Hey All, Halfway through last week’s Joint on Eddie Aikau, I noted that his Waimea Bay memorial service, despite being announced beforehand and held on a Saturday, drew less than 1,000 people, which seems like an impossibly low turnout but the photos don’t lie. EOS contributor John Callahan emailed back the next morning: A memorial service held today for Eddie Aikau, if he were to pass in the sa...
Hey All, EOS will always jump at the chance to go around the world, and this week is no exception. A British surf-mag collector reached out to Julio Adler of Brazil and turned him onto a forgotten gem of a movie by Japan’s Kiyoshi Fujimoto, which closes with a tribute to Hawaii’s own Eddie Aikau, and that film, thanks to Julio, has landed in the inbox of yours truly—feeling Canadian, given what I...
Hey All, What giant snobs we were, all of us California-born surfers, for a few decades there but especially the 1960s. Hawaii was above us, of course. Australia mattered, once Farrelly and Young literally beat us at our own game. But in the continental US, as far as we were concerned, the sun rose on one side of Pacific Coast Highway and set on the other, and if for some reason we happened to lo...
Hey All, How did I get to Burleigh Heads, Queensland, Australia, floating like a buoy at the top of the point on a dying swell, trying to conjure a chest-high set wave along with three other second-tier pros before an indifferent few hundred spectators at the 1981 Stubbies Pro Trials? Practice, practice, practice! to steal an antique punchline. More specifically, I got to Burleigh by selling my c...
Hey All, I asked my dad recently if he was disappointed or puzzled or otherwise confounded by the insane amount of time I spent surfing. He thought about it. I watched him think about it. He’d gone along with my new interest way back when, no problem, backed it even, got me a SURFER subscription for Christmas, paid for or did matching funds on my first half-dozen boards, drove me two or three tim...
Hey All, The days of high-low hip-swinging culture-vulture Sunday Joints—you know what I’m talking about, Mike Doyle riding tandem with Diana Ross or the one where we parkour from Vishna to Bells Beach to David Cassidy—are about to return. Further down the page here, in fact, I’ve loaded up a little preview of what’s in store next year. But for the moment we are still in fundraising mode. If an...
A Letter from Matt Warshaw, Executive Director of Encyclopedia of Surfing Surfers, surf culture aficionados, fellow travelers—the 2023 EOS fundraiser is ON and if you want to skip to the business end of this message, click here to donate. Last week we pushed the big red launch button on EOS 2.0, and bringing that new and massively upgraded version of the site to life pretty much sucked all our t...
Hey All, It is befitting, I suppose, if we are being charitable, that I've just this moment hit Save on the Joint that I spent all afternoon working on, announcing that the new and rebuilt EOS is finally live. I've lost count of the number of times I've said this thing is here, only to watch it move another two or three weeks into the future, again and again. Instead, you get a cheap video test ...
Hey All, Last night, with a steady finger and cool gaze and a whispered "Now am I become Surf, the Destroyer of Free Time," I pushed the giant red launch button on EOS 3.0—which I've been calling EOS 2.0 for the past year and half, forgetting that we not only launched 2.0 in 2019 but ballyhooed the shit out of it—and set Encyclopedia of Surfing blasting through the series of tubes that is the int...
Hey All, Damien Hardman is my second favorite Iceman, ahead of Val Kilmer but miles behind George Gervin, and I apologize to anyone here who is not an NBA nostalgist but I cannot say Gervin’s name without proselytizing on his behalf, starting with the fact that he was the smoothest, most stylish and fluid player of his or any other generation, the Tom Curren of NBA shooting guards, right down to ...