Miki Dora The black knight returns
If you took James Dean’s cool, Muhammad Ali’s poetics, Harry Houdini’s slipperiness, James Bond’s jetsettting, George Carlin’s irony, and Kwai Chang Caine’s Zen, and rolled them into a single man with a longboard under his arm, you’d come up with something along the lines of Miki Dora, surfing’s mythical anti-hero, otherwise known as the Black Knight of Malibu.
The short version of the Dora story goes like this: Introduced to surfing by his stepfather in the thirties, Miklos Sander Dora made a huge reputation for himself at Malibu throughout the fifties, riding the long, hotdog waves of First Point with style and panache. Then came Gidget, the Beach Boys, beach blanket bingo, and the commodification of surfing. Dora was repulsed.
He voiced his protest through a series of colorful acts. The most memorable came in the 1967 Malibu Invitational. In the semi-finals, with thousands of spectators huddled on the beach, Dora took off on a wave, dropped his shorts, and flashed his bare ass whilst riding the length of First Point. It was his final fuck you. He then set off to travel the world on what can only be called the greatest surf odyssey of the twentieth century.
Throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties, Dora sightings flooded back to the States, always shrouded in romance and mystique: Dora the gypsy hopping trains in Budapest; Dora the nomad on the backs of camels in Kenya; Dora the bon vivant skiing in the French Alps; Dora the jewel thief hunting diamonds in Namibia; Dora the bullshit artist at the casino in Monte Carlo; Dora the hustler on the golf course in Biarritz… His surfboard was his magic carpet and his wits were his wings, and from the late sixties up until his death in 2002, Dora lived the Endless Summer lifestyle, defining what it means to be a surfer.
I ingested Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora, cover to cover in a hypnotic, four-hour sitting. It has the aura of an illuminated manuscript. If velvet covers, gilded pages and elegant script were what they did in the Middle Ages, then minimalist graphics, photographic smartness and tactile sleekness are what we do today. If you don’t surf, the book is beautiful. If you do, it’s nearly biblical — a portrait of surfing’s original artist.
And the legend only grows. The more you try and define Dora (poet, prankster, philosopher), the more he squirms out the side. In the making of the book, co-author Drew Kampion tells stories of multiple hard-drive crashes, unaccounted for edits, and the of Miki appearing in his kitchen one morning. Even the screen rights to his life story have been slippery going, with rumours of skirmishes and shit fights. Perhaps Miki should have the last word:
“Real secrets will get you dead. I always forget to remember anything. I am a waterlogged, sun-baked old surf bum and that act always ends the inquisition. I wanted to be left alone. So I left alone. Now I don’t want anything.”
Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora
, by C.R. Stecyk III and Drew Kampion, is out now on T. Adler Books, Santa Barbara.
This story originally appeared in Huck #001.
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