From hodaddy.
Photo of Midget Farrelly - early 60s. If you relate to what Albert is saying below - check in to
hodaddy.com.au/ and score the new book for Christmas.
Albert Falzon: Midget was graceful. No two ways about it, he had a lot of influence on me and probably a lot of others. I was more attracted to the grace in surfing, rather than the dynamics of surfing and the two different people and personalities that expressed it at that time were Midget and Nat. Midget was a graceful surfer, beautiful in his movements and Nat was dynamic and aggressive. It gets back to how you are in your own nature and for me I just felt a lot more harmony with watching Midget surf and going down that path with harmonisation . I just felt like he was much more in tune with the Ocean, rather than trying to destroy it, which was the other approach.
That is why competition surfing has never appealed to me, because it has taken that road where the dynamics of being really aggressive . where you lose the beauty of surfing, it becomes about destroying what you are on. Midget wasn't like that. He was a real forerunner in style and I also thought Bobby Brown was a beautiful surfer to watch. Ted Spencer was graceful. Keith Paull was a really beautiful surfer, could ride big waves and small waves, but had a beauty and fluidity about him.
I actually enjoy watching people who do nothing on a wave.
I am so over watching people who are trying to reach for the stars when they get to the top of a wave, doing all these aerobics, acrobats and hard core turns . it is just dreary to me, has no grace to it. Just get on the wave and let it take you, rather than you take it. I think that approach is more characteristic of the early Hawaiian surfers, maybe because of the boards they were riding. They rode the wave and just tried to fit in with the ocean, they didn't try to destroy the wave. They just get in the slipstream.
We live in a 'me, me' world and there is no doubt about it, that everyone is on show ... but if you take the show away and it is just you, then what are you doing? Just riding the wave .
