Surfing Heritage and Culture Center History and Milestones

History and Milestones of surfing and Surfing Heritage Founder Dick Metz.

We are a community of people who share a common passion

Question:
What is this common passion we all share?

Answer:
“For the Love of Surfing”

"For the Love of Surfing" is perhaps the best way to describe the common passion we all share, but it is also the title of the soon to be released Oral History film directed and produced by Eric Jordan. As Surf Industry legend Duke Boyd says, while "Eric Jordan doesn't surf, but his documentary For the Love of Surfing does!” For four years, Eric has chased every surfing aficionado who would sit still and "talk story". The result is almost 300 hours of on camera interviews with over 100 of the most influential surfers of the Twentieth Century, “telling it like it was."

Eric Jordan’s new film "For the Love of Surfing" is a documentary for surfers about surfers by surfers without interpretation. It tells the real story of the "golden era” of surfing in the words and manner of the people who lived and breathed surfing.

Surfing legend Ricky Grigg describes the passion for the ocean and wave riding in the film this way. "A lot of people talk about surfing as the ultimate pleasure, well it certainly has been, and is still the ultimate pleasure for me, but that's at the first level of my love, my joy of surfing. To me it's the ultimate obsession. The reason it's an obsession and the ultimate pleasure is that it goes deeper than just fun, it goes deeper than joy, it goes to your soul. In fact it tells you who you are. The ocean defines freedom for you, it makes you realize when you are first out there that you make up the rules, you can decide who you are, you can live the life that you want to live, it's not their rules, it's your rules, and suddenly you are liberated, it makes you who you are, it's more than liberation, it's more than freedom, it identifies you, it empowers you, and that's why it's an obsession."

Steve Pezman, founder & publisher of Surfers Journal calls Eric Jordan’s new film For the Love of Surfing "the most comprehensive and complete on camera collection of people from Surfing's "Golden Era" telling their story, in their own words, so that you and I can take a trip back with them to a truly magical time in the history of our sport.”

It was a time when Surfing Heritage was being shaped and formed in the heart and mind of its Co-Founder Dick Metz. That's right; The SHACC mission states that we are dedicated to the Preservation of our sport and culture. As Dick says, "back then [late 50's] surfboards were not worth anything, to me, these boards were works of art. So I could not bring myself to let these boards get trashed, I wanted to save them, preserve them, I had no idea what I was going to do with them back then, I just could not let them be lost forever." At 16, working as a surfboard repair person for Dick at the Hobie Surf shop in Hawaii, Randy Rarick said it this way, "I always wondered what Dick was going to do with all those old boards he had stacked up over in the corner where I did my repair work, I guess even back then Dick had a vision for the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center."