Who runs this

A site about a man whose name is owned by somebody should say who owns it and who is paying for the site. So, plainly.

What we are

Aloha To You is published by a for-profit company that holds a licence to use Duke Kahanamoku's name and likeness. The same company runs a gallery in Waikīkī that sells things. That is a commercial business and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

This site is the other half of it. Nothing is sold here, nothing is advertised here, and there is no link to the gallery anywhere except one line in the footer, in the same type as its neighbours.

What we are not

We are not a charity, not a nonprofit, and not a 501(c)(3). Nothing paid to us is a tax-deductible donation, and this site does not ask anyone for money.

We are not the Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation. That is an independent 501(c)(3), founded in 1986, which runs the scholarships, the grants, the Waterman Hall of Fame and the water-safety work that most people have in mind when they think of a Duke Kahanamoku charity. It is not us, it has no connection to us, and it is the place to give. Their site is here. We receive nothing from your gift and we do not want to.

We are also not Malama Pono, Inc., which owns the trademarks and the publicity rights, and from whom the licence comes.

Why we write some things differently

Two phrases appear on other Duke sites that will not appear on this one.

He was not the father of surfing. Heʻe nalu is Native Hawaiian and centuries older than him. It is in petroglyphs and in moʻolelo, tied to particular breaks and particular chiefs, and it was driven down under missionary suppression before he was born. What Duke did was carry it out to the world and help bring it back at home. That is a large enough thing to say without borrowing something that was never his.

Five Olympic medals, not six. Three gold and two silver, across 1912, 1920 and 1924. He was an alternate in 1928 and again in 1932 at forty-two, and did not compete in either. He was not on the 1924 relay.

How this site is written

Every factual claim here is either sourced or marked as unresolved. Where accounts conflict we say they conflict rather than picking the tidier one. Where we are working from a reproduction rather than an original we say so.

We do not invent quotations for Duke and we do not inherit them either. Three sayings attributed to him circulate very widely, and every trail we followed led to quotation-aggregator sites citing each other, with no book, no interview and no date behind any of them. They may well be genuine. Until somebody finds one in Duke Kahanamoku's World of Surfing or in Brennan's biography with a page number, they will not appear here.

There will be no artificially generated likeness of him on this site, no synthesised voice, no colourised footage, and nothing you can ask questions of that pretends to be him.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we would like to know and we will say that we fixed it. Corrections will be logged in public with dates, including the ones that are embarrassing.

Contact details, named people and the corrections log to follow.