Hey All, Phil Becker died two weeks ago at age 81, and Mike Eaton died on Wednesday at 86. Between them, Becker and Eaton shaped north of 200,000 boards, with no machines involved save the ancient planers they kept alive with solder and electrical tape and spare parts. Phil’s work ethic was ridiculous, maybe pathological; he shaped the day his mom died, and during his own Hermosa Beach Walk of Fa...
Hey All, First, a bit of housecleaning. Thanks to Spencer Croul and Kevin Kinnear for reminding me that Joe Quigg shaped the game-changing Darrylin Board, not Tommy Zahn, as I reported last week. Zahn himself was a fine shaper, and Darrylin was his steady, which makes me wonder why he jobbed the project out to his friend Joe. An unwritten surf-history footnote. Meanwhile, I dug out this 1947 shot...
Hey All, Sam George once said that Robert Redford became Hollywood’s hottest new star in the mid-’60s because he looked like Tommy Zahn. Zahn, of course, was the bushy-blond postwar Malibu surfer who, along with Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin, reinvented performance surfing—the Free Ride generation of the Truman era, if you will; with dizzyingly handsome Zahn as the Shaun Tomson figure, although keep ...
Hey All, Five years ago, Steve Hawk wrote an amazing story on Duke Kahanamoku, titled “Duke’s Ulcers.” Here is my favorite part: [Greg Noll] was sitting beside Duke at some event that had been arranged in the aging Hawaiian’s honor. The organizers had promised Kahanamoku that he wouldn’t have to make a speech—a prospect that always made him uncomfortable. But at some point, the emcee pointed to ...
Hey All, Last’s week’s riff on Bob Purvey and his big beautiful Ugly stick, with all those sweet candy-colored “Follow Me” visuals, sent me back to this 2014 post in which I blew your minds with the never-before-told origin story of Nazaré as a surfing break. “Next stop, Nazaré!” the voice-over says, and there we are in Portugal, 1968, kids and goats on the high street, swarthy Portuguese fisherm...
Hey All, I am impressed and baffled by people like Mick Dooley, Aussie “functional school” virtuoso and ’64 Bells Beach winner, who don’t begin surfing until young adulthood. As a kid, Dooley was a boarding school detainee and high-achieving tennis player (nearly 80 today, Mick will smile and self-efface, then destroy you in doubles), and claims he’d never so much as been to the beach before a fr...
Hey All, Astride my high horse and wearing my finest gold-threaded sash of pedantry, I suggest perforce that the word “legend” is not only much overused among our people, but used incorrectly, or at least lazily, as well. I have been called a “legend” for example. Repeatedly, on Instagram. “Legend” followed by praise hands, just like Gerry Lopez or JJ Moon, forsooth! That said, I’m all for spendi...
Hey All, Ben Aipa, boardmaker and power surfer for the ages, died last week from a long list of ailments including diabetes, heart issues, and dementia. He was 78. Derek Rielly and I emailed back and forth about Ben yesterday, and the first thing I wrote was: “Ben didn’t start surfing until he was 21 or 22. Every time I think of him, that’s what comes to mind first. I don’t know of any big-name s...
Hey All, The Kevin Brennan Joint two weeks ago connects us almost magnetically to Cronulla’s Bobby Brown, as they are the Lennon and McCartney of Aussie surfing tragedy. That gorgeous 1967 aquamarine Brennan-Brown-Tallows sequence in Hot Generation is a high point for both surfers—as well as the beginning of the end. Brennan found drugs and never recovered. Brown took a beer glass to the neck dur...
Hey All, I’m very much looking forward to the new women’s pro surfing doc Girls Can’t Surf, which drops in March and, judging by this excellent trailer, will not pull any punches. (“They were all such dumb-ass chauvinistic pigs,” Wendy Botha says, after a couple of pork-scented quotes from Gary Elkerton and Damien Hardman.) That said, I’m staying limber for some light finger-wagging at the movie’...