"Profile: Michael Ho," by Reno Abellira, ran in the January 1978 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited. * * * In the highly pressure-sensitive world of professional surf contests, especially the events that take place on the North Shore, to be a winner often means that a surfer must harness more than sheer determination, skill, and guts. In the water, he’s got to be more “on,”...
"Long Soggy Saga," Tom Morey's story about making a surfboard from cardboard, ran in the Fall 1993 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited. * * * It was 1965, the middle of November, and a typical dreary morning. I was working out of Ventura, California (going broke actually), trying to build surfboards from a tiny metal shed at the north end of Santa Clara Street. No...
"Nixon Saw Me Naked," by Steve Heilig, ran in the July 1996 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Way back in 1973, President Richard Nixon was starting to have a bit of trouble back East. Watergate, Vietnam, and so on were making life tough for Tricky Dick. But in right-wing Republican Orange County, Southern California, he was still King—except among us stoned high s...
"Florsheims in the Sand," by Drew Kampion, was first published in the June 2021 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited. * * * When John Severson hired me as associate editor of SURFER magazine in the spring of 1968, he didn’t much know what he was getting into, nor did I. I was a “communications” man with an English degree working at the new Wall Street Journal pro...
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...