Russ Spencer’s profile on Kemp Aaberg ran in the Summer 1999 issue of Surfer’s Journal. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Kemp Aaberg paddled by in the steel blue light, the body still ropy and confident at 58, head down in concentration. A serious early-evening fog had settled onto Rincon, lending the chest-high waves a diffuse perfection, as if they had been created in a factory som...
Nick Carroll's profile on Danny Wills ran December 1998 issue of Australia's Surfing Life. This version has been slightly edited. * * * He could be world champion. Does anybody really get it? That Danny Wills could be the world champion? The list of names is enough, maybe. Peter Townend. Shaun Tomson. Wayne Bartholomew. Mark Richards. Tom Carroll. Tom Curren. Barton Lynch. Martin Potter. Damien...
Matt Warshaw's feature on the history of surfing in the movies ran in the Winter 1998 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited. * * * The Bridge Theater audience pulled together for the San Francisco premier of In God’s Hands and turned the evening into a minor event, the high point coming about mid-way through TriStar’s handsome and thoroughly boneheaded film, when a lov...
Marc Rubel's Big Wednesday review ran in Surfing magazine's February 1980 issue, which was itself a review of the 1970s. This version has been slightly edited. * * * For the 1970s, the dream went something like this: A major Hollywood motion picture about surfing would take the country by storm, putting the nation's youth back on the Gidget track of surf fever. Soon no self-respecting kid, no ma...
Janet Maslin's review for Big Wednesday ran in the July 28, 1978, issue of the New York Times. * * * It wasn't very long ago that John Milius's expensive, ambitious "Big Wednesday" was one of the more widely touted movies on the horizon, so what's it doing sneaking into Flagship theaters for only a weeklong run? The honorable thing, that's what. "Big Wednesday" isn't even a tiny fraction of what...
"Is Surfing Hip?" by Sam George, ran in the June 1998 issue of Surfer. This version has been slightly edited. * * * In a world of MTV Sports, X Games and Mountain Dew commercials, with Spandexed sky divers hopping out of planes with video cameras on their heads, with brain-dead bungee-jumpers falling off bridges for fun, with gang-baggy, shambling skaters scraping up against greasy parking lot p...
Derek Hynd's profile on Tony Moniz ran in the March 1991 issue of SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Near a decade back, Tony Moniz hooked into a twelve-footer at the Pipeline Masters—the type of wave that misses Second Reef and viciously stacks and stacks again in apex shifts. He slid down the face at the last instant with a deliberate layback takeoff, then switched t...
Drew Kampion's profile on Santa Barbara's futuristic wave-ski rider Merv Larson ran in the May 1970 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited. * * * You can see for yourself when Rincon is breaking good, or Secos or Huntington when they’re on. He works out through the lineup on his butt, sitting on a foam cushion, buckled into his seat belt, working a double-ended paddle, with his f...
This article ran in the July 31, 1888, issue of the Pittsburgh Press. The unnamed woman is almost certainly a wealthy Hawaii-raised teenager named Emma Spreckels, daughter of sugar baron Claus Spreckels and great-aunt to famed 1970s surfing antihero Adolph "Bunker" Spreckels. In August, the cover drawing on the National Police Gazette—a risque and hugely popular national tabloid specializing in cr...
Phil Jarratt's profile on newly-crowned world champion Damien Hardman ran in the September 1988 issue of SURFER Magazine. * * * Never having met Damien Hardman—the man who would soon become world champion—I asked around about him. “He’s kinda like Simon Anderson in his approach to life,” said one person. “It’s that Narrabeen thing, I suppose. But I wouldn’t put Damien in Simon’s class. He hasn’t...