Hey All, John Peck died this week, age 81, of cancer. He began surfing in the late 1950s and just kept going, decade after decade, era after era, trip after trip. I don't know exactly when Peck paddled out for the last time, but it was late in the game—he was nothing if not durable, there are plenty of edits out there of John waltzing those soft roly-poly walls at Swami's deep into his senior yea...
Hey All, Unless he rises from his frosty Washburn, Wisconsin, resting place and rattles chains at me, this will be the last Encyclopedia of Surfing post on Tom Blake. I've always thought of EOS as an open-ended project, but given where I'm at age-wise (hale and 65 still means 65) and given where I'm headed work-wise (less EOS, more EOS Archive), when these Old Testament surf-world figures show u...
Hey All, The John Whitmore Joint from two weeks ago veered into politics, almost against my will. It didn't start that way but I bend toward apartheid like a shopping cart with a bum wheel whenever South Africa comes up. Blame Tom Carroll. Today we track a few more SA-related threads, none of which—or almost none of which—have anything to do with politics, and let's start with Nobel-winning Irish...
Hey All, John Whitmore of South Africa came to the surf world's attention in stages between 1964 and 1968, as Endless Summer first played high school auditoriums in American beach towns, then leveled up to first-run theaters in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and London. Whitmore, 34 when Endless Summer was filmed, was the oldest surfer in the movie and his signature diamond-tipped goatee was already go...
Hey All, Today we put right a few of the not-quite-settled Joints from our bygone Summer of '25. Too often these days I part with a Joint on Sunday afternoon, all done, thanks and nice working with you, only to have it return the following day, tugging on the hem of my frayed Tommy Bahama shorts, asking for further attention. Last week's Joint on filmmaker Curt Mastalka, for example. You'll reca...
Hey All, The Waikiki Shell, located just off the famous west-facing slope of Diamond Head, is a beautiful mid-sized performance venue; a smaller, more casual version of the Hollywood Bowl, with seating for 2,400 and a broad skirt of lawn for 6,000 more. Elvis played the Shell. Dylan, Sinatra, the New York Philharmonic, the Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, all played there. When your tour hit H...
Hey All, If George Orwell's 1984 was assigned to my 10th-grade English class, and it probably was, I have no memory of it. I knew how to get Bs with near-zero effort and would have skated past Orwell like I did everything else at the time apart from surfing, basketball, and rending my Unity Surfboards T-shirt over whatever girl was ignoring me that month. I already knew that to describe somethi...
Hey All, Last week's Joint featuring Fred Van Dyke, surfing's emotionally-charged one-man Tortured Poets Department, reminded me how much I enjoyed writing those 10,000-word XXL features for Surfer's Journal in the 1990s and 2000s—back before social media threw our attention span in the woodchipper. Van Dyke's TSJ profile in particular was a joy to write, mostly thanks to Fred himself but also be...
Hey All, Three-quarters of all North Shore WCT winners between 1975 and 1980, men and women, rode Tom Parrish-shaped boards, and that might be lowballing it. Parrish was of course the apex craftsman at Lightning Bolt—"The Man with the Red-Hot Planer." He was also a friendly, upbeat, one-man corrective to all that wizardy shaper-guru hoodoo we got stuck with in the '60s and '70s. If you somehow ma...
Hey All, Last week's look at the 1977 Stubbies was meant to be a two-parter, but halfway through I changed my mind and tried to squeeze everything into on probably-too-long Joint—and now I'm U-turning again to add a few more thoughts on the Stubbies, and pro surfing contests in general. Underlining the not-so-groundbreaking yet frequently ignored point that great contests only happen in great wa...