Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

35 страница из 91

Alexander Hume Ford was an unlikely champion of the sport. Orphaned at an early age, Ford spent much of his early professional life as a writer in New York and Chicago. After stints as a dramaturge and staff journalist, he became a roving freelance reporter. At roughly the same time that the United States was annexing Hawai‘i, Ford was tramping across Siberia and eastern Europe as a foreign correspondent for a handful of American magazines. Before long, however, his career began to decline. Then, in 1907, at the age of thirty-nine, Ford arrived in Honolulu.⁴⁵ “It was the thrill of the surfboard that brought me to Hawaii,” he later wrote. As a schoolboy he saw a picture in his geography book of “Hawaiian men and women . . . poised upon the crest of monster rollers,” and, he said, he “longed” to join them.⁴⁶ Almost immediately upon his arrival he took to the waves. The reason was simple: “There is a thrill like none other in all the world as you stand upon [a wave’s] crest,” he gushed in the pages of Collier’s.⁴⁷ Ford was in fact rather late in his discovery; others had already uncovered and touted the “pure joy” and “spiritual intoxication” to be found in the waves off Waikiki.⁴⁸ But Ford pushed it further than most. After nearly three months of daily four-hour sessions, the journalist could claim to “ride standing.”⁴⁹ He quickly emerged as surfing’s leading evangelist, corralling Hawaiian “beachboys” and visiting Americans alike into his cause—most notably among the latter, the celebrated author Jack London, whom Ford introduced to surfing in 1907. “Learn to ride a surfboard,” Ford advised the readers of St. Nicholas magazine. “[I]t is the king of sports.”⁵⁰