Miki Dora

Miki "Da Cat" Dora, a.k.a. "The Black Knight" (b. Miklos Sandor Dora 11 August 1934, Budapest, Hungary - d. 3 January 2002, Montecito, California) was an iconic Malibu surfer of the 1950s and 1960s. He had a unique style, in and out of the water, and was generally considered rather iconoclastic. He is featured in the seminal surf movie The Endless Summer, and is credited as a surfer in several beach party films - specifically Beach Party (1963), Surf Party (1964), Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), Ski Party (1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965).

At the height of his surfing popularity, he decided to flee the U.S. in 1970 after a warrant was issued against him for credit card and check fraud. He traveled around the globe surfing for a living before returning to California in 1973 and facing probation, which he broke. He was in and out of jail twice and spent much of his later years in France. He resurfaced in the documentary Surfers: The Movie (1990) and became the subject of his own film In Search of da Cat (1996) (TV).

Miki Dora died on January 3, 2002, at age 67 at his father's home in Montecito, California after a six-month battle with 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.... His surfboard was his magic carpet and his wits were his wings, and from the late ’60s up until his death in 2002, excepting a couple brief prison stints, Dora lived the Endless Summer lifestyle, defining what it means to be a surfer ...."

Publications

• Miklos S. Dora: The Aquatic Ape, The Surfer's Journal, 2003, Volume 12 NO. 1 (surfersjournal.com (.jpg))

Further reading

• Drew Kampion, C.R. Stecyk: Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora. T. Adler (US), 2005, ISBN 1-890481-17-3.
• David Rensin: All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora. It Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-06-077331-1.
• Greg Noll: The Saga of Da Cat, The Surfer's Journal, 05-12-2010 (PDF)

External links

• All For a Few Perfect Waves, an oral biography of Miki Dora by David Rensin ... the ULTIMATE Dora reference
• IMDb: Miki Dora
• MikiDora.com
• Surfline Miki Dora Bio
• LA Weekly Book Review of Dora Bio Requiem for Surfing's Black Knight
• Miklos 'Miki' Dora, 67; Rebel Surfer, Jan 5th 2002