| transition from long-nose riders to the short, more-spontaneous "pocket rockets."
While designing and merchandising Hang Ten, Duke created and developed the Golden Breed brand for Hang Ten's primary men's and boy's licensee ad his dear friend and montr Robert McAllister; worked with surf filmmaker Dale Davis to make and merchandise the film of the same title; with Hawai'ian surfing great George Downing, created the Objective Scoring System for judging surf contests; and with 1960s-1970s surf all-star Jeff Hakman, created the experimental Expression Session anti-surf contest exhibition format.
Eventually, Duke and his better-business-half partner Doris Moore sold Hang Ten and Duke moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he lived on Woody Creeek down the way from Hunter S. Thompson, skied Aspen mountain fast with Chart House restaurant founder Joey Cabell and their friend Tommy Lee, and explored life a bit, attending EST seminars and thinking about what to do next. "Next" turned out to be taking a red-hot grassroots surfboard brand, Lighting Bolt, and licensing it for surf wear. It was partially a test to see if Hang Ten had meant he really knew something unusual, or was it just luck. It, too, succeeded, and he realized it was probably a healthy dose of both.
Much of the surf industry's ultimate growth into a multi-billion-dollar category has been based on principles of brand merchandising and retail that Duke originated back in the 1960s, using off-the-cuff ideas and seat-of-the-pants logic of his own and of surfers around him who he alone bothered to listen to, all based on applications of the real stoke of surfing that drove the underpinnings of the surf marketplace. You had to be a surfer to know the feeling, and Duke was a surfer.
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Duke has always urged those around him to be all they can be, myself included. The ultimate romantic when it comes to amplifying the inner qualities of riding waves that become so compelling to all surfers, Duke has always been taken by the rich human pageantry of the surfing individuals that makes up the core sport. He has always wanted to take a stab at chronicling in book form those hard-to-touch human qualities that make the sport eccentric and wonderful.
In this day and age, the realities of book publishing tend to compress big ideas to fit within such practical boundaries as price point and time schedules. If Duke was unrestricted by that reality, his passion for the subject would demand that this tome measure three by four feet and contain several hundred poster-sized pages, painstakingly printed on the heaviest sheet, featuring thrillingly huge and impactful reproductions of the most incredible surf photos ever taken, accompanied by genre-defining essays by surfing's most eloquent writers, each edition coming with a custom handcrafted teakwood floor stand. While reality does make it something we can conveniently hold in our hands, this book attempts to realize the very same aspiration, to touch the soul of surfing. That's always been Duke's dream.  |