Or not the wrong reasons, exactly, but for reasons
that were long ago bent to fit a certain narrative about
Dane.
Dane Kealoha of Hawaii has died at age 64, after a long
fight with cancer that nobody outside of family and
friends knew anything about.
Social media jumped the gun, as usual.
Last weekend, before I’d even replied to the first of many texts
from many people alerting me that Dane had passed, I got an email
from daughter Kelai Kealoha saying that “Dad is very sick” but not
gone.
Dane hung in there for another three days.
Death rumors, I suppose, are not high on the list of pollutants
flooding the information landscape, but Dane’s case stood out, to
me anyway, because apart from the surfing itself he never much
wanted to grab and hold our attention in the first place.
Dane has been on my mind all week. Mostly from marveling, again,
as I have been for 45-plus years, at his satin-finished tuberiding performances at Backdoor
and Off the Wall—or any other hollow wave, large or
small, warm or cold, left or right.
That should be his legacy. I hope it is.
But I think history will remember Kealoha in part for the
wrong reasons.
Or not the wrong reasons, exactly, but for reasons that were
long ago bent to fit a certain narrative about Dane.
Let’s talk about the missed world title. He was runner-up to
Mark Richards in 1980, but that one wasn’t really even close. MR
put a huge distance between himself and the field that year and ran
away with it.
In 1979, when Dane finished #4—that was the year. Old-timers,
harken back with me. This was the first, and maybe still best,
down-to-the-wire pro tour
showdown. In his third season as a pro (he’d finished
#20 as a rookie and #9 the following year), Dane headed into the
final event of the season, the World Cup, in what
was basically a three-way tie for first, along with Cheyne
Horan and Wayne Bartholomew. MR was a distinct 4th, but Richards
himself knew his chances were pretty much nil. In big raw surf at
Haleiwa, against Puerto Rico’s Edwin
Santos, an underdog if there ever was one,
Dane paddled out for his opening heat and absolutely blew a
huge homefield advantage, waited too long between waves, let Santos
run the inside, and basically kicked the title away on poor
tactics. Bartholomew and Horan did much the same, and Richards came
from way back to win his first world title.
(A second heartbreak, from a week earlier at the
’79 Pipeline Masters:
with five minutes left in the finals, Dane, having ridden all of
his allotted 10 waves, proned to shore with a solid lead. From the
beach he then watched as Larry Blair, with just a minute left,
speared the best wave of the event, rode it perfectly, and took the
win.)
Everybody thinks Dane was denied a world title in 1983, and
we’ll get into that below—1979, though, was the real missed
opportunity.
SURFER Magazine said in 1980 that, title or no title, “Dane
Kealoha is doing the most advanced surfing of anybody in the
world.” That was Dane up there balanced at the tippy-top of power
surfer pyramid. He was built like, and moved like, Houston
Oiler fullback Earl Campbell—whose eight-year pro career tracked
with Kealoha’s almost to the year. But it’s a big mistake, I think,
to call Dane a power surfer and leave it at that.
Somebody online last week said Kealoha was the ultimate in “raw
power,” when in fact everything about the way he surfed, power
element included, was the opposite of raw—Dane and Tom Curren were
(and remain, for me anyway) our two most refined
surfers.
With Johnny-Boy Gomes, Dane’s protege, power itself was the
object, a shock mechanism, a flying mace, and it was
thrilling to watch Gomes set off one flagrant, detonating turn
after another.
Dane, by contrast, could go all afternoon without any kind of
Gomes-like demonstration of force. The power was simply there,
always, foundational and evenly distributed, takeoff to kickout, a
low-pitched elemental thrum.
Dane knew what he had, owned it and at times obviously enjoyed
it, but seemed to understand that the power was elevated for being
kept in reserve.
Built on top of that root-level strength was Dane Kealoha’s
actual and mostly-unmentioned superpower, which was flow and
patience and finesse.
There is a shot of Kealoha in the
video I just posted doing 500 down-the-line pump turns on a small
peeler at Burleigh Heads, so the man could get busy
when he wanted to. But move ahead to 3:15, that big wave at Honolua
Bay, and watch how still and composed he is. To my eyes, Dane is
exactly as powerful as the wave itself; they match each other;
Kealoha’s force, like that of a big gorgeous Honolua bowl, is
mostly below the surface, quiet and smoothed out, up to and
included Dane’s gliding exit as the wave flattens out. His front
arm alone makes me want to finally learn and understand ballet or
modern dance or something, because everything I hold dear in terms
of surfing style is somehow contained in Dane’s fingers, arm, and
shoulder.
This is why, jumping back to 1983 and the bit of world tour
stupidity that ended Kealoha’s competitive career, it makes no
difference to me whatsoever that Dane didn’t get a world title. His
surfing, like that of Phil Edwards or Wayne Lynch or Dane Reynolds,
exists independently and I think well above that of rating points
and world titles.
Maybe Kealoha felt that way, too, but maybe not.
