Surfing

All For A Few Perfect Waves - Book Review

I first heard of All for A Few Perfect Waves - a biography of Miki Dora (or is it Mickey Dora?) via an interview with the author of the book, David Rensin, that appeared in Surfer Magazine in April 2008. It was a great interview, but I thought it was enough of a picture of Miki Dora’s life that I might not actually have to read the book. Wrong. I have to admit that I circled this book at my local bookstore many times before finally buying it…picking it up, flipping through, and putting it down. I had bought relatively…err…thick…books before and never gotten through them, and, in the case of a biography, dumping the book in boredom when I reached tales of the subject’s high school days. Point is, I wasn’t so sure. I’m damn glad that I picked it up, and in a not-like-Miki-Dora-at-all kind of way, I paid for it.

In sum, All for A Few Perfect Waves is a fantastic book that any serious surfer or surfing historian must have in his reading quiver in order to fully respect the surfing past.

This biography is very different from any other I’ve read, because interspersed with Rensin’s narrative are a collection of quotes, points of view and stories about Miki Dora by all of the people who played some sort of role in his life. Lovers, haters, lawyers, businessmen, fellow surfers of the era, including Mickey Munoz, Gregg Noll and, of course, Johnny Fain (who it appears that Dora beat up from time to time just for the sake of beating up on him). Everybody has a piece of Dora, and Rensin’s book is the medium by which they are heard once and for all. Each of the cast of characters - some 300 people - were meticulously interviewed by Rensin in preparation for the book. Indeed, the research began not in 2003, when he first started writing the Dora biography, but in the early eighties when Rensin’s article about the legend of Miki first appeared in California magazine. Rensin has been at it for some time.

Readers are the great beneficiary of Rensin’s efforts, as he succeeds through his words and the words of the people around Dora at the time in transporting us back to the beach when Malibu was still a virgin. He proceeds to document just why and how Miki Dora picked up and left Malibu, never to come back again.

Dora clearly had an incredible impact on those around him, perhaps none more so than the impact he had on his father, Miki Dora, Sr., faced with a son whose life pursuit he could not understand and, ultimately, disapproved of. If anything, Miki Dora’s relationship with his dad might be something of a lesson for all of us when it comes to our relationship with our fathers. It is clear that both Miki and Miki Sr. had a deep, if troubled, bond.

There are some startling moments in the book, not the least of which is the turn for the worse Miki Dora undergoes in the early part of this century, ultimately leading to his death from pancreatic cancer in 2001. That aside, on his last visit to Malibu, he and a friend drive past Malibu, but Miki Dora doesn’t even bother to look out over the PCH to see the wave. Malibu was dead to Dora.

Finally, and perhaps the most interesting, is the revelation that pops up throughout the book that Dora invented localism. Oft repeated, it appears that Dora really did invent localism, and admited as much to Chris Malloy on a surfing trip to Chile late in Dora’s life.

There are plenty more waves of revelations in All For a Few Perfect Waves. Rensin paints what appears to be as accurate of a picture of Miki Dora we’ll ever get.

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