Hey All, There is a good chance that somewhere deep inside an ancient metal filing cabinet, in a plastic file tucked inside a M*A*S*H-age Pendaflex hang folder, is a 35mm color transparency of Florida surfer Steve “Beaver” Massfeller taken by Orange County photographer Mike Moir. Both men were incredibly good at what they did. Both were at the height of their powers in the late ’70s and early ’80...
Hey All, The bottom turn used to be the maypole of surfing maneuvers, the nucleus, the move around which all other moves depended on and circled around and took orders from, but also, in the right hands, a spectacular thing in and of itself, and while Jeff Hakman was and remains my own personal bottom turn Shiva, the first surfer to actually imprint on my barely-salted nine-year-old mind as a hea...
Hey All, Kimo Hollinger, whose early gift for big-wave surfing was eclipsed by an even greater gift for short first-person essays that were funny and heartbreaking, casual and self-deprecating and wise, often in the same sentence, died last week at age 84. There is a steady, deceptive 2/4 simplicity to Hollinger’s work. Short sentences, mostly. Some commas here and there but otherwise very little...
Hey All, Occasionally I will pass my keyboard-calloused hands across the near and far fields of surf history, eyes closed, senses open, from Mamala the Shark Woman to the Swell of ’39 to T-Street, checking the sport’s auras and chakras and whatnot. All part of the job. And without fail, while performing this survey, things go dark when I pause and hover over Tom Blake. I marvel at Blake’s range ...
Hey All, “22 Street” was the bare bones title of a feature piece in the June 1963 issue of SURFER. Eight full pages on a negligible little piece of Hermosa Beach, holding down the middle of an issue that’s just 60 pages front to back. If you don’t know Hermosa, you are baffled. If you do know Hermosa—you are more baffled. South Bay old-timers will bang their canes on the floor and tell you Hermos...
Hey All, In two days I fly to LA, and from there to Namotu, Fiji, where I will absolutely avoid nearby Cloudbreak—I’m 63, the inside section at Cloudbreak is called Shish Kebobs, enough said—and instead I’ll prowl the lineup at a resort-fronting break known, appealingly, as Swimming Pools where, if my pop-up doesn’t fail me, I will do graceful slow-motion turns and trim for the channel with back ...
Hey All, I knew Margo Godfrey (as she was then known) was very young when she took 4th in the 1965 SURFER Poll. I didn’t know till just now that she was in fact just 12 on the night of the awards ceremony in mid-April 1966. A braces-wearing sixth-grader! With that in mind, my newly adjusted Top-Five Greatest Preteen Surfers is as follows: 1. Jeff Hakman 2. Margo Godfrey 3. Donald Takayama 4. Jer...
Hey All, The eagle has not landed. The eagle has swooped in, majestically—I have seen the eagle up close. Then it turns and flies away, and this has in fact happened four or five times now, but today is worse, today feels as if the eagle has dropped a parting gift on the back of my head. EOS 2.0 is not up. October 1st was the deadline. But we’re not ready, and as much as I want to say we are ver...
Hey All, Count me among those who canceled, without any hand-wringing, the never-jailed but ninth-ring-creep filmmaker Woody Allen. This scene alone should have done it, decades ago—watch and cringe. Yet a half-dozen Woody Allen lines are still hung on the walls, dusty but accessible, in the comedy museum of my mind, like the bit in Annie Hall where Allen, reconnecting with his ex while still bei...
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 the book wobbles into a 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 r...