Tim Baker's profile on Robbie Page ran in the Aug-Sep 2009 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Four months after being jailed in Japan for possession of LSD, pro surfer Rob Page found himself dining in the home of then-French President François Mitterrand, having recently romanced the great leader’s granddaughter. This is just one example of the wild ride ...
The following excerpt, by Pauline Menczer and Luke Benedictus, is from Menczer's "Surf Like a Woman" autobiography, published in 2024. Menczer, in this 1984 scene, is 14 years old, has been surfing for a year, and has just paddled out at the notorious South Bondi—on a foam Coolite board, because she hasn't yet enough coins from recycling soda cans to buy a real board. "I don't get too fazed by the...
"Pauline's Pain," by Tim Baker, ran in the April 1994 issue of Australia's Surfing Life magazine, just after Menczer won the 1993 WCT title. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Guests at the Turtle Bay Hilton who observed the small, pale, freckly, crippled girl's warm-up routine at the hotel swimming pool could have had little idea what they were witnessing. The frail, 23-year-old b...
"Dark Star," Matt Warshaw's profile on Sunny Garcia, ran in the June 1993 issue of SURFER Magazine. * * * A common prediction in 1987 was that Hawaiian Sunny Garcia, then 17, would in three years time either self-destruct completely or develop into one of the world's great surfers. Garcia extended the time frame to five years, and began 1993 having come surprisingly close to doing both. He ...
On the morning of December 21, 1987, during a lay-day for the Pipeline Masters, Herbie Fletcher rolled his modified Kawasaki JS550 down the beach at Pipeline and offered to tow a handful of pro surfers into waves that were feathering on Second and Third Reef and rolling through to First Reef. Fletcher had already made a name for himself as a piston-loving pioneer and pest, wave-jumping his PWC at ...
"Ricky," by Drew Kampion, ran in the February 1978 issue of Surfing magazie. This version has been slightly edited. * * * I first met Rick Rasmussen on the North Shore in the winter of 1974-'75. He was the United States Surfing Champion that year and was wandering around the country trying to figure out why he hadn't been invited to the major Hawaiian contests the way former U.S. champions ha...
Dean LaTourrette's profile on David Eggers ran in the October 2007 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited. * * * David Eggers is anxious. Just yards from the water, longboard in hand, he stops short and gazes out at the lineup at WindanSea in La Jolla, his old stomping grounds. It’s been years since he’s surfed here, surfed at all for that matter, and decades since ...
"Gavin Rudolph in Hawaii," no author credit, ran in an early 1972 issue of Surfing World magazine. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Gavin Rudolph has become the most controversial boardman of modern competition surfing by winning the 1971 Smirnoff Pro-Am Surfing Championships. Representing South Africa, and on his first visit to the Hawaiian Islands, the possibility of Rudolph ev...
A pair of gold-painted fiberglass mermaids were installed on Big Rock, North Bondi, in 1960. They were under attack from the beginning—not just from rain, sun, big surf, but vandals and angry editorialists—and not surprisingly fell apart, until the remnants of the one remaining mermaid were pried from the rock in 1976 and hauled away. A resurrection of sorts would come later, but let's start at th...
"Riverside Men Perish on Fishing Trip When Boat is Upset by Ground Swell," by A.B. Berry, was a front page Orange County Register story on June 15, 1925. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Fire men were drowned and 12 others narrowly escaped a similar fate yesterday morning at 6:45 o’clock, when a heavy ground swell, said to have been more than 20 feet high, capsized the 40-foot fis...