The Local Surfer - University of Exeter

“any occupation, pastime, or the like in which a person is engaged regularly or
customarily” (dictionary.reference.com, 2010a). This is very much in line with
the Hawaiian form of surfing that began to spread around the world. However,
once surfing the pursuit had globalised to places such as California and
Australia, surfers began to establish surfing the sport, attempting to do it in its
homeland, Hawaii. This quote from Dave Gilovich suggests that the formation
of surfing as a sport was a conscious decision, one that many believe was made
in 1975 by a group of surfers including Shaun Thomson and Rabbit
Bartholomew on the North Shore of Hawaii;
Surfing reflected sort of a counter culture idea, that there was this
mainstream way of doing things and looking at things and the
coolest of the cool would kind of forgo you know our normal job and
let‟s just kind of escape and get away from normal society and that
was kind of what was going on and then this new group came along
and said no no we‟re not going to do that at all in fact we want to
bring professionalism we want to make surfing into a sport
(Gosch, 2008)
However this decision was met with anger by the Hawaiians who felt that
surfing as a pursuit was one of the last areas of their culture not to be destroyed
by the western world, exhibited here in a quote from Rabbit Bartholomew who
was verbally and physically abused for his attempts to make surfing into a
sport and was confronted by a Hawaiian surfer;
he really gave me a dressing down about uh, and he bought up the
fact that the Hawaiian culture, and we‟d offended the culture
because they, the Hawaiians were loosing everything and you know
basically the Western world was coming and taking their land and
everything and surfing was the last bastion and you know I, I got it, I
got it, I could understand that we‟d enraged them.
(Gosch, 2008)
It is this feeling that the Hawaiians had that still today divides the surfing
culture and has in some way help form the surfing types developed in my
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