Hey All, Phyllis O'Donell, who won her final in the 1964 World Championships at Manly Beach about 45 minutes before Midget Farrelly won his, and thus became our sport's first world champion, died this week at age 87. She was private and level-headed, intense but funny, upbeat by nature. Zero pretense. Sure-footed in every sense of the word. O'Donell loved getting in the water, and for 15 or so ye...
Hey All, I have pulled a few historiographical boners in my day, more than a few, but the results by and large have been humbling instead of mortifying. I wrote that former Top 16 pro Wes Laine was from West Virginia, for example, instead of Virginia Beach, which mistake-wise is a long way from signing off on a King James Bible run with “Thou shall commit adultery” jumping off the page like Magic...
Hey All, Last week's Joint on the UAE and Kelly's wavepool and surfing's ongoing move toward a chlorinated, less-democratic, rich-guys-ride-first future, was a surprise hit. My inbox lit up and wow you bunch are just as pessimistic as me, and that feels . . . great? Comforting, is the better word. We are going down, but we're going down together, and righteously, and if there was thread of sadnes...
Hey All, It took years, nearly a decade in fact, but I finally cycled through all the stages of grief regarding Kelly Slater's Westworld-lite wavepool—only to end up, surprisingly, more or less back where I started. Nonplussed. Cool. Maybe a bit arch. I could ignore Surf Ranch or laugh at it, whichever suited. Not laugh hahaha, like Raglan Surf Report, but I can eye-roll Surf Ranch and judge it d...
Hey All, David Nuuhiwa's rank and standing as a benchmark surfer for the ages needs adjusting on both ends of his career. As a longboarder, peaking in 1966, he was even better than we remember—and there's not much room to move there, he's already rightfully thought of as among two or three best performance surfers of the pre-shortboard age. But still, yes, nudge him even further up. The long beau...
Hey All, As full and rich and abounding as my three-score and four years have been, I am still looking at some real gaps here on the life-experience resume, and the biggest gap of all might be that I've never visited Great Britain. This isn't a fluke, exactly. In my hardcore wave-chasing past, the UK never made the cut as a destination. The pull was always west by southwest: Hawaii, Australia, In...
Hey All, Big thanks to New Jersey surfer-historian Mike May who led me down this week's Edwardian Age rabbit hole, which ended up being way more twisty-turny than I bargained for. Short version: that grinning black-lipped tux-wearing Bela Lugosi-looking ukulele player you see above is Alvin D. Keech, and it looks like he is your new Father of East Coast surfing. We mostly all thought that Duke Ka...
Hey All, I will fascinate you in a moment with context and analysis and whatnot, but let's not bury the lede: the four-shot screen-grab sequence you see above, of Santa Monica's Les "Birdman" Williams, filmed in 1950 or '51, is the closest we'll ever get to pinpointing the start of high-performance surfing. Not trick riding, which was already in play, or high-and-tight trim, which Hawaiian surfer...
Hey All, We're doing another Sunday Joint graveyard today—a little of this, some of the other, stir and serve, bottoms up. First things first, I owe Corky Carroll an apology and a correction. For 20 years now, EOS has noted (a bit smugly, maybe) that Carroll was gonged during his 1976 Gong Show appearance. Not so. In fact, Corky Carroll and his super-tight matching-outfitted Funk Dog Surf Band e...
Hey All, Surf media in the '60s and '70s was like a middle school dance, with boys on one side of the crepe-paper-bedazzled gym, girls on the other. Except the boys got 98% of the dance floor, and the yearbook photographers were all boys, along with the principal, the band, the yearbook staff—in fact, gals, would you mind running out to pick us up some more refreshments? I can't think of any othe...