Dru Harrison's "SURFER Tips" article on speed surfing ran in the May 1969 issue of SURFER Magazine. "Speed surfing" was invented by Joey Cabell a year or so earlier, the result of Cabell trying to bring his downhill skiing experience to bear on his wave-riding. The concept was squishy at best, and never caught on, but in 1969 it was a hot topic, and Harrison was Cabell's #1 speed surfing acolyte. ...
Reno Abellira's article about his 1974 Smirnoff Pro win originally ran in the March 1975 issue of Surfer. This version has been slightly edited. * * * The kona weather finally broke. A gnarly northeast swell was coming in with an exaggerated push to it. Totally flushing through the outside peaks at Sunset, the waves would then reform and double up on the notorious inside wall, quick-forming into...
Excerpted from "Boy You Gotta Carry That Weight," by Drew Kampion, which ran in the March 1970 issue of SURFER. Kampion's article reported on the 1969 Smirnoff Pro-Am and the 1969 Santa Cruz Big-Wave Contest; Johnny Fain, one of the older competitors, did not place in the former and was 4th in the latter. * * * Johnny driving north in his paneled Ford Falcon wagon. Two Formula Model boards in ba...
“A Gomes Family Saga,” by Bob Cooper, ran in the August 2012 issue of Surfer’s Journal. This version has been shortened and slightly edited. * * * Once again, I direct our focus to the Velzy and Jacobs shop on the border of Venice and Playa del Rey, where the usual suspects from South Bay and Malibu merged to catch up on happenings in the SoCal wave-riding culture. V and J’s unique feature was t...
"Why Gays Don't Surf . . . Or Do They?" ran in the Fall 1979 issue of H20, a Los Angeles based surf-art-culture magazine. Writer RC Pennie was a UCLA grad student in Sociology. The version below has been slightly edited. * * * Clustered together like chickens in a barnyard coop, the half-naked, sun-bronzed group of young men constantly eye the scene and continually evaluate the competition. High...
"Why Blacks Don't Surf" ran in the Summer 1979 issue of Los Angeles-based H20 magazine. Writer Earl Ofari, 24, was then the Public Affairs Director for radio station KPFK, and has since written more than a dozen books on race, culture, and politics. This text below has been slightly edited. * * * “I was a black man in a white world, I never had it made.” The words were not spoken by some wild-ey...
This excerpt from "The Brothers," by Kimo Hollinger, ran in the Winter 2004 issue of Surfer's Journal. Photo of Gebauer (left) and Hollinger at Laniakea, in 1960, taken by John Severson. * * * Paul Gebauer knew how to surf Sunset. He had Pat Curren build him a semi-gun board that worked perfectly. It was colored a pale greenish-blue. I think Paul felt he wasn’t getting proper recognition for hi...
"What Does the Contest Prove?" ran in the December 28, 1964, issue of the Honolulu Advertiser, during the same week at the annual Makaha International Surfing Championships. Roger Pepper, columnist for the Advertiser, wrote a short intro noting that "there are some who feel that it is bad to exploit surfing in the form of contests. Your reporter asked one of Oahu's best surfers, Paul Gebauer, to p...
This year marks the first time in the pro surfing era where the men's and women's world titles will be determined not by a surfer's aggregate point total over an entire season, as has been the case since 1976. Instead, the top five men and top five women surfers, as ranked over the course of a seven-event season that finished last month in Mexcio, will face off in the Rip Curl WSL Finals, a one-da...
Nancy Franklin's review for John From Cincinnati ran in the June 18, 2007, issue of the New Yorker. * * * You know how when you use a big bill to buy a train ticket or stamps from a vending machine and unexpectedly get a handful of Susan B. Anthony dollars as change you think, Oh, come on, this is no good—why didn’t the machine warn me? I’m never going to be able to get rid of these—nobody wants...