"If he'd hit his wave-riding peak in 2022 instead of 1965, he'd be the hottest thing in America surfing."
Johnny Fain of Malibu died yesterday at age 78.
A pointbreak genius with lightning-fast feet and a wicked grin, Fain famously dueled in and out of the water with Miki Dora in the early- and mid-’60s—it was a show they put on, and it was a great one, except that it left Fain in Dora’s shadow, which was unfair to Johnny.
He was thought of by some as a blowhard, but from here it all looks like grand beach theater, and if Fain hit his wave-riding peak in 2022 instead of 1965, he’d be the hottest thing in America surfing.
“Even though I was the youngest surfer at Malibu [around 1958], I kept up with the older guys. That was the challenge. That’s what helped my drive. I knew if I didn’t keep up, I was gone. Later on, I got a Panama hat, and that was a big deal. If you had a certain ranking in the Pit, you were allowed to wear a Panama hat and stripes on your trunks. It was like being a commander with bars on your shoulders. The hat and the stripes were people’s way of knowing you were somebody without knowing your name. Then they got to know your name real quick. Rank and file.⠀
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“I was lucky because I had plenty of time to surf. My mother [Jeanne Bartlett] was a professional writer—she wrote the screenplay for Son of Lassie, the film that made Peter Lawford a star. My dad owned and operated Malibu TV. The chores I had at home were minimal. That helped me tremendously. While most kids were out doing their paper route or some other odd job, I was in the water advancing to new heights. I remember thinking of the Indy 500 while I surfed, I’m passing people in my Formula One race car, pitting myself against the wave, pushing myself to the limit. I wanted to see how far I could go to defy the force of gravity. Only the equipment was holding me back.”⠀
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RIP to a true original. ⠀
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Dec 22? Oh youre joking. Ha
77 yes. 97 more.
The fires durfing hurricane season in 77 were amazing. Offshore for weeks, pumping swell.
But nothing can touch ‘83.
Jonah Hill would go !
different times eh….I arrived IV 72? Came from Pt Loma after east coast upbringing…San Diego was nuts, violent parties, cops/hippies/stoners/surfers all fighting at all the parties. Parties everywhere across the county, come one come all. Hard stuff just cracking the whole thing apart, 60’s dream concluding.
…I just saw waves….IV was pretty tranquil after the bank….Cito seemed like an OK place to land. Kinda weird now..the choices we make huh?
Hey Section bro. I was 13 at the time in ’72, long-haired surf rat, right before I met you. Rowdy times in P.L. but surfed my brains out, number one priority.. Still is. Everybody was a character back then. RIP all the bros who died. It was a whole ‘nother world from Malibu.
There’s a lot of really cool young people who rip, but there’s a lot too, too many, that don’t give us older surfers any respect. They just assume we’re kooks because, as in my case, my shoulders are weak and I have a hard time getting up. Once I’m up I can do OK, but there are days where they don’t even give me a chance to get a wave. They drop right in front of me and make me eat it at a place I’ve surfed since I was 11 because they and their friends think it’s cool to do so, to the old guy who can’t get up too good on a long board.
I remember when we were young, for all our rowdiness and giving kooks a hard time, it was a general rule among all of us, where ever we went, that the old guys, and there wasn’t very many of them in those days, Doc Cherry and his friends, Skeeter Malcom, Jack Lansberry, especially those having a hard time getting up, got a pass. They always got to give it a go without any fuss from any of us, no fear of being threatened and harassed or even slapped by some twenty-something year-olds, which is what I’ve been putting up with lately at a place where I’ve been barreled a thousand times with light to no crowds when I was younger. Now zoo’d by wannabe hot shot rippers who bully on an old guy with bad shoulders who wouldn’t be able to hit harder than a weak girl if I tried (no offense to girls, I’m sure some of you could hit plenty hard).
Like I said, some of the young guys are cool, but too many aren’t. What, they don’t teach kids no respect for elders these days? What’s up with that? I don’t drop in. I treat people nice and I always have, at least since I was a teenager and was influenced and mentored by some very cool, incredibly gifted older surfers, that you remember too, my friend Section Man.
I could use some body guards or navy seals to surf with me. Anybody reading this care to volunteer?
Holy Moly…the Legend appears on Beach Grit. (one good thing about this place is that no one reads anything older than….right now today. So its a good place to post rants and raves or chat up someone and learn about some far off surf spot.
Modern times man, what ya gonna do? Instagram, Facebook…me and mine, screw you, my camera guy is on the cliffs. I think whats really changed is that the waves suck. Maybe Im senile, but I just remember waves pretty much all the time, often too big to even deal with. Sure some flat spells, but thats what beachbreaks are for!! So surfers today, wait 3 weeks for a 1 day swell, and then surf with all the others who did the same. Even Santa Barbara had too many waves…..just everywhere, not one point.
