Surfing's post-World War II infatuation with bullfighting lasted for 20 or 25 years, give or take. It's hard to say exactly how deep it ran, or if the whole thing was half-serious half-ironic (although I think it leaned serious), or if bullfighting was just the lowest-hanging fruit when somebody needed to compare the sport to another sport.

Nothing has been written specifically about the surfer-bullfighting connection, or nothing I've seen anyway, but from old magazines, books and movies we can make some educated guesses. First, bullfight-loving surfers were mostly non-Hawaiian Americans. Big-wave riders were more smitten than the rest of us. Ernest Hemingway was definitely involved. And the whole vaguely overwrought affair ended, nearly overnight, with the equally overwrought Sgt. Pepper grooviness of the shortboard revolution. Then, there was a surfer-bullfighter epilogue, but we'll get to that later.

 his first novel, much of it set in and around the Spanish bullfighting scene, came out in 1926. 

, Hemingway's worshipful nonfiction look at bullfighting's tradition and techniques, followed six years later. Both are written in the stripped-down forward-march style that made Hemingway famous. 

 is full of peripatetic Lost Generation swells drinking Pernod, eating and brawling and stripping down in the Spanish summer heat for casual offscreen sex, with bullfighting more or less at the center of it all.

 bravest, coolest, sexiest, most heroic character is a teenaged bullfighting-savant named Romero (based in part on legendary 18th-century Spanish bullfighter Pedro Romero and played in the 1957 movie adaptation by a young browned-up Robert Evans), and here is how Hemingway describes the young matador's style in the ring:

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Romero’s bullfighting gave real emotion because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.

Hemingway then gives us a great macho-comic exchange between Romero and Brett, the gorgeous bob-haired female lead with “curves like the hull of a racing yacht." Romero surprises Brett by saying, in Spanish, that "the bulls are my best friends."

"Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me. ”

 got mixed reviews upon publication (as did the movie version, 30 years later) but became a young adult classic in decades to come. I think it is safe to say that virtually every American-born surfer of the 1950s and '60s had either read the book or knew of it, and that the gung-ho first-wave American surfers who sailed or flew off to Hawaii to ride the big ones hit it repeatedly then went back to the library to find 

Butch Van Artsdalen covered his bedroom walls with bullfighting posters. Buzzy Trent played at being a matador in Bud Browne's movies. Matador Surfboards was founded. Surfing itself, John Severson wrote, was the greatest thing since "Greek bare-handed bullfights." Hemingway said bullfighting "is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could." If there were 25 dedicated big-wave surfers during the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, I'm guessing 20 of them thought of themselves, to one degree or another, as a bare-chested salty-haired Romero.

Count me among those who believe that: 1) Surfing doesn't need to compare itself to any other sport, and 2) bullfighting is an indefensible animal snuff atrocity hiding behind bullshit Old World tradition. But the fashion contained in a single suit of lights burns brighter than a hundred SURFER Poll Award banquets, and the movements of a great matador—"straight and pure and natural in line," as Hemingway noted—very much put me in mind of the best surfers.

Here is a sampling of what it looked and sounded like in the 1950s and '60s, when surfers threw roses at bullfighters.

Staying with the big-wave surfers for a moment, it is difficult to figure out how much of the bullfighting influence was widespread and how much of it was concentrated within Buzzy Trent—although, to be fair, the glories of German warfare was an even bigger deal to him than bullfighting. He quoted Hemingway often, with "courage is grace under pressure" being a favorite. In the opening lines of a free-verse poem written by his wife Violet, Trent is described thusly:

loves scenes—movies—posters—paintings of bulls

and bullfighting . . . wanted to be a bullfighter

To his credit, when Bud Browne filmed Buzzy in a Hawaiian field somewhere trying to get an uninterested bull to charge, Trent smiles as he gives up, drops his white T-shirt cape, and holds his arms up while 10,000 white handkerchiefs wave in the surrounding imaginary bullring.

