Mike Hynson, who embodies the image of the Surf Bronzed God as a star of the Surfing Hit 1966 documentary “The endless summer” And, with its outlaw instincts, embodied the rebellious philosophy of sport on the way to be praised a colossus of the loop, died on January 10 in Encinitas, California. He was 82 years old.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Donna Klaan Jost, who collaborated with Hynson on her 2009 autobiography, “Transcendental Memories of A Surf Rebel”. She said the cause was not yet known.
Hynson appeared at a time when surfing was often marginalized as a curious ritual of adolescent culture of the west coast, thanks to a price of sparkling mornings like “Beach cover bingo” (1965) and a swell of Beach Boys Hits. He was praised not only for his skills on the waves, but also as a builder of board of directors, in particular the popular Red fin Longboard, which he designed for the manufacturer Gordon and Smith in 1965.
He was “one of The biggest surf lives Never lived, “Jake Howard wrote in Surfer magazine after Hynson’s death, describing him as” a hot dog artist, shameful genius, a cosmic adventurer “who” modified the sport and the culture of surfing in a way incalculable. »»
Hynson’s life became the fabric of tradition from 1963, when he was invited by filmmaker Bruce Brown to join him and Robert August, another young surfer in southern California, on a trek that would lead them through Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand and Hawaii, Sauté the equator to avoid the slightest cooling of winter while looking for the perfect wave.
Hynson was only 21 years old but had already built a reputation as a shattered power surfer on the beaches of San Diego. He could be arrogant and distant, recalls friends – but not without reason: he has already proven his courage as one of the first Hawaiians who are not native to climb on the pipeline, on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Oahu , sometimes called the most dangerous wave in the world, in 1961.
He had certainly watched the ready camera, with his caramel tan and his white hair on the sun in return in Dracula fashion, a hairstyle that will soon be imitated by surfers around the world.
Brown had only $ 50,000 for his project, leaving his stars to pay for their own tickets worldwide. To finance his trip, Hynson turned to the famous manufacturer of the board of directors Hobie Alter, for which he had worked, to provide him $ 1,400 for the plane ticket“Even if I had stolen nine surfing boards from him a few years earlier,” he said in a 2017 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian.
Unbeknownst to his companions in Detroit, Hynson brought an amphetamines reserve with him and a three -month supply of marijuana from Tijuana. “I was Young, stupid and loaded“, He said in an interview of 2009 with OC Weekly, another newspaper in Orange County, California.
The first stop was Senegal, where the inhabitants “used wooden boards to bend in the waves,” Hynson told Guardian, “so when they saw Robert and I surf, they were out of date.”
A biggest game awaited them. Hynson finally spotted his career in Cape St. Francis, on the southern coast of South Africa – a “perfect right -handed in shockWithout a surfer in sight ”, as Surfer magazine describes it once.
“During Mike’s first walk,” said Brown in his narration of “The Endless Summer”, “the first five seconds, he knew that he had finally found this perfect wave.” The waves, he added, “seemed to have been made by a kind of machine. The rides were so long that I couldn’t put them on a single film. »»
In his autobiography, Hynson recalled the experience: “I did not have too many adrenaline rushs like that in my life, a pure and natural phenomenon. It was electric. The hair on my neck got up straight.
Michael Lear Hynson was born on June 28, 1942 in Crescent City, California, near the border of Oregon, the eldest of two sons of Robert Hynson, an engineer who worked for the Navy and Grace (Wheaton) Hynson. During its early years, the family divided their time between Hawaii and San Diego, finally settling in southern California at the age of 10. As a teenager, he started surfing with a crew called the sultans.
After graduating from the Jolla High School in San Diego, Hynson found himself dodging the letters from the dashboard in the first years of the Vietnam conflict. “I have circumvented them for three years,” he wrote in his book. The trip around the world for the film, he added: “It was the miracle I needed.”
The trip is not lacking in challenges. On a stopover in Mumbai on the way to South Africa in Australia, Hynson had to record five 16 millimeter film cartridges containing the precious images of the St. Francis under a Hawaiian shirt Baggy, to sneak it in front of the Indian customs agents who had confiscated cameras. And film in a repression of unauthorized photography.
Distributors initially shown little interest. Warner Bros., Hynson wrote: “predicted that it would never go beyond 10 miles from the beach.” Mr. Brown finally proved them, attracting lines around the block for a projection in Wichita, at Kan., During a snowstorm. “The Endless Summer” continued more than $ 30 million.
At the end of the 1960s, Hynson had left for another quest, this time to find enlightenment with the brotherhood of eternal love, a band of psychonauts and drug smugglers in the Laguna Beach region. Fraternity mixed elements of the eastern religion with a faith in the transformative powers of psychedelic drugs, which they treated in quantities so prodigious that the authorities described the “hippie mafia” to them.
Hynson soon took LSD regularly, but he escaped an arrest for a long time to make another cinematographic foray: he was mastering himself “Arc-en-ciel bridge” (1972), which he originally designed as a surf film. The film, directed by Chuck Wein, a protégé by Andy Warhol, has evolved into an almost documentary on mysticism, surfing and drugs, culminating with a concert by Jimi Hendrix at the base of the Laakala volcano in Maui.
In a scene, Hynson impatiently opens a surfboard and produces a hidden bag of hashish (in fact the ovaltine), reflecting a smuggling tactic that he had used with fraternity.
Despite the vertiginous representation of the film of drug use, the dependence of Hynson with regard to drugs, in particular cocaine and methamphetamine, finally led to a precipitated slide, including time behind bars to Drug possession. “I hit Rock Bottom,” he told Oc Weekly, “then I stayed there for a while.”
He finally got out of his spiral and started to make surfboards again. He credited his ex-wife, Melinda Merryweather, a former model of the Ford agency, and his longtime partner, Carol Hannigan, as “Angels”.
Ms. Hannigan survives him, just like Michael Hynson Jr., her son of her first marriage.
In a video interview of 1986, Hynson looked back on his perfect walk in South Africa and wondered if he and his companions had invented a surf fantasy with or simply reflected one already anchored in the conscience of the surfer. “If we had not had” endless summer “, he asked,” you think there would always be Quest of a perfect wave? Do you think someone would care about it?
“I don’t care about it,” he said. “But when I saw it, I knew exactly that we had jumped a bubble and had a dream.”
