Hey All, I am three-quarters Jewish and 100% non-practicing. I act the Jew now and then by mentioning my brother played volleyball in the Maccabiah Games, and that Irv Zeiger, our family’s beloved showboating uncle, cofounded the Mulholland Tennis Club because Jews were barred from other Los Angeles-area clubs. But I never attended synagogue or fasted for Yom Kippur or celebrated Hannukah. No ba...
Hey All, Pro surfing’s #1 feel-good moment of 1985 was Tom Curren winning his first world title—never mind that the achievement led to a pig’s breakfast of a tribute section in Amazing Surf Stories where the silken visuals of Tom’s wave-riding are laid without mercy or care atop a two-bit Casio-made anthem titled “Top Cat,” with Curren lauded as “pride of the USA” by a singer with a British accen...
Hey All, I was an okay skier for a few years there, back when André the Giant was throwing heels into the front row and cooling down après-wrestle with a hundred beers and playing rhyming games with Mandy Patinkin in the third-best comedy ever made, but I was not good enough or stoked enough to ski into middle adulthood, and I went without schuss for 25 years and didn’t miss it a bit. I picked it...
Hey All, A few additions to last week’s Sunday Joint on Pat Curren, who died two weeks ago today. From Joe Curren’s Instagram: “We said goodbye to my dad on Sunday, January 22nd, in North County San Diego. His family, including all of his kids, and most of his grandkids were at his side when he passed. We are all going to miss him.” Unverified, but from a source close to the family, Pat was repor...
Hey All, Big-wave surfer and boardmaker Pat Curren died last Sunday at age 90. Here it is a week later, no decent obit has yet surfaced, and I’ve got six phone calls out trying to find out the simplest of facts, like where he died, Idaho or Utah or California or somewhere else, but no luck there either, so the Pat Curren mystique continues unto death. He always kept us at a distance. The quiet ch...
Hey All, I’m halfway through Demon Copperhead, which has me walking around the neighborhood in a contemplative reverie trying to imagine the sheer depth of Barbara Kingsolver’s magic writing bag to be able to take a story this relentlessly grim—poor kid growing up in 1990s Appalachia with its royal flush of pathologies including drugs, abuse, prison, neglect; there is no human cruelty that does n...
Hey All, I won't bet my AARP card on it but I think Florida’s own gonzo-hunk surfer-writer Bruce Valluzzi was the person who gave Backdoor its name, at the end of a 1968 article for Petersen’s Surfing magazine: When the mortals awoke the next morning, they found a right breaking where the mighty Banzai Pipeline had been. The tubes sweep down from the north and die violently, their crystal blue t...
Hey All, I’m a long way removed from the action, and reports are still coming in, but my Sunday Joint hot take is that California’s big-wave beatdown last week was All-Time Top Three for size and destruction, right there in the mix with 1969 and 1983. The Santa Cruz footage from three days ago has me thinking that, when everything is tallied up, this monster will end up at #1 damage-wise. As far ...
Hey All, Nat Young’s SURFER Magazine report on the 1969 Australian National Titles, a five-round marathon held that year in Western Australia, mostly at Margaret River, skips completely over the women’s event and doesn’t even bother to post the final results. (For the record: Josette Lagardere won, followed by Nola Shepherd. We’ll skip the men’s.) This is actually an improvement over Nat’s take o...
Hey All, We’re going Jointless this Sunday, tomorrow, Christmas Day, but I just wanted to shoot a little something out before signing off for the week. The EOS Fundraiser has just crested $60K, and I expect some showboating latecomers out there will be dropping something into the kitty between now and the New Year, and folks, this means we can keep the lights on in 2023, and start to build the Ar...