by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset senior writer

Not long after I moved west, I read an article by David Rensin in California magazine about surfer and international fugitive Miki Dora.

Riding inflatable air mattresses on nothing bigger than the waves on Lake Michigan, my exposure to surfing up until then had been decidedly limited: Gidget, Beach Blanket Bingo, The Beach Boys, and the like. Bubblegum stuff. To my rock and roll sensibility, surfing was frothy pop.

But Dora, now he was another story. In his day maybe the greatest surfer in the world. The dark knight of the endless summer and the King of Malibu back when Malibu was still Malibu and surfing was a way of life not a lifestyle.

(For a taste of just how big  surfing has become, head down to Huntington Beach this week for the Honda U.S. Open of Surfing).

Rare is the article that opens up your eyes and changes perspectives but that piece hinted that the California I had idealized through cold Midwestern winters was a more complex place than I had ever imagined.  And somewhere beneath surfing’s fun fun fun image was a soulfulness and authenticity that I had completely missed, one that fit perfectly with a post-college world view shaped by Born To Run and On The Road.

Rensin has returned to what he calls DoraWorld (really a universe unto itself) with the biography All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora. Faced with such an elusive subject, Rensin chooses to reject a traditional biography, opting instead for a looser narrative assembled of first-person accounts from interviews, letters, and other sources.

As he writes, “What I discovered is that many possess a piece of Dora’s complex saga, holographic bits that suggest the whole. But always the master compartmentalizer, he wanted no one to have it all.”

The result is a surfing Rashomon—300+ times over. That’s the number of interviews that Rensin conducted for the book. To the extent that there is an answer to the question “Who was Miki Dora?” it can only be hinted at by combining all of these often contradictory takes. Dora was a legend. Dora was a grifter. He “was an artist in the art of living” or simply “a guy who just loved to surf.”

At 475 pages, it’s a big, dense book but not nearly as big as it was before, as Rensin describes it, editor Mauro DiPreta demanded cuts to “coax the statue out of the stone.” And the statue that emerged is both heroic and human-scaled.

When you consider how prominent surfing’s cultural role has become and Dora’s own embodiment of an uncompromising hope-I-die-before-I-get-sold ideal, it’s clear that he has his place in the pantheon of American originals and anti-heroes where some in the book enshrine him. Right alongside Dylan, Kerouac, Brando.

Or as Rensin puts it, “Dora was Sid Vicious meets Cary Grant, in board shorts.”

Legends are one thing, and what I took from that magazine article 25 years ago was the Dora myth. What I have taken from All for a Few Perfect Waves is more complex.

It’s hard not to revel in descriptions of Dora’s artistry on the waves and to imagine what it must have been like out at Malibu back in 1949. There’s even pleasure in the boldness of Dora’s scams.

But I’m a bit past my hero worship days. Beyond that, to simply elevate Dora to icon status is to somehow reduce the man. Rensin’s achievement is that you get both, side-by-side and inseparable from one another.

(MORE NEXT WEEK, INCLUDING GREAT SURF BOOKS TO TAKE ON VACATION)

(Top image is  Miki at Malibu 1966, photo by Pat Darrin)