"Born on Oahu, Uncle Kimo kicked off as an ink
drinker, not the tall, graceful heavyweight of legend."
Kimo Hollinger, revered Hawaiian surfer and writer, died
yesterday. He was eighty-four.
Born on Oahu, Uncle Kimo kicked off as an ink drinker, not the
tall, graceful heavyweight of legend.
“You see, I became a bookworm, even reading encyclopedias. But
my father made me go out. He sent me to the YMCA, he sent me to
judo classes, and when he was sure I could take care of myself, he
sent me to Waikiki.” He started surfing at sixteen but jumped the
rungs quickly to become a standout at Sunset and Waimea.
Hollinger, who loved listening to jazz on his back porch almost
as much as he loved Spam, rode waves without much of the glory
draped on his contemporaries. He shunned the spotlight but relished
being a part of the adventure, talking story and writing it, too.
Kimo gifted us tales of big wave disasters and low-brow mischief so
crisp you’d swear you were there dripping wet laughing beside him.
His self-effacing prose made ya’ feel like a brother.
Kimo would say that he’s not a pro surfer, not a legend. “I’m
just an observer,” he called himself. An observer? That’s like
thinking of a stringer as decoration. Kimo was a link in the chain
of surf history. A few years back a Greg Noll 10’ 10’ gun was
auctioned, grabbing $9,500. That’s a steep gavel drop even for a
Noll. The plank was advertised as a board Kimo stood on in his
prime.
It’s well-deserved. I chipped this from Warshaw’s
EOS:
“On Thanksgiving Day, 1975, just prior to the final heats of the
Smirnoff Pro, with the Waimea surf booming in a gorgeous 25 to 30
feet, Hollinger and a handful of other non-contestants were asked
by Smirnoff officials to leave the water. Hollinger complied, but
resentfully—in part because Waimea breaks just a few times each
season, and rarely with the kind of form seen on this particular
day, and in part because of the commercial intrusion on what
Hollinger regarded as a sacred surfing area.
“Powerboats and helicopters appeared,” he wrote in Surfer
magazine a few weeks later, “and contest officials started warming
up on the loudspeaker. I couldn’t believe it. Telling us who could
ride and who couldn’t. A surfer has trained himself to ride these
waves. It is all he asks of life. Who the hell is Smirnoff to tell
him he can’t? God created those waves.”
But Kimo was never shy to find the humor even in the most
miserable circumstances. Speaking at the launch party of his book
Talking Story, Hollinger recalled a near-fatal experience in the
mid-seventies. Some big-name mainlanders, including Mike
Diffenderfer, went out at big Waimea and Kimo, proud and itching to
get in the mix, paddled out, wanting to represent the islands.
“When I went out it was only about 15 feet, then it was eighteen
feet then it was twenty feet, then it was closing out the bay,
Eddie was trying to scream at me to come in, but I couldn’t hear
them. This huge set was coming from way outside and I thought to
myself, ‘Well, I’ll take the first one cause I didn’t wanna, you
know, get pummeled. But it was a big mistake. So, I took the first
one and when I wiped out I was right in the impact zone and all the
following waves just smashed me.
“My wetsuit was around my head and my shorts around my ankles
and I had to clear a hole in the foam so I could take a breath. I
was crying for my mother, I knew my wife would take care of the
kids, I was wondering ‘who is gonna take care of the dog?”
Fifteen foot shore break with rocks on the sand, he was getting
pounded and couldn’t make it the last twenty yards in.
“Butch van Arstdalen was on the sand, shouting me in. I always
called him Dutchman and he always called me Hawaiian. ‘Hawaiian,
Hawaiian, swim around the rocks!”
But he couldn’t make it the last twenty yards.
“So all the guys formed a human chain and they grabbed me.”
Tributes coming in rapidly.
A quote from Kimo:
“Life is a compromise. You’re not going to make everyone happy,
but that’s the only way to do it. There’s no sense yelling and
screaming at each other and being angry.”
