Word: sporting
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...them, they abruptly dropped the pastime. Except for Vason's, missionaries' accounts of Tonga during the 1800s make no mention of fanifo or any aquatic activity that could be mistaken for it. What happened? The widely accepted theory is that someone convinced Tonga's ruling chiefs to ban the sport. That someone was not Vason, who arrived with eight others sent by the London Missionary Society. Amid civil war, three of Vason's colleagues were killed; the others fled. Vason, a young bricklayer, saved himself, he wrote, by assuming "the revolting customs of a savage life." Far from banning anything...
...pastime in which men and women, boys and girls - almost certainly naked - cavorted in the surf. It's thought that the missionaries convinced the chiefs that fanifo was corrupting Tongan youth and didn't belong in a budding Christian society, and that the chiefs placed on the sport a tapu, or ban. "This is, to some extent, speculation," says Po'oi Puloka, secretary general of the Tonga Amateur Sports Association and National Olympic Committee (tasanoc), "but it's more than likely what happened." (The banning of a sport has a more recent precedent in Tonga. In the 1920s authorities prohibited...
...adopted two others - how to surf, and it was their eldest son, Michael, who first showed promise. By the time he was in high school, having featured in the local press for excelling in overseas competitions, Michael had drawn a number of his friends toward this unfamiliar sport. None of them had a board of his own - one still can't buy surf equipment anywhere in Tonga - so they used boards donated over the years by guests of the resort, usually superseded old faithfuls. "If the surf was good, I'd pick them up from school and bring them back...
...competitive success of some Tongan surfers seems less important than the joy the sport has brought to local converts. "It is pure soul surfing for most of them," says David Boardman, an Australian staying at the resort. For the idle Liava'a, it was friends' involvement in the sport and their brightly colored surfing magazines that sparked his interest. Having had two serious knee injuries playing rugby as a schoolboy, he appreciates how surfing can provide equal or greater thrills without rugby's bone-jarring collisions. "I love it," he says. "It is fun for hours...
...island where nearly everyone could lose a few pounds without keeling over, Burling's students are among the fittest-looking folk around. Lavinia Sunia, 15, had no interest in sport until she started mucking about on a board seven years ago. "I just watched TV," she says. Now she'll surf two hours every day if conditions allow it, and her toned body would be the envy of teenage girls anywhere...