Waterman: The Life and Times of Duke Kahanamoku

Waterman is the primary comprehensive biography of Duke Kahanamoku (1890–1968): swimmer, surfer, Olympic gold medalist, Hawaiian icon, waterman.

Long before Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz made their splashes within the pool, Kahanamoku emerged from the backwaters of Waikiki to develop into The united states’s first superstar Olympic swimmer. The unique “human fish” set dozens of global records and crowned the arena rankings for greater than a decade; his contention with Johnny Weissmuller remodeled competitive swimming from a trifling sideshow into a headliner event.

Kahanamoku used his Olympic renown to introduce the game of “surf-riding,” an activity unknown beyond the Hawaiian Islands, to the arena. Status proudly on his traditional wood longboard, he unfold surfing from Australia to the Hollywood crowd in California to New Jersey. No American athlete has influenced two sports as profoundly as Kahanamoku did, and yet he is still an enigmatic and underappreciated figure: a dismal-skinned Pacific Islander who encountered and overcame racism and lack of awareness long before the likes of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson.

Kahanamoku’s connection to his native land used to be similarly vital. He used to be born when Hawaii used to be an independent kingdom; he served because the sheriff of Honolulu throughout Pearl Harbor and International War II and as a globetrotting “Ambassador of Aloha” afterward; he died no longer long after Hawaii attained statehood. As one sportswriter put it, Duke used to be “Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey combined down here.”

In Waterman, award-winning journalist David Davis examines the outstanding lifetime of Duke Kahanamoku, out and in of the water.