Duke Kahanamoku: Aloha spirit incarnate

Before surfing was a global obsession—before it had pro contests, COVID surfers, and surfing influencers—there was Duke.

I honestly do not want to imagine a world where Duke Kahanamoku was never born. We probably would never have surfed. He was “the most magnificent human male God ever put on the earth” after all.

????️ A waterman is born

Duke—and that’s his given name—Kahanamoku was born in 1890 in Honolulu, Hawaii, into a family of watermen: surfers, swimmers, and paddlers.

Around the time of his birth, surfing suffered a decline because it was fun—and Calvinist missionaries did not do fun. Plus, the entire Hawaiian society was decimated by diseases brought from the mainland. Thankfully, by the time Duke went to school, religion was out, making money from tourism was in, and surfing became a thing again. Waikiki emerged as the newest vacation destination.

???? Duke the champion

Though we remember him most as a surfer, Duke first made his mark as a swimmer. In 1911, when he was 20, he broke the American 50-yard record by more than a second and beat the 100-yard world record by over four seconds.

The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) was in total disbelief and didn’t recognize these feats until many years later. According to Wikipedia, they claimed the judges must have been using alarm clocks rather than stopwatches, and later argued that ocean currents had aided Kahanamoku.

Duke won his first Olympic gold medal in 1912 in Stockholm, setting a world record in the 100-meter freestyle. Over the next twelve years, he collected five Olympic medals (three gold, two silver) and became a Hawaiian hero and an international sports icon.

???? Surfing goes global

While Duke was competing and performing swimming exhibitions around the world, he brought something else along: his surfboard.

In 1915, he paddled out at Freshwater Beach in Sydney, Australia, and gave what’s considered the first public surfing demonstration outside Hawaii. He did the same in California, inspiring the earliest mainland surfers.

Even before the Olympics, when all the surfers in Waikiki were hanging out near the shore, Duke would build himself a 10-foot board and paddle further offshore to surf much bigger and longer waves. He would make the beachgoers look twice as he approached the shore—standing on his head.

???? Not quite fame

He was celebrated as a swimmer and a surfer, hanging out with Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, and John Wayne. But he was also a dark-skinned school dropout who was only given small roles in movies and was denied service at restaurants and hotels.

Thanks to his new manager, Kimo Wilder McVay, from 1961 Duke was at the head of a small commercial empire that included Duke Kahanamoku’s Restaurant, the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championships, and merchandise.

Unfortunately, Duke didn’t get a chance to enjoy commercial success for long, as he died of a heart attack in 1968 at age 77.

???? The Duke legacy

Duke was a skilled wave-rider, but his real gift to surfing was the way he presented the sport as something that could be practiced with grace, humor, and generosity, according to Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing.

“You know,” he said in 1965, “there are so many waves coming in all the time, you don’t have to worry about that. Take your time—wave come. Let the other guys go; catch another one.”

I have to wholeheartedly agree with Matt here: surfing’s greatest shortcoming may be that surfers have, for the most part, failed to live up to the Kahanamoku ideal.