Hey All, Surfing has a knack for fragging itself with embarrassment. Always has. Cheap canvas Duke Kahanamoku signature tennies. Droopy soul surfing platitudes. Surf Ranch Pro. I may roll my eyes and complain a little, but none of these misdirected surf-world outgrowths really bother me, for a couple of reasons. First, gorgeous as it is, surfing has always tricked people into thinking that, as a ...
Hey All, In 2007, as I began researching History of Surfing, I got an email from 1965 world champion Felipe Pomar, of Peru. I’ve known Felipe since the late ’80s when he revealed to the SURFER staff and the sport at large that Peruvian fishermen were riding waves 3,000 years ago on small and incredibly cool-looking dagger-shaped reed boats. After hearing about my surf history project, Felipe offe...
Hey All, Sydney surf-industry pioneer Barry Bennett, 89, dropped through the ceiling of his Bennett Surfboards factory last month, broke his fall on an unfinished longboard, and didn't pop right back up but is going to be fine. It was an uncharacteristically spectacular move for Bennett, who has spent the better part of seven decades (not a typo) producing high-quality boards and materials and pu...
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...