Ricky Grigg won the 2nd Duke Kahanamoku Invitational 48 years ago this week. It was an amazing victory, in what was by any measure an amazing event.

Everything about the Duke contest was well thought out, even futuristic. The format was neat and trimmed down: just 24 competitors, as compared to the insanely bloated Makaha International with its village-sized 500-plus starting field. Four six-man prelim heats. Two advance. Eight surfers in the 90-minute final, with judges instructed to score high on performance, not just wave size and length of ride. So that's five heats, total. Start in the morning, announce a winner by midafternoon. 

There's more. The Duke contest was designed and packaged for television (CBS Sports), instead of a beach crowd. We're talking first-rate presentation, the likes of which today's world tour fans have never seen. Professionally-manned cameras. NFL-level editing. Bruce Brown on the mic doing commentary. The post-heat interviews were rote, yes, but they didn't make you cringe either. (Note to world tour color man Greg Tomlinson, aka GT: you see Bruce wearing a damn sailor's cap while he's interviewing Eddie Aikau? No? Me either.) The only real flaw in the inaugural Duke contest—held the year before; won by high school senior Jeff Hakman—was that the invite list was a bit too haole. Organizers fixed that in '66, inviting up-and-comers Ben Aipa and Eddie Aikau, both of whom made the final.

And the perks! Every Duke invitee received free round-trip airfare to Honolulu and a room t the glorious Surfrider Hotel in Waikiki (wrong side of the island, but so plush!). Fully-comped nights on the town. Face time with Duke himself.

How good was the Duke contest? Miki Dora entered it, played it straight, no bullshit, no irony, no gamesmanship, and praised it afterward.

The waves were huge for the '66 Duke (which was actually held in early 1967 but is called the '66 Duke because another Duke event was held that December—it's confusing). Maxing west-northwest long-period Sunset. Hollow sections, trades blowing, but not too hard. Some big dark cave-like tubes. Greg Noll called it "the best day of the year; maybe the best day I've ever seen at Sunset." Not everyone's cup of tea, of course. Two Duke competitors pulled out. Rusty Miller took gas in the prelims and broke his leg.

Grigg was a question mark, even an underdog, going into the event. He was 30, which in 1966 was ancient for a surfer. He'd been among the first great Sunset riders, swooping up and down those big open-ocean waves in the late '50s and early '60s when everybody else was gunning straight for the channel. Then Grigg suddenly checked out of the whole thing and went back to school. When he got his Duke invitation, Grigg was in San Diego, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, hitting the books and grinding away on a Ph.D. He stepped off the plane the day before the contest (looking "pale and bookish," according to SURFER), having not surfed the North Shore in two years.

Grigg was lucky to advance out of the prelims. But he felt his sea legs coming back, and as the surfed bumped up just before the final, it suddenly clicked that the whole thing was his for the taking. The jitters Grigg had felt all day were gone. He paddled out calmly and spent the first 40 minutes getting loose, putting up mid-range scores, along with one or two keepers (each surfer's best five waves counted in their scoreline), then paddled 100 yards or more beyond the other guys, to a section of the reef that North Shore vet and Duke director Fred van Dyke had long thought of the "Ricky Grigg peak." 

Kahuna smiled, and over the next 30 minutes sent him a pair of flawless hard-west set waves. Grigg nailed 'em both. He got in early and was up and riding for 10 seconds before hissing by the rest of the finalists, on his way to connecting a series of hollow inside sections. Grigg won going away. Nobody was close.

1) Ricky Grigg, 243
2) Mike Doyle, 219
3) Fred Hemmings, 214
4) Felipe Pomar, 208
5) Jock Sutherland, 206
6) Eddie Aikau, 202
7) Ben Aipa, 195
8) Greg Noll, 193

It was the best contest of the decade, and the highlight of Grigg's career, and I couldn't wait to talk to him about it.

You didn’t surf in the first Duke contest, the year before, in 1965. How come?

I was already at Scripps, and I had a final exam that week, so I couldn’t make it. Plus I was just so under the gun with school for a while there. The Scripps people were always saying things like “You gotta really commit here or don’t do it at all. No screwing around; no surfing Sunset Beach.” So for a couple of years, I kind of dropped out of the sport.

You hadn't surfed the North Shore for two years before the won the contest. And they held the thing on the very first day of the waiting period. You guys had no idea the surf was going to be good when you woke up that morning?

No. We left the hotel, loaded into a bus, drove across the island, and didn’t know a thing about the waves until we rolled over the hill there, heading down toward Haleiwa, and could see could all the whitewater at Avalanche. Everyone on the bus just started screaming.

The surf was good all day but really pumped for the final.

Oh gosh, it was good. Fifteen-to-eighteen on the face, a little bigger maybe. About as big as Sunset gets.

At one point in the final, you paddled way past the other guys and sat out there and waited for those giant West Peak sets.

I caught one way out there and actually went left on it for quite a ways, fading. Brought it back around and went right just about where everybody was sitting and waiting to take off. I’d ridden the wave for about 200 yards by the time I got to those guys.

The interference rule wasn’t really a deal back then. Did anybody try and drop in?

No, it was a pretty polite bunch of guys. On that wave, at least.

You and Greg Noll were the two surfers in the final with the most Sunset experience. But you actually had a lot more; you lived in Hawaii for a long time while Greg just came over in the winter.

I knew the place so well. Partly because I dove there all the time. And I had all kinds of different lineup markers. I knew Sunset like the back of my hand. The hardest thing, at that size, when you go way outside and wait for a big West Peak wave, is just catching the thing, because there’s more wind on the face out there.

There was no prize money the year you won?

No money. Two years later there was. A thousand bucks, winner take all. Mike Doyle won and got a bowlful of cash. I took second and got a handshake.

Everybody was so stoked on the Duke contest because it was well-organized and streamlined. It just looked so much better than the Makaha contest, which had grown into this huge creaky event. Did you surf in the Makaha contests as well as the Duke contests?

I think I surfed in one or two. I never did real well. The way they judged Makaha was mostly on length of ride, and that really bugged me, mostly because Peter Cole could paddle so much faster than I could, so he was always in position for the best waves.

He did. He was my roommate. We were great friends. And after that Makaha contest, he came home and put the trophy right over my bed.

You were really one of the more clean-cut surfers of the time.

That signature “arms up” move you had, that pose you liked to strike now and then—where did that come from?

I went to Hawaii in 1953, when I was 16, and surfed Queens every day. There was a kid there named Alan Gomes; Baby Alan, everybody called him. He was the guy who did that first, who threw his hands over his head. I loved it. I just copied him and took it back to Malibu, and it became such a hot item there. Lance Carson, and all those guys, they copied it from me. Even on the land, you know, it was just something you would do while you were standing there, maybe watching somebody else surf. Or anytime, really. It was just a “surfer” thing to do.

Yes. Buzzy Trent used to take me to the Tijuana, to the bullfights, and after each fight, if the matador did a good job, you know, he’d stand there and look at the crowd and throw his arms and head back, arch his body. And it just looked so cool! It just seemed like something that ought to be done on a surfboard.

But you were the only one doing it in bigger waves.

I liked how it looked, and I liked how it felt. It got you to focus up at the very top of the wave, right above you. It made you look in a direction you don’t normally look.

[Photos: Bill Cleary, Tim McCullough, Dick Graham]

RICKY GRIGG: DUKE WINNER FROM SQUARESVILLE

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