‘Bustin’ Down the Door’ with Surf Legends Townend, Cairns & Tomson

URL SlLegendary surfing champions Peter “P.T.” Townend, Ian Cairns, and Shaun Tomson were guests of honor at a screening of the celebrated 2008 documentary film “Bustin’ Down the Door” in Huntington Beach on Saturday, April 27.

Actor Gregory Harrison (“North Shore”) moderated a Q&A with the surfers and the film’s director, Jeremy Gosch after the screening at the Dwyer Middle School gym, with about 100 surfers and surf fans attending.

Part of the 2024 SURFScape festivities in Surf City, the screening/Q&A was also a fundraiser for Maui Wildfire Relief, sponsored by the Surf Industry Members Association (SIMA) and INSTINCT surfwear.

The film flashes back to winter 1975-1976, when a half-dozen young, brash, and progressive surfers – Cairns, Townend, Mark Richards, Mark Warren, and Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew from Australia, and Tomson and his cousin Michael Tomson from South Africa – dropped in on Hawaii’s North Shore.

RELATED: BUSTIN’ DOWN THE DOOR: The Original SURFER Article From 1977

They were out to introduce their aggressive new style of wave-riding and break down the barriers that kept them out of surfing competitions then dominated by Hawaiians and Californians.

But these so-called “free ride” revolutionaries clashed with North Shore locals, Barry Kanaiaupuni among them. They refuted Bartholomew’s claim in an article that “Aloha was dead” in Hawaii and resented the disrespect for the birthplace of surfing. As the film dramatically details, Rabbit had to back down to avert a full-scale civil war in the international surf community.

The confrontation was also a watershed in surfing, which went on to become a serious competitive sport with worldwide events year-round, major sponsorships, media coverage, and cash prizes large enough for the best surfers to sustain professional careers.

No longer relegated to a segment of a weekly sports roundup on TV (as in ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” several decades ago), today’s surf competitions are streamed online for days, from the first heat to the awards ceremonies. Surfing’s in the Olympics. And an international audience of surfers and surfing fans is watching.

Cairns, Townend, and Shaun Tomson are among the architects of modern professional surfing and competition. The two Aussies created a new international ratings based on Formula 1 motor racing for the Australian Professional Surfers Association (APSA) in 1975 that was adopted by Fred Hemmings and Randy Rarick’s International Professional Surfing (IPS). Tomson, after dominating amateur surfing in South Africa, won the IPS World Championship in 1977, and his style in and out of the water was a huge influence on aspiring young pro surfers everywhere.

Cairns and Townend teamed again in 1980 to become executive directors of the National Scholastic Surfing Association (NSSA) to mentor and coach future generations of pro surf competitors. In 1983, Cairns founded the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP), which superseded the IPS to lead professional surfing into what we know today as the World Surf League.

But in the Dwyer Gym Q&A, along with his recollections of that epic winter of ’75, Cairns cursed the WSL World Surf League for making it very difficult for newcomers to break into the surf competition circuit – just as it was half a century ago when he and his mates were bustin’ down the door on the North Shore.

Here’s my video of the Q&A in two parts:

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Stephen K. Peeples is a Grammy-nominated multimedia writer-producer and award-winning radio/record-industry veteran raised in Miami and Los Angeles by career newspaper journalists and music lovers. Based in Santa Clarita, California, he semi-retired in 2021 after a 46-year media career. As of spring 2024, he was interviewing surf and surf culture legends and writing a book celebrating the 60th anniversary in 2024-2026 of filmmaker Bruce Brown’s epic surf travelog “The Endless Summer,” with the full cooperation of Bruce Brown Films, which is opening its photo archives to the project. Publication is projected for late 2025-early 2026. See the “About” page on Peeples’ website. More of Peeples’ original stories and exclusive interviews are posted on his site and on his YouTube channel.

Article: ‘Bustin’ Down the Door’ with Surf Legends Townend, Cairns & Tomson
Category: News and Reviews
Author: Stephen K. Peeples
Article Source: stephenkpeeples.com