Endless Bummer : Surfing’s Darker Side Is Surfacing During Assault Trial in Malibu

It’s safe to say that the spirit of Duke Kahanamoku was not alive on the waters of Malibu that day late last summer.

When two surfers punched out a third at the Oxbow Longboard World Championships, the prized “aloha spirit,” a camaraderie of the world’s wave-riders, sank like a tired orchid lei beneath the perfect three-foot point break.

One surf historian said the on-the-water pummeling of Richard Ernsdorf desecrated the spirit of the sport’s Hawaiian progenitors, not to mention the Chumash Indians who had blessed the competition’s opening ceremony.

Now a Malibu jury must decide whether the incident was also a case of assault and battery. A world-class surfer and the father of another professional surfer could be sent to prison for as long as seven years.

In many ways, the trial of Lance Hookano of Honolulu and Joseph Tudor of San Diego is a routine assault and battery rap. The victim claims he was pounded silly for no reason. The two defendants say they were acting in self defense, after amateur surfer Ernsdorf aggressively refused to leave the competition area.

But the trial, which began last week and continues Monday in Malibu’s lone Superior Court department, has also become a forum for ruminations on the darker side of the sport. Inside and outside Judge James A. Albracht’s courtroom there is talk about the endless competition for waves; about rivalries between locals and outsiders; rivalries between surfers and knee boarders, and rivalries between Hawaiians and mainlanders.

A couple of surfboards have been introduced into evidence and propped against the jury box. A handful of blond Malibu surf locals have taken up positions in the gallery. Noting that both he and the defendants were wearing print shirts, Judge Albracht quipped: “It looks like we should all be tending bar in a Polynesian restaurant.” Only in this setting could the question of a swim fin’s buoyancy become a critical piece of evidence--the surf-bound equivalent of the O.J. Simpson case’s melting ice cream.

Swim fins and surfing tribalism aside, the whole ugly incident of Sept. 27, 1994, really defied the image of long-board surfing. Those who ride foam and fiberglass boards of 9 feet or longer do not win the money or the acclaim of their short-board brethren, but their sport is one that resonates cool. While short-boarders “shred” and slash aggressively across a wave, long-boarders typically score points for effortless nose rides, striking poses of extreme insouciance.

But even among long-boarders, competition can be fierce. That day at Surfrider, just north of Malibu Pier, tension was high. Not only had the surfers been waiting for days for a swell worthy of their skills, but locals had endured a prolonged exclusion from one of their favorite spots because competitions had been held most of the month.

In the water early that morning was Ernsdorf, now 44, a tile contractor from the San Fernando Valley who had been surfing “The ‘Bu” for 30 years. The lanky blond favors a knee board of little longer than five feet, ridden as its name implies.

Ernsdorf said he had finished a morning of surfing and was drifting south intending to get out of the water. But many people on shore thought he was dawdling, intentionally blocking the first heat of the competition, which began at 8:30 a.m. Pre-event favorite Joel Tudor was among the competitors in that heat, and soon his father, Joseph, was paddling out in an apparent attempt to remove the interloper.

What happened next is in dispute, but the net effect was that Ernsdorf was hit several times by Joseph Tudor, also 44, before Hookano (pronounced Ho-O-kahn-o), now 34, also paddled out to the scene and delivered repeated punches of his own. Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip Stirling called it a “feeding frenzy.”

Defense attorneys told the jury that a belligerent Ernsdorf had struck the first blow, removing his swim fin to whack Tudor in the head.

When an event organizer finally pulled the non-competitor ashore, he was bleeding and disoriented, suffering from a dislocated shoulder and facial cuts that took 15 stitches to close.

Two videotapes of the incident show Tudor and Hookano clearly delivering repeated blows to a struggling Ernsdorf. But because the tapes do not capture the onset of the struggle, they do not resolve the question of how it all began.

That task will be left largely to the witnesses, led off last week by the amiable but often vague Ernsdorf, who in several hours on the witness stand attributed his uneven recollections to being “beaten bloody.”

