If you were a surf fan and conscious in the ’80s, or else happen to be a student of the sport’s arcane history, then you know about the infamous riot that erupted at the 1986 Ocean Pacific Pro Surfing Championships in Huntington Beach. I didn’t. I was negative 4 years old in 1986—a hypothetical person, the mere potential of an organism latent and split across two separate nowheres inside my parents’ respective organs as they walked around and went to work and acted out the choreography of their lives.

Here’s a sketch of what happened that afternoon: It was the last day of August, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, and everybody had Monday off work. It was the hottest day of the summer. (I can’t actually prove that, but it sets the perfect powder-keg scene, and by several accounts it was actually a really hot day.)

Propelled by a marketing monster that had been metastasizing since the event’s 1982 inception, a record crowd of 100,000 people thronged the pier and the beach and flooded the streets in a scene out of a parody of an ’80s film: big hair, neon everything, Oakley Blades, zebra print, French-cut bikinis, men in short-shorts, coolers sloshing with ice-cold beer. Just two years earlier, the legal drinking age was 18, and the cops—also in short-shorts—were still turning a blind eye. The crowd was raucous, blitzed. A hive mind. Dark impulses coursed in lizard brains. At the last bikini contest in HB surf-competition history, packs of angry, dead-eyed men seethed with vicious lust. “Show us your tits!” they screamed from red faces.

In one account, a group of men assaulted two women behind the bleachers by forcibly removing their bikini tops, whereupon the police intervened and the riot exploded. In another, corroborated by one of the women, Stacey Foster, she and her friends voluntarily flashed the men “after some cajoling,” and it was actually a rival local beach girl, jealous of the attention the flashers were receiving, who threw the first punch that sparked the wick. The squabble grew, the police engaged, the crowd took exception, and a brawl spread like fire down the beach.

Earlier in the afternoon, 20 miles north and thousands of feet in the sky, two airplanes had met over Cerritos in a nose-to-tail collision. The pilot in the nose was decapitated on impact. The aircraft respectively spiraled into a residential neighborhood and an elementary school playground—the playground empty by the grace of what some call God, the whole concatenation claiming 67 lives in the air and 15 on the ground.

Gallery: Untitled, Surf Riot, August 31, 1986

Then, at around 2 p.m., as if by some glitch in space-time, the great black tornadoes of smoke transposed themselves over the OP Pro. In the parking lot and streets, a foaming crowd of rioters was filling empty beer bottles with sand and hurling them at the retreating police, turning over cop cars, ripping off their doors, and setting them ablaze. The smoke lofted huge, like a massive curtain of black fur, like the many arms of a goliath Kraken over the beach party scene, reaching toward the Goodyear blimp hovering in the sky.

Though legendary goofyfooter Mark Occhilupo had easily won the first two heats of a best-of-three finals series over underdog Glen Winton, contest director Ian Cairns asked the men to stage a fictional third heat to keep the spectators on the beach, away from the bedlam erupting behind them.

*

“Just a minute, Thomas.” It’s 2024, and Nick Waplington is admonishing his 8-year-old son in his deadpan British accent and bristly white beard. They are sharing a booth in an East London pub with the members of Spiritualized, the English rock band. “I’m doing an interview. I’ll get you a lemonade in a minute.”

Waplington’s tone is flat, his heart clearly not into reprimanding his kid. “I just picked him up from school,” he says to me through his laptop. “So this is, uh…the closest place.” Waplington looks around, adjusting a pair of silver over-ear headphones, corded. Tucked under the headphones is a black flat-brim hat crowning his round face. He wears a black Thrasher hoodie. Behind him, through the window, it’s night.

Gallery: Photos from Made Glorious Summer, 2014

Waplington is a Yemen-born Jewish-British-American skateboarder—“I am! Or I was. My knees have regrettably little cartilage left”—and globally recognized and exhibited fine-art photographer and artist. His work, often chronicling the humanity of outsiders (like the working-class residents of the Nottingham housing project where his father grew up, or the lives of Jewish settlers in the West Bank), is held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, among other honors too numerous to count.

He is 59, which made him 21 on August 31, 1986, the day of the OP Pro riot, where Waplington happened to be on hand. His “iron-rod Victorian” stepfather was a nuclear physicist who worked for a Swiss company—“We were told not to ask. Various nasties going on”—and his job had brought him out from under the UK’s gray rag to the cerulean skies of LA, where Waplington was visiting on his college summer break. He found the weather nice, the skateboarding fun, the music scene limiting. He missed the small, sweaty electronic dance clubs of ’80s Europe.

Waplington was a child when urethane wheels arrived, along with the first skatepark with flat-bottom bowls in Europe, built just down the street from his boyhood home in England. Tony Alva’s UK tour stopped there on Waplington’s 13th birthday. The craze raged and died, leaving Waplington to count himself among the last 50 or so skateboarders in London. Despite this early influence, he was careful to separate his burgeoning photographic practice from what he terms “skate art.”

“I wasn’t drawing pictures of upside-down skulls,” Waplington explains. “I studied at a good university and had an academic education in art. For a long time, I kept the two things [skateboarding and photography] very separate, because if you wanted to make serious art, you didn’t want to be involved in skateboard art.”

Gallery: Untitled, Living Room, 1986–1990

Yet on the day of the ’86 OP Pro, Waplington couldn’t resist turning his lens to boards on wheels. He’d been at the wooden ramp at the north end of the beach, photographing his skateboarding idols, the Alba brothers, Steve and Micke, when “all hell broke loose.” He followed the rising smoke to the lifeguard headquarters, saw the overturned police cars, the fire feasting on their metal guts.

“I had one roll of film with 24 shots left,” he says, “so I had to make it work.”

“Dad, lemonade?” Thomas says, his wavy blond mop flopping into the corner of the Zoom frame.

