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...
Hey All, I’d never heard of Moroccan-born Ahmed Erraji before last week, but he’s been floating like a seal on the edges of surf media for the past five or so years. Erraji wrote to the Inertia in 2016, introducing himself as an “XXL bodysurfer” now living in the Canary Islands, who had recently been tackling 50-footers “with only my bare chest,” and was now bound for Portugal to ride the “megasw...
Hey All, For all of you who rushed off to MyBookie and put a little something on the Italo-Carissa Olympic double-gold exacta, as tipped here in last week’s Joint—well done, enjoy your winnings, and maybe break off a piece for the EOS fundraiser later this year. I also mentioned last week that my Olympic views “lean grumpy,” forgetting the degree to which the Games themselves lean euphoric, and ...
Hey All, My view toward surfing and the Olympics leans grumpy, but there is wiggle room, and things took a turn for the better last week as Tropical Storm Nepartak gathered force off the coast of Honshu and the forecast leading up to Wednesday’s medal round jumped from summertime Hermosa to possible Katsushika Hokusai. Surfing’s official Olympic debut was yesterday, and BeachGrit’s Steve Shearer...
Hey All, Phil Byrne and Dennis Jarvis, both excellent surfers who became even better shapers, finally got their long-overdue EOS pages, and I just this moment recalled a tenuous connection between the two. In late February 1981, Dennis and I flew to Australia in what proved to be another of our failed runs on the pro tour. DJ had just started making Spyderboards, but the label hadn’t yet caught ...
Hey All, Maybe it is a defense mechanism, but when somebody leads a long and full life I can’t feel too mournful when they die. Joe Quigg made it to 95, Greg Noll beat all odds to hit 84, and neither man left much on the table, so my response to their deaths is cliche but sincere, and goes something like great run, and you couldn’t ask for more. In Noll’s case, additionally, we are never not in t...
Hey All, I’ll be working blue this week in honor of Greg Noll, who at age 84 has shuffled off his mortal boardshorts and charged into the great hereafter. If you’d prefer a family-friendly obit, here are three, from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times. These articles mention, in passing, Noll’s “salty” and “blunt” sense of humor, which is like saying Jason Momoa is “handsome...
Hey All, Joe Quigg, the Stradivarian-level midcentury boardmaker who more or less invented surfboard rocker—which gets us to the first cutback, which in turn gets us to John Florence at Haleiwa—and did it with great style and warmth, died last weekend, just a few days short of his 96th birthday. Design-wise, Quigg is best known for a pair of boards he made in 1947: the Darrylin Board (small, lig...
Hey All, The Sunday Joint gets longer each week, yet I look back and see meat on the bone and marrow unsucked—so let us rejoin the feast. First, Rodney Sumpter is still very much alive. I have made this mistake before—riffed on somebody’s life and times in such a way that could be construed as a memorial. Apologies to Rod, who is low-profile but very much of this world at age 74. Also, while I m...
Hey All, I’ve never met or talked with Rod Sumpter, the most uniquely decorated competitive surfer in history—during the 1960s he won national titles in Australia, America, Ireland, and Great Britain—and I understand there may be a Sumpter memoir in the works, so what you’re getting here is by no means the final word on a truly singular rider of waves. Sumpter was born in England, then moved at ...