Surfing Great Dewey Weber Dies : Sports: He won fame as a hot-dogger in the long board era and became a millionaire as a short board manufacturer. Known as hard-living and fun-loving, the innovator had fallen on hard times.

Dewey Weber, whose intricate surfing style and board designs helped popularize the sport and made him one of surfing’s legends, died Wednesday of cardiac failure brought on by alcohol abuse. He was 54.

One of surfing’s first millionaires, Weber rode the financial crest of the budding surfing industry. He was discovered dead in a bed in his tiny apartment at the back of his Hermosa Beach surf shop early Wednesday evening. Weber was making plans to move into a new home, but had been ill for several weeks and a doctor had told him his liver was failing.

Those who knew the hard-living, fun-loving original crazy surfer said it was a painful end to a vibrantly full life.

“Some people might say he threw his life away but, hey, some of us get up every morning and go to work on those freeways and we just hate it,” said Gene Briggs, 50, a friend of Weber’s for the last two decades. “He always loved what he was doing.”

A happy-go-lucky yet competitively intense man, Weber earned accolades for his early performances in everything from yo-yo contests to wrestling matches. But his first and unending love was surfing.

Weber was the real-life incarnation of the surfer icon popularized in such classic surfing movies as “Endless Summer” and “Slippery When Wet,” both of which he appeared in. Weber was the woody-driving wave rider that the Beach Boys sang about.

“He was the ultimate hot-dogger of the long board era,” said Steve Pezman, publisher of Surfer’s Journal, a quarterly for older surfers. “With his flamboyant red trunks and blond hair, he was sort of the prototypal surfer. He was loud, really aggressive, ostentatious in his surfing and in his antics.

“He was one of the original party animals.”

In the earliest days of surfing’s popularity, Weber’s friends from that era said, Weber had no equal.

“He was a master . . . back in the days when surfing wasn’t big,” said David Nuuhiwa, 44, a two-time world champion surfer and early protege of Weber’s. “He was creative. We called him our little man on wheels because he was short but he could move around on those big boards like a little fly--up and down, up and down--so fast, so good.”

Modern innovations and shorter boards forced Weber out of the limelight. But he adapted his style to the new boards and encouraged new generations of surfers, often taking them into his home, giving them jobs in his shop and patiently teaching them the finer points of riding the waves.

Born David Earl Weber on Aug. 18, 1938, in Denver, Weber moved with his parents to Hermosa Beach at age 4 and immediately took to the beach life.

A natural competitor and a born ham, Weber parlayed his boyish charm into a brief television advertising career as a “Buster Brown Boy” for the shoe company of that name. Friends said he also appeared on the Ed Sullivan show after becoming a three-time national Duncan yo-yo champion.

During his teen-age years, Weber played quarterback for the school football team and won state wrestling titles while attending Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach. He was selected for the 1960 U.S. Olympics wrestling team, but a shoulder injury kept him from competing, friends said.

By that time, however, Weber was achieving fame in the waves of Southern California.

Weber earned his reputation as a surf hero during the late 1950s and early ‘60s, during the “golden years” of long board surfing. While most long boarders cruised the waves with their arms hanging loosely against their sides, Weber walked up and down the 10-foot planks with short choppy steps, changing positions in the flash of an eye.

Colleagues say he was among the first to assume the arch-backed “hang-10” position with all of his toes gripping the edge of the board.

“He was catlike on a board,” said John Joseph, 47, who became a world champion surfer in 1962 under Weber’s tutelage. “He was all over and switching from one position to another so fast you really had to watch him to see how and when he did it.”

Because there were no major surfboard manufacturers, Weber and other surfing enthusiasts taught themselves how to make them. As youths flocked to the sport, they sought out experienced surfers such as Weber to make boards for them.

At first Weber, who worked for several years as a Los Angeles County lifeguard, treated board-making as a sideline. But as the sport turned to shorter boards, Weber banked on his reputation as a surfing legend to help build a highly successful manufacturing business.

“A lot of guys were defensive about the change, but Dewey saw that what was happening was a good thing and adjusted his own approach and psychology to go with the new trend,” said Drew Kampion, former editor of Surfer magazine.

Weber’s innovative surfboard designs became the board of choice among such surfing notables as Harold Iggy and long board world champion Nat Young, who formed the Dewey Weber Surf Team, one of the first of its kind at the time.

“Surfboards were measured by how many hot guys you had riding your brand,” Pezman said. “And Dewey had one of the hot teams.”

At its peak in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Dewey’s burgeoning company was cranking out as many as 100 surfboards a week and shipping them all over the world.

But the short board evolution eventually worked against Weber, said Allan Seymour, special events coordinator of Action Sports Trade Expo. The demands of the new sport required a number of innovations.

Large surfboard companies such as Weber’s “couldn’t compete with the small, garage-based companies that could react quickly to the changes,” Seymour said. “They became what General Motors is to the guy making sports cars.”

In the 1980s, the annual Dewey Weber Longboard Surfing Classic helped spark renewed interest in long boarding, but Weber was unable to capitalize on the renaissance.

In 1986, Weber’s parents died within months of one another and his marriage of nearly two decades came to a bitter end. A couple of years later, he injured his back during a surfing trip in Baja, virtually ending his surfing career. And for the first time in his life, friends said, Weber became melancholy. That was when his heavy drinking began.

He became a daily fixture at the Hermosa Saloon five blocks from his surf shop; friends looking for him knew to look there first.

“Everyone knew he was drinking and worried about his drinking,” Pezman said. “He didn’t hide it. He was not a closet tippler.”

Brent Chastain, Weber’s friend, roommate and eventual shop manager, said he tried to persuade Weber to seek treatment, but did not succeed.

In his final weeks, Weber tried to ease back on his drinking, Chastain said.

“He knew his liver was going. He knew he was sick. But he just couldn’t see what to do to straighten it all out,” Chastain said.

Weber’s girlfriend went to the small apartment he and Chastain shared to check on him about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.

“She thought he was sleeping on the bed,” Hermosa Beach Police Cmdr. Michael Lavin said. “She sat down waiting for him to awaken and after a couple of minutes, when he hadn’t moved, she touched him. He was cold.”

Weber’s doctor, Leland Whitson of Manhattan Beach, attributed his death to acute cardiorespiratory collapse because of delirium tremens. “He died from drinking,” Whitson said.

On Thursday morning, Weber’s shop was closed--no surfers milling around, no war stories being swapped of big-wave riding. A simple bouquet was tucked into the handle of the glass front door.