SUNDAY JOINT, 8-4-2024: MICHAEL HO, GOOD AS GOLD

Hey All,

Montreal, we can all agree, is as French as a city gets without having a Gitanes-studded bank on the River Seine. So if Teahupoo had been on the map 50 years ago, and surfing was already an Olympic Sport, we can further agree that our "surfing shortboard" Olympic venue for the très fleur-de-lis '76 Montreal Games would have been End of the Road, just as it is for Paris '24. 

In which case, Shaun Tomson for the gold, easy.

And I like Michael Ho for silver—provided he gets past Rory Russell, Jeff Crawford, and possibly Richard Harvey. Plenty of talent there. But Tomson and Ho had the best boards in '76 for big fast-sucking reef waves, Tomson with his rockered-out "banana" model, Ho with his quiver of step-up guns that were all six-inches smaller, at least, than what the other pros were riding. The equipment would make the difference. Rounding out the medalists, I'm gonna say Crawford for the bronze.

Everybody in surfing recognized Ho as a major up-and-coming talent in the early 1970s, but if you happened to be a pocket-sized schoolboy like me, Ho was more than that, he was your relatable hero, your shaka-throwing Peter Pan, the surfer you could both worship and imagine playing tag with (which I saw Ho doing in the La Jolla Shores parking lot just before the 1970 Menehune contest). Ho was 15 when he made the finals of the '72 World Championships, but looked 12 (see photo above), not yet five-feet tall, with Bambi eyes and a fantastic black-brown-blond tornado of thick wavy hair. Reno Abellira and Tom Stone were his most direct surfing influences, but Ho was quicker and looser than either, a first-gen shortboarder (Abellira and Stone both learned on longboards), with a back arm that he liked to keep elevated, right hand dangling at the end like a casually held pearl clutch. In just a few years' time, Ho would be out-radicaled by Buttons, Tomson, Richards, Bartholomew and others—he would later be described as "best position surfer there is," which I'm still not even sure what that means exactly—but in '72, and for the next couple of years, Ho and Larry Bertlemann were the young high-performance kings of American surfing. 

Michael Ho went on to have a long and successful WCT career, almost all of which I have no memory of, save the 1982 Pipe Master win, when he had a fresh cast on his wrist from a scrap the night before. And Ho's heroic 1985 fail at Waimea Bay, as seen in Billabong's Surf Into Summer video, was just as mind-blowing—except he was unidentified. 

Bringing us to another interesting aspect of Ho's life and career, which is that he wasn't much interested in being a star, never chased the cameras, would maybe give us the big beautiful Cheech Marin smile now and then, but basically moved in a closed-off North Shore world that you had to be invited into—and, close friends and family excepted, that was just never going to happen. Dane Kealoha told Surfing magazine in 1984 that Michael wanted to be the "Godfather of the North Shore," and maybe that was one keep-your-distance Hawaiian pro surfer raising an amused eyebrow to another, or maybe not, and anyway, that was that, no further questions asked. 

The latest, and for my money greatest, version of Michael Ho is the AARP-card-carrying elder-surfer, and probably you've seen recent clips of him at Backdoor, but you likely have not yet seen this one, shot at Ala Moana on July 15, last month, two days after Ho turned 67. (It's a long video: Ho enters the water at 6:25, gets his first wave at 7:19, his best wave at 9:32.) Maybe Shaun Tomson, two years older than Mike, is still surfing this well. Slater, in decades to come, will outdo both of them. But what Michael Ho is doing right now at Backdoor and Ala Moana and anywhere else he paddles out is pensioner surfing at the highest level, pure Gandalf-goes-Hawaiian gold. 

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Matt

PS: Forgot to mention this 1977 Michael Ho SURFER mag profile by none other than Reno Abellira. "Mike is a Cancer, or moon child, considered a fruitful water sign." 

PSS: And this 1982 segment from Adventures in Paradise.

PSSS: Going out on a high note—11-year-old Michael Ho, feeling it with tandem partner Luana Froiseth, Makaha, 1969.

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: young Michael Ho at Makaha; Ho at Pipeline, 1976, photo by Larry Marshall; 1982 Offshore ad with Larry Blair, Mike Benavidez, Michael Ho, and Chris Barela; Ho and Rory Russell at the 1975 Smirnoff, photo by Kim McKenzie; Gitanes cigarette ad; women's 100-meter finals at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Jimmy Blears and Michael Ho at the '72 World Championships, photo by Kim McKenzie. Ho surfing, photo by Jeff Divine. 1970 Menehune contest, La Jolla Shores, Ho bare-chested in the middle. Ho winning the 1982 Pipeline Masters, frame-grab by Chris Bystrom. Ho at the 1976 Coke contest in Sydney. Ho at Waimea Bay, frame-grab from Surf Into Summer. Ho throwing a shaka. Ho and tandem partner Luana Froiseth tandem partner at Makaha in 1969.]