Hey All, America was a more hopeful and less-divided nation when everybody hated surfers, and that’s just a sociological fact. You could still be against the blacks, pinkos, and libbers, but venom directed at surfers was venom removed from other repressed groups, and you don’t have to connect many dots before realizing that hodads and gremmies gave us the Civil Rights Act. I mentioned attack-dog ...
Hey All, Most surfers, for different reasons, think of the still-private (for the moment) Hollister Ranch as either half-mythical or past tense or both. “What is paradoxical about the Ranch,” as Paul Gross put it a few years back, “is the place it occupies in our minds.” Gross continues: When it became world-renowned, there were thousands of surfers dreaming about a location that, A) they had n...
Hey All, My first brush with Hare Krishnas, common to Los Angeles-born people of my age, was seeing them at the airport in the early 1970s, bald-headed and saffron-robed, dancing and chanting and banging drums. This was just after the Manson murders and the Krishnas were bad-vibed by almost everybody for being cult-adjacent—which at the time they kinda were, as the movement was attracting plenty ...
Hey All, I’ve posted more pages on Dick Brewer than any other boardmaker, by a huge margin (too many links to list, but here’s the “dick brewer” search results page), and like everybody else who has written about the Minnesota-born shaper I have leaned into the “guru” bit and mostly avoided talking about the nuts and bolts of his design work. Brewer, after all, was a mechanic before reinventing h...
Hey All, Red boards were scattered all over the cutting room floor while making last week’s Sunday Joint, including this rubescent 1962 SURFER cover, below, featuring Oceanside regularfooter and Paul Newman lookalike LJ Richards. Earlier in the year SURFER had switched from duotone to four-color covers, but this was the first dalliance with red, and publisher John Severson, as you can see, leaned...
Hey All, I cut way back on the screentime after posting that Make or Break rave last month, and not until yesterday did I get around to the season finale, which of course takes place at Lowers and ends with Carissa Moore and Gabriel Medina crowned as 2021 WCT world champs. I remain a Make or Break fan. But the show did not, for me anyway, build or improve on the first two episodes—in fact it seem...
Hey All, Localism was already a thing in 1972—you might even say it was the thing, in terms of the sport jumping all over a new trend—but for most of us it was still a rumor, a bit of sidewalk graffiti, a lustily shouted “GO HOME, KOOK!” after a drop-in by a non-local surfer. Of course, we’d been tribal for 20-plus years by that point. “Locals Only” blew up not just for its perfect four-syllable ...
Hey All, Sometimes the Sunday Joint moves me to lock eyes with mortality, or religion and mortality, or fatherhood, plague, and mortality. Other times I am moved by a need to tidy up the Sunday joint whiteboard. Today we clear the whiteboard. Start Surfing is a short 1980 how-to book by a British wetsuit maker and an Exeter post-grad student. It is among the best of its kind. The prose is clea...
Hey All, Ten years ago somebody posted a two-star Amazon review for the book version of Encyclopedia of Surfing, noting that “it is an encyclopedia!” and because of that they “haven’t bothered reading it.” And folks, this is why EOS has a 4.4 star Amazon rating instead of the perfect 5 to which all encyclopedists aspire. The point being: a thing should be judged—whatever the thing is, book, mov...
Hey All, Pointing out the smallness of 1970s world tour surfing won’t raise any untrimmed eyebrows over at the Society of American Historians. Smallness is a cornerstone of the WCT origin story. To demonstrate growth, the tour will invariably harken back upon its kitchen-table origins, the tiny but hardcore cluster of spectators at the early events, the blue-collar paychecks. (Eddie Aikau, 1975’s...