California has long, rich history of handsome dark-haired pointbreak stylists. Matt Kivlin was the original. That hands-low, back-knee-tucked-in, slightly jazzy, easy-on-the-eyes way of getting from the top of the point all the way to the cove? Kivlin invented that. Dora copied it. Everyone else copied Dora, and eventually you get to Tom Curren.
Kivlin died on Sunday night, at age 85, of pneumonia. While he lived in Los Angeles his entire life, he more or less checked out of surfing in the early 1960s, moving on to career and family, and (my guess) not willing to be part of a lesser version of the sport he?d known prior to the Gidget-launched boom.
I had very little to go on when I originally wrote Kivlin?s EOS entry, in 2002. Thankfully, Jeff Duclos had done an excellent first-rate Kivlin profile for Longboard a few years earlier, and that was almost all I needed. With Jeff?s permission, I?ve gone through that profile and excerpted quotes from and about Kivlin, and posted them below. (If you can find a copy of the full article?it?s in the June, 1998, issue?it?s a fine read; our loss that Duclos isn?t doing more surf work.)
Malibu, in the first decade after the war, was a surfing paradise. And paradise was lit up by Kivlin?s generosity, his beaming good-guy smile, and his Gary-Cooper-meets-Fred-Astaire trim line. How deserving it would be to have him up on his own marble plinth, next to Dora. The sport would be so much nicer.
More here...
http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/eos-blog/matt-kivlin-1929-2014-styling-all-the-way/
