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

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Surfing competitions became a means through which Hawaiians and the haole elite contested each others’ superiority. Ford, for his part, was unambiguous in his boasting. “[A]t the recent surfing carnivals in honor of the visits of the American battleship and later of the cruiser fleets,” Ford wrote for a national audience in 1909, “practically every prize offered for those most expert in Hawaiian water sports were won by white boys and girls, who have only recently mastered the art that was for so long believed to be possible of acquirement only by the native-born, dark-skinned Hawaiian.”⁸⁹ He seemed especially proud that “a white boy now fourteen years of age” had won “the medal given to the most expert surfboarder” for the third time. “The white man and boy are doing much in Hawaii to develop the art of surfriding. Games and feats never dreamed of by the native are being tried,” he boasted.⁹⁰ Indeed, by 1912, “the native” had disappeared from Waikiki altogether, Ford remarkably claimed. It was “white men and boys” who “kept [Surfing] alive.”⁹¹ As even those with the most casual knowledge of twentieth-century surfing history will recognize, Ford was patently wrong about the disappearance of Hawaiian surfers. But his statement is instructive. The Out-rigger founder was, in essence, attempting to create his own reality. Not only did Hawaiian surfers still exist but, by nearly all accounts, they excelled over whites. Matt Warshaw called Ford’s boasts “ridiculous,” noting that Hawaiians “usually didn’t bother to enter surfing competitions” or were not invited.⁹² And when they did, Isaiah Walker wrote, they emerged “victorious.”⁹³