The Pipeline Masters is the North Star of professional surfing.

 It is the best contest on the WCT schedule, or any other schedule; the year-ending, title-deciding, legend-making, ego-crushing, spectator-stoking wonder of the ASP tour. For as long as most surfers can remember, this has been true.

But that wasn't the case in the beginning. The Hawaiian Masters, as it was then called, started as a kind of fever dream for pro contest organizer Fred Hemmings. "I wanted a format that would look good on television so I could market surfing to a larger audience," Hemmings said. Who did he see watching the event? And let's not mince words, Fred. "The average schmuck in Middle America."

What Hemmings got instead was the most slapdash little pro event of the decade. The first Masters was smaller, less costly, less decked-out than your company softball game.

Six surfers were invited, and put on call for mid-December. Late morning on the 16th, Hemmings showed up at Pipeline with a card table, a roll of plastic bunting, a megaphone that he loved but didn't need, some folding chairs for the judges, and a thousand bucks worth of prize money checks donated by Continental Airlines. The waves were six-feet and average. Below average, actually. Hard trades, mostly rights. So not-good that Gerry Lopez, having shown up earlier that morning, assumed the contest would be called off, and drove back to Honolulu.

But the show went on. One heat, one hour. Jeff Hakman, the best competitor by an order of magnitude in Hawaiian surf, won the $500 first-place check. (Sixth-place finisher Jock Sutherland, barely a month past his return from the Army, earned $20.) Hakman, in years to come, had fond recollections of winning the '65 Duke, and of his spectacular runner-up finish in maxing Waimea for the '74 Smirnoff. But that first Masters contest is almost a blank. "I know it's a prestigious thing and all, but I just don't remember too much about it." SURFER and 

 didn't bother to cover the contest. Not a world. Didn't even print results.

The Masters remained a one-heat specialty event for another four years. It got tossed around year to year from one low-paying sponsor to the next. The waves were good in '72 (Lopez won) and '77 (Rory Russell won), but mostly average or worse for the rest of the decade. In 1976 the starting field was expanded to 18 so the contest could be included on the just-formed IPS tour. Still, the Masters was regarded as a kind of novelty event, and as such was never a serious candidate for the vaulted year-end slot, which belonged to the World Cup.

In 1983, after getting caught in the political crossfire between ASP director Ian Cairns and Triple Crown owner Fred Hemmings, the Masters was mercilessly cut from the world tour schedule altogether and left to wander the non-tour-sanctioned wilderness for three years.

The resurrection began in 1986, when the contest was reinstalled, and was finished in 1992, when it took it's rightful place at the end of the season, just as Kelly Slater won his first world title. Twenty years to get it right, is one way of looking at it.

Then again . . . bygones, hey? The contest is where it needs to be; where it deserves to be. There is so much wrong with world tour surfing. But the Pipeline Masters is so right.

PIPELINE MASTERS: THE EARLY YEARS

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