Riding waves on boards. Ancient Hawaiian tradition called it "The Sport of Kings". And it was in Hawaii that surfing was first seen to be practiced with unsurpassed skill. Captain James Cook was stunned by the way the surfers managed to stay erect on their surfboards and ride the waves at such velocities. The entry of Christianity led to the decline of the sport because the missionaries of those times frowned upon the scant way the surfers were dressed. But the sport did not die out completely and the art of riding the wave was acknowledged as a blend of athleticism and the understanding of the beauty and power of nature by the Reverend Henry T. Cheever, who documented it in 1851. Mark Twain tried it and failed in 1866.
Alexander Hume Ford introduced the sport to Jack London when London and his wife Chairman visited Hawaii in 1907. Together with George Freeth, an intrepid surfer, they brought the art of riding the waves to it own. Subsequently Duke Kahanamoku, a Polynesian, brought it to California in 1912. From then on the popularity of the sport grew exponentially.
Simultaneously, the early twentieth century saw the birth of the t-shirt, the ancestor of the surfing t-shirt. It was during the World War I, that the American soldiers noticed that the European soldiers were wearing comfortable cotton underwear when they were wearing woolen ones, totally unsuitable to the then European weather. Since the undergarment of the European soldier was shaped somewhat like a "T", the Americans called it a T-Shirt.
The T-Shirt had come into its own rights (thanks to Hollywood) and everyone, man, woman and child, people from all walks of life and all ages - from the youngest to the oldest - were wearing t-shirts. It had graduated to a National Phenomenon. Printing on T-Shirts had boosted the popularity of the T-Shirt to such heights and it had become a medium of expression of just about anything and everything.
