Amateur competitive surfing may have gotten its act together over the past ten or 12 years. This is something I probably should know, being an encyclopedia-level surf authority and all. But the thought of sending even a simple email query into the vast international chamber of bickering that constitutes amateur surfing to check on the welfare of non-pro-competitive surfers and those who administer them puts me into a fugue state. 

In 2001 and 2002, younger and braver, and with the luxury of EOS assistants who jumped at my bidding, I tried to sort out all things amateur in the world of surf. There were, here and there, honorable people doing good work. But by and large this was an area of surfing where the X and Y axis were, respectively, Dull and Complicated. WSA, ESA, TSA, HSA, NSSA, USSF, USSA, ASA, HASA, TGSA, CSA—we hacked through the acronyms, sorting, organizing, and researching. Buy the print version of the Encyclopedia if you need to know more. I often tell people that I'll get around to loading all the print entries onto the website, but in all honesty I'll be working on the Kingsley Looker page before getting to the TGSA. And I don't actually remember who Kingsley Looker is.

Still, I was way overdue in posting the United States Surfing Championships page, which for years was the amateur surfing's showcase event—a huge, loud, cheek-to-jowl whirlygig of a contest, very much the template upon which today's US Open was built. 

It was also, as I remembered while putting together the two clips you'll find below, a barometer for how America felt about competitive surfing. In the early days, SURFER and the rest of our in-house media embraced the contest to its salty bosom, and the City of Huntington even paid for a half-hour promo film, which I'm guessing aired on local TV. "It's been a great contest," the voice-over guy says at the end of the show. "Two days of magnificent surfing and entertainment. Now it's over. But is it? In fact, it is never over. Already thoughts are turning to next year, and how to make the United States Surfing Championships even more successful." 

When Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman assembled footage shot at the 1971 contest for their upcoming epic 

 they opened with a panning shot of the United States Surfing Championships banner, featuring Coca-Cola logos on either side, and MacGillivray's narration begins, "Each year the top surfers in the United States come together to surf for the Chamber of Commerce." Droll! Like, Jack Benny droll! Contest finalists then talk about how bad the surf is, and at the end, in a bleakly comic finish, event officials blatantly rip off Corky Carroll and give the trophy to David Nuuhiwa. "He [Corky] was cheated," MacGillivray flatly states in his voice-over. For this and a host of other reasons, contest popularity at that point, in the view of American surf media tastemakers, was roughly in a three-way tie with chastity and Vietnam.

Not long after that, with the advent of professional surfing and the WCT, the US Championships were removed from Huntington and were never again of much interest to anyone not directly involved with the contest. But these days, looking back to those old HB events? In their own weird, hyperbolic, petroleum-scented fashion, they were . . . no, actually MacGillivray was right, they were mostly pretty awful.

OUR LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNITED STATES SURFING CHAMPIONSHIPS AT HUNTINGTON BEACH

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