Steve Barilotti's profile on Mike Hynson ran in the August 2007 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Jimi Hendrix had been dead a year, but the revolution—or at least a movie version of it—kept right on jammin’ without him. Less than a month after Hendrix played a free concert on the slopes of Mt. Haleakalā, effectively wrapping principal photography for Rainbow Bridge,...
Matt George’s critique of the ASP world tour ran in the December 1988 issue of SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly edited. * * * During its 12-year existence, the world professional surfing tour has changed the face of the surfing experience, and all of us along with it. Despite the rose-colored view offered by organizations, sponsors, media, and some competitors, all is not well wit...
Geoff Luton’s “Bondi (Concrete) Soul” feature ran in the May 1970 issue of Surfing World. This version has been slightly edited. * * * When Albert suggested I do a story on Bondi for SW I must admit that at first I had a number of evil thoughts about his motives. I first thought that he must be really short of material to want an article on such a colorless place as Bondi. Then I thought he was...
Matt George’s piece on “Harbor Bill” Mulcoy ran in the July 1986 issue of SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly edited. * * * THE PROBLEM Harbormaster Steve Scheiblauer leaned against his office window, steaming coffee mug in hand, and sighed deeply. He had a problem. A big problem. Its name was a shadow known only as “Harbor Bill.” No last name, no other information at all, but he’d m...
Peter Drouyn of Australia was the first Westerner to surf in China, but just a few months later SURFER Magazine organized a visit with writer Matt George and photographer Warren Bolster, plus pros surfers Rell Sunn, Jon Damm, and Willy Morris. George’s story ran in June 1987 issue. This version has been slightly edited. * * * 10/29/86 SOMEWHERE OVER THE HUBEI PROVINCE, CHINA It was the turbulen...
KFMB-TV, channel 8, is San Diego's longtime CBS affiliate. Tune into CBS Evening News and you'd see (depending on the decade) Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Katie Couric. Watch the local news and you'd very quickly see reporter Harold Keen, the Bronx-born "Dean of San Diego Journalists." The footage here consists of Keen interviewing three notable local surfers, Mike Diffenderfer, Mike Hynson, a...
You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago, Phil Edwards's 180-page autobiography, came out in the summer of 1967. A lot of things were lined up in the book's favor. It was published by powerhouse Harper & Row, home to Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and Harper Lee, among others, and Endless Summer had just introduced the non-surfing world to "the amazing Phil Edwards." The book was co-authored by Sports ...
"Ballet on a Surfboard," Tony Pratt's review of Midget Farrelly's 1965 book This Surfing Life (released two years later in America as The Surfing Life) ran in the February 21, 1965, edition of the Sydney Sun-Herald. This version has been slightly edited. * * * We have underestimated the surfboard rider. He is a modern mystic, a perfectionist, a striver for the impossible. His ultimate goal—the p...
This Surfing Life, Midget Farrelly's first book coauthored with Craig McGregor, was published in Australia in 1965, and republished two years later in America, as The Surfing Life. The excerpt below has been slightly edited. * * * I suppose my first ride on a surfboard, if you could call it that, happened when I was about nine. I was living with my parents at North Bondi at the time. I had an un...
Frank Frazetta, the pompadoured New Yorker artist whose obsessively detailed paintings of shredded axe-wielding barbarians and their Playboyesque women made him the once and forever Michelangelo of fantasy art, did his best-known work in the 1960s and '70s, and died in 2010 at age 82. Even if you don't know the name, you've seen Frazetta's art, or people and works influenced by his art—the Ring mo...