“Call Them All: Data Gathering for Surfing’s Ultimate Encyclopedia," by Nathan Myers, ran in the Fall 2003 issue of Surfer’s Journal. This version has been slightly edited.

“Goddamn it! I’m so sick of you people calling up all the time and asking me the same shit,” the legendary Phil Edwards is yelling at me. I should be honored, but I don’t know any better. I’m just doing my job. Moments ago Edwards had been polite as a lamb, then two questions into my profile questionnaire, something snapped. The lamb grew horns and burst into flames. “I’ve been telling you people the same shit for 40 years. Why don’t you just read my book? It’s all in there.”

, out of print and 35 years out of date—is sitting in front of me, courtesy of the Matt Warshaw surf library. But I’m something of a lamb myself: polite and utterly non-confrontational. I can’t stand the idea of bothering someone about their personal business if they don’t want to be bothered, but this is my job, so I thank Mr. Edwards for his time and hang up the phone.

A few minutes later, I’m on the phone with Mickey Muñoz. The man is a saint. He willingly shares the facts of his life with me, and beyond that, he patiently unveils to me his various revelations about Life and Surfing in a way that leaves me speechless and full of awe. “It’s the process that’s important,” Muñoz says, looking back over more than 50 years of surfing. “Riding waves is just the icing on the cake. The process is everything. It’s making the boards and the toys people play on; it’s the surf trips and all the people you meet along the way; it’s sitting in the water looking into the depths and watching the colors change, sensing the rhythm of the ocean and knowing you’re not tied to your wristwatch.”

It’s beautiful and calming to hear Mickey speak, but I have little time for my own starstruck awe. The list of names in front of me is long and strangely ominous. Which ones will yell at me? Which ones will pour out their hearts? Both results are somehow nerve-racking.

I pick up the phone and dial Gerry Lopez.

I scroll through my list of names: Tom Curren, Cheyne Horan, Rob Machado, Tom Carroll, Lisa Andersen, Mark Richards, Kelly Slater—all in a day’s work.

I’ve organized them by country, so I can phone different time zones strategically. But mostly, I just leave vain messages on answering machines and cell phones, and for some people—like Lopez and Curren who just plain aren’t going to call back—I leave nothing at all.

The phone rings and I snap it up, hoping that someone out there might actually be returning one of my calls. It’s Matt Warshaw, the former editor of SURFER magazine, current author of the much-rumored 

, and to me, the boss. “Looks like it’s glassing off,” he says. “We'd better hit it before the wind comes up again. See you on the peak.”

Rewind to fall 2000—about the time Ben Marcus wrote his article “The Beach” (San Francisco’s Ocean Beach) about Warshaw writing the dreaded behemoth 

I’m in a tiny room filled with 10,000 surf magazines, each bound by year and organized by volume.

Surfer. Surfing. Australian Surfing Life. The Surfer’s Journal. Surfing World. Deep. Wahine. Eastern Surfing Magazine. Surfing Girl. Transworld. H20. Petersens Surfing illustrated. Blue. Surf Guide. The Surf Report. Beach Culture.

 Each volume is neatly numbered and arranged sequentially against a single wall. There are also three-ring binders filled with mainstream articles about surfing—

Time Magazine, Life Magazine, The New York Times, L.A. Times, Outside

, more—organized by year and stretching back as far as the turn of the century (the other turn, that is). Another wall holds just about every surf video ever made, arranged and labeled by year. A third wall is all books about surfing, also neatly categorized by fact, fiction, pictures, history, biography, etc.

Matt Warshaw, compulsive organizer and obsessive tube rider, is handing me a list of names and another list of questions. “I want you to call all these people and ask them these questions,” he says.

I read down the list. Hundreds of names, each with a brief note.

Gordon Clark: inventor of Clark Foam. This might be a hard one. Doesn’t give interviews. Probably need a third party.

Michael Peterson: awesome Queensland surfer from the ’70s. Went insane in the ’80s. You may have to interview a family member. Also, ask him what he was arrested for in the mid-’70s, what were the charges, was there a conviction and any jail time served. Good luck.

Buffalo Keaulana: Mr. Makaha for decades, father of two famous surfers, Rusty and Brian. Probably won’t talk to you on the phone. Ask Bernie Baker or Randy Rarick how to contact.

The list goes on and on. Foreign names like Hiromishi Soeda, Arnaud de Rosnay, and Gordo Barreda. Scary names like Pat Curren, Titus Kinimaka, and Johnny-Boy Gomes. Incredible names like Kelly Slater, Sunny Garcia, and Mark Occhilupo.

