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...
Hey All, I face death the way Westley faced Inigo Montoya in their magnificent Princess Bride cliffside duel—with a wry grin and a volley of bon mots. “I will die of a heart attack in 2045,” I wrote on EOS a while back, “in the water at Malibu, suddenly and painlessly, age 85, having just ridden a double-overhead screamer all the way down from the Second Point—silver hair blowing in the wind, wr...
Hey All, Our travel plans were struck down one after another over the past two years, like Cheyne Horan's world title campaigns, but here we are at last, as a family, unmasked and Spring Breaking and flashing our Seattle-white limbs all over the North Shore of Oahu. Mark Cunningham emailed recently and I told him there would be no Sunday Joint while we were on vacation. “There will be no Sunday J...
Hey All, I keep a whiteboard with a list of new and revised EOS pages, each of which is supposed to be noted on the Sunday Joint so as to present you with as many pleasure-giving rabbit holes as possible. “Interfere with their Monday Morning Work Schedule” is the inscription on the Sunday Joint coat of arms. Yet every Sunday I ignore the whiteboard and build out an entire Joint from just one or t...
Hey All, Wave-wise, Santa Monica is not even in the conversation as a great surfing town. You can scrape together a decent surf life here, but only by commuting up and down the coast. I learned to surf in Santa Monica at age nine, and by ten I’d already learned to call Bay Street “Bay Slop.” Zero local pride, wave-wise, except maybe for the Cove, but that’s another story. Nobody lives in Santa M...
Hey All, I’ve said Laura Blears was the most famous surfer of the mid-’70s, and stand by that claim, but you’d want to make room up there for Kim McKenzie. The two had a lot in common. Like Laura, Kim was a first-rate surf jock, with a matching set of Australian National Titles (1973 and ’74) to go with her two Queensland States Titles. And, again like Blears, surfing was more or less incidental ...
Hey All, Johnny Fain died last weekend, at 78, after years of failing health. Fain was a high-performance surfer for the ages, an updated and improved version of Dewey Weber, built like a gymnast, with hummingbird feet and a set of whipturn variations that defied physics, given the deadass 30-pound boards he was wrangling. Fortune smiled on young Johnny Fain. He was handsome and well-connected a...
Hey All, Gerry Lopez and I talked in 2014 about the origins of Lightning Bolt, which opened in the just-shuttered Honolulu Hobie shop during the summer of ’70, and the Bolt logo itself (“the result of me doodling while talking on the telephone”), and at the very end of the conversation, unbidden, Gerry said, “One of these days, Shipley and I”—Bolt cofounder Jack Shipley—“will tell the whole story...