Four new members were inducted into the Surfer’s Walk of Fame in a ceremony on Hermosa Beach’s Pier Plaza Saturday morning. Stretching from the era of no wetsuits to neon wetsuits, the latest additions spanned multiple generations and showcased the breadth of South Bay surfing achievement.
Ted Robinson, Kelly Gibson, Chip Post and John Leininger made up the Class of 2016 inductees. The quartet was the first set of nominees to come through a revamped selection process.
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Photos by Mike Balzer
Unlike in years past, nominees were slotted into categories: Champion, South Bay Legend, Pioneer, Cultural Legend and Female Legend. Under new rules, a maximum of four surfers can be inducted each year, with no requirement to fill all the categories. (For this year, no nominee was selected in the woman’s category.)
John Joseph, a 2004 inductee and member of the selection committee for the Walk, stressed the importance of community involvement in coming up with a roster of nominees.
“If you think someone belongs, please nominate them,” Joseph said. “There are so many deserving people around here, but we have to have the nominations to get them in.”
First up was Robinson, in the Champion category. The former touring pro achieved high ranks on both a shortboard and a longboard and continues to froth. He wears a Rip Curl-brand watch that tracks his sessions, and surfed 432 times last year. According to a feature in the surf publication Stab Magazine, Robinson totalled more than 21 whole days in the ocean.
“Being in the water is really important to me, every single day,” Robinson said. “It keeps me young. I can’t imagine my life without surfing.”
Joining Robinson was his friend, South Bay Legend inductee Kelly Gibson. Gibson shared a story of getting a ride to Mira Costa High School with Robinson after a surfing session. The two made a quick but decisive stop before getting to campus.
“We were at Best Donuts and Ted said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think so,’” Gibson recalled. “I went to class, Ted went back surfing.”
Gibson said that the camaraderie, and rivalry, among himself, Robinson and fellow South Bay touring pro Chris Frohoff, was an essential part of their success.
“We wouldn’t have done it, I don’t believe, if the other guys hadn’t been there, pushing one another,” Gibson said.
Representing an earlier era was Chip Post, the selection for the Pioneer category. Post grew up in Hermosa, and would go on to a long career in city government. His youth was surf-crazed, spending as much time in the waves as he could, despite the rudimentary gear and cumbersome boards of the time. Sonny Vardeman, a 2004 inductee to the Surfers Walk, recalled that Post was once unable to get a ride to Palos Verdes for a good winter swell. So he paddled there from the Hermosa Pier, without a wetsuit.
Post was among the first to ride the huge surf of the North Shore of Oahu. At the time, the world looked at surfing very differently.
“Sixty years ago, surfing was just a small fragment of the counterculture. Surfers were Jack Kerouac-, Woody Guthrie-types,” Post said. “This was long before it became a cultural bonanza, a pop-culture phenomenon.”
Rounding out the nominees was the Cultural Legend John Leininger, who has spent more than 50 years in the local surf industry. He recalled with pride the days when Hermosa produced more surfboards than anywhere else in the world. And in those pre-Internet days, Leininger recalled, surfboard shops served a vital function, providing a place for surfers to exchange information about spots and swells.
Leininger looked back fondly at his career in the surf industry, convinced that he was made for it.
“A number of times over my career, people said, ‘When are you going to get a real job?’” he said said. “Well, I tried that, and I didn’t like it.”
The nominees may have spanned different eras in the South Bay’s surfing history, but were unified in the continued reverence for the sport, and the way it brought out the best.
“It has changed a lot, but at the end of the day it’s still pure: all the guys, out there, doing it for the love,” Gibson said. ER
