We Lost a Legend !!!
As a young man, Noll had a bodybuilder’s physique, and it was that - along with what fellow surfers described as his hard-charging, bull-headed surfing style - that earned him his nickname "Da Bull".
From the early 1950s through the 1960s, he traveled from Southern California to Mexico, Australia and the North Shore of Hawaii’s island of Oahu in search of the biggest waves.
Noll was also an entrepreneur who helped transform the sport with his Greg Noll surfboards, which were among the first to be built from balsa wood, a substance that made them more maneuverable and light enough for most people to use.
In 1964, Noll was credited with being the first person to ride a wave at Oahu’s Third Reef Pipeline.
Five years later in 1969 at Hawaii’s Makaha Beach, he rode what surfers who saw it asserted was the biggest wave anybody ever caught up to that point.
Soon after, Noll famously quit surfing and closed his surfboard factory in Hermosa Beach and moved to Northern California, where he became a successful commercial fisherman and later a sport fishing guide.
Noll was unhappy, he said years later, with what the popular “Beach Party” movies of the 1960s had done to surfing. The films flooded the Southern California shoreline, he said, with people who couldn’t surf.
“That whole Hollywood scene at that particular time was just a mess when it came to doing anything meaningful with the surf community,” Noll told Associated Press in 2013.
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19 сен 2024
