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Surfing Fukcs

Jailhouse Stripes, No Leash: How a Manhattan Beach Gremmie Became Da Bull

Cartoon illustration: a tiny invented surfer in striped trunks rides inside a huge curling turquoise wave while, on a rooftop in the foreground, a frazzled cameraman fumbles an old movie camera as loops of film spill everywhere.Illustration

Before jet skis, before leashes, before anybody called it big-wave surfing, there was a kid cutting bait on the Manhattan Beach Pier and watching the older guys surf under it. His name was Greg Noll. He grew into a 6’2″ slab of South Bay beef in black-and-white convict trunks, and he spent about fifteen winters asking the Pacific for a wave he couldn’t ride. In December 1969 it answered.

A wide beach with volleyball nets and a lifeguard tower stretches toward the Manhattan Beach Pier and its red-roofed roundhouse under a gray marine-layer sky, with an old-fashioned lamppost in the foreground.
Manhattan Beach and its pier, 2007. Photo: Paul Hamilton, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Unmodified apart from resizing.

The facts, no wax on top

  • South Bay born and raised (almost). Born Greg Lawhead in San Diego on Feb. 11, 1937, he moved to Manhattan Beach as a little kid (at 3 or at 6, depending on who you ask) and took his stepdad Ash Noll’s last name.
  • Pier rat. He fished and cut bait on the Manhattan Beach Pier and hung around the surf club under it, where Dale Velzy was shaping balsa boards.
  • Garage brand. According to the family’s board company, he was building boards under the Noll name in his parents’ Manhattan Beach garage by 1951.
  • Lunada Bay before Hawaii. Per the family’s account, he learned big surf at Palos Verdes’ Lunada Bay, just over the hill from Torrance.
  • School? Sort of. At 17 he moved to Oahu, lived in a Quonset hut at Makaha and finished high school at Waipahu High. As he put it in his autobiography: “School came second… or third.”
  • Exporting the stoke, 1956. He was on the US lifeguard team that went to Australia during the Melbourne Olympics, for a surf carnival held alongside the Games, not as part of them. They brought light balsa “Malibu” boards to a country still riding 16-foot “toothpicks.”
  • Waimea, Nov. 7, 1957. Nobody had surfed the bay since Dickie Cross drowned there in 1943. Noll led the crew that broke that spell.
  • Jailhouse trunks. Black-and-white prison stripes became his trademark on giant days.
  • Factory boss. In 1965 he opened a 20,000-square-foot board factory in Hermosa Beach, then the biggest in the world. It turned out roughly 175 to 200 boards a week, and about half of them went to East Coast surfers.
  • Da Cat. He teamed up with his old Malibu pal Miki Dora on the “Da Cat” model and its infamous ads.
  • Hollywood stunt. He did the Waimea riding for James Mitchum’s character in Ride the Wild Surf (1964).
  • Indie filmmaker. From about 1957 to 1961 he shot his own Search for Surf movies (four or five, depending on the count) and toured them himself.
  • The Makaha wave. On Dec. 4, 1969, during the “Swell of the Century,” he dropped into the wave that made him a legend.
  • Then he walked. He closed the factory in 1971, moved north and fished commercially out of Crescent City for years.
  • Hall of fame times three. He was inducted into the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame (1996), the first class of Hermosa’s Surfers Walk of Fame (2003) and the Surfers’ Hall of Fame (2006).
  • Paddled in for good. He died of natural causes in Crescent City on June 28, 2021, at 84.
A lone surfer carves down the face of a giant green wave at Waimea Bay as the lip feathers white overhead, with a water-safety swimmer bobbing in the foreground.
Waimea Bay on a giant day during the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational, February 2016. Photo: Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized only.

Stories you probably haven’t heard

He wasn’t technically first at Waimea, and he still owns it. That November morning in 1957, a quiet Seal Beach lifeguard named Harry Schurch had already caught a few waves alone. Then Noll showed up with a crew and turned it into a movement. By the family’s account, the crew included Pat Curren, Mickey Muñoz and Mike Stange. Head counts run from “four or five” to “a dozen or so.” As Stange later told it, nobody “would even have thought of it except for Greg.”