“You know what you can do?” Waplington reaches for his wallet, pulls out a blue Chase Sapphire credit card, and hands it off-screen. “Go and ask for a lemonade, and ask for a beer for me. It’s very illegal, this, but see if she’ll give it to you while I’m talking.”

Waplington looks at me and almost smiles.

“Bit naughty there. Where were we? Ah, yes, the riot. I spaced out the pictures,” he continues. “It’s concise and covers the whole thing. But the burning cars were so hot, I had to stay away.”

Thomas has returned empty-handed.

Untitled, Living Room, 1986–1990

Malcolm and friend, Worthing Art College, Made Glorious Summer, 1979–1984.

Untitled, Corinthian, 2005–2008

Record shop, Worthing, Made Glorious Summer, 1979–1984

Waplington shot the whole roll, 24 photos plus a bonus 25th you can sometimes get with film. Like many beachgoers, he dispersed when the National Guard arrived. Traffic was very bad getting home, he says. Summer was over. He flew back the next day to university in England, where he packed the photos away in a box in his mom’s attic and forgot about them until 2009, when they resurfaced in a move.

In 2011, Waplington released them to the world in a photo book aptly named Surf Riot. “I think what made my pictures interesting when they eventually turned up was the fact that they were in color,” he says of the results. “There were lots of black-and-white pictures. Newspapers printed in black-and-white. Why waste the money on color?”

“What do these photographs mean to you?” I ask him.

“On a personal level? Nothing,” he says. “I was there, I knew how to take photographs, I made the photographs, but they’re mere historical records. They have nothing to do with my artistic practice.”

I disagree. Despite Waplington’s low estimation of these photos’ artistic merit, the Surf Riot series finds its highest meaning precisely divorced from its historical context. This is how I first encountered these images, before I did my research: ignorant of the events that had transpired that day. Through this lens of ahistory, Waplington’s images attain to the surreal, like a paradox fed into an AI photo generator, except the people have the right number of fingers. The photos defy the standard garish, idyllic, utopian imagery associated with the timeless SoCal surf aesthetic that inhabits the collective psyche. You will rarely find blue sky and sun and palms and fit, young, happy-looking people juxtaposed with cop cars burning so hot, you can almost smell the rubber through the ink.

Maybe Waplington would think this simplistic, but I find the contrast striking, evocative: retro SoCal inflected through a fun-house mirror. There is something biblical in these images, the eternal boxing match between darkness and light. This is a portrait of a sun-kissed apocalypse, evoking the dark corners of a human subconscious that could inherit utopia and destroy it just to feel alive.

Gallery: Untitled, Surf Riot, August 31, 1986

There’s also the effect that time and displacement have had on these images, lost and then published after almost 25 years, like the magic of waiting for your film to be developed and getting to see how your pictures turned out on steroids, the way images seem to store power over time. Now, nearly four decades later, it’s hard not to read these pictures through the lens of today.

They seem to foretell our modern situation of environmental upheaval: a world that appears always on the news to be going up in flames. They also mark time in a racial dimension. “Everyone’s white!” Waplington notes. “This was just at the beginning of Latin American immigration, and of course there were African Americans in LA, but I suppose they weren’t going to surf events. You don’t think about it at the time, but it’s striking now. One sec—I’m gonna see if I can get the barkeep to get me another beer.”

*

The ’86 OP Pro riot is interesting precisely because it means something different to everyone who encounters it. To many beachgoers that day, it was an emblem of brutal police aggression. To then–ASP Director Ian Cairns, who stepped down in disgrace afterward, it was an instance of “rock-and-roll crazy bad guys” spoiling a good, fun, wholesome, profitable day at the beach. To anti-contest surf purists, the riot validated their belief that surfing and mass commerce formed an unnatural union, and the events of that day were a kind of symbolic karma against the industry for corrupting the soul of an art that was never meant to be packaged and consumed as sport. To the surf industry, it was a PR nightmare—those cop cars might as well have been sponsorship dollars going up in smoke. To Waplington, it was a historical event, of interest to maybe some surfers or LA history buffs, for which by chance he was around to take pictures—no more serious than skate art.

Gallery: Untitled, Surf Riot, August 31, 1986

What is the truth of his photos? What sparks a riot? Why does anything happen? Who cares? History is hard to know because it isn’t real. The past has no objective record—there are merely the vague sketches of what we can triangulate from the various fallible minds that happened to be at that point in the world at that time, and their fallible memories, and the constructions we fallibly shape out of them. Writing history is like trying to take a single picture from a thousand different angles.

History throws its empty bottles out the window. It also tends to echo. Hours after the finals of the 2013 US Open of Surfing, the swollen downtown throngs devolved into flipping over porta-potties—gags—uprooting a stop sign, and spearing it through a storefront window. Attempts to flip squad cars were this time unsuccessful. It took eight arrests, riot gear, tear gas, and rubber bullets for the cops to stamp out the embers.

In the end, my mind returns to what is perhaps the Surf Riot series’ most iconic image: the sinewy young man in cutoff jorts and tube socks, throwing a lifesaving board onto a cop car that’s roasting in a palm-fringed lot. There are two competing theories of what happens when human beings reach utopia, as symbolized here by vintage California surf culture.

The first is that, bored to tears for lack of the struggle that has always given our lives meaning, we destroy it and dance in the trash and flames on repeat until the sun finally eats our Earth. The second is that, with no more primal challenges to overcome, we vest the meaning of our lives in the games that we invent—like surf contests. Perhaps in the ’86 OP Pro riot, we witnessed the intersection of the two. As for the truth? Occy won. Twice.

Untitled, Surf Riot, August 31, 1986

[Feature image: Untitled, Surf Riot, August 31, 1986]

Category: Podcast