Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн
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The young Hawaiian, who also gave surfing demonstrations on both American coasts and would go on to tout surfing’s exhilaration and health-giving qualities to America’s youth, received considerable press coverage during his wave-riding displays.131 More than anything, however, Kahanamoku, like his contemporary George Freeth, allowed his body to serve as his media. While operating within the racial constraints of a brown-skinned athlete in a white-dominated world, Kahanamoku demonstrated what it meant to be a surfer at a time when a common vernacular for the pastime did not exist.132 Some media would speak of “surf-board swimming.” Others would refer to “surf bathing” or “surf shooting.” What ever the term, Kahanamoku and Freeth demonstrated, through their skills in the water, that their ancestral pastime not only had survived the missionary onslaught of the nineteenth century but, spearheaded by these same supposed racial inferiors, would again thrive in the twentieth.
Though not at first. It would not be until after World War II that surfing really began to enjoy explosive international growth. Given the crippling nature of the Great Depression, the slow global expansion of the sport during the interwar period is hardly surprising. Still, in Hawai‘i, people continued to find joy in the waves. This was true during World War I, when the letterhead of the Hawaii Promotion Committee, which was dominated by an image of surfers at Waikiki, happily pronounced that the islands were “Out of the War Zone,” and it remained true in the years that followed.