What Is Really California's Signature Sport?

5/17/2018

Nothing is sillier than naming a state bird or a state tree – unless it is naming a state sport.

The legislators of California --bless their hearts -- are currently debating the proper official state sport for the fifth largest economy in the world.

The favorite in the polling makes me happy, makes me warm, makes me want to sing harmony.

I could say they should nominate all the sports Jackie Robinson played for UCLA – that is to say, all four of them. (Have you ever seen a video of Jackie Robinson sweeping around the end? He was Bo Jackson and Walter Payton and Gale Sayers, wrapped into one. Baseball was his fourth best sport, everybody agreed.)

However, California legislators are leaning toward surfing. I heard this on NPR the other night, and they included just a bar or two by the Beach Boys, which made me realize that surfing is exactly right as the state sport.

All those land sports are wonderful, but surfing is the sport, the recreation, the life style, that made California the state that makes me wonder why everybody, I mean everybody, didn’t just move there.

(To be sure, in the old days, thousands of frozen Americans would begin packing for the Golden State on Jan. 2, after watching the Rose Bowl game on New Year's Day.)

Nobody had to go in the water, dig their toes into a surfboard. I have never touched a surfboard, even on land, butI have watched men and women, a different breed, agile and lithe sea creatures, performing acrobatics off the beaches from San Diego to the Bay Area (where they wisely wear wet suits.)

Surfing is what you could do -- or watch -- if you reached the western fringe of mainland America. It was waiting out there. I came of age, well, with the election of John F. Kennedy and hopes for the New York Mets, and on the radio there were the Beach Boys, with those high harmonies, singing about the beach and first love and Little Deuce Coupes.

On my first business trip to LA in 1962, I went to Chavez Ravine to cover baseball, but I saw cars bearing surfboards, heading west. The Beach Boys were on the car radio. California was being invented or discovered.

Later, on mornings before night games in LA or Anaheim, I went body-surfing (with seals) at Laguna Beach, stopped for date shakes on the Pacific Highway, and one time watched a fellow sportswriter frolic in the cold surf off Dana Point.

And one night in Chicago in 1966, I went with another colleague to see the classic, very un-Chicago documentary, “The Endless Summer” by Bruce Brown.

Surfing was the culture of California, even with all kinds of good and bad and momentous things happening in People’s Park in Berkeley and the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and Watts in LA, with Sandy Koufax and Kareem and Magic Johnson and Joe Montana and Landon Donovan and all the rest, playing those ball sports. Surfing was the backdrop for the promised land.

(Some people are proposing skateboarding as the state sport; my rebuttal is, no, skateboarding is merely surfing on hard surfaces.)

Surfing still echoes on the beaches and strangled freeways and hills and valleys. Brian Wilson, who somehow survived, brought the sound of the Beach Boys and the sport of surfing forward by half a century with his 2008 album, the symphony/poem called “That Lucky Old Sun.”

At 25 I turned out the light
Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my
tired eyes
But now I’m back, drawing shades of kind
blue skies.
(From “Going Home,” By Brian Wilson and Scott Bennett, from the album, That Lucky Old Sun)
.
With all due respect to Jackie Robinson, the legislators ought to vote for surfing -- and get on with the business of the fifth largest economy in the world.

Brian Savinw

5/17/2018 09:44:01 pm

Wow. This is so tightly packed with interesting observations that there are infinite possibilities for discussion. Impressive. I’ll try to start. I’ll give the surfing title to Hawaii. They need something to keep spirits up. I will also agree that it’s not baseball. I’m old enough to remember channels 5, 9 and 11 were all
baseball channels my Father switched between, and California stole two of those “channels” away from us. Thievery can never convey good title. Well then, Stanford kids qualify for wall climbing laurels. So many of their students seem to find Stanford classroom buildings irresistible challenges. But the most impressive to me is female beach volleyball. The toned bodies and bikinis raise sport to ethereal ecstasy and earn my deepest respect.

Peter Kennedy link

5/18/2018 07:42:42 am

Ah, yes, California. Surfing, Early 1960s. Nice piece, George, to take our minds off the problems of the world, if only for a moment. To Brian Savin's comment, it's wholly appropriate that CA and HI share surfing as a state sport. After all, there are 50 states and just so many sports to go around... And Texas, for sure, can't claim football all for itself, much as it would like to! Cheers, PJK

Alan Rubin link

5/18/2018 03:24:30 pm

Research indicates that Hawaiian royalty used surfing as a spiritual means of calming the waters before putting out to sea.