Bud Hendrick, a production shaper for Hobie Surfboards and the only surfer who actually became a matador (read the full story 

), first saw bullfighting in 1955, while vacationing in Mexico with Flippy Hoffman.

It was hard to get to the ocean or beaches in those days. There wasn’t a coastal highway yet. But we got as far south as Manzanillo and spent two months there during which we went to a bullfight in Colima, about 50 miles away. That really got ahold of me. When I had come back from [fighting in] Korea, I didn’t ever want to be frightened again, but now that some healing had occurred and things were kind of tame and I found I enjoyed the excitement. I was amazed at how the toreros were playing with death. I could see that there was a formalized approach and they were doing it by choice. It captured me. That year we went to all the Sunday fights in Tijuana, Mexico. There was a lot of interest in bullfights in those years and many friends from Laguna would go down. As surfers, we felt a connection. We’d perform arched poses while surfing waves.

The surfer-bullfighting moment came into sharpest focus in 1968, when Joey Cabell, wearing a beautiful Hawaiian-print silky shirt, jeans and huarache sandals, and feeling his oats after winning the big-wave event in the Peru International, stepped into a Lima bullring. Years later I asked Cabell about the experience.

The local guys were always be thinking of things to do, how to entertain us visitors, how to have fun with us. Peruvians are wonderful people. But sometimes they wanted to have fun at our expense. They wanted to see what we were made of. So they got this bullfighting thing set up. The bulls were real; their horns were trimmed a bit, but there were still full-on charging bulls; they wanted to get you. And the Peruvians wanted to see if we'd hang in there. I knew I was going to get gored, I knew that bull was going to hit me. That's how I was thinking, anyway. And to figure it out, so it didn't happen—that surprised me.

Probably 10 minutes. And that was with a lot going on; a lot of passes.

Of course. I learned really quickly how to do it. Or not how to do it, but how to survive it.

When you know the bull is checking you out and wants to charge but isn't quite ready, you stand with your body directly behind the cape. What you want to make sure of, is that when you move the cape his eyes follow the cape. Then you're OK. Remember, those were the days when we'd all go to Tijuana and watch the bullfights. I'd seen a few bullfights. I wasn't totally clueless.

Photographer Leo Hetzel, who took the amazing picture you see above, confirmed what Joey told me. "Some of the other guys [who got in the ring] clowned around, grabbing at the bull's tail. Cabell didn't do that. He tried serious passes and was more stylish than anyone else—like he surfed."

The Tijuana location Joey Cabell refers to above is the Plaza Monumental de Playas de Tijuana—or Bullring by the Sea—and it literally and figuratively looms over the surfer-bullfighting relationship. Opening in 1960 and located just steps from the Mexico-America border fence, the 21,000-seat concrete-and-steel "bowl" was popular with locals and visiting tourists alike for decades. San Diego County surfers were close enough to drive in for the afternoon of bullfighting and Long Bar drinking and be home by dinner. (Smaller and older but also very popular was the wooden Plaza de Toros ring, located two miles east of Monumental and just seven blocks from the border entry point.)

Windansea Surf Club founder Chuck Hasley:

I just fell in love with the bullfights. We all got hooked on them to the point where we started going down to [Tijuana] every Sunday. We used to go to the stadium with a watermelon that we'd hollowed out and filled with tequila or rum. I remember the first matador I ever saw, Pepe Luis Vasquez, he went right in front of the tunnel where the bull comes out. Then he got down on his knees and his cape underneath his chin. When he opened the door and the bull came running he just fell straight back between the bull's legs and the bull went right over him. Then later, when he went to kill the bull, it only took one stick with the sword and the bull just dropped.

Marvin Van Artsdalen said his Pipeline-afflicted brother Butch felt the same way. "Our bedroom started to look like a shrine to Mexico. Butch was bringing home sombreros, serapes and Mexican blankets. Posters of bullfights adorned our walls. He was really into it."

