The Sunday Joint

SUNDAY JOINT, 8-11-2024: "FRANCE CANNOT BE FRANCE WITHOUT GREATNESS," WHICH BRINGS US TO JOEL DE ROSNAY

Hey All, The "greatness" quote, above, is from the towering, and toweringly insufferable, Cinquième République founder Charles de Gaulle, and maybe you're thinking, Just what you'd expect—nobody appreciates the French like the French. Or maybe you're more like, It's not bragging if you can back it up. I lean toward the second option. If you value culture in all it's manifest wonder—not counting c...

SUNDAY JOINT, 8-4-2024: MICHAEL HO, GOOD AS GOLD

Hey All, Montreal, we can all agree, is as French as a city gets without having a Gitanes-studded bank on the River Seine. So if Teahupoo had been on the map 50 years ago, and surfing was already an Olympic Sport, we can further agree that our "surfing shortboard" Olympic venue for the très fleur-de-lis '76 Montreal Games would have been End of the Road, just as it is for Paris '24.  In which ca...

SUNDAY JOINT, 7-28-2024: MOONSHOTS FOR EVERYONE!

Hey All, Probably the first thing I did on my first day at SURFER, January 1985, the new junior associate editor, was plug in my pea-green IBM Selectric II, power up, hit the "return" key a few times and whisper, "Tick-tock, Jarratt—here I come." Six months later I got a Leading Edge word processor, a year after that I traded up to a Mac SE, and that was it, Team Apple all the way, and never a pr...

SUNDAY JOINT, 7-21-2024: “GOLD! WHAT CAN IT NOT DO, AND UNDO?” HERE COMES THE OLYMPICS!

Hey All, The self-justifying nonsense we’ve said and done over the years to make surfing grander than it is, am I right? All the energy we’ve spent pulling our beautiful blue sport this way and that, stretching and tugging till we can rub it against the hem of religion or the Olympics or live-laugh-love style personal affirmation. I’m not entirely against this. (Mostly I am. Blame atheism and Ste...

SUNDAY JOINT, 7-14-2024: STAY TUNED, WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK!

Hey All, Tom Curren and I spoke by phone in early 1996, five years after his third and final world title. He’d been traveling hither and yon that whole time, as headliner for the Rip Curl Search campaign. Perfect waves, no more chasing scores and rating points. Everybody assumed Curren was now finally living his purest surfing life—myself included. Does traveling better fit your idea of what a p...

SUNDAY JOINT, 7-7-2024: THE RESIDENT PRESIDENT

Hey All, Richard Nixon was never far removed from the surfing conversation, in one way or another, during his presidency. Mostly because if you were of fighting age, as the vast majority of surfers were in the 1960s and ’70s, Nixon was viewed as the person responsible for the draft and America’s grinding and ongoing involvement in the Vietnam War. Unless you were 4-F, or in college, or already pl...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-30-2024: BUILDING A BETTER WORLD, ONE PRIMO AT A TIME

Hey All, First apology goes to Captain Mike Cunningham, the unidentified Manhattan Pier kneeboarder from last week's Sunday Joint. Mike was the best bodysurfer in the state during the 1970s and '80s, possibly in all of Mainland America, possibly the world, but he had the bad luck of being the same age and having a near-identical name as Mark Cunningham, who of course lived in Hawaii and famously ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-23-2024: DO THE WRIGHT THING

Hey All, I'm 64 years old, and hope to ride many more waves before getting my celestial flip-flops—here's me, pretty much, week before last in Southern Costa Rica; of course I want to keep this show rolling—but my surfing life now is mostly spent thinking about the past, and one of the best parts of that past is recalling the families I was lucky enough to embed with over the years. The McFarland...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-16-2024: THE GREAT UNSEEN – JIM CARTLAND AND PAULINE MENCZER

Hey All, None of you called me out for this, but the recent Rick Rasmussen post kind of gets caught in its own trap. The point was made that most surfers (me, for sure) have a high tolerance for what I not-so-delicately referred to as "our biggest fuck-ups," because our own "transgressions in the name of surfing are trivial by comparison but not consequence-free"—meaning we cut a lot of slack to ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-10-2024: HIP CHECK

Hey All, Surfing is no longer hip, but lack of hipness doesn’t matter. This is the apple-sized conclusion, placed 100 yards downfield, that my arrow of logic was going to smartly pierce at the end of this Joint. But nay. Every time I draw the bowstring my hand wavers. The word “hip” is so wrung out, for starters. What about “cool,” then? Is cool okay? Isn’t cool the same as hip? They are not the ...