Hey All, The New Yorker ran an article earlier this week about Paul McCartney, and near the end author David Remnick asks: "Who among the living has brought more delight into the world?" Tom Morey's name popped into my head immediately. Not just because the bodyboard, Morey's legacy creation, could hold it's own in a head-to-head delight-off against the McCartney song catalog, but because Morey h...
Hey All, Ten years ago, somebody who knows the small business game way better than I do advised strongly against what he called “mission creep.” Stay focused on one thing. Do that thing well. I nodded firmly in agreement, and went back to work on what was then, concept-wise, the simplest of missions—migrate the Encyclopedia of Surfing from book to website. Technically speaking, the mission never...
Hey All, I spent last Sunday at the Boardroom Show in Del Mar. I haven’t been to a trade event in years, but it was the same as ever; I drag my feet walking in, spot a friendly face, then another, and next thing you know the day has passed and I’ve done nothing but talk and laugh and catch up with people I know and like, and then driving back to Manhattan Beach I had a magical classic rock run on...
Hey All, My wife and her two sisters used to get dropped off at their grandparents’ house, and sometimes for lunch the girls were treated to Jello Surprise in which, through some midcentury kitchen magic, pieces of fruit and marshmallow bits were suspended in the Jello mold like tiny sea creatures. So far so good. In her declining years, however, Grandma Mildred became, let’s say, a bit more free...
Hey All, For those of you who feel that maybe I’ve leaned too hard into the competition scene of late, what with recent confabs on the Olympics, the WSL Finals, and Fred Hemmings—today’s Sunday Joint is dedicated to Paul Gebauer, the most non-competitive and anti-Hemmings surfer of his or any other generation. Gebauer died last week at the age of 80. By his own choice, he did not have a long car...
Hey All, The World Surf League has done many things I disagree with (Surf Ranch Pro and Ultimate Surfer for starters), and a few that I’m grateful for (disappearing Martin Potter), but never has the WSL thrown something out there that truly confounded me. Until this year’s new wham-bam Finals format, that is, in which the top five men and women surfers shoot it out over the course of a single day...
Hey All, Late yesterday afternoon I finally crawled out from the bovine-sized rabbit hole that had been my home throughout the previous week. “A Short Illustrated Look at Surfing and Bullfighting” was supposed to be a quickie blog post of photos and videos I’ve been setting aside for the last few years, but I made the mistake of wondering why surfers got interested in bullfighting in the first pl...
Hey All, Gidget was the first to tell everybody that surfing is the “ultimate.” That’s her quote, above—and we’ve been whipping that poor noun-adjective hybrid ever since—from Surfing: the Ultimate Pleasure, to Mark Foo’s own-death-foretold “ultimate thrill, ultimate price” quote, to the 1995 Quiksilver G-land Pro being headlined as “the ultimate event.” It’s like when my mom told me, as a kid, t...
Hey All, Jodi picked up a head cold during a long-delayed family trip to California, and coughed her way through our nightly Scrabble match Sunday before last, but destroyed me nonetheless. “Covid is doing great things for your game, hahaha!” I said. You can guess the punchline. The next day her Covid test came back positive. We are all fully vaxxed, so Jodi and her breakthrough case retreated ...
Hey All, My default setting with 1968 world champion and former Hawaii state senator Fred Hemmings is to admire his determination and grit (beat polio as a kid, for starters), respect his service on behalf of pro surfing (founded the Pipeline Masters, the Triple Crown, and the IPS tour), and gratitude for his being such a perfectly upsidedown rebel—the lone high-profile conservative during surfin...