Love of bullfighting, however, did little or nothing in terms of steering any of the visiting California surfers toward the bullfighting code of honor that Hemingway outlined in 

 Steve Pezman recalls a drunken visit to Tijuana's Plaza Monumental bullring in the mid-'60s that ended with one of Pezman's buddies heaving a tequila-soaked watermelon into the ring, where it exploded at the feet of the aging but revered Luis Procuna, covering his suit of lights in seeds and pulp. “Years later,” Pezman said in 2017, “My friend Bob Beadle was attending a party in Beverly Hills where the guest of honor was Procuna. When asked about his worst moment in the ring—you guessed it.”

"A Sunday Journey," by Lawrence Powell, ran in the September 1960 issue of 

 magazine and is the runaway most depressing piece of surf fiction ever published. Ben, a young alcoholic, crippled four years earlier in a surfing accident, drives with a friend to the Tijuana bullring for the Sunday 

 in an effort to feel something, anything. A matador is gored, and Ben, disgusted not by the injury but the idea that the matador is maybe faking it, heads to the beer stand where he shotguns a half-dozen Carta Blancas, finds a pencil, picks up a piece of trash from beneath his table, and writes a short story about his own death. End of story. (The nonfiction article directly following "A Sunday Journey" is titled "Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer," and it is as cheerfully factual as "Journey" is morosely invented. I learned that the word "bridal" is a beer-related Old English combination of "bride" and "ale.")

Not quite as depressing but just as alcoholic, Big Wednesday's Matt Johnson's dumb-ass highway bullfighting earned him a knockdown right cross from Jack Barlow.

Drunk but not alcoholic, and the opposite of depressing, Bill Hamilton briefly ran with the bulls during his 1968 European trek to film Waves of Change. Like Matt Johnson, Hamilton ended up on his ass. Unlike Matt, he popped up with a smile and wave cheerful little double-handed claim.

With one important exception, 1968 is where surfing and bullfighting part ways. The new boards themselves had a lot to do with it. Controlling your new high-performance spacestick required a lot of crouching, 

 and constant movement, whereas much of the surfer-as-bullfighter deal—in terms of how it manifests itself on a wave—had to do with drawing up to a haughty chest-out vertical stance and holding it, quietly, for as long as possible. "I like to bank turns as sharp as I possibly can then run straight back up the wave, " Nat Young said in 1968. Vertical, in other words, was now something you did with your board, not your body.

Meanwhile, because surf culture at the time was fast melting into the counterculture, almost everything associated with what is now thought of as the "longboard" era was downgraded or thrown out altogether. Big-wave surfing itself was briefly made passe. If the previous generation—meaning just a few years ago, in this case—was into something, surfers in the last '60s defaulted to 

 doing or believing or supporting that thing. "[There was] a severe generation gap," Drew Kampion wrote, decades later. "Minds had expanded. You were on the bus or off the bus. You got it or you didn't. You believed in gravity or you believed in space." Never mind that a huge portion of what the original shortboard generation said or believed in was basic headshop hippy-dippy bullshit. "New" was everything, all eyes were forward-looking only, and the surfing consensus would no more nuzzle up to Hemingway and bullfighting than they would to Glenn Miller and jitterbugging.

Now, cutting against everything I've said in the above two paragraphs, what Gerry Lopez did at Pipeline in the early- and mid-'70s was the most bullfight thing in surf history. Pipeline, at that time, was the only bull in the game. Butch Van Artsdalen rode it like a cruiserweight boxer. Jock Sutherland rode it like a balance beam gymnast. Lopez, with his brown-rice diet and yoga-expanded mindfulness, leaned to the East, but his Pipeline act screamed Juan Belmonte. "How can I describe Gerry at Pipeline?" Corky Carroll asked. "The best and most stylish bullfighter ever going against the biggest, most gnarly and angry bull."

The surfer-bullfight thing ends once and for all with Gerry Lopez because he owns it so perfectly and so completely.

[Photos: Art Brewer, Leo Hetzel, Ron Church, Collin Spencer]

A SHORT ILLUSTRATED LOOK AT SURFING AND BULLFIGHTING

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