Duke Boyd - Legends of Surfing: The Greatest Surfriders from Duke Kahanamoku to Kelly Slater

In the SPRING of 1963, this guy walked into OLE SURFBOARDS on Bay Boulevard in Seal Beach, California, where I worked as manager Mickey Muozs left-hand man. This was in a time when surf shops sold surfboards, period! The use of neoprene wetsuits hadnt yet arrived, and the only other auxiliary income such a retail operation might allow itself to derive came from patching dinged boards. Selling other stuff was considered sissy, nonpurist.

The guy was wearing a madras shirt, black pants, and brown leather shoes with white socks. He turned out to be a salesman, and he wanted us to carry his new brand of surf trunks called Hang Ten. We flat out refused to even consider selling surf trunks to our customers, and he eventually went down the highway a few miles to Huntington Beach and successfully talked Jack Hokanson into carrying his trunks. The parable to this story is, Ole Surfboards ceased operations some years later while Jacks Surf Shop grew into a multimillion dollar business that sold everything under the sun related to surf and beach. The guy who tried to convince us of what was around the corner was named Duke Boyd. Muoz and I became lifelong friends with him, but we never bought his trunks. He gave them to us.

Hang Ten was the first commercially produced authentic surf trunk, and the company eventually topped a hundred million dollars a year in sales. Hang Ten also owned the ad space on the back cover of Surfer magazine where Duke articulated Hang Tens relationship with the sport of surfing in ways that other companys couldnt fathom. One of Dukes secrets to success with Hang Ten was that he picked a very graphic logo symbol that represented a high level of skill (and corn) to surfing acolytes. Then he moved the logo from being hidden inside the collar and placed it boldly on the chest; he infused that logo with so much promotion and romance that the name quickly lost its corn factor and became a household word for surf trunks and raglan-sleeve woven shirts in every color of the rainbow. That was another of Dukes secrets. If you wanted to do volume, you created a branded basic that everyone needed and bought, then got them to buy into your brands cool factor rather than some meaningless mark.

Early in his Hang Ten years, just as Wide World of Sports was first flourishing, Duke saw surfing as a potential TV sports subject that was being ignored because it was misunderstood. While managing an apartment in Long Beach to get free rent, he invited all the sports heroesPhil Edwards, Dewey Weber, Corky Carroll, Donald Takyama... maybe twenty-five to thirty of themto his apartment to talk them into forming a professional surfers union and present the concept of covering a worldwide series of competitions to network television. As a group, they found the idea interesting, but no one pursued it.

While Duke was building Hang Ten, his friend Dick Graham was serving as publisher of Petersons International Surfing magazine, which was floundering in second place behind the seminal Surfer magazine. Graham hired Duke as managing editor to help create authentic content and to merchandise that title like he did his clothing brand. Graham was a jock and body surfer, and Duke was hooked into the surf scene, so Duke started going to his beach buddies at Huntington Pier near where he lived, recruited them as test riders for his surf trunks, well before anyone had team riders, and started Graham running articles on and by those underground heroes. That strategy worked in both cases.