Surfing has never been an easy sport to define. It wavers between sun-kissed pastime, mind-melding vision quest, communion with nature, and open license for disorderly conduct. But with all its contradictions, the aquatic art can still be aptly summed up in the life of one surfer: Miki Dora, the subject of David Rensin's engrossing new oral history, All for a Few Perfect Waves (HarperEntertainment).
"You pick whatever that rebel, individualistic thing that the average surfer had, multiply it a hundred times, and you've got Miki," Greg Noll, a big-wave surfer and board-maker who knew Dora for five decades and participated in the book, told me by phone from his home in Northern California. "He was probably as good a surfer as the sport has ever seen on the performance-type waves, 10 feet and under — and for the time period, he was so far out ahead it was ridiculous."
Rensin proves an inexhaustible interviewer, teasing out colorful tales never before set in print. Over the course of five years, he spoke to 300 people: surfers, girlfriends, rivals, family members, lawyers, doctors, and fans. The meandering tome carved from his transcripts reads, as onetime Dora companion Linda Cuy points out, like a mash-up of Catch Me If You Can and The Endless Summer. (Leonardo DiCaprio's production company optioned the rights before the book was even written.)
In the fifties and early sixties, Dora presided over Malibu — then a small, interwoven community of wave riders. His eccentricities on land and his aggression in the water inspired awe, fear, imitation, and, most of all, curiosity. When the man known alternately as the Black Knight and Da Cat wasn't pushing Valley "kooks" off waves, he was astonishing his peers with his leonine stance and graceful cutbacks, riding the nose on LSD, speaking in a strange patois all his own, voraciously reading Huxley and Hemingway, attempting to crack the JFK assassination, serving as a stunt double in several Gidget-era movies, mingling with Hollywood royalty, and wooing a long parade of bikini-clad lasses. (Legend has it that he dated Cher pre-Sonny and made out with a young Barbra Streisand.)
Dora, too, was something to behold: tall, dark, tanned, broad-shouldered, square-jawed. "Miki definitely had his own style," Bob Cooper, a surfer from the early fifties, recalls. "He would stand in the sand at Malibu dressed in a white shirt, elephant cords, sandals or Florsheims, no socks, and a nice hunting jacket, and assess the situation. He'd make sure he was seen." Dora also zipped around Los Angeles in an English Alvis roadster, a 1958 Porsche 550A Spyder, a 1948 Jaguar XK120, and a 1930 Rolls-Royce Phantom II Town Car — all without ever holding down a steady job. "Miki swore to me that he would never work a day in his life," the former world champion longboard surfer Nat Young tells Rensin.
Instead, Dora grifted to get by, running up thousands of dollars' worth of fraudulent charges on a series of doctored Diners Club cards, emptying wallets, lifting passports, and pilfering jewelry whenever the opportunity presented itself. His scams financed a decade-long traipse around the globe that began in the early seventies, as he moored in New Zealand, South Africa, and France in search of the perfect empty right break. Dora amassed an 800-plus-page FBI file, then voluntarily returned to the States for brief stints in California and Colorado penitentiaries in the early eighties, before regaining his freedom and resuming his escapades. "For Miki, it was never about the money," one of his many girlfriends says. "It was about testing one's intelligence, trying to find out where the limits were and how far he could go."
