Men and Women of the Sea
What began last year as an honor will become an actual location this year when Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation (ODKF) unveils the Hawaii Waterman Hall of Fame at Hilton Hawaiian Village Sunday, Aug. 21, with an awards dinner honoring its second class of inductees.
By Chad Pata
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He surfed up until 2006 when, at the age of 76, a rotator cuff injury and cancerous neck tumor ended his career. Through more than a half century of surfing, he still values quality over quantity when it comes to waves, and the innovation he hates the most in surfing shows you plainly how old school he really is.
“I can’t stand the leash; it has caused a lot of problems. It has created quantity freaks; they have to get every wave in the ocean,” says Cole. “Also, because they don’t lose their board and have to swim after it, they flounder around in the white water.”
While he acknowledges that at certain breaks like Rocky Point and Yokohamas, where there are rocks, the leash has a purpose, but for the most part he believes it kills the purity of surfing.
“With a sandy beach and a little bit of a swim, it seems a bit ridiculous. When we didn’t have a leash then we all surfed next to each other. Now they surf underneath and inside of you, and the bigger sets come in and they are floundering in the white water but they aren’t worried because they can keep their boards.
“It has eliminated the essential part of surfing, which is the swim in to get your board to learn the rip tides. But that said, I’m obsolete, I haven’t done anything new since I was 24.”
Swimming is where the next inductee, Aileen Soule, excelled. At the age of 14 she was youngest Olympic champion in U.S. history, when at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp she competed in both diving and swimming, taking gold in the springboard competition.
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She followed that up with another first at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, where she was the first woman to medal in both sports, taking a bronze in the 100-meter backstroke and silver in the springboard. It was on that team that she got to know Duke Kahanamoku on the voyage by steamer from New York, fueling her attraction to the Hawaiian Islands.
Soule turned pro after the Olympics, appeared in some Hollywood films, formed a special bond with Duke and remained active in competitive sports throughout the 20th century. This includes co-founding the Hawaii Senior Games. During her reign as the grande dame of Olympic swimmers, Soule also was regarded as a living treasure, a pioneer of women’s sports, a spunky celebrity and an asset to the world.
She moved here in the late ‘50s and continued competing almost up to the time of her death at age 96 in 2002. In her memoirs, she wrote of her passion for not just swimming, but competing.
“It did not end in her youth,” says her daughter Patti Anderson. “She set an age-class record in 1976 in the Waikiki Roughwater Swim and set numerous world age-class records in pool swimming, and swam well into her 90s, swimming almost daily in the ocean behind her Waikiki apartment.”
Such was her impact on the swimming world that in 1976 she was elected to the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, and in 1984 marched in with the Olympic flag at the Games in Los Angeles.
The final inductee won no medals, but Ethel Kukea paved the way for all the women who followed her into the formerly maledominated world of surfing. She proved to be a leader, dominating the nascent world of women’s surfing in its first two competitions, the Makaha International Surfing Championships, taking the title in 1955 and ‘56.
Her success created the building blocks that helped lead Rell Sunn to be the dynamic surfer and community leader she was, and the world champion and million-dollar property that Carissa Moore is today.
(Her son Kahele would go on to serve as principal of the elementary school at Kamehameha.)
Their stories will be on display Sunday, Aug. 21, for all to learn from with a Hawaiian luau to feast upon and the sounds of Maunalua and the Brothers Cazimero to soundtrack it.
The public is invited. Tickets cost $85 until Aug. 17 and $95 after that, and can be purchased on its website, dukefoundation.org.
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