Hey All, The day came and went without me noticing, but as of last month the Sunday Joint is now five years old. "I’m going to try and send one of these out each week," I wrote on September 3, 2017, back when we were all wearing $500 crop-top designer T-shirts and soothing our frayed nerves with fidget spinners, "mostly just to catch everybody up on what posted [on EOS] over the previous seven da...
Hey All, Jen See of Santa Barbara, BeachGrit's least-trolling and sole PhD-holding writer, said last week she was "pretty sure the curve of a woman’s hip off the end of a longboard, that dance, that swing, is the most beautiful thing in surfing." Jen was inspired after seeing Lauren Hill's new documentary film The Physics of Noseriding, which looks slow-mo and groovy in the trailer but apparently...
Hey All, Whatever the funniest thing in surfing is at the moment always seems, in my experience anyway, to be the funniest thing ever, and right now that thing is a huge plushly-bearded goofyfooter from New Zealand named Luke Cederman. Luke posts often on his various Raglan Surf Report platforms, and I encourage you to visit and sample freely, but you might start here with "Surf Nerd" and "Surf D...
Hey All, Except for Jesus and Elvis, every famous person's life eventually gets reduced down and poured into the smallest possible container, and while Florida-based surf photographer Tom Dugan worked miracles at Sebastian Inlet, he will not be mistaken for the Redeemer—redheads never are—and thus I believe Dugan's contribution will in time rest on just two images. Which is more than most of us w...
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...