The long-haired, deeply tanned surfer insisted that when the trouble began, he had already ridden his last wave and was preparing to leave the water. He said he was drifting slowly across the surf zone, as is his custom, rather than paddling in rapidly to shore, when Tudor paddled toward him furiously on a behemoth two-man tandem board. “He grabbed me by my hair and threw me off my board,” Ernsdorf testified.

He said he was just recovering from the initial assault when Hookano also paddled out from shore, where he was waiting for his heat to begin. The rest was blurry, Ernsdorf said, seeming near tears: “They were just hitting me, hitting me, hitting me.”

During the testimony, Hookano buried his face in his hands repeatedly and shook his head.

When the defense attorneys got their turn with Ernsdorf, they attempted to paint him as a belligerent local, unwilling to give up his waves to outsiders. Wayne Young, representing Hookano, began by having the local surfer concede that a lifetime of surfing and physical labor had made him fit and strong, although he insisted that his nickname, “Shark,” had something to do with his looks, not his demeanor.

Ernsdorf was quoted in a surfing magazine as saying he had been in his share of scrapes at Surfrider, but on the stand he said that he had been misquoted. “In 30 years of surfing,” he insisted, “I haven’t been in a fight.”

Next, Tudor defense lawyer Victor B. Kenton implied that Ernsdorf’s presence had made a confrontation inevitable. “It’s like someone going on the field during the World Series with a glove and trying to catch a fly ball,” Kenton said. “It’s dangerous and it’s disruptive.”

At least one witness will testify next week that Ernsdorf struck the first blow, using one of his blue and yellow Churchill swim fins, Kenton said.

The flotation properties of the fins became a subject of intense cross-examination. Ernsdorf said he was holding the fin, not as a weapon but because it was ripped off during the melee and “floated up to the top.” This pronouncement caused the intense Hookano to surge forward in his chair in apparent disbelief.

“You know for a fact that when Churchill fins come off your foot they sink to the bottom like a stone, don’t they?” attorney Kenton said, bearing down on Ernsdorf. “You smashed at [Tudor] with that fin, toward his head, didn’t you?”

Ernsdorf became foggy as to exactly where the fin was when he grabbed it, but insisted, “I never hit either one of them.”

In a moment of Perry Mason theatricality, Kenton told the court that he would impeach Ernsdorf by conducting a videotaped demonstration that would prove the fins do not float--and thus must have been grabbed as a weapon.

The intrigue promises to continue this week when one witness may raise the specter of a shadowy and feared Hawaiian underworld group known as the hui. Prosecutor Stirling said a key eyewitness was approached shortly after the attack by a Hawaiian man and warned: “If you ---- with the hui, we’ll kill you, man.”

But defense attorney Young plans to object to that as irrelevant, arguing that Hookano knew nothing of any threats.

The sympathies of local surfers watching the trial clearly swung toward Ernsdorf. Longtime Malibu regular Steve Dunn, 46, said the beating probably was exacerbated because, as a knee-boarder, Ernsdorf is at the “bottom of the pecking order.”

Dunn said the court needs to set an example that such distinctions are intolerable. “They have to set a precedent that you just can’t violently beat someone to get a wave or to get them out of the water.”

If Tudor and Hookano did gang up to batter Ernsdorf that day, it would have been the only cooperative effort between the two. As it turned out, Tudor’s son, Joel, then 18, and Hookano were locked in a tight competition for the world championship.

Surfer magazine reported that Hookano and two other Hawaiians combined to close out Tudor, blocking the mainlander’s access to the best waves. The result: Hawaiian Rusty Keaulana won the championship, Tudor was pushed into third and Hookano finished fourth.

Ernsdorf says he is still shaken by the beating and sees a psychologist regularly.

He still surfs. “In fact, there is a swell today at Malibu,” he said during a courtroom break, “but I’m stuck in here.”