The Sunday Joint

SUNDAY JOINT, 4-16-2023: MIDGET VS PHIL, BATTLE OF THE BIOGRAPHIES – GENTLEMEN, START YOUR METAPHORS!

Hey All, Midget Farrelly's The Surfing Life and Phil Edwards' You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago were published back-to-back in the summer of 1967, and are more or less the original surfer autobiographies. The genre didn't exist—then suddenly we had not one, but two very good first-person books by surfers who were not only supremely gifted in the water but also bright and articulate and opinio...

SUNDAY JOINT, 4-23-2023: IF THE FLYING SAUCER'S ROCKIN' DON'T COME KNOCKIN'

Hey All, The drink where you grab a little from every bottle in your parents' liquor cabinet and blast out into the night with your sticky 80-proof contraband feeling like Junior Johnson on a Carolina backroad outrunning a half-dozen G-Men? Like I said week before last, we called it a Suicide, my wife called it a Graveyard, and some of you out there called it Jungle Juice, or the Pearl Harbor, a ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 4-02-2023: BONDI BEACH TEEN-TERROR AND SURFING SAVANT KEVIN BRENNAN

Hey All, Kevin Brennan is the jagged little diamond that at some point drops into every historian’s lotion-soft hands as he or she tills the fields of mid-1960s surfing. But unless you’re a pension-age Bondi local familiar with the Hep Pit and can tell Bluey Mayes from Red Ted, you likely know just three things about Brennan. First, he was called the Head, thanks to a large and well-rounded uppe...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-26-2023: À VOSSA SAÚDE! AND CAIPIRINHAS FOR EVERYONE

Hey All, Correcting surf history misconceptions is great just for the neener-neener I-fixed-it pointy-headed rush, and I’ll be chasing that high till I’m soul-arching past the Pearly Gates on my way to an afternoon meetup with Tubesteak and Rell Sunn. But it also feels great because installing a new bit of history, apart from moving the ball a bit further downfield in terms of truth, more often t...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-19-2023: I’M DRESSING YOU WITH MY EYES

Hey All, It was the clothes, not the wave-riding, that caught everyone’s attention in Gidget. Or it was both. But mostly the clothes, I think, and the Gidget producers obviously had a lot of fun, without being mean about it, making fashion distinctions between Gidget’s parents (cardigan sweater and tie for Dad; long skirt and shellacked hair for Mom) and the surfers on the beach. Yes, the trunks ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-12-2023: MISSTAKES, I’VE MADE A FEW

Hey All, I have pulled a few historiographical boners in my day, more than a few, but the results by and large have been humbling instead of mortifying. I wrote that former Top 16 pro Wes Laine was from West Virginia, for example, instead of Virginia Beach, which mistake-wise is a long way from signing off on a King James Bible run with “Thou shall commit adultery” jumping off the page like Magic...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-5-2023: SKIN IN THE GAME

Hey All, I finally watched the original 2012 Magic Mike, which has a too-soft ending but is otherwise a 90-minute sticky-fingered joyride of a film. The banter is excellent, loose and southern-dipped, but my favorite bit is an acting-within-acting scene where Channing Tatum, in cop mode, walks into a sorority party with flashlight at high port and brusquely tells a roomful of coeds who don’t yet ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 2-26-2023: TORAH! TORAH! TORAH! NEW DOCUMENTARY TAKES AIM AT SURF HISTORY

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...

SUNDAY JOINT, 2-19-2023: FROM OCEANSIDE TO NIRVANA WITH BRAD GERLACH

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...

SUNDAY JOINT, 2-12-2023: SURF HOAXES WE HAVE LOVED

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...