Wayfaring Australian surfer Peter Troy has often been cited as the person who introduced surfing to Brazil, in 1964. A SURFER profile on Troy, for example, tells the story as follows: "While in Rio, [Troy] met the son of a French ambassador who had been given a surfboard but couldn't ride it. As he strolled down the beach at Copacabana, Troy saw the familiar shape. Using sign language, Troy borrow...
This installment of the Naughton-Peterson travel articles took place mainly in Morocco and Western Sahara, and ran in the July 1975 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited. * * * "So long. Vicky!" “Goodbye. Fela!” "Oh . . . uh . . . our addresses? Yeah, sure! You have a pen?" And so we exchanged addresses with promises to write. The final gesture of a farewell with two lovely y...
“Why Don’t Jews Surf?” ran in the Spring 1980 issue of H2O magazine, and was written by A. M. Strand, which is almost certainly a pseudonym for H2O publisher-editor and former top-ranked California surfer Marty Sugarman. An editor’s note advises the reader to “take this article with a grain of sand,” which doesn’t mean the piece is full satire, or anywhere close. It reads to me like Sugarman, who ...
Sarah Smith's LA Times profile on Brad Gerlach ran on August 29, 1986. The full title is "Surfer Gerlach has a Certain Style: Flamboyance, Personality Set Him Apart on Pro Tour." This version has been slightly edited. * * * When professional surfer Brad Gerlach was 14 months old, his father threw him off the high dive into a swimming pool. When Joe Gerlach plunged in, he found his son paddling u...
Mick Mock's profile on Sydney surf entrepreneur Shane Stedman ran in the Winter 1999 issue of Deep magazine. This version has been slightly edited. * * * His life is a strand pulled through three decades of Sydney surfing summers: from a 1960s tin-shed surfboard factory, to popout boards and Ugg boots, to a surf reporter's voice on a car radio as the sun burns away the morning haze. For many of ...
At the beginning of this clip you see a skinny big-nosed fellow attempting to skateboard. It’s like he’s pretending to be the great alpine skier Stein Eriksen: parallel stance, knees together, shoulders forward and hips moving side to side. Except he loses control and nearly goes face-first into a parking meter. That’s my dad, Winfried Breuer, owner and operator of Sundown Ski and Surf Shop in L...
Judy Trim wrote this essay on her longtime boardmaker and friend Shane Stedman, shortly before she died in 2018. It appeared in The Shane Gang, Stedman's autobiography, published that same year. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Wham, bang, smash—the new era had arrived. Shortboards, powerful bottom turns, re-entries, and radical cutbacks. The Everly Brothers, the Stomp with Little Pa...
Malibu surfer Jojo Perrin died in early January 2023, at age 72. He was best known as the lightning-quick 14-year-old Santa Monica High freshman who took on the best surfers in the state during the 1964 Malibu Invitational and finished 3rd—ahead of Miki Dora, Mike Doyle, Rusty Miller, and other A-team surf stars. While he transitioned easily to the new short surfboards in 1968, and for a few years...
A line from a recent Sunday Joint, about the first two great post-revolution surfers at Pipeline—“Jock Sutherland, my third-favorite surfer as a kid, rode Pipeline like he had a stick of dynamite up his ass; Gerry Lopez rode it like Audrey Hepburn stepping out of a cab on 5th Ave"—prompted New Zealand surfer Phil Bonham, a retired art and art history teacher, to shoot me an email recalling the dec...
Margaret Ann Kandal's profile on Judy Trim ran in the October 16, 1968 issue of Australian Women's Weekly. Trim, 15, was the just-crowned national surfing champion. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Six years ago a cult swept Australia. It brought with it new jargon for the teenagers' already revolutionary vocabulary—words such as "gas," "king," "noah," "gremlin," and "femlin." New si...