SUNDAY JOINT, 10-26-2025: ALOHA AND THANK YOU TO JOHN PECK
Hey All,
John Peck died this week, age 81, of cancer. He began surfing in the late 1950s and just kept going, decade after decade, era after era, trip after trip. I don't know exactly when Peck paddled out for the last time, but it was late in the game—he was nothing if not durable, there are plenty of edits out there of John waltzing those soft roly-poly walls at Swami's deep into his senior years. What a huge talent. Peck in the autumn of life was tall and nimble, stick-thin, with long steel-gray hair and a chest-cozy beard like the noseriding ghost of Walt Whitman.
Surfing was good for John. He was from a well-to-do family, determined and physically gifted, both, and could have thrived at most any other sport. But only surfing could have given John a through-line from age 15, when he began riding waves at Coronado Beach, all the way to Thursday's meet-up with Dharmaraja. Surfing got to Peck early and thoroughly—before meditation, yoga, acid—and helped shape him. Peck, in turn, helped shape the sport.
Early Peck, for me, is the best Peck. There is no getting around the full-dress cosmic elder he became, but let's start with the Pipeline and the Penetrator—our first and best impression of John Peck.
The Penetrator was a beak-nosed rocker-free double-stringered John Peck signature model longboard made by Morey-Pope, and I'm not sure if anybody but John could actually ride it. The board sold decently. It also allowed Peck to flaunt his talent for double entendre; his Penetrator, John said in a Morey-Pope ad, was "an effortlessly responsive tool" that "enables me to maneuver through positions previously thought impossible." I appreciate too that John went Mod-lite (see below) to goose sales.
John would have earned a signature model even if he'd never seen the North Shore of Oahu. Style-wise, he borrowed without shame from Edwards and Dora, was loose and powerful, and at 16 he surfed just like fellow copycat Nat Young did at 16—except John got there first. He was a showman and crowd-pleaser, with a T-shirt that read "Yes, I'm John Peck." At Honolua Bay one afternoon, John paddled out with a lit cigarette and was still hitting it a minute or so later while trimming through a hot section. In 1966, he had a fantastic run through the Southern California competition season, finishing off with a win at the Laguna Masters in Redondo Beach.
All of this impressiveness took place in waist- to head-high surf. And all of it is now shadowed, or forgotten outright, because of what Peck did at Pipeline over the course of two or three years, but mostly on January 1, 1963—a surf-break debut for the ages. John was 18 and had ridden Pipeline for the first time just a week earlier. On the afternoon prior, December 31, everyone on the North Shore knew for sure the surf would be pumping the next morning, but of course everybody also knew for sure that New Year's Eve was going be ferocious, if for no other reason than the fact that Butch van Artsdalen and Dewey Weber were set on drinking the Island dry and so a party at Bud Browne's rented beachfront house spiraled through a decathalon of drinking games, beer at first, then whisky. Peck picks up the story:
The drinking contest came down to me and Butch because everybody else had either quit or passed out. Butch had finished his bottle of Scotch. Then he goes over to the icebox, opens it, pulls out a beer. Turns around and suddenly goes completely still. Then he slowly pitches forward, right onto his face. Candy Calhoun drags him into a corner and starts mothering him. Dewey is on the floor, barely coherent, slurring, "Well, that's it! I guess you won, John!" I slide onto the floor, crawl out the back door, fall off the porch, and roll down the lawn into oblivion. Just before I went totally unconscious, Buddy Boy Kaohe is out there pissing on me, laughing his head off. "You may have won, but I'm still standing and I'm pissing on you!"
Then Bud and Buzzy [Trent] are holding me up, and Buzzy is going, "Look what you've done, John! Look what you've done to yourself!" They picked me up and carried me to where I was staying and threw me on the bed. Next thing I know someone is shaking me awake, saying "Butch is already out at the Pipeline! Come on, John!"
Peck, that morning, bloodshot and leaving a flammable trail of Black and White fumes in his wake, paddled out and over the next three hours laid pretty much all the foundation stones for surfing Pipeline backside. Van Artsdalen, a goofyfooter, caught bigger waves and rode deeper. In fact this was the day Butch more or less formally became "Mr. Pipeline." But for my money, and maybe just because I'm a regularfooter, Peck is the real groundbreaker here, starting with tucked-knee angled takeoff and the fin reset halfway down the face, then famously curling himself into that modified cannonball trim stance—folded torso, knees to chest, right hand clamped on the rail, head up and left arm pointing the way to the channel. Caity Simmers could do the same thing this New Year's Day, except on a shorter board and while threading a fairground's worth of paddlers, and be a Wave of the Winter contender.