Impossible names like Bob Simmons, Lorrin Harrison, and Rell Sunn.

I know a little about some of them, nothing about many of them, and a lot about none of them.

“Which ones do you want me to call?” I ask.

I met Matt on Ocean Beach a few years back. Just surfing. That’s all it was then, back before I became such a surf-trivia smarty-pants. We’d stand on the bluff overlooking our fickle beachbreak discussing the wind, the sandbars, and the approaching swell. I’d been an ocean lifeguard and surfer for years, but I’d barely ever read surf magazines.

I knew Warshaw was a surf writer of some sort because my housemates said so. I was a writer, too; writing restaurant, bar, and club reviews for every watering hole in San Francisco and getting paid mostly in beer. Warshaw had been complaining about the massive amounts of work on his latest project—

— and saying he was in way over his head. I told him if he ever needed help I’d be happy to do whatever I could.

We met over coffee one day, and I was hired to help write encyclopedia entries. Warshaw would compile folders full of photo-copied magazine articles for me about a specific subject, and I would hand him back concise, definitive, encyclopedia-style entries about the subject. Well, in theory, at least. In reality, I was pretty terrible at it.

“It’s not your fault, really,” Warshaw explained to me the first time he fired me. “I’ve been doing this stuff for over 20 years. You haven’t.”

But it’s like Phil Edwards once said (to someone else): “No one ever falls off the wave. They jump.”

With that philosophy in mind, I kept my feet and held on through the foam. “Look, I really just want to help you with this,” I told Matt. “I’m not doing it for the money, so just let me help. Tell me what you need done, and that’s what I’ll do.” So Matt came up with this list of names.

“So can you tell me about any jobs or careers Joel has held?” I’m interviewing longboarding’s favorite son, Joel Tudor. Well, actually, I’m interviewing his mother, a very nice lady. The question is strictly standard, something I have to ask everybody, but Mrs. Tudor is just cracking up.

“Joel?” she laughs. “Ha! Can you imagine Joel working?”

I guess she’s right. I certainly can’t imagine him answering phones.

Pro surfers are not the easiest people to get in touch with. That’s why I’m interviewing Tudor’s mother. She probably knows more about his career than he does, anyway. It’s come to my attention over the last couple hundred interviews that talking to young pro surfers is less thrilling than watching them throw spray on a cutback. In most cases, their well-to-do parents put them in the water at a young age, chauffeur contest to contest until they drop out of high school and begin touring the world.

Surfing, surfing, and more surfing. So, sure, their wisdom is deep and intrinsic when they’re standing in the tube, but their life story generally amounts to a pile of contest results and a blur of perfect surf sessions.

The old guys, though—the ex-pros and the grizzled legends that were around before there was money and stardom to be won—these are the guys with yarns to spin and fat to chew. Time is the best teacher, I guess.

But ex-pro surfers and grizzled legends aren’t easy to track down either, nor are wandering nomad photographers, corporate high-hogs, or the long-dead.

You bet. My list was full of them: Dickie Cross, Whitey Harrison, Bob Evans, Gard Chapin. For the dead guys, Warshaw wanted me to interview their widows or next of kin; wanted me to stir the ashes and nudge the corpses. The Ouija board just wasn’t precise enough. Warshaw wanted blood.

For recently deceased filmmaker Dale Davis (who had side-slipped his career from surfing to softcore porn), I called some of his old friends, like Lance Carson and Jackie Baxter. “Dale’s dead?!?” they said. “Oh my god! Are you serious? Tuna’s dead? When did this happen?” I helped them mourn a bit as they fondly remembered their friend “Tuna,” who had begun filming on bigger days because he was “chicken of the sea.” And in the meantime, I subtly hassled them for facts: “Hey, remember when Tuna started surfing? What year was that again?”

Then there were the people who were dying, too sick to interview, but yet not dead enough to get the info from their obituary: Miki Dora, Mike Diffenderfer, John Whitmore. This left me with the grim task of vulturing around their already-grieving friends and relatives, trying to extract the necessary information. All I wanted to do was honor their role in the sport, to accurately relate their piece in the greater puzzle of surf history—but it still felt like ambulance chasing. Which is only fun if you’re a dog.

 editor Bill Cleary on the phone and his nurse held the phone while he told me classic stories from the days when it was all wide-open waves and nobody to surf them; of living at Pipeline before it had ever been surfed; of the freedom of Topanga Beach before it was turned into a parking lot. Bill had advanced Parkinson’s disease when we talked but, reviewing his own life, there was great happiness behind his rasping voice. When we were done, he chuckled and said, “Come by if you ever want to get an ice cream or something.” I almost cried. Gentle, kind souls, pouring out their lives for some sort of historical telemarketer fact-hassling them over the phone. But I think they understood the importance of what we were making. Times were a-changing and history—like their own fragile lives—was slipping away. It was now or never for these people.

