SUNDAY JOINT, 5-4-2025: "THERE ARE ONLY THREE SPORTS: BULLFIGHTING, MOTOR RACING, AND SURFING. THE REST ARE MERELY GAMES"
Great subject line for today's Joint, and all I did was steal Ernest Hemingway's favorite barstool quote and change one word. "Mountaineering" was his actual third and final sport, of course, not "surfing"—which makes sense because what Hemingway valued above all things, apart from a pitcher of daiquiris and an open tab, was the lurking specter of danger and death. Surfing was never going to fit the bill. Base jumping would have. Cheerleading should have. Big-wave surfing might have caught Papa's eye, but not enough to bump mountaineering off the list.
Nothing, of course, pumped Hemingway's blood like bullfighting.
Eisenhower-era surfers loved bullfighting, too, and in 2021 I did a Joint about it. Back next week with a fresh one!
Hey All,
Late yesterday I crawled out from the bovine-sized rabbit hole that had been my home for much the previous week. “A Short Illustrated Look at Surfing and Bullfighting” was supposed to be a quickie post of photos and videos I’ve been setting aside for the last few years, but I made the mistake of wondering why surfers got interested in bullfighting in the first place, which of course led to Hemingway, who I hadn’t read since high school (no loss, his writing hasn’t aged well), and an enjoyable revisit to Cocaine and Rhinestones’ take on bullfighting (Season Two, the opening section of Episode Five and Episode Six), and of course I had to watch and post Matt Johnson’s highway corrida from Big Wednesday—and by then my week was sideways in the dirt, breathing its last.
And yet, the big long post that resulted still feels half-baked. I needed to talk about how the performance aspect of surfing’s interest in bullfighting was almost entirely related to “dominating” the curl in smallish waves, by standing up and sticking your chest in the lip the way a torero stands calm while the bull rushes by. (The big showy drop-knee cutback might have been an homage to a bullfighter’s trincherazo, too, but that’s just a guess.)
Then we have the pioneering big-wave surfer’s fascination with bullfighting, which was less about cool Iberian style flourishes and more about the idea, inflated but not untrue, about voluntarily and repeatedly dancing with their own mortality. Hemingway famously wrote that "Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor," and I can imagine Buzzy Trent squinting his eyes and nodding in brotherly fellowship.
I would have bet money that the Beats were the first to fall in love with bullfighting, then surfers, but not true. In a 1951 short story written after seeing his first bullfight, Jack Kerouac described the event as a blood-soaked horror and even paused to consider the bull’s POV: “Oh, why can’t I go home?” Years later, after the piece ran in Escapade magazine and some bullfighting aficionados took exception, Kerouac doubled down with a letter to the editor that read, in part, “I do not believe it is a grand thing for men to prove their goddamn dignity at the expense of some dumb beast.” (Anybody raised with the peaceful flower-smelling Ferdinand the Bull, as I was, will on be on Kerouac’s side here. If there are any anti-Ferdinand readers out there—you are not in good company.
That said, the fashion and style horsepower contained within a single suit-of-lights burns brighter than a hundred SURFER Poll Award banquets, and the movements of a great matador (“straight and pure and natural in line,” as Hemingway wrote) very much put me in mind of the great surfers. And obviously, to bring this thing home, what Gerry Lopez did at Pipeline in the early- and mid-’70s was the most bullfight thing in surf history. Pipeline, at the time, was the only real bull in the game. Butch Van Artsdalen rode the place like a cruiserweight. Jock Sutherland rode it like a balance beam gymnast. Lopez, with his brown-rice diet and yoga-expanded mindfulness, leaned to the East, but his Pipeline act whispered Juan Belmonte. “How can I describe Gerry at Pipeline?” Corky Carroll asked. “The best and most stylish bullfighter ever going against the biggest, most gnarly and angry bull.”
The surfer-bullfighter connection ended with Gerry Lopez because he owned it so perfectly and so completely.
Thanks for reading, everyone, and see you next week.
Matt
[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Gerry Lopez at Pipeline by Art Brewer; surfer-bullfighter Bud Hendrick; Matt Johnson on Pacific Coast Highway, channeling Juan Belmonte, in Big Wednesday; Jackie Baxter at Malibu; 1960s postcard of the Plaza Monumental de Tijuana; Buzzy Trent working on his rebolera in Hawaii, late 1950s. Ernest Hemingway at the bullfights, in Spain, in the 1950s. Peter Van Dyke, drop-knee cutback at Trestles, 1964, photo by Bev Morgan. Jack Kerouac and the issue of Escapade featuring his article on bullfighting. Juan Belmonte in the ring. Gerry Lopez at Pipeline by James Cassimus. Lastly, a big Florida-sized thank-you to Kevin Miller for goosing me away from the desk to an easy-to-ride Latin pointbreak where on a few waves I went full Don Ameche in Cocoon and thus kept the last ember of my active surfing life aglow.]