The prophet’s name was Tom Blake. He was born in Milwaukee, in 1902. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis eleven months later and his father, a bar owner and club steward, soon abandoned the infant to a diminishing return of distant relatives. Beyond that, there was nothing else to distinguish Blake’s childhood, save an early fondness for water.
Around 1911, in something of a burning bush moment, Blake saw newsreel footage of men surfing in Hawaii. Chances are the reason these wave-riding snapshots made it all the way to Wisconsin had less to do with the divine and more to do with Jack London’s recently published The Cruise of the Snark, a book which forever immortalized surfing as “a royal sport for the natural kings of the earth” among many other things. Blake was ten at the time and probably too young to realize he was one of the first Westerners to witness what was not just an islander’s aquatic pastime, but an ancient Polynesian ritual: both a celebration of athletic prowess and a direct form of deity worship. Whatever the case, what Blake didn’t understand as theory, he certainly intuited as fact.
By age eighteen, a high-school dropout doing nothing much beyond marking time in Detroit, Blake met legendary Hawaiian surfer and Olympic gold medal swimmer Duke Kahanamoku in the lobby of a movie theater. That meeting left a mark. A few months later, Blake moved to California and became a regular at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. A year after that, he set the world record in the “ten-mile open” swim, two years after he was just another of our country’s novice surfers: a grommet in technical parlance, a newbie, a greenhorn, just another guy in too tight trunks getting good and throttled by the Pacific.
The throttling was no joke. So badly did Blake get beat down that it took him three years to try the surfing a second time, but that second time was the charm. In the decades that followed, to quote the writer Drew Kampion: “Blake altered everything. He almost single-handedly transformed the sport of surfing from a primitive Polynesian curiosity into a 20th Century lifestyle.” Among the things he altered were board design—inventing both the fin and the surf leash—and, by creating the rules for the world’s first surf competition and thus abetting that competition, the fabric of the sport itself. He also invented the first water-proof housing for camera equipment, thus jump starting a revolution in the field of surf photography and, since there is very little that can compare with frozen images of cresting waves, helping insure the burgeoning popularity of the sport.
Blake is further credited with expanding the realm of the possible, both literally and figuratively. Literally, he was the first person to paddle the 26 miles from Catalina Island to the town of San Pedro, California, just down the road from Long Beach, in a feat many though unachievable.
Figuratively, in a 1969 Surfing magazine article entitled The Voice of the Atom, Blake penned what amounted to the first modern expression of a theory that has since become known as: Surfing as Religion. Following up on this thread, a few years later, in what Surfing magazine editor Matt Walker once termed “an insightful mix of Moses and Thoreau,” Blake carved the core statement of that new religion into a rock in Wisconsin. “Nature=God,” is what he carved. What he really meant is a different story altogether.
This is part one of a many stage report, tune in for future installments.
