Surfing long a religious cult for wave worshipers, has lately not only won coast-to-coast status as a bona-fide sport (there is even a surfing Hall of Fame) but has also inspired a burgeoning subculture that includes rock-'n'-roll songs, magazines, and films such as Bruce Brown's excellent surfing odyssey, The Endless Summer In Southern California, where American surfing was incubated, hordes of "stoked" (hooked) surf devotees, single-minded as lemmings, strap their 25-pound boards atop their cars every day and head for the beaches. playboy's nomadic artist LeRoy Neiman, who spent a month on the surfers' trail, from San Onofre to Malibu, found their life a robust one: "They live for the sport. Surfing has made Muscle Beach a memory. The surfers' beaches are a kaleidoscope of Hollywood types, 'beach bunnies,' rebellious hipsters and myriad adolescents, some arrayed in wet suits, some bristling with surfing pins, Maltese crosses or good luck and other contemporary finery. There are professionals who represent board manufacturers in tournaments and form-conscious aesthetes who, in their own idiom, 'please fear' by riding the 'heavies' on their 'big guns'—surfboards built for big waves." Veteran surfers get their biggest kick from "getting locked in the curl" (above) or riding inside a ponderous wave. Right: As motorcyclist-musicians provide gratuitous background sounds, Malibu surfers traverse The Pit, a favored rendezvous, on their way to the waves. "The boards and costumes create a symphony of colors," observes Neiman. "In the overcrowded water, however, play gets rough sometimes as surfers jostle for space; 'surf birds'—female wave riders—are on their own. On a good, or 'glassy' day, pandemonium rules."