Cartoon illustration: a burly, bearded, invented surfer in black-and-white striped trunks strides through the shorebreak on a big longboard, leading a line of skinny surfers paddling out toward a towering wave under a psychedelic striped sky, while wide-eyed beachgoers gasp in the foreground.
Original Surfing Fukcs illustration. Invented characters, not likenesses of real people.

The trunks were (maybe) a joke. Per the family, he had a Waianae tailor stitch up the prison stripes “sort of as a joke.” He also told a reporter he wore them so people would know it was him on the wave and get out of the way. Both sound like him.

Cartoon illustration: baggy 1950s surf trunks with bold, wide black-and-white stripes and a drawstring hang from a weathered wooden post on a sandy beach, set against psychedelic orange, pink, purple and teal sunburst rays and a curling blue wave.
Original Surfing Fukcs illustration of striped trunks in the Da Bull spirit, not a photo of his actual trunks.

He blew Australia’s mind, then sold them the evidence. In 1956 the Aussies watched visiting Americans turn and trim on short balsa boards, something their 16-foot planks couldn’t do. Within weeks Sydney shapers were copying the boards, and Bob Evans bought a 10-foot gun straight from Noll. Noll’s own verdict: “we hit ’em like a comet.” Fair warning: Aussie surf historians argue the real first demo was at Avalon in Sydney, not at Torquay, where Noll’s memory puts it.

The biggest wave nobody filmed. How big was Makaha? The local paper the next morning called them “massive 25-foot waves.” Most of the surf world says 35. Noll guessed 35 to 40, the retellings pushed it to 50 and 60, and some skeptics say 20. Shaun Tomson filmed from a rooftop on Super 8, then “lost” the reel. When Stacy Peralta went through Tomson’s footage for Riding Giants, the film cut to white right before the wave. Tomson’s line: “That wave has grown about 6 inches a year.”

Silhouetted surfers sit and ride small waves under a dark band of storm clouds as golden light breaks over the horizon and a sailboat passes in the distance.
Surfers in Hawaii at sunset, 1965. Photo: Toni Frissell, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Toni Frissell Collection (LC-DIG-tofr-30011). No known restrictions on publication.

He traded big waves for steelhead. After Makaha, by his own account, he and his wife Laura drove an old Metro all the way to Alaska looking for a place to land, and they ended up in Crescent City on the Smith River. Per the family, they named their son Jed after the mountain man Jedediah Smith. Jed now runs Noll Surfboards in San Clemente.

Cartoon illustration: a big, bearded, invented fisherman in a yellow rain slicker and striped shorts hauls a net full of fish into a wooden boat with a longboard strapped to the cabin roof, while a seagull flies off with a stolen fish against redwood-covered hills.
Original Surfing Fukcs illustration. Invented characters, not likenesses of real people.

Last call

Noll once told a reporter that people call surfing a sport, “but it’s not. It’s a lifestyle.” His took him from a South Bay pier to the North Shore, to Australia and back. He helped make surfing a world thing, and he made it look American as hell doing it. Not bad for a gremmie.

Commercial fishing boats with tall rigging tied up along a wooden dock in Crescent City's harbor under a partly cloudy sky.
Fishing boats in the Crescent City harbor, 2012. The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-highsm-21841). Public domain.

Da Bull Corner

Hear it from the man himself. Every video here is an official upload from the channel that made it. No bootlegs, no rips.

Noll tells his early North Shore stories over archival footage. Official upload by Surfline.
Greg Noll mini documentary. Official upload by Billabong.
Lost & Found: The Film Archives of Greg Noll, official trailer, built from his own 16mm reels. Uploaded by the producer, Over the Ledge Productions.

Sources

Photos: Paul Hamilton via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0); Toni Frissell, Library of Congress (no known restrictions); Anthony Quintano via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0); Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress (public domain). Photos are resized only, not cropped or edited. Illustrations are original Surfing Fukcs artwork with invented characters, not likenesses of real people. No photo of Greg Noll himself is used because we couldn’t find one that is openly licensed.

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