Malibu Seen: Who is Mr. Big? Part one
By Benjamin Marcus · Mon Jul 20 2026
History and mysteries at the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center
Tore myself away from Santa Cruz, which was very much enjoying that semi-world-record southern hemisphere swell of mid June. Drove down the coast on Juneteenth and got stuck in a 40-minute traffic jam at Bixby Creek Bridge, which was no bueno. You don't go to Big Sur to sit in traffic. Came back to Malibu to write a review of Wally's and also to cross the Orange Curtain and attend the hard hat/soft opening of the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center. This is a big deal. And here is that story in part one of two parts.
"It's a game changer, compared to where we were in San Clemente. This is going to be something — it's going to be very, very impressive. We have big ideas."
— Jeff Alter, Orange County Register, Dec. 16, 2025
The cultural stereotyping of surfers in the media — From Frankie and Annette to Jeff Spicoli to Mick the Masochist to “Point Break” to “Surfer, Dude” with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson (a movie I have never hazarded because the word of mouth was vomitous, and it infamously scored a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes) — would have you believe surfers uniformly suffer from the Seven Deadly Uns:
Unsophisticated
Uncultured
Uncouth
Uncreative
Unintelligent
Uneducated
Unmotivated.
While that's true of many in the surfing tribe, anyone who believes all surfers suffer from all seven is Uninformed, and indulging in a canard (cool word, look it up).
The new iteration of the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center Formerly Known as the Surfing Heritage Foundation (SHACCFKATSHF) is a shining beacon of how sophisticated, cultured, curated, creative, intelligent, educated, and motivated surfers can be about their own history and culture.
For a special invitation-only sneak preview on June 20 — one day after the Obama Presidential Center was unveiled to the unsurprisingly mixed reaction — the founders Willy Wonka-ed open the doors of their new facility in Laguna Beach, for what founder Dick Metz called a "hard hat" opening, since the SHACC is about 90% pau (Hawaiian for "done"), with refinements and polishing to come before a Grand Opening in September, after the hordes of Laguna summer have gone.
And it's something. Walking into the 9,000-square-foot main room with 30-foot ceilings ringed with surfboards, I thought the same thing I thought when I visited the Surf Ranch in Lemoore, home of the first Kelly Slater artificial wave: "Blank check."
The dreamers/engineers/entrepreneurs behind the Kelly Slater Wave Co. machine in Lemoore clearly had a blank check — trees, gravel, fencing, misters for the valley heat, and of course the wave itself — one of the great crossovers of natural and engineering wonder — are all first cabin, thoroughly modern and top dollar.
British Museum X Cooperstown X Library of Alexandrian Greeks
The new SHACC building has that same feel. In a word: velvet. Lavish. Luxurious. Respectful. Combine the artifacts of the British Museum with the history of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown with the Alexandrian Greek ambition to put all human knowledge under one roof, and you've got the gist.
This place is fancy as, inside and out, and perfectly located, located, located a few doors up from Main Beach Laguna, equidistant between HB Pier and San Clemente Pier and directly across from Hennessey’s Tavern. And they even have their own parking lot!!!!
Whatever, the SHACC has a collection of 800 surfboards, with a couple dozen of them on exhibit along the walls and in the rafters of that shining, happy new facility. The rest are stored in hidden nooks and crannies, behind the walls of thebuilding.
Along with a good chunk of the total history of surfing: Captain Cook to Teahupoo.
From a closet above PCH
I've been involved with the SHACCFKATSHF going back to at least 2005, when it was called the Surfing Heritage Foundation and was squirreled away in a nondescript business park behind San Clemente. When I described Spencer Croul and Dick Metz as co-founders, Barry Haun corrected me again and filled in some early backstory: “Spencer Croul came on as a co-founder in 2004, when he bought the San Clemente space and the doors opened to the public in 2005. Before that, Dick and Spencer shared Spencer's Costa Mesa warehouse, where the boards were mostly kept. Dick's office at the time was literally a closet inside his then-girlfriend's office — up the street on PCH, across from the Laguna Art Museum, above what was the Indian Territory store. Full circle, now that the SHACC has landed back in Laguna.”
Croul added: “The Croul Foundation donated the San Clemente building to SHACC in 2015. It only (?!) sold for $4.2 million, but the proceeds went a long way to covering the cost of the new building.”
Malibu citizen John Mazza added: “I think you need to add that Dick was the founder and partner of the Hobie surf shops in Hawaii and California for many years and had the foresight to understand that there was value in keeping old wood boards that were traded in or going to be dumped as they were replaced by modern technology during the '50s and '60s."
He ended up with what was the basis of the collection that exists at SHACC today. When he moved back to California, he brought the gems of that collection with him. At the time collecting surfboards as a hobby did not exist and actually consisted of surfers like Dick understanding that the culture of surfing was expanding and valuable. Only with the first organized surfboard auctions did the value of saving the history of surfboards become understood.
It was really from surf shops that Dick ran that the origin came from not his closet which would have to have been pretty big.”
Brock Little at Waimea on the 11'4"
When I worked at SURFER Magazine in the 1990s, we borrowed an 11’4” 4’-inch-thick beast of a yellow Greg Noll elephant gun from off the wall at the Hobie Shop in Dana Point. I barely got that thing on the plane and very carefully transported that gun to Oahu where Brock Little rode it at Waimea. I think that board weighed more than Brock. He said it paddled great but didn't turn too good. That board almost went into the lava rocks but we got it back in one piece.
Working at SURFER Magazine from 1989 to around 1999, I'd saved a lot of artifacts and was glad to have somewhere to send them where they'd be appreciated: VHS tapes from the first six years of the Surfer Video Awards, some of those 14-foot-long, hand-scrawled faxes Derek Hynd used to send from the ASP World Tour. All kine cool stuffs.
In 2005 — for an SHF project about the evolution of surf wear — I put together a video montage called “Trunk It,” which opens with Bishop Museum footage of Waikiki in the early 1900s, guys surfing canoes in 1906, Duke dancing hula at the Moana Surfrider — and closes with “Sweet Sixteen:” 16 minutes of 16mm film shot by longtime Latigo resident John Larronde in 1947: San Onofre, Malibu, Ventura overhead, Rincon with Bob Simmons, Matt Kivlin, Joe Quigg.
That footage is the Rosetta Stone of surfboard history — and like the Elgin Marbles, I kiped it, copied it, and returned it to a former Malibu person who didn’t know what they had — and it's in safe-keeping at the SHACC.
Stay tuned for Part Two!