I didn’t mean to imply, earlier, that all the hot young pro surfers are themselves boring, exactly. I only meant that they make for less-than-exciting encyclopedia entries. How many ways can you say a guy has a great cutback and awesome tube-riding skills? The questions I was asking everyone—geared entirely toward writing encyclopedia entries—only asked for the compiled facts and figures of a life. Where have you lived? What work have you done? What did you create? Most new pro surfers are just that: new. They’ve only started out on their path, so they don’t even understand the questions I’m asking.

“Work?” they would laugh. “I went on the tour as soon as I finished high school. I like girls. I like hanging out with my friends.”

“College?” they said, sounding slightly nervous. “Yeah, I got a masters in surf-ology from the University of Sunset.” (You wouldn’t believe the number of surfers we found who were two units shy of an AA degree.)

You have to have a certain level of charisma to make it as a pro surfer—something to do with the subjective judging system, I suppose—and lots of these guys just cruise on it.

Life comes easy, is the message. They’re right, too—life, for them, at this stage, 

But it won't be that way forever. Not everybody can end up on top with a small pot of gold in the bank. I came across many ex-pros struggling to make ends meet, take care of their kids, pay alimony. Former Australian National Champion Peter Drouyn told me how he just sold his Makaha championship trophy to pay rent. Or what about East Coast legend Gary Propper? He produced 

 and is now managing comedian Carrot Top’s career. Sure, he’s making money, but what about his pride? I found 1974 Pipe Masters winner Jeff Crawford keeping the wolves at bay by brokering zoo animals. “I’m licensed to sell everything from rhinos to hedgehogs,” he told me, “but monkeys are my specialty.”

But again—lots of surfers just plain don’t answer their phones. I don’t. If I’m not working, I generally look at the phone like it was something spoiled in the fridge. These days, however, the ringing of the phone held absurd possibilities—legendary surfers are calling my house.

One Saturday, my housemate Peter and I were toweling down from a morning surf when the phone rang. Peter answered and handed me the phone with a deadly serious look, “Be cool,” he said. “It’s Titus.”

He was referring to Titus Kinimaka, of course, who we both knew only for his reputation as a Hawaiian heavy hitter. I’d been leaving phone messages and e-mails everywhere for just about everyone and, now and again, one of them would actually call back. My surfing idols, like Chris Malloy, Donovan Frankenreiter, and Brock Little might just call my house at any old hour. 

What’s up, guys? How’s it going? Any surf today? Yes, I’m a kook. Now, please, tell me your entire life story. Ready, go.

But Titus could not have been cooler-—friendly, open, and generous. In fact, just about everyone was super cool. Strange, quirky, grumpy, and difficult sometimes, but always cool. Surfers are cool. We’re competitive and territorial, but basically, we’re family. And interview after interview the conversation flowed easy and calm. These were the people I already got along with, talking about their life of waves. People generally enjoy talking about themselves, especially when someone’s anxious to listen, taking notes even. It’s fun to think back over the entire course of your life, something you may only get to do in the final instant before you die (or so they tell me).

Time-traveler, yogi-guru-noserider John Peck (a self-proclaimed 2,000-watt light bulb in a 100-watt socket) laid it on the line for me—took me to heaven and to hell with him—and I believed every word he said. The two-hour narration he laid out defies description: a punch bowl filled with LSD, laser beams shooting from his eyes, 30 days in heaven talking to God—a long, strange trip to say the least. “You know,” Peck said near the end of our conversation, “I can meditate, stop my breath, do magic—all this difficult stuff. And yet I still wipe out. Surfing, especially a longboard, really well, is still one of the most challenging, athletic, dancing arts the human body can do. You’re constantly having to act, react, respond, and relate to nature on nature’s terms, God on God’s terms, full-on manifest physical form, you’ve got to be just totally surrendered in the now. Flowing. You can give your will and support, like power turns and off-the-lips, but it’s all with the flow. If you try to fully control it for even a second, you’re blown.”

That’s where we’re at, trying to tame this beast of a book. Blown away. The entries are changing under our feet. We’re constantly having to update information, and by the time we go to print, things will already have changed. The world of surfing is now, and now, and now again.

