Sometimes sports is so chockfull of ugly herd behavior that I’m not inclined to spend another second thinking/writing about them. Praise Jeebus for the underrated icons and weird convolutions of athletics. Oh the places you'll go.

Praise Jeebus for individualists such as Miki Dora.

As the 1950s crested, Miki Dora,
aka Da Cat, introduced the anti-hero to an innocent surfing scene. An
enigma in Ray-Bans, Dora (1934-2002) was nuanced and obsure, surfing
like he lived. On the way to a last act of life that would become
increasingly eccentric, Dora was featured in throwaway films like How
to Stuff a Wild Bikini and Beach Blanket Bingo.

I don’t know
jack-shit about surfing beyond this one hot girlfriend I had back in
the day. So I reached out to LA-based author David Rensin to learn more
about Dora. Rensin has written and cowritten twelve books, including
The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (2003), an oral
history of what it's like to start at the bottom in a talent agency
mailroom while dreaming of the top. Next month, HarperCollins will
publish All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life of Legendary Surfer Miki “Da Cat” Dora.

“What
I learned during this book,” Resin told me in an email exchange, “was
to take him more seriously than I had, and to be able to look at him
from many different points of view at the same time – as performance
art, as theater. He wasn't performing all the time, especially in his
post-prison years, but it was easier to comprehend him that way.

“Dora's story is a ball of string that unravels infinitely. He was a question — what should I do with my life? — not an answer.”

What was the most compelling aspect of Dora's intelligence that you
learned of while reporting this book? And what of his darkness?

Hmm. Tough to single out one compelling aspect. My immediate instinct
is
that he was able to see humans as an infestation on the planet. But it
was less a "green" point of view than that he simply didn't like most
people. They took his waves. They got divorced. They injured him
emotionally. They were
stupid. They made hypocritical rules. They
idolized him — probably appreciated to some extent — but then they
wanted something from him (even just his story — which is why he felt
anyone writing about him was feeding off of him), that they lacked in
themselves. Or they imitated him to his face, or in some way
disappointed him because they seemed trapped by society, themselves,
blind belief. On the other hand, he didn't necessarily advocate his
lifestyle for them... it was lonely.

In other words, he was smart enough to see behind the curtain of shared belief and he didn't like what he saw.

Is
that also his darkness? I think so. He was emotionally vulnerable to
the extent that his defenses were very strong in response.

The other most compelling aspect is a native intelligence on the waves. The late Surf Guide magazine editor Bill Cleary—a prime surf culture mythologizer who could spend hours deconstructing Dora—once wrote:

"Miki was born with an invisible organ, some mysterious faculty
analogous to a radio tuned to higher frequencies. The sounds that
reached
Miki . . . were more like a swirl of color that contained information
Miki’s brain hungered for, which enabled him to surf in ways beyond our
imaginings."

And this is before kids rode shortboards like they were skateboarding on a wave.

How savvy was he to the performance art aspects of how he lived?

I
think Miki was absolutely savvy about the performance. You could
applaud or boo, but you had no right to it, other than to watch the
show if you chose. Should you get too close, or try to get involved you
could get burned. Surfing in his era was about style, not simply
performance. He objected to quantifying
performance in contests. He
viewed it more holistically. The question with Dora is always about how
much he directed the play of his life, was aware of himself as a
character. I think he was because of all the people who responded to
that character, and his desire to leave that behind -- or at least find
a new audience. His performance liberated and trapped him.

Do you feel he had points of cultural reference for going about things this way?

He
continually floated through the cutting edge, from the LA art scene,
music scene, Hollywood and Beverly Hills parties. He read voraciously.
His mind
connected all the pieces.

How do you feel his being a part of the very specific LA subculture of surfing affected him?

He
rejected the surfing subculture as too commodified, full of lesser
mortals. His surfing heroes were pre-subculture. He couldn't escape the
subculture, though. So he toyed with it. Performed. Punished it. Then
fled.

Tell me about your earliest personal encounter with the man/myth?

Although
I knew him from a distance in the mid - late '60s, and read everything
about him in the genre magazines, saw him in movies, and him in the
water once or twice, I first met Miki in the Orange Coast Community
College reading room in 1983, where he'd agreed, finally, to get
together because I'd been reporting a magazine story on him, and after
avoiding me for months, decided perhaps he'd handled it wrong. We spoke
for an hour. Afterwards, I asked to meet again. He said he'd think
about it. As he sauntered away into the dark I flipped a quarter into
the air, caught it, and cupped it on the back of my hand. Heads he'd
call; tails he wouldn't.
It came up tails. (We met again a few months later, anyway, to discuss a movie of his life...)

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness. He posts Mondays and Thursdays.