California can justly claim surfing as it states sport, but not as an equal with Hawaii.

The following is taken from the Wavehuggers web site.

https://wavehuggers.com/

Over the centuries, surfing has become part of the cultural fabric in any region that has access to beaches and the waters beyond. In fact, surfing culture has even expanded to land-locked regions of the U.S. and countries abroad. Curious as it may seem to hear that people in Kansas, Wyoming, or Iowa talk about surfing, use the lingo, and even cover the rear windows of their cars with Ron Jon Surf Shop stickers, it may satisfy to know that surfing has been around long enough that it has earned a legitimate place in nearly all cultures and regions. But, having stated that, one begins to wonder just where surfing began and who brought it to the attention of so many across the globe. To answer these questions, we turn to the history books.
There are many stories that build the legend and lore of the origins of surfing. Most of these stories come from the islands of the mid-Pacific – Hawaii, especially. For those steeped in surfer culture, Hawaii is the epicenter of the surfing world. It is, for most, the birthplace of surfing. Or is it? The indigenous people of Hawaii trace their origins back to Polynesia. And although the actual history of the settling of Hawaii is still yet to be resolved, many historians suggest that the first Polynesians to set foot on the Hawaiian Islands came during the 3rd Century (between 201 and 300 A.D.) from the Marquesas Islands. These original islanders may have brought a rudimentary form of surfing from their homelands – which were a group of volcanic islands in French Polynesia that shared much of the same geography and ecology as the Hawaiian Islands. But, of course, every islander has to come from somewhere, so in looking back into the history of the Marquesas Islands, we find that earliest settlers to those islands arrived from Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti sometime before 100 A.D. Before that time, the recorded history gets quite murky, so we’ll refrain from travelling back in time any further. At this point, it can be easily said that the history of surfing came with the people who travelled from island to island across the South Pacific Ocean to eventually settle in Hawaii. Given that travelling vast stretches of ocean during those early time periods was a treacherous undertaking that made use of simple wooden canoes, we can only assume that these early island explorers were in search of better surfing!
Outside of the history of the people who introduced the world to surfing, one might also ask, “How did we first hear about surfing?” We return again to the history books.
As it turns out, one of the more notable stories about our first experiences with surfers begins with Captain James Cook, a British explorer and navigator, who arrived in Tahiti on a “voyage of discovery” in 1769. Captain Cook moored his ship, the Endeavour, in Matavai Bay, where a noted botanist named Joseph Banks wrote in his diary about how the local peoples would amuse themselves by riding a piece of wood across the waves “with incredible swiftness.” And that, according to the Museum of British Surfing, is the earliest recorded description of surfing we have ever uncovered. Although surfing is eternally tied to Hawaii, it was in Tahiti that surfing
was first glimpsed by Western eyes.
Surfing, which was originally called he’enalu (or wave-sliding) in the language of the people of Hawaii, was later experienced by American troops who were stationed in Hawaii during WWII. At present, surfing is enjoyed by people of all walks of life – all across the globe. And we have some ancient island explorers to thank for getting it started.

George Vecsey

5/19/2018 10:45:33 am

Thanks to all for your comments. Beach volleyball is fun to watch. As an Olympic sport, well, let's say the TV producers treat women's VB like NFL cheerleaders. I appreciate the mentions of Hawaii....I meant no disparagement of Hawaitt (never been there) but California and its life style and music was part of the national mood in 60s, even when the mood darkened. I wasn't a Beach Boy fan back in the day...but half a century later, I can be as nostalgic as the next person. GV

bruce

5/22/2018 10:47:10 am

george,

loved endless summer.

saw it when i was 16.

i knew robinson was a four sport guy and baseball was fourth. didn't his brother compete in one the sprints in the berlin olympics?

i would opine that jim brown could've rolled into one.

i think i saw every one of his games on the toob.

if memory serves, he was syracuse's placekicker and an all american in lacrosse which, i've read, was his best sport.

had some problems with women back in the day, if i recollect correctly.

bruce

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

What Is Really California's Signature Sport?

Categories

Buy the Book