“The numbers are this,” Warshaw is being interviewed by Swell.com’s Matt Walker on the phone and I’m laughing in the other room, hearing him obsess endlessly over the Numbers. “There’s 1,500 entries from A to Z: people, places, events, culture, all that. Every entry has an assigned word length from 100 to 1,000 words. I’ve already written 900 of the 1,500, more or less, but I did the short ones first because I thought it would be easier. So, I’ve written about 175,000 words, and the total word count is somewhere around 500,000. That leaves at least 275,000 words left.”

“So I’ve got to write about a thousand words a day up until June, just to get the first draft finished. Then I’ve also got all these appendices to write. I’m doing a list of every surf film ever made, a discography of surfing music, and also a big, long appendix in the back of surf contest results.

“Crazy. I don’t know what I’m going to do, ’cause the surf’s gonna get good here, and then it makes it really hard for me to sit up here and get work done.”

There’s a reason we chose to be writers. When the surf comes up, Warshaw is among the first to capitalize on that reason. And if Matt’s going surfing, well, then, I am too. It’s his book, not mine.

In many ways, going surfing with Matt has taught me as much as all the phone calls and pawing through surf magazines ever could. But it’s not something I can describe here without cracking open a trunk full of cliches and waxing with cheese, so I’ll just say that it’s been everything this book is not, and the entire reason for working so hard to get it right. Confusing, I know, but I’ll bet you understand what I’m talking about, too.

 is running a year behind schedule. But it’s not the sort of thing we can just slap together to make a deadline. What we’re building here is meant to stand the test of time.

Harcourt, the publisher, has the option to keep updating the book every couple of years. The entries we’re writing stick to a formula; they each contain certain necessary facts.

An entry on a “Place” will tell you when the Place was first surfed and by whom, then track the development of the Place along with its significant moments, up until its present status.

The entry describes the Place in terms of temperatures, physical make-up, moods, and attitudes and tries to include a clever and interesting quote about it from someone who really knows—something to capture the spirit and essence of the place in a voice other than ours. Entries on “Things” track the Thing’s inception and development up to its present status or demise, and also define its parameters—size, color, cost, availability, and other relevant information about it—and includes an interesting outside perspective.

A lot of the info is acquired from other sources. That’s what we’re doing with all these books and videos and magazines all day. That’s why Warshaw spent a full year making the Database: a complex personal reference system, built in Filemaker Pro, of every bit of info stored in Matt’s home office/surf-trivia-temple. Type “Kelly Slater” into the database and you’ll get a list of 261 items about Kelly Slater from every surf magazine, book, video, or outside source (

Time, Life, Outside, New York Times, L.A. Times

, etc.) that ever mentioned the six-time world champion. The idea is to use the sources to piece together this basic map of a surfer’s life so that we can write an entry that traces the course of their surfing life: born when and where into what sort of family (generally indicated by “father’s occupation”), started surfing when and where, started competing or shaping when and how, first big breakthrough (win, publication, promotion, etc.), and on and on until present status or death. Entries try to stop and enjoy the grand moments, to characterize the person’s style (on land or on waves), and capture more than just the factual events, without actually expressing anything in terms of opinions.

Inevitably, though, the sources and the almighty database fail to cover every aspect, angle, or era (or as was too often the case, the sources proved faulty or contradicted themselves on information), vital to the formula of writing an encyclopedia-style entry. It became my job to track the actual person down and ask them the questions. Then we figured, if we’re asking them a few questions, we might as well just ask them all the questions. And, if we’re going to do it for some of them, to keep everything consistent, we might as well call them all. That way the sources became the icing on the cake of facts we already knew from the firsthand source—the way history is supposed to be recorded.

But, like I said, surfers are not exactly the easiest people to get in touch with.

Dave Parmenter is not the easiest person to get in touch with.

The reclusive Central Coast shaper-writer likes to say nay to things—he’s one of the best at doing it I’ve ever heard—and when I finally got him on the phone and explained what we were doing, he said nay.

“Why is this important?” Parmenter asked. “Why would anyone need to know this stuff? If someone already knows who Fred Van Dyke is, they know. If they don’t, what does it matter?”

“Well, you see,” I said, using my best brown-nosing voice. “The book is collecting basic information on every important person, place, or thing in the sport. The way I see it, it’s like putting all the pieces of the puzzle into one box so you can go in there and start to see whole pictures emerge and develop the way they did—piece by piece. And you’ve played an important part, so we were hoping you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions for us to help us make sure we get all the information correct.”

I was proud of my little “puzzle pieces” metaphor. