Matt Warshaw's article originally ran in the October 2005 issue of Surfer's Journal.

Last June, not long after Dale Velzy died, I spent an afternoon searching the 

 online archive for surfer obituaries. Early days in the hereafter, it turns out, are as random and capricious as life on earth.

An example. Match the famous and fairly-recently departed surfer with the word length of their 

Moriarty, the smiling big-wave manchild who drowned in a diving accident at age 22, was an inspiration and the very model of surfing civility but fluffed a bit at 1,600 words. Dora was robbed at 1,100. And the magnificent Rell Sunn, first in line for surfing sainthood, inexplicably got not so much as a passing notice from the 

. “We are all equal in the presence of death,” as that Latin wag Publilius said way, way back in the day. Maybe so. But we’re very much 

 in the presence of a harried and uniformed obit editor.

While it's still a crapshoot for any new Styx-crossing surfer in terms of making the 

 cut (pioneering surf photographer Doc Ball, for example, also didn’t get a notice), there’s no doubt that obituary pages in general have over the past several years become a welcome place for surfers, just as the business section has embraced Quiksilver and the sports page has taken on the Boost Mobile Pro. And it’s not just the 

and others, all dipping their oars, along with a thousand other formerly disinterested parties from across the cultural spectrum, domestic and abroad, to drive our sport ever-deeper into the mainstream.

Surfer obituaries were a late-comer to all this. Yes, newspapers published multi-column sendoffs for Duke Kahanamoku, Pete Peterson, Snow McAlister, Nancy Katin, and a few others, but these were the exceptions, and it took Mark Foo’s front-lit, prime-time-ready, big-wave death at Maverick’s in late 1994 to put surfers on the obituary pages to stay. The 

 gave the Hawaiian a hero’s write-up, as did dozens of other papers and magazines around the world, and the flood of headlines meant that friends and loved ones of expired famous or semifamous surfers – not just icons like Dewey Weber and Mickey Dora, but supporting players like Jack Haley and Dru Harrison – could reasonably expect a place on the obit page alongside recently-departed notables from politics, sports, entertainment, science, and academia. And the trend is up. Thirty-five articles appear when I plug “surfer” into the keyword field on the 

 obit archive; 28 from between 2000 and mid-2005, and 10 from the past 18 months. Meanwhile, surfing’s first-generation media stars – headliners from Bud Browne’s early movies and cover boys from 

 quarterly – are about to hit 70. Some already have. Obituary writers are about to become part-time surf historians.

Obituary notices aren’t too far removed from the biographic entries I did for the 

, which is probably why I find them so compelling, and why there are hundreds of surf-related obits in my database. Newspaper and magazine obituaries aren’t as form-bound and templated as in years past, and the line between today’s obits and other forms of reportage can be blurry; 

 magazine, for example, often gives the assignment to a friend or peer of the departed, with instructions to write a short first-person essay.

But obituaries for the most part don’t stray from the traditional style: concise, informative, and – provided the expired wasn’t famously violent or corrupt or scandal-ridden – salutary. The occasion demands a reserved, almost flat voice (more so than an equal-length profile on the living or the long-dead), but the good obit writer, with a knowing word or well-turned phrase, can open a window on a lifetime of color and flair. (Film critic Anthony Lane once quoted from a favorite 

 obituary, on comic actress Beatrice Lillie: “She had a reputation as a prankster and in 1951 ordered a live alligator from Harrods and sent it to Noel Coward with the message: ‘So what else is new?’”) Newspapers and magazines have long kept pre-written obituaries on file for famous people who are either old or ailing; a newer approach is to interview an obituary subject before they die, as a kind of newsprint final accounting, with a caveat that the material won’t be used until after they’re gone. The terminally ill Johnny Carson did such an interview with the 

 last year, as did celebrity attorney Johnny Cochran.

Surf magazines have for the most been all thumbs with obituaries. Death in the abstract – a grim specter hanging over Pipeline and Maverick’s, or the menacing shadow behind big-wave riders like Laird Hamilton and Flea Virostko – is a surf mag staple. But an actual dead surfer usually brings out the rank amateur in surf writers and editors, with the cause of death, age at death, career highlights, and other basic obit compulsories often going unreported. “Recently,” 

 wrote in 1979 in a fairly typical notice, “the surfing community suffered a terrible loss when Butch Van Artsdalen succumbed to the eternal deep after becoming too seriously ill to recover.”

Mainstream sources have had low moments as well. Mark Foo’s 

 obituary said that he died on his first wave at Maverick’s, that he washed ashore, that Brock Little found the body, that Foo hadn’t slept the night before, that “Maverick” is surfer-slang for a big wave, and that a shift in the wind contributed to Foo’s death. That’s six boners in a single midlength article, from the world’s most respected newspaper.

Then there’s the amazing case of Joe “Dr. 360” Wolfson, the Manhattan Beach bodyboarder who died in February 2000. I went to high school in Manhattan and surfed with Wolfson a few times. He was a competent bodyboarder who did belly-spins with the compulsion of an autistic child rocking himself to sleep (hence the self-given nickname), and he made a lot of noise while surfing. Nice guy, stoked off his nut, but with a surf-world reputation that didn’t extend much beyond the mile-long stretch of beach between Manhattan Pier and El Porto. Not long after Wolfson was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, he swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, put his wetsuit on, rode some waves under cover of night, then paddled further outside where he looped his leash around a near-shore buoy and waited to die. Instead, he was pulled from the water the next morning, had a turn for the better health-wise, and was reborn as the first human interest surf celebrity, making appearances on 

, and signing a book deal. When Wolfson died 14 months later in a single-car accident (probably a suicide), the newspaper and magazine obituaries fell like dominoes: the 

 said “Dr 360 was master of the bodyboard,” the 

 called him a “a surf legend,” and a 

 magazine obit was accompanied by both a portrait of Wolfson and an action shot of him at Puerto Escondido. The lead sentence for the obituary in the London-based 

 read, “Will Joseph Wolfson become an American icon, in the manner of James Dean or Buddy Holly?”, prompting 

, in a short article title with the brilliant headline of “Joe, We Hardly Knew Ye,” to ask, “Who the hell is Joe Wolfson?”

Post-Wolfson surfer obits could only improve. Miki Dora’s 

 notice in early 2002 got all the information right, positioned him just so in the surf pantheon, and even hit a note of elegance by describing him as “the profane evangelist of a youthful counterculture.” While Dale Velzy’s recent 

 obit got off to false start, with surf impresario Allen Seymour’s lead testimonial that Velzy was “the original surfer-cowboy-hot-rodder in Southern California” (he was the 

 surfer-cowboy-hot-rodder), the rest of the article moved with ease through a colorful and vigorously-lived life, describing Velzy’s postwar introduction to surfboard building, his rise and fall and resurrection as a commercial manufacturer, and his cash-draining attraction to diamond rings, Cuban cigars, and fast cars. Velzy himself gets the obit’s final quote, which ends with a bit of Yogi Berra-like wordplay. “All I’ve tried to do is have fun and do whatever it was as good as I could.”

So I think this is what we’re looking at here.

Goodbye, soon enough, to our Golden Age surfers – the profane evangelicals, the diamond-wearing craftsmen, and big-water pioneers.

Not much of an exchange, but there it is. Be grateful that obit writers these days are doing as good as they could.

THE FINAL WORD: SURFERS DROP INTO THE OBITUARY PAGES

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