Hey All, Damien Hardman is my second favorite Iceman, ahead of Val Kilmer but miles behind George Gervin, and apologies to anyone here who is not an NBA nostalgist but I cannot say Gervin's name without proselytizing on his behalf, starting with the fact that he was the smoothest, most stylish and fluid player of his or any other generation, the Tom Curren of NBA shooting guards, right down to th...
WSL Finals Day 2022 is a wrap, and we won't dwell too long, but I watched the entire damn event and need to get a couple of things off my chest. First, I'm okay with the ten-surfer one-day title shootout format. Yes, it means that the best performer over the course of the year—the surfer who, in the old aggregate-points format would have been the champ—might get kicked down to runner-up. Carissa M...
Hey All, I’ve been racing around this past week on trains, planes, and automobiles, swept away in an end-of-summer crescendo before my son returns to school, and by the weekend I was left completely Jointless. The Joint below, in a slightly different version, originally posted at the end of 2019. * * * I can go years without thinking about Roddy Doyle, then here comes something like The Curfew,...
Hey All, Watching movies with my 13-year-old son is mostly down to throwing a lot of Netflix-Hulu-HBO against the wall and seeing what sticks, and while I have passed on to him a few traits and characteristics that I wish I could delete, I am grateful that, like me, he has a congenital indifference to fantasy and superheroes, which means our movie-night hit rate is pretty high. We are currently o...
Hey All, I am duty-bound as a fan of surfing to lead with this clip of Matthew MacGillivray scoring his gold-plated wave-of-the-year perfect 10 at Teahupoo last week, but we can’t dwell because you need to see this two-wave masterwork of tuberiding heaviness by long-forgotten 43-year-old journeyman Nathan Hedge, the first of which should have been a 10 as well, but oh well, and again we can’t lin...
Hey All, The surfer who came out on the wrong end of a nighttime death battle with the big rubber fish-man in Beach Girls and the Monster, as teased in last week’s Sunday Joint? Dale Davis. Surfing’s own Mr. Hollywood—for better and worse. Mostly forgotten today but a genuine surf-world mover and shaker in the 1960s, Dale was a cheerful well-tanned Rolex-wearing man on the make who produced mov...
Hey All, The EOS team is 75% fraidy-cat when it comes to scary movies. Jaws, for some reason, didn’t set me back the way it did for a lot of other impressionable mid-’70s surfers. But Carrie destroyed my interest in horror as completely as Sissy Spacek destroyed prom night, and I don’t think I’ve made it through a scary movie since, not that I’ve made much of an effort—20 minutes of Get Out was e...
Hey All, We think of Pam Burridge as being one of those late-career half-geezer world champions, like Joel Parkinson or Sunny Garcia, but in fact Pam was just 25 in 1990 when she won her first and only world title. Margo Oberg was an older champ than Burridge. So was Phyllis O’Donell. On paper at least, Pam was still young in 1990. Then again, she’d been a pro for 10 years—and they were hard yea...
Hey All, My James-Bond-Meets-Leif-Garrett prom pic from last week’s Sunday Joint was meant to honeypot you guys into sending your own best-worst formal dance photos, and in fact I was going to run a little gallery of those shots at the bottom of today’s Joint. I got one response. The rest of you kept your scrapbooks closed and firmly on the shelf, so here I am this Sunday feeling less Bond and ...
Hey All, There are no waves to speak of in Long Beach, so for me, as a kid, even though we lived just a few miles to the north, it almost didn’t exist. At some point my mom drove a group of us kids out for a day at the Long Beach Pike, which to us Disney-raised creampuffs was unnerving in its seedy midway decline. My senior prom took place at the Queen Mary. I was frog-marched to a few ASR trades...