He said, more than once, that pro
surfing was mostly just a career, the thing that
allowed him to stay in the water. He was intense during
competition, sure, but that was likely a scare tactic, a mechanism
to keep people at a distance—people he didn’t know, anyway—rather
than from any burning desire to win heats. He learned the game but
was never especially tactical, or not like Shaun and Rabbit and MR.
That said, it’s not hard to imagine Dane wanting to prove people
wrong.
Like Drew Kampion, for instance, who had this brief and
insulting and arguably very brave conversation with Kealoha at the
end of the 1980 North Shore contest season:
DREW: Well, you got into the final of the Duke
and you got into the final at Pipe, too, so you’re doing pretty
well.
DANE: Nnnyeeahhh . . . . [laughs]
DREW: But you’re not winning, huh?
DANE: [laughs]
DREW: Does it bum you out not to be winning
contests over here?
DANE: Mmmm, I don’t know. I don’t really
care if I win or not. I just go out and try. If I don’t, I
don’t.
DREW: Maybe that’s why you lose.
The world tour went to war with itself in 1983. Tour founder and
Triple Crown owner Fred Hemmings was on one side. Ian Cairns and Op
were on the other. Fred was the IPS. Cairns headed up the
newly-formed ASP, and without getting too deep in the weeds, Ian
won the war, the IPS crashed, but the Triple Crown—Fred’s
property—got caught in the middle, and basically it was decided, by
Cairnss, that any top-ranked world tour pro who surfed in the 1983
Crown events would forego their all-important seeding for 1984.
Most of the tour pros all complied—Dane did not, entered all three
Crown contests, won the Pipeline Masters and the Duke, and refused
on principle to pay the bitter little ASP-levied fine that would
have allowed him to keep his seed for the next year.
And that was pretty much it for Dane’s competitive career.
Kealoha would later say he was zeroing in on the 1983 world
title at the time of the Triple Crown blow-up. But in truth
he surfed in 11 of 13 tour events, got his full allotment of
points that year despite the fiction with Cairns and the ASP, and
was #14 in the final ratings. He would have been a longshot
contender, at best, in years to come—Tom Curren, Tom Carroll,
Martin Potter, and other world tour newcomers were younger and
better in the small beachbreak waves that were taking over the tour
schedule.
At first, Dane himself seemed just irked by how the world tour
had treated him, not devastated or defeated.
“I’m not afraid of surfing the
qualifying trials again,” he told Sam George in early
1984. “I’ll do whatever they want.” He then added,
“The sport still has to grow a bit more [but], I think it’s going
to be a great circuit.”
Paul Holme’s 2022 Surfer’s Journal profile on Kealoha paints a
different and much sadder picture.
“It really hurt me,” he says of the break with the tour. “I hate
talking about it. They tried stopping me in so many ways.”
This is where Kealoha, to my ears, drifts into something related
to but removed from what actually happened in 1983. He was a victim
of the IPS-ASP fight, yes, but not a target. Dane doesn’t see
it that way.
“They didn’t want me to have the title. They knew I would
eventually snap. And they were right.”
You couldn’t tell from his surfing,
which remained sharp, fast and powerful,
but Kealoha went dark in the late 1980s and ’90s.
“Depression, disappointment, frustration, all that stuff,” he
told Holmes. “I was racist. Anybody who wasn’t from Hawaii didn’t
belong in the water when I was out. It got violent . . . and that
hurt me even more. I’d go home and cry and drown myself with drugs.
I was so depressed. It really broke my heart. I went down some
pretty horrific roads that I’m still battling with.”
And this, sadly, is where we last saw Dane.
Holmes notes that Kealoha was living on Maui and “repeatedly
managed to pull himself back from the brink.” He found God, and for
a period in the 2010s he was living in Honolulu, doing surf-therapy
sessions for injured war vets and working with foster kids. The
work didn’t last, and he moved to Maui. Reading between the lines,
it sounds like Kealoha was estranged from at least part of his
family.
“From his window,” Holmes ends his article, “he sees clouds
gathering.”
We heard nothing else from Kealoha, publically, until his death
notice this week.
I hope over the past year or so Dane and his scattered family
found some measure of peace and comfort. I also hope he spent a few
idle moments remembering and reconnecting with a younger version of
himself—there’s a joyous bit in 1979’s Many Classic Moments
with a teenaged Dane day-tripping from Oahu to Maui with
fellow sting-riders Buttons and Mark Liddell.
By that point the surf world at large already knew Kealoha as
quiet and glowering and basically unapproachable. But Moments
shows another side, an earlier and I think maybe more authentic
side, as he grins and surf-raps with his friends during the car
ride to Honolua. Dane’s famous glare is nowhere to be
seen.
The glare, I think, at least back then, was more a mask
than anything. A great mask, something Dane was more than
comfortable wearing, a device used to keep us away, to stay inside
himself, to gain an advantage, take your pick. But here with
Buttons and Liddell, Dane looks fully at home, literally and
figuratively—powerful but powerful and relaxed, both. People like
Dane need a Buttons in their life. They rolled on to Honolua Bay,
scored, and let’s leave it there, in the afternoon light, with
smiles and set waves for everybody.
(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.)
