"The V-2 rocket or penis obsession—boys and their
toys, am I right?"
Watching movies with my 13-year-old son is mostly down
to throwing a lot of Netflix-Hulu-HBO against the wall and seeing
what sticks, and while I have passed on to him a few
traits and characteristics that I wish I could delete,
I am grateful that, like me, he has a congenital indifference
to fantasy and superheroes, which means our movie-night hit
rate is pretty high.
We are currently on a roll, here in these last couple of weeks
of summer. Forrest Gump (better than I remembered), was followed
by Bridesmaids, then The Right Stuff—which is still a
thing of cinematic beauty, and Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager is
fourth-dimensional flyboy cool, although the movie at times launches itself pretty far
its own hyper-virile Mach-One ass.
Two great Right Stuff moments occur almost
back-to-back, in the same scene, which is set deep inside the
Pentagon. It is 1957. The Russians have just launched Sputnik 1
and, this being peak Cold War, American politicians
are now frantic to one-up the Soviets by putting a man in
space.
A pair of fast-talking young NASA recruiters (Harry Shearer
and Jeff Goldblum, both having a blast), with the aid of a film
projector, are pitching President Eisenhower and Senator Lyndon
Johnson on the type of men needed for space flight.
The projector rolls.
We see circus performers, high divers, race-car divers
(“they already have their own helmets”) and—surfers, yes, because
they would be naturals for the mission-concluding splashdown.
All are rejected. Eisenhower wants real test pilots; men with
the Right Stuff. But let’s be clear—Phil Edwards would have made a
Life-cover-worthy astronaut.
The second great bit in that scene is when Johnson looks across
the room and asks the top rocket engineer if it was former Nazi
scientists now working for the Soviets who had produced
Sputnik.
“Was it them?” Johnson asks. “Was it their German scientists
that got them up there first?”
“No it was not, senator,”
the rocket engineer calmly replies. “Our Germans are
better than their Germans.”
That unnamed rocket guy is a proxy for Wernher von Braun, the famous
Nazi-turned-American-turned-Disney-pitchman who,
during World War II, while still a bad guy, designed the landmark
V-2 rocket—V for “vergeltungswaffen,” or “retaliation
weapon”—which first rained holy terror on London and Antwerp and
then sparked a global fascination for rocketry and space travel and
to this day is the sleek and pointed four-finned vehicle that comes
to mind when we think back to when space flight was sexy and
awe-inspiring instead of a budget-sucking black hole.
Germans, Americans, Russians—everybody put aside their
differences when it came to loving the V-2 and its
rocket-spawn.
I am not even half-joking, in fact, when I suggest that the V-2
is how we ended up with Australia’s absolutely bonkers “racing 16” board design,
which was used for both for paddling and
wave-riding.
“Racing 16,” as in 16 vertical feet of lumber and plywood, and
okay maybe you’d mess around with something that huge for paddling,
but for riding waves? You know what, never mind what I have to say,
just watch the last two waves on
this video and sort out for yourself if there was any
other reason apart from the fact that the board looks like a
maritime V-2 rocket that you’d ever want to paddle that thing into
a wave.
Except a lot of times you couldn’t paddle it into a wave.
Not by direct means, anyway.
Follow closely, because this is how the hot Aussie surfers
of the day would take off, while on a racing 16, if the wave jacked
up. This is so un-V-2. You’d paddle like mad until just before the
wave broke and the front of the board lifting off the face, at
which point, still prone, you’d scoot forward and whip the board
round 90 degrees so that the nose went parallel to the wave-crest
in one direction and the tail did the same in the other direction.
I know, it’s hard to picture. In other words, your body would be
like the fuselage while the board itself extended from your chest
and shoulders like airplane wings.
From this position, you would plunge down the face, let the wave
break, then swing the nose back around 90 degrees and stand up.
This was actually easier to do than to try and navigate the drop,
on a normal point-to-shore trajectory, without poking the nose.
I’m laughing here, but my God the skill it took to pull this
off, without fragging any nearby swimmers and bodysurfers, is
Chuck Yeager-level.
Once the Yanks showed up and began zipping
hither and yon on their nine-foot Malibu chip
boards—no over-the-falls crucifixion takeoff required
here; just hop to your feet and start surfing—local surfers
realized that the V-2 racing 16, gorgeous as it looked while
resting against your tanned and muscled shoulder on the beach, was
not the thing for riding waves.
The Aussies were humble for about 15 minutes and then, look out
world, here comes Midget Farrelly, Nat Young, Wayne Lynch and the
rest, and basically, performance-surfing-wise, it was game over.
(The actual V-2 rocket itself, by the way, like the racing
16, often did not perform as well as it
looked.)
It occurs to me that if I’d spent the week
revisiting William Finnegan’s “Playing Doc’s
Games,” about San Francisco surfer-doctor Mark
Renneker, this story may have gone in a different
direction completely.
While trying to figure out what drives Renneker to take on
huge waves, Finnegan consults Edwin Salem, a mutual surfing friend,
and reports back: “Edwin’s theory is that Mark is driven to surf
big waves by the rage and futility that he feels when his patients
die. Mark says that’s ridiculous. Edwin’s other theory is Freudian.
(Edwin, remember, is from Argentina, where psychoanalysis is a
middle-class religion.) ‘Obviously, it’s erotic, he says. ‘That big
board’s his prick’.”
The V-2 rocket or penis obsession—boys and their toys, am I
right?
Let’s not even get started on surfboard fins.
LOST.TV – FLIGHT OF THE V2
ROCKET from Lost Video
Productions on Vimeo.
(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf essay every Sunday,
PST. All of ’em a pleasure to read. Maybe time to subscribe to
Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, yeah? Three bucks
a month. Tell me that ain’t a deal.)
