📍Surfrider Beach, Malibu, CA 90265, USA
1950 – 1968“I was born Miklos Sandor Dora in Budapest in August 1934, and brought to California as a small child. My father, Miklos, taught me a gracious way of living, but my mother remarried, and my stepfather, Gard Chapin, a legendary and difficult surfer, taught me how to survive. Gard saw nothing wrong with my skipping school when the surf was up, and he bought me my first surfboard, one of Joe Quigg's pintails. I was shuffled between schools, and I split my time between San Onofre with Gard and Malibu, where in the early 1950s the most progressive surfers in the world rode the long, peeling right-hand waves at First Point, now Surfrider Beach. As I grew older I spent more and more time at Malibu, and by eighteen I was the best surfer at First Point and the most aggressive in the water. I walked up and down my board with a style people compared to a cat, and they called me Da Cat, and Malibu Mickey, and the Black Knight. Malibu was my kingdom through the 1950s and early 1960s, and I fought the crowds that came after the film Gidget made it famous. I hated the commercialisation of surfing, and I played the rebel, a trickster who lived by his own rules, appearing in beach films while mocking them. In the 1960s and 1970s I left California and roamed the world in search of empty waves, to France, Africa and beyond. Malibu still remembers Da Cat, the king of First Point, and my style still defines what longboarding should look like.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today