Hey All, Linda Davoli was the stealth surfer in our recent Boyer-Oberg Sunday Joint, and that tracks with the MO of her entire seven-year pro career, during which time you could find reputable surf-world figures who thought Davoli was not among the world's best female surfers but the best, full stop. Scroll to the last wave on this clip. Hang Ten Pro, 1977, First Point Malibu. My take is that Mar...
Hey All, Airbrushing is still a thing in surfing and always will be, until the Cybertrucks go rogue and bring down the grid at which point the compressors fall silent and we’re back to decorating our boards with charcoal and berry juice. But airbrushing is not a thing in 2024 the way it was in the 1970s and the sport is less colorful for this fact—and a bit less ridiculous, and I mean ridiculous ...
Hey All, We all got ripped off by ignoring or dismissing women surfers year after year, decade after decade. Today’s Joint runs the idea through a pro surfing lens, but the same can be said for the sport in general—more girls in the water means a better surfing experience for all, full stop. Anyway, let’s get to griping. This will not be breaking news, but it is worth noting again because the nu...
Hey All, Comedy-loving Boomers are saddened by the fact that Spinal Tap references don’t land like they used to—or don’t land at all—and, in fact, if you play the Tap card here in 2024 you run the risk of being, maybe not laughed at or pitied, but blank-stared, and fair enough, the movie is older than LeBron James. Generations have passed since we first set eyes on Nigel and the boys. Empires hav...
Hey All, I aim the Joint downfield, pull back and let fly, and it always more or less lands on target, but only after veering in directions unplanned—in some cases unknown; I often bang stuff into the Joint that I find in momento—and that is very much where we are today. I took aim at Shirley Rogers. Easy choice. Anyone with a passing knowledge of late ’70s and early ’80s surf media has aimed his...
Hey All, Janice Domorski of Bradley Beach, New Jersey, was the first East Coaster to make the finals of a World Surfing Championships event (Puerto Rico ’68), and during the second half of the ’60s she parked herself on the winner’s podium from Miami to Narragansett. Read Janice’s EOS page here, and skip ahead to 17:15 on this video to catch an eyeful of her classy upright riding style—for a hot ...
Hey All, It is midwinter break for those of us living in the Seattle Public School District, so I took my eighth-grade son and his best pal to Leavenworth for a few days. Not the once-notorious Kansas state penitentiary—although allow me to direct your attention to Frank Grigware, the train-robber turned Leavenworth inmate turned locomotive-powered-gate-busting escapee, who fled to Canada where h...
Hey All, “Rolling With Frank,” a 2006 Surfer’s Journal essay by Dorian Paskowitz, introduces us to a long-forgotten Los Angeles surfer named Frank Donahue, and we’re in rogue territory right away as Paskowitz describes a midnight poker game in San Pedro with Donahue and a group of longshoremen. The twist is that each player has a pitcher of beer, everyone has to drink following each hand, and who...
Hey All, There are different paths to riches, and while I am a traditionalist in that I’d love to trod the path that ends with two or three more zeros in the family IRA, I am wealthy in other ways. I am up-triggered, constantly, for example, when reminded of the cultural bounty that dropped like rosebuds and free Sex Wax into my tanned hairless arms during the earliest years of my surfing life....
Hey All, Los Angeles-born surf filmmaker Hal Jepsen was the Taylor Steele of his era, or the other way around. The right guy in the right place at the right time. Jepsen’s Cosmic Children(1970) equals Steele’s Momentum(1992), is what I’m trying to say—both movies are raw and artless and as bleeding-edge as you could get in a pre-internet age in terms of showing us what was happening almost as it ...