Miki Dora

Miklos Sandor Dora III (August 11, 1934 – January 3, 2002), known professionally as Miki Dora, was a noted surfer of the 1950s and 1960s in Malibu, California.[1]

Miki Dora
Dora in 1963
Personal information
BornMiklos Sandor Dora III
(1934-08-11)August 11, 1934
Budapest, Hungary
DiedJanuary 3, 2002(2002-01-03) (aged 67)
Montecito, California, US
Height6 ft 0 in (1.83 m)
Surfing specifications
StanceRegular (natural foot)

Dora received numerous nicknames and aliases during his life, including "Mickey Dora," "The Black Knight," "the Gypsy darling," "Malibu Mickey," "Kung'Bu," "the Fiasco Kid," "El Taquache," and "Da Cat."[2]

Life

Dora was introduced to surfing by his father, Miklos, in the late 1930s.[3] His stepfather Gard Chapin was also a "surf pioneer . . . a roughneck rebel who never fit into polite society."[2] Chapin's obsessions with surfboard design brought Dora into contact with California industrial designers including visits to the studio of Charles and Ray Eames.[2]

Dora's signature surfboard, released in 1966, became the biggest selling surfboard in history, and again on its re-release 25 years later.[2] The visibility of surfers such as Dora as well as the impact of the book Gidget meant many new surfers were starting to surf and thus crowding out existing surfers such as Dora. This sudden influx of surfers caused Dora to decry the masses both in person and in advertisements for his surfboards, one of which features Dora being crucified on two of his boards.[2]

He decided to leave the U.S. in 1974 and lived around the world spending a majority of his time in France and, in the '80s, South Africa.[4][5] After he returned to the US from France in 1981, he was subsequently arrested by the FBI for violating his parole by leaving the country in 1975 after pleading guilty to writing a bad check for the purchase of ski equipment. While serving time for that, he was sentenced to six months in federal prison after a Denver grand jury indicted him for credit card fraud in 1982.[1]

Despite his perceived mistrust towards the commercialization of surfing, Dora did enter into a profit sharing arrangement with Greg Noll to release a limited number of Miki Dora "da cat" surfboards, during which time he created magazine advertisements promoting the boards.[6]

He died at his father's home in Montecito, California, on January 3, 2002, at age 67 from pancreatic cancer.

"... 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."

— surfer and author Jamie Brisick, in a retrospective on Dora.[7]

Filmography

Feature Films

Year Title Role Notes
1963Beach PartyBeach Boy
1964Surf PartySurfer
1964Muscle Beach PartySurfer Boy
1964For Those Who Think YoungCollege Boy
1964Bikini BeachSurfer #6
1965Beach Blanket BingoBeach Boy
1965Ski PartyMickey
1965How to Stuff a Wild BikiniBeach Boy
1965The Living CurlHimself
1965The Endless SummerHimselfuncredited
1968The Sweet RideSurferuncredited
  • In 2010,the band Sol Driven Train released their song "Miki Dora" featured on their album Believe.
  • In 2011 a fictionalized poetic homage was made to Miki Dora played by Paulo Carvalho “The Story of Miki Dora“. Written by Danny Camp and performed by Paulo Carvalho (kid Rio)
  • In 2013, Leroy Fail recorded the song "Dora Lives".[8]
  • In 2014, Anderson .Paak included the track "Miki Doralude" on his album Venice. The track is an audio clip of Miki Dora talking taken from the 1990 documentary film Surfers: The Movie.
  • In 2018, Amen Dunes named a song "Miki Dora" on their album Freedom.[9]
  • In 2023 Pushkin Industries published season 3 of their podcast Lost Hills, titled "the Dark Prince" which follows the story of Miki Dora. [10]

References
  1. McLELLAN, DENNIS (2002-01-05). "Miklos 'Miki' Dora, 67; Rebel Surfer". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2018-07-29.
  2. Lunenfeld, Peter (June 2008). "Gidget on the Couch". The Believer. San Francisco: McSweeney's. Retrieved 2018-07-29.
  3. Pezman, Steve (Spring 2002). "The Cat's Ninth Life: On Visiting Miki Dora Near the End". The Surfers Journal. 11 (2).
  4. "Miki Dora Biography and Photos | SURFLINE.COM". www.surfline.com. Retrieved 2018-07-30.
  5. McLellan, Dennis (5 January 2002). "Miklos 'Miki' Dora, 67; Rebel Surfer". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 12 September 2021.
  6. Rensin, David (March 2008). All for a Few Perfect Waves - The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. pp. 892–899. ISBN 9780061868160.
  7. Jamie Brisick: Requiem for Surfing's Black Knight - The sanctioned Miki Dora, LA Weekly, Mar 2 2006
  8. "Dora Lives".
  9. Sodomsky, Sam (2018-01-17). ""Miki Dora" by Amen Dunes". Pitchfork.
  10. "The Dark Prince". Pushkin.
  • Miki Dora at IMDb
  • MikiDora.com as preseved by Archive.org. The website changed over the years, and was active from 2003 to 2018 (although it existed in a less than barebones state previous to that).
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