Act Two. John Peck's life from 1967 forward was a spin-art flux of drugs, crime, religion, yoga, mystic prattle—and, somehow, still, an abundance of extraodinary surfing. I have watched and admired a half-dozen or more short clips of John surfing over the past three or so decades. But I've steered clear of all Peck-related interviews and features. In 2000, while researching the print version of EOS, Nathan Myers called John on my behalf, and the notes from that conversation were enough for me. I'm looking at a printout right now, and I won't wallow here because the whole document to my eyes is little more than addiction residue and half-resolved mental health issues. Levitation, shape-shifting, space-travel, conversations with God, at least one person struck dead by God on John's behalf, on and on. Peck was not shy or olbique when conjuring his past.
There were also drug-related indictments and convictions, jail time, institutionalization. He married, moved often, quit surfing, buried two stillborn children, divorced, drank, drugged, recovered, relapsed.
Peck returned to California in 1984 and got clean. Four years later he began riding waves again and the surf magazines soon reintroduced him as a rapturous yogi with a big inviting smile, surfing chops fully intact. Outwardly, he seemed an entirely different person than the swaggering "Yes, I'm John Peck" hotshot from the Kennedy years. Prayerful, sonorous voice, plain-spoken at times but never far from New Age verse.
What a comeback. You do not have to be onside with Peck's beliefs or visions to recognize that, however he got there, he not only pulled himself out of the deepest and darkest of holes but found a healthy, sustainable, at times beautiful way of being. Except it was never that simple. Peck remained a work in progress, which is one way of saying that he could veer gnarly just as easily as he could crimp himself into full lotus. Peck's temper was an open secret among those who surfed with him, and the episodes could be really unpleasent. Watch here, and here.
I'm not especially put off by Peck's behavior. Given what he'd been through, and given how everybody struggles with righteousness or life-balance or whatever you want to call it, as we age—few of us, really, are consistent. Surfing and meditation and freestyle sermonizing no doubt helped keep Peck from raging way more often. John himself maybe could have been more open about his own obvious dualities. On the other hand, perhaps he was and we just weren't paying attention.
One person on the receiving end of a 2016 Peck tirade, issued at night on a remote beach after some fireworks were set off and ruined the nocturnal vibe, with Peck unaware that he was screaming at a pair of surfers, ended when one of the guys said, "Hey, I used to see you surfing Swamis." Peck went silent. He backed away, turned and gathered himself, turned back. The surfer on the receiving end continues the story. "All of the rage from a moment ago was gone, replaced by a Ram Dass smile and eyes that could see into my soul. He stuck out his hand and, cool as a cucumber, said, 'Hi, I'm John Peck.' He was gracious and apologized for losing his shit."
This echoes what Peck told Surf Guide magazine way back in 1963, when he was just 19 years old: "I'm schizoid. I've always had an inferiority complex, no matter what. I feel inferior and cover up with a veneer of superiority."
Peck always knew about his contradictions, in other words. We were the ones who wanted to see him only and exclusively in full lotus mode. If John Peck got by, thrived even, for 40-plus years by fooling us and at times possibly himself that he could levitate and travel though space and had thus found enlightenment—that is not, in the big picture, much of a flaw.
And let's not forget, on New Year's Day 1963, at Pipeline, Peck pretty much did in fact levitate.
Thanks for reading and see you next week.
Matt
[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: John Peck at Pipeline, photo by LeRoy Grannis; Mr. Natural cartoon by Robert Crumb; Peck at Malibu, 1963, photo by Jim Driver; 2016 self-portrait; Peck Penetrator model. Turning at Redondo Breakwater, by Grannis. Peck dressed up for 1966 Penetrator ad. Smoking at Honolua Bay, by Bob Evans. Pipeline sequence on Jan 1, 1963, by Bud Browne. Peck on the beach in Hawaii, date unknown. Peck closeout by Jack Coleman]