(OT) A famous American...
[lots of FP in this one though. Even linguists here say Ca surfers are a significant force on the English language]
Obituary
Mickey Dora
Surfing hedonist who became a hero to a generation of beach bums, before turning his back on the waves
Mickey Dora was everything that a surfer ought to be: he was tanned, he was good-looking, and he was trouble. West Coast archetype and antihero, he became the incarnation of surfing for the postwar generation. Technically, he was an innovator whose effortless grace and balletic suppleness (which gave him his nickname, “Da Cat”) set new standards.
But he was above all the siren voice of a nonconformist surfing lifestyle, making a career out of never holding down a serious job and injecting the brash hedonism of the beach into the culture at large. Even among surfers, Dora was notorious. Indeed, he was so much a rebel that he rebelled, in the end, against surfing.
Born in Budapest in 1934, Miklos Sandor Dora moved to California as a child, and attended Hollywood High School unless the surf was up. He learnt the art of boardriding at San Onofre from his stepfather, Gard Chapin, in the 1940s, and by the Fifties he was one of the leading lights of Malibu, where he drew new lines across the long lazy point-break waves on his Quigg pintail.
With the publication of Frederick Kohner’s 1957 book Gidget (based on his daughter’s adventures at Malibu) and the subsequent epidemic of naïve Hollywood romances — notably Bikini Beach, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and For Those who Think Young — in which he played bit-parts, Dora was consecrated as the profane evangelist of a youthful counterculture.
He performed as a stunt double in Ride the Wild Surf (1963), which was distinguished not only by songs from Jan and Dean and Brian Wilson of Beach Boys fame, but by some serious 20ft-plus surf at Waimea Bay on the North Shore of Hawaii. But if he had the ability and courage to surf big waves, he lacked the desire, and specialised instead in maximising the style factor in the mannered manoeuvres of small-wave riding. His technique may have been the origin of the term “laid-back”, as he typically leant backwards on his board, slightly bent at the knee. “Mickey had a tremendous influence on us as surfers,” said John Milius, a friend of Dora’s and director of Big Wednesday, the classic elegy of the West Coast utopia. “Everybody tried to surf like him and have his grace and his style and cool.”
It was a brief golden age that was destroyed by its own popularity. “I grew up under this wonderful freedom,” Dora said, “but it went so quickly.” A soul-surfer at heart, Dora became increasingly hostile to the professional and commercial evolution of the sport. Although intensely competitive, he denounced competitions, pulling down his trunks to moon at the judges at the 1967 Malibu Invitational.
Dora was a Kerouac in shorts, the soulmate of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: a subversive, restless wildman. He was a joker who fired off army flares on the pier at Malibu and played tennis in a trenchcoat. With an essentially religious mentality, he was haunted by a deep sense of paradise lost, and looked forward to some catastrophic apocalypse restoring the original purity. Meanwhile, he continued to ride his own miniature version of the Ark, on which only he would be saved.
The more mainstream surfing became, the more he felt marginal and alienated. He grew up when barely a handful of people would be found out on the break, so he hated crowds, and was often ill-tempered and ungenerous towards fellow surfers, even — perhaps especially — to those who liked and admired him. He believed he had a divine right to every wave at Malibu, and took to painting swastikas on his board.
“I remember riding this one wave and someone pushing me off my board from behind, screaming, ‘Go home you little creep’,” recalled the curator of the Santa Barbara Surfing Museum, Jim O’Mahoney. It was Dora. “As a little kid, it was like getting yanked from your board by God. It was a badge of honour.”
There used to be a quasi- monastic creed among surfers that one had to choose between women and waves: you couldn’t have both. Dora chose waves. When he took off from California in the early Seventies, some said that it was the endless quest for the perfect wave, though others said that it was not unconnected to his habit of passing bad cheques. Either way, he was arrested by the FBI in 1981 for having fled the country in violation of parole.
While in prison he was sentenced to a further six months for using a stolen credit card on a two-year spending spree through Europe and Asia. Maybe this was a spirited protest against capitalism, or perhaps it was simply that Dora felt the world owed him a living for being Mickey Dora. In any case, his spell in jail only enhanced the legend in the morally inverted realm of surfing.
Dora attained mythic status long before his death. After his departure, “Dora lives” was painted on the wall at Malibu, and over the next three decades there were reported sightings of him as far apart as South Africa, New Zealand and Chile.
He was rumoured to have settled for a while in Guéthary, on the Atlantic coast of southwest France, but even in the 1990s one film-maker could still produce an enigmatic documentary called In Search of Da Cat. He was more symbol than surfer, and his legacy is his attitude.
Only when Dora discovered, in July 2001, that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer did he give up his exile and return to his father’s home in Montecito, California.
Mickey Dora, surfer, was born in Budapest on August 11, 1934. He died on January 3, 2002, aged 67.
thetimes.co.uk |
