THE New England missionaries who began arriving in Hawaii in 1820 were horrified to find, as they sailed in, people surfing. “Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle,” wrote Hiram Bingham, the missionaries’ leader. This devastating display of half-nude “barbarism” — really, it was the ancient practice of he’e nalu, which was rich in traditional religious meaning — clearly had to be stamped out. Twenty-seven years later, with Hawaiian culture being destroyed by changes that the missionaries helped set in motion, Bingham wrote with satisfaction of the “decline and discontinuance of the surfboard.”

Of course, surfing was never fully extinguished. A handful of Hawaiians, notably Duke Kahanamoku, who won gold medals for swimming in the 1912 and 1920 Olympics, kept it alive, and the sport slowly caught on across the world. Today — cue different gushing tears — untold millions surf. The better waves on every accessible coast are overcrowded. Even mediocre spots are often mob scenes. A multibillion-dollar surf industry has emerged, eager to “grow the sport.” And now the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee has proposed including surfing in the 2020 Summer Games. When I heard this news, I thought, O.K., the Calvinists couldn’t finish off surfing, but maybe the Olympics can.

Organized competition is entirely peripheral to surfing qua surfing. People surf for love. The pastime lends itself to obsession. Surfers travel to the ends of the earth to find great, remote waves. I spent much of my 20s chasing waves through the Southern Hemisphere. Most surfers have home breaks that they come to know at a subgranular level of detail. Committed surfing is a deep immersion, literal and philosophical, in the ocean. The goal, if there is a goal, is a certain drenching experience of beauty. It’s quite possible to surf for decades without laying eyes on a surf contest.

But, with increased popularity, a slapdash competitive structure, different in each surf region, has developed. More visibly, there is an international pro tour, on which some of the world’s best surfers perform occasional miracles in 30-minute heats. The judging is wonky, obtuse, subjective. Surfing is, after all, more like dance than it is like baseball. Then there’s the ocean. If the waves are good, the contest will be good — and in that case I will probably be in the global audience, glued to the live-stream, waiting for something transcendent to happen. If the waves are crummy, the contest will be unwatchable.