George Greenough (1941-)

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George Greenough rides a kneeboard and an air mattress, but don't let that fool you. He is one of the most influential people in the evolution of modern surfing. He hasn't stood on a surfboard since 1961, yet he is credited as the inspiration for the modern surfboard fin, in-the-tube water photography and the entire shortboard revolution. In response, Greenough just shrugs and goes about his business, which is innovation and reinvention.

A full-time resident of northern New South Wales, Australia, since 1998, Greenough was born in Santa Barbara and attended high school there. Descendent of the great American sculptor Haratio Greenough, his father, Hamilton, was heir to a railroad fortune (his mother Helen was Hamilton's nurse). Greenough grew up in a Montecito mansion; his upbringing was unique if not eccentric. He didn't want to wear shoes, and his parents didn't make him. Greenough's worn them only three times in his adult life (he flies first-class so he can remain shoeless) and a suit just twice in his life. He survived open-heart surgery to become a gifted aquatic athlete.

Although he started surfing in the mid-'50s and often enjoyed the pristine waves of Hollister Ranch (the Hollisters were friends of the family), Greenough never related much to stand-up surfing, finding the boards too cumbersome and the crowds too hectic. He shaped a 7'8" x 22" baby surfboard in 1962, but never rode it much. It was later sampled by friends such as Bob Cooper, Skip Frye and Bob McTavish. Greenough built a rather conventional kneeboard with a slightly scooped-out deck in 1962, much like the one he'd later take to Australia and inspire a band of surfers in quest of new dimensions of performance.

In 1965, Greenough created his breakthrough kneeboard, Velo. Unlike anything that had gone before, Velo featured the distinctive "spoon" shape, which has been the trademark feature of Greenough's boards ever since. Based on a performance concept Greenough called "neutral handling," the board was designed to flex in the same way his fins did. With a Bob Simmons-like plan shape that was buoyed only by a foam-filled rail section (the middle of the board was just fiberglass, tapering back to a flexible glass tail), the board just barely floated itself.

Velo weighed only about 6 pounds and was powered by an 11-inch high-aspect fin designed built by Greenough. Wide and thick at the base, then sweeping and tapering to a raked tip, the fiberglass foil loaded up on torque and propelled his kneeboard out of a turn with alarming force. It was Velo (and its powerful fin) that inspired Nat Young's 1966 World Championship board, Sam, and the vee-bottom shortboard experiments of McTavish and his test pilots in Australia in 1966 and 1967, thus becoming the catalyst for the shortboard revolution.

In Australia, with a Nikonos water camera, Greenough snapped his seminal in-the-tube shot of Russell Hughes that opened an entirely new territory in surf photography. Inspired by such successes, he began to fabricate his own waterproof boxes for his 35mm camera. In the late '60s and early '70s, these Greenough housings were in great demand among the rising stars in surf photography and many continue to build housings in the Greenough style.

Featured in Paul Witzig's 1967 surf flick, Hot Generation, Greenough began to experiment with motion pictures, shooting in-the-tube point-of-view footage with a modified 16mm camera mounted on his back or on the nose of his spoon. He created a rig with battery pack and lights and filmed at night at Rincon and other spots. The resultant film, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1970), reflected Greenough's crystal-clear fascination with the curling wave and his own torquing wake; it was a completely unique cinematic adventure that broke new ground.

By 1968, shortboards had swept away the old logs and Greenough was a renowned surf-culture hero. Curious surfers were ever on the lookout for his celebrated California Highway Patrol black-and-white Dodge 440, but just as likely, Greenough was cruising the Channel Islands in his modified 16-foot Boston Whaler (old surfboards were cut up, shaped and glassed into a coupe-style shell that gave the thing roll-over capabilities), checking his lobster traps or shark fishing along the way to esoteric surf spots that he generally surfed alone.

For the next 30 years, he followed the endless winter, alternating residences between Montecito (where he had transformed large sections of the house into workshop spaces) and the Byron Bay area, so he could ride the more powerful winter swells and escape the summer crowds. More and more often he took to the surf on a canvas air mattress, which he could somehow make go faster than anyone on a surfboard. His surfing became the stuff of legend.

Greenough now resides near Byron Bay and remains unconcerned with any sort of acclaim. His current ongoing film project is a documentary on dolphins, for which he crafted a housing shaped like a baby dolphin to keep pace with the creatures underwater. "Part of the delay in finishing," he says, "is that lately the water hasn't been clear -- too much pollution."

Actively involved in efforts to clean up the ocean, Greenough has been participating in recent surf elder powwows Down Under. Even so, he has been forced to abandon the powerful grinders at Lennox Head. "It's too violent down there," he says. He simply continues to innovate, record the action and surf, even if it is on a mat. -- Drew Kampion, October 2000

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