Hawaiian: The Legend of Eddie Aikau | Surfline

Using a combination of archival footage, family photos, first-person accounts, and re-enacted scenes, Hawaiian: the legend of Eddie Aikau provides a thorough account of the life of one of Hawaii's greatest watermen. As each person in the film gives his or her recollections of Eddie, a clearer picture of humility and courage emerges. The great tragedy of his disappearance at sea looms over the film, adding poignancy to the triumphs and setbacks that Eddie faced. And taken together, the events of his life line up like stars in the Pacific night sky, marking a course of development from great surfer to ageless Hawaiian legend. But perhaps the film's greatest achievement is its deft presentation of the corrosive effects of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and the ensuing denigration of traditional Hawaiian ways of life.

Three Scholars -- Jonathan Osario, Nainoa Thompson, and Isaiah Walker -- give many examples of the injustices done throughout the 20th century in Hawaii: The coup d'état set up by American businessmen in 1893; The systematic crushing of the Hawaiian language in schools; And pervasive stereotypes of native Hawaiians as stupid and lazy.
"Say it long enough," Nainoa Thompson explains of racist ideology, "and you'll believe it, and then you'll become it." Surfing in Hawaii, as every visiting waverider should know, can mean experiencing fierce localism.

As Jonathan Osario, Professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii, notes in the film, "We are an angry people, a warrior people." He speaks in reference to the commodification of traditional Hawaiian arts such as hula and ukulele performed for the endless stream of tourists in Waikiki. But the larger point is that a proud and self-sufficient culture has been left with few resources, other than performing a kind of minstrel show, or parody of itself for outsiders.

Isaiah Walker points out that for all that was taken from native Hawaiians, the surf zone is where they "assert themselves... resisting colonialization, and asserting their chiefly role." The great irony of the overthrow, Walker shows, is that the same group who engineered the take over of a sovereign kingdom, established surf clubs and adopted surfing at Waikiki, complete with signs that read, "Whites only." This systematic racism is brought home in the moving recollections of Eddie's brother, Clyde Aikau, who says that as kids on the beach at Waikiki in the 1960s, "We was not wanted." Tearing up, he adds, "That really hurt."

But surfing was a place where the boys experienced freedom. "The water was everything to us," Clyde says. And from the beginning it was clear that Eddie had a special gift.

"He could do things that other people couldn't do," Kimo Hollinger related of Eddie at Waimea on a recent phone call. "He timed it... waiting for the first swell and the backwash off the rocks, and the wave would be so steep, but he took off deep, at an angle."

And the footage in the film of Eddie Aikau at 17-years-old, charging 20-foot plus Waimea, is a study in pure Hawaiian surfing: A wide stance for stability, but a lithe upper body, and micro-adjustments to his line, allowed Eddie to make unbelievable drops from behind the peak on boards that were none too user friendly.

As Clyde Aikau noted, also on a recent phone call, "If you looked at the lift [rocker] from nose to tail on Eddie's board... there was no lift -- it was straight like a two-by-four." It was Eddie's stance that marked him as a great Hawaiian waverider. Again, that bandy-legged squat that might sound a little ugly in those terms was in fact utilitarian and timeless. Poised and artful, those arms drawn up, his back leg holding the long rail of his gun in the face of the wave, was physical perfection and a high expression of the essential Hawaiian art of surfing.

Eddie's surfing career coincided with the nascent pro surfing world of the North Shore in the mid 1970s, when the Australians in particular took high performance surfing to new levels with egos to match the moves the made in the water. Hawaiian surfers, living in a place that was being transformed by outsiders in ways that left few options for them in their own land, were understandably infuriated by haoles boasting of their superior abilities in the surf.

Soon, things turned dangerous on the North Shore. Famously, Eddie intervened on behalf of Rabbit and Ian Cairns, and as Shaun Tomson notes in the film, Eddie had the "gravitas," to pull it off. "I don't think there was another surfer who could have done what Eddie did," Tomson adds. The situation was way beyond a squabble over a particular surf session -- Hawaiians from outside of surfing were gunning for Rabbit and Cairns -- and without Eddie's help those two may well have ended up in serious trouble, with unknown repercussions to the future of pro surfing.

Why did Eddie step in to help these two? The film does not answer that question definitively, but Sam George suggests that the Hawaiian custom of Ho'o pono pono -- getting together to air grievances and work out solutions -- may have been a reason. "Ho'o pono pono was a family tradition for the Aikaus," George said. "Pops Aikau got everyone together on a weekly basis." Continuing, George related that he thought that Eddie believed that Hawaii, and Hawaiian culture, was about fairness, and that at his core, Eddie simply cared about other people. "The biggest discovery I had in making this film," George said, "was that Eddie was a hero. He put himself in harm's way for other people as a lifeguard, and he stood up in front of his own people for the Aussie's." A telling piece of audio in the film has Eddie saying to Kimo Hollinger of the Aussies, "They brag too much, Kimo." His words sound angry, and he says there will be fights, but adds, "I don't want to fight nobody." And Sam George took this point to say: "Eddie was a hero to people he didn't know, and didn't even like, and he did it out of a sense of fairness."

Hawaiian: the legend of Eddie Aikau is remarkably well done. The narration by Josh Brolin is subtle and captures the ominous feeling of the open ocean in the beautifully filmed opening scene. In speaking of the making of the film, producer Paul Taublieb said: "People should know that this is Sam George's film."

Of course, a documentary film of this scale takes the efforts of many people, but Sam George's long history of probing the significance of what we're after in all of this wave riding seems to have coalesced in this effort. "We were trying to get the context of the modern Hawaiian experience in this film," George said. "And we wanted this to be a statement about surfing in Hawaiian culture."

It's clear that Sam George and company have succeeded in their mission. The much-used phrase, "Eddie Would Go," is a statement of fact. Eddie went -- on huge waves, on over 500 successful rescues at Waimea Bay, and most famously on an attempt to save his shipmates aboard the capsized Hokulea in March 1978. An exemplar of deep Hawaiian values -- skill, courage, and aloha -- Eddie held to a real sense of the significance of his Polynesian heritage. Any surfer who aspires to be a "waterman" needs to see this film.

Hawaiian: the legend of Eddie Aikau plays Wednesday, September 18th at Turtle Bay's Surfer Bar, and Sunday, September 22nd at the Hawaii Theater in Honolulu. Profits from the showings in Hawaii go to the Eddie Aikau Foundation (www.eddieaikaufoundation.org). The film will run on ESPN TV October 1st as part of the network's acclaimed "30 for 30" series. Download from I-tunes on October 2nd.