I was the head judge for the Sandy Beach contest for 18 years, so I judged the mat surfing event as long as we ran it. I don’t have any photos, but Gordon Smith, one of the best mat surfers back in day, is still around, so I’m going to try to contact him and see if he’s got anything. I’ve attached a scan of one of our early programs, which lists Gordon as a two-time winner of the mat surfing event.

I also wrote about bag riding in Hawaiian Surfing and Al Santos, who was the best bag rider I’ve ever seen.

The popularity of bag riding on O‘ahu’s west side produced Hawai‘i’s greatest bag rider, Albert “Al” Santos. Born on July 17, 1934, Santos grew up riding paipo boards he made out of plywood and sand sliding on the sloping beachesin Nānākuli. With the influx of mattress covers during World War II, he began “belly bagging,” as he called it. Of all the sand-sliding sports,