Miki Dora

Miki "Da Cat" Dora (born August 11, 1934 in Budapest , Hungary as Miklós Sándor Dóra , † January 3, 2002 in Montecito , California ) was a Hungarian surfer, stunt man and actor. He was a style-forming surfer on the beaches of Malibu in the 1950s and 1960s.

Dora has worked as a stunt double as well as an actor in several feature films and played herself in the surf films The Endless Summer and Surfers: The Movie . Dora is considered one of the most important surfers of the 20th century.

Life

Dora's parents, Miklós and Ramóna Dóra, divorced when he was six years old. In the 1950s, Dora's stepfather, then well-known surfer Gard Chapin , bought the boy a new type of longboard from the designer Joe Quigg, which had special fins for the first time, and taught him to surf on the beaches of California. In the years that followed, the beach and surfing became Dora's life. Due to his extraordinary technical ability, his relaxed style and his social behavior, he earned the nickname "Da Cat" in the then still small local surfing community.

The great commercial success of Frederick Kohner's novel Gidget (1957) and the film based on it, April discovers the men ( Gidget , 1959), in the following decade a wave of so-called surfer films , which were usually set in the Malibu region, and the popularity of sport and the beach area increased enormously. Dora took on the stunts in numerous of these productions and finally played herself in The Endless Summer in 1966 due to his popularity .

During the same period, Dora repeatedly took part in various surfing competitions and won z. B. 1967 a trophy at the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championships on the Oahu North Shore .

The increasing number of technically uninhibited surfing beginners on his favorite beaches and the concomitant overcrowding of the waves themselves met with increasing dissatisfaction with Dora in the course of the 1960s. The same was true of the increasingly commercialized competition scene. Since he demonstrated this again and again through his behavior towards beginners and functionaries on the water and on land, he soon received a second nickname: "The Black Knight". Back then, Doras decorated his board with a swastika and was known for regularly using tricks to get beginners who crossed his waves off the board into the water.

While Dora felt increasingly repulsed by the effects of the surf boom, at the same time he entered into a business partnership with surfer legend Greg Noll in the 1960s , who subsequently manufactured and sold up to 175 Da Cat surfboards per week . Dora finished his last competition in 1967 at the Malibu Invitational Surf Classics in front of thousands of spectators by turning his back on his board to the audience and organizers while sliding down a wave in the semifinals, bending over and showing off his bare bottom .

Dora's public image in these years was again and again shaped by this and many comparable unconventional behaviors.

Dora left the United States in the early 1970s and for the next three decades surfed and lived in South Africa , Australia , the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, among others . He mainly lived in France. During these years he repeatedly financed his life with counterfeit credit cards and bad checks. After his return to the USA in the early 1980s, he was first imprisoned.

After his release, Dora lived repeatedly in Guéthary in the French department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques and, as one of the "legends" of surfing, was regularly invited to international meetings of the surfing scene.

After fighting a pancreatic tumor for six months, Dora died on January 3, 2002 in the house of his father, Miklós Dóra, in Montecito.

The magazine LA Weekly took Dora's life in 2006 as follows:

"[...] If you took James Dean ’s cool, Muhammad Ali ’s poetics, Harry Houdini ’s slipperiness, James Bond ’s jet-setting, George Carlin ’s irony and Kwai Chang Caine ’s Zen , and rolled them into one man with a longboard under his arm, you'd come up with something like Miki Dora, surfing's mythical antihero, otherwise known as the Black Knight of Malibu. [...] His surfboard was his magic carpet and his wits were his wings, and from the late '60s up until his death in 2002, excepting a couple brief prison stints, Dora lived the Endless Summer lifestyle, defining what it means to be a surfer [...]. "

"[...] If you take James Dean's coolness, Muhammad Ali's poetry, Harry Houdini's suppleness, James Bond's jet set life , George Carlin's irony and Kwai Chang Caine's Zen and you put everything in one man with a longboard under his arm, like that it would come out like Miki Dora, the mythical antihero of surfing, also known as the Black Knight of Malibu. [...] His surfboard was his magic carpet and his mind was his wing. From the late 1960s until his death in 2002, Dora lived the "endless summer" lifestyle, with the exception of a few brief prison stays, and thus defined what it means to be a surfer. [...]. "

Steve Pezman, editor of Surfer's Journal, described Dora 's life as follows:

"[...] He's probably the most notable California surfer in the history of the sport [...] If you had to pick one surfer that epitomized California surfing in the 20th century, it would be Miki Dora - everything that's wrong with it and everything that's right with it. "

“[...] He's probably the most respected California surfer in the history of the sport [...] If one had to pick a surfer who epitomized surfing in 20th century California, it would be Miki Dora - with everything what is going wrong and right in this [sport]. "

Film rights

Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way Productions acquired the rights to David Rensin's biography All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora in 2004 . Various conversations with Dora himself had repeatedly failed in the years before his death. Among other things, both Art Linson and John Milius had tried to find appropriate projects.

Double in surf scenes (excerpt)

• Beach Party (1963)
• Surf Party (1964)
• Muscle Beach Party (1964)
• Bikini Beach (1964)
• Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)
• Ski Party (1965)
• How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965)

Publications

• Miklos S. Dora: The Aquatic Ape , The Surfer's Journal, 2003, Volume 12 NO. 1 (online at surfersjournal.com (.jpg))

Documentation

• Surfers: The Movie (1990)
• Beaches of the sixties ... Surf forever (Samuel Lajus, ARTE, France 2010, 43mn)
• In Search of da Cat (1996)

Literature on Miki Dora

• Drew Kampion, CR Stecyk: Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora. T. Adler (US), 2005, ISBN 1-890481-17-3 .
• David Rensin: All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora. It Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-06-077331-1 .
• Greg Noll: The Saga of Da Cat , The Surfer's Journal, May 12, 2010 (PDF)
• Mickey Dora - The angry young man of surfing , Surf-Magazin, October 1963 (cover story)
• Malibu Characters and Waves , Surf Guide, 'Malibu Issue', November 1964 (cover story)
• Chris Mauro: Breaking Dora's Code , Surfer Magazine, April 2008
• Joel Tudor: # 14: Miki Dora - Surfer Celebreates the 50 Greatest Surfers of All Time , Surfer Magazine, online at surfermag.com
• Sheila Weller: Malibu's Lost Boys; Surfing was still a strange and exotic art in 1961, when Mike Nader, Duane King, and Larry Shaw escaped their troubled homes for the beach at Malibu. , Vanity Fair , August 1, 2006, online at surfwriter.net

Web links

• Miki Dora website
• Miki Dora in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Miki Dora (1936–2002) , biography on surfline.com
• Miki Dora images from another life a collection of photos & letters , surfwriter.net

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Miki Dora (1936-2002). Biography on surglich.com
2. ↑ Greg Noll (February 11, 1937-) , biography on sur lines.com
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Jamie Brisick: Requiem for Surfing's Black Knight - The sanctioned Miki Dora. In: LA Weekly. March 2, 2006.
4. ↑ further examples e.g. B. with Dennis McLellan: Miklos 'Miki' Dora, 67; Rebel Surfer , January 5, 2002.
5. ↑ Dennis McLellan: Miklos 'Miki' Dora, 67; Rebel surfer. January 5, 2002.
6. ↑ Quoted from Dennis McLellan: Miklos 'Miki' Dora, 67; Rebel Surfer , January 5, 2002.
7. ↑ Surfer Biopic - DiCaprio goes surfing , kino.de, May 13, 2004 , Leonardo DiCaprio filmed the life of a Californian surfer. dpa  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .