Hey All, There’s a lot of surf fiction out there, short and long, and damned if I can recall a single passage that gets anywhere close to a bullseye in terms of actual wave-riding. Tim Winton’s Breath, maybe—the early chapters, before it all goes big-wave-life-or-death-psycho-sexual-triangle. But as a rule, you will sooner lasso a cat with a piece of string than you will capture the rush of a lat...
Hey All, In 1972, at age 12, I wanted to grow up and be Jeff Hakman or Jerry West, flip a coin. Instead, I grew up to be the editor of SURFER, which is one of those consolation prizes that turns out to be better than the thing you wanted in the first place. I was hired in 1985. Creatively speaking, the magazine was in middling-poor shape when I arrived and middling-good shape six years later when...
Hey All, Hang Ten beachwear cofounder Duke Boyd died last week at age 85. I never met Duke, but from the photos you can tell that his former business partner was on the money when she called him a “handsome California surfer,” and by all accounts Boyd was a smart, creative, generous, good-humored man. His legacy, though, is very blind-men-and-elephant. Those early Hang Ten trunks, for example, de...
Hey All, Jack Murphy, the handsome surfer-playboy jewel thief—that’s what Nora Ephron would have you think, anyway—died last week at age 83, from heart failure. Murphy was born in L.A. but belongs to Florida. That’s where he made his mark as a surfer, winning the ’62 Daytona Championships and briefly running Murf’s Surf Shop in Indialantic. And that’s where he began thieving professionally, as a ...
Hey All, Fire and plague and a dozen other gloom-inducing recent events have led me to George Freeth, just as surely as romantic heartbreak used to lead me to Otis Redding’s ballads. Sometimes you fight the sadness, other times you melt into it, and I’ve always viewed Freeth as our sport’s top-ranked melancholic—or possibly #2, behind Tom Blake. Freeth was unmarried, childless, itinerant, underpa...
Hey All, Big waves put the wind right up me, big books do not, and to explain we must return to Venice Beach, 1972. The Breakwater that year kicked my prepubescent 7th-grade ass so hard one morning that Allen Sarlo—just three years older, but covered head to toe in muscle and hair—swam over to rescue me. I walked home and got in bed and continued reading Hawaii. James Michener’s 1959 book is righ...
“A little ditty about Jack and Charmian. . . .” Hey All, In the Spring of 1907, writer Jack London, along with a crew of five, including his cheerful free-loving socialist wife Charmian, set forth out of San Francisco bound for Hawaii on the Snark, Jack’s leaky DIY yacht. A few hours out of port somebody asked “Who’s navigating?” and they looked at each other for a few moments before slapping th...
Hey All, Remember that uptempo Joint a few weeks back where Bo Diddley, Henry Mancini, Chubby Checker and others jumped on the surf music bandwagon and, to one degree or another, rocked? Afterward, some of you sent me links to other kindred salty-sweet tracks, and sweetest by far was “Surfer Boy,” by the Supremes, which I'd managed to never hear even once in my entire Motown-loving life. First of...
Hey All, I don’t know if Australian Surfing Hall of Fame photographer-kneeboarder-whirling dervish Peter Crawford really was a genius, as his aging but enthusiastic supporters claim, but he for sure had a formidable talent for head-fuckery. Which was annoying as hell to anyone on the receiving end of a Crawford verbal barrage of jabs, japes, cackles, and non-sequiturs. I met Peter in Hawaii in De...
Hey All, Rumble at the Ranch is GO, and today’s pizza-oven forecast in Lemoore—102 degrees, no wind to speak of—has me feeling like the biggest, proudest snowflake in all of surfing. Yes, I may tune into the Rumble now and then as the day passes. But it will be from two states away, in my leaf-shaded Queen Anne backyard, where it is clear, mild, and 100% sweat-free. I will not prose on here about...