Weather sources suggest its tied to the high pressure ridge parked offshore of CA allmost year round, pushing jetstream notrth, instead of letting it come in at a lower latitude, bringing waves, and just as important……RAIN!!!
Speaking of Johnny Fain, just to share something relevant to the post, I went into the school library at Dana Jr. High in Point Loma when I was in the seventh grade (1971) to find something about surfing to read. So, I asked the librarian.
He, an older surfer, told me that it just so happened that Dana Jr. High had the largest collection of surfing books and magazines in the USA, not just all the high schools and junior high schools, but more than any library anywhere, probably more than any library anywhere in the world. They had every magazine that had ever been printed from Australia, the USA, and anywhere surfing magazines were printed. Every book that had ever been written with surfing as the subject.
I spent a lot of time in that library. We weren’t allowed to take any surfing books or magazines out the library door. You had to read the surfing literature in that small library. Even though, to this day, I held the record for ditching school, I only made it through the tenth grade, not meaning to brag because it’s nothing to brag about, I still managed to read every book and magazine they had by the time I was a few months into the ninth grade.
So, even though I was a short boarder, I got heavily indoctrinated into everything there was to know about longboarding and the entire longboard era. And my local surfing hero, one of them anyway, was a guy who could longboard and shortboard. His name was Mike Mansfield. I thought the coolest thing you could do in surfing was to be able to ride different styles of surfing, whether it was a fish or longboarding or riding down rail guns. I bought used boards, any kind that cost about $10 to $20 in those days, rode with no leash, broke my boards on the rocks. Must have been through about a few hundred surfboards in my time.
Anyway, I digress. But I was fascinated with Mickey Dora and I believed the stuff he said about surfing being ruined by the surf industry, even though I voraciously gulped everything I could read that the surf industry produced.
Of course, in those days there was nothing in the books or magazines describing what kind of person Mickey Dora is now described as, a criminal and a thief, but I didn’t know that at the time.
So, I really took to heart the anti-hero Dora versus the establishment glamorous surf star Johnny Fain thing that I read about a few years after it happened. I sided with Dora’s comments about the whole scene and really didn’t appreciate the whole Surfline camera on your favorite surf spot so every inland guy who can’t get to the beach can see what’s up ruination of surfing, or so it seems.
Remember when you just had to be there? Especially on the first day of the swell? I remember you and me, Section Man, in 1975, driving past Rincon when we thought it was flat, when everybody thought it was flat, when it had been flat for weeks, and I looked out the window, driving south, and saw it 4′ – 6′ (backs), perfect, ruler edge lines stretching to the horizon. I was yelling at you to turn around, and we did, and surfed it all day with just a few guys out…. Me, on my dynaflow tube-riding surfboard. Still remember that clearly.
So, for all the anti-industry, anti-commercialism surfers, misguided and foolish as we were and always probably will be, to the death, thank you Mickey Dora for the image, if not the man, that you portrayed and thank you for being ‘Da Cat, forever the cat as far as I’m concerned.
One humble surfer’s opinion.
no memories!!!! ha funny! Jet stream left us.
greg noll made and sold a shaped blank, a ‘Johnny fain model’ for, $20.
I got one, had it glassed by a friend, and used it, a 7 footer, at Luanda bay
in 68/69 , where i destroyed it on the rocks on a large Sunday afternoon solo session.
good aarticle Matt,, fain always seemed like just doras sidekick, but clearly was much more.
RIP Johnny
He had a part in the movie “Dicktator”. The IMDB synopsis would make Derek proud. Legend.
Now, if that isn’t the best title for a pOrNO, I don’t know what is.
Johnny Fain quote.
“My surfing career has been a blessing and a curse. Unfortunately, the surfing lifestyle can give you a false set of values—because you think it’s never going to end. You develop tunnel vision. You lose your perspective of what life’s all about. Why should you care about anything else? Earthquakes—who cares? It’ll cause a giant tidal wave—so you’re hoping for an earthquake. On the other hand, surfing is good for you. It’s important to keep surfing. Not just for the physical aspect, but for the spirit. It’s good for your soul”
Thars some truth in there.
RIP Johnny
Malibu used to be so rad.
1983 destroyed her best sections and Ben Marcus moved to town sometime afterwards to network.
Toast.
what happened in 1983?
Massive El Niño swell with torrential rain trashed the entire coast.
That was my favorite El Niño. Piers destroyed, huge waves, etc. Of course being 8 or 9 and not having ever surged yet all my recollections are from Surfer magazine descriptions and the local news.
Long live the Malibu Lizard
(At quick glance I thought it was Jonah who’d died…)
This headline was more turgid than anything heard in the WSL booth over the last week.
7.4 on the turgid scale, for sure