.” With
a section, or breaking crest of the wave, looming ahead,
Propper didn’t back pedal…the safer approach…but
stood up out of the crouch, still on the nose, driving his
board through the concave wave face. This is the point where
most surfer’s ride would end: forward momentum stopped,
tenuously balance on the brink of a wipeout, a critical
section waiting at the end of any decision.
Propper’s call? He deftly side-slipped
his board, pulling the skeg from the water and drifting
through the section with less resistance. Nice, but with
no directional stability. In fact, Gary’s
nine-six board began to spin out of control, pivoting
180 degrees, pointing skeg-first now. But what looked like
a glorious end was actually playing right into Propper’s
hand. An opportunity to put one of his most strident axioms
into practice, one that would characterize his approach
to myriad challenges ahead…go with the flow,
but with attitude.
Gary simply stepped forward again, re-engaging
the fin, completed the pivot and spun his board through
the entire radius. A 360 degree turn. A truly space-age
maneuver, completely unheard of in 1966.
Did it win him the championships? Naturally.
Was it one of the many memorable performances to come, as
Gary went on to become modern surfing’s first Eastern
superstar? Without question. And would this same exhibition
of balance, of verve, of commitment, blended seamlessly
with a palpable sense of fun, serve Gary Propper on the
ride that lay ahead? Say, his early days as a rock promoter,
a behind-the-scenes career managing the world’s most
in-your-face comedian, or teaching an entire generation
of kids (with a little help from a foursome of talking turtles)
the meaning of “Cowabunga, dude!”
The answer just might be found in these
pages. A visual testament to the ride thus far of an extraordinary
figure in popular history, a cultural pioneer who made passion
his profession.
And in doing so Gary Propper did
more than simply create a lifestyle. He’s created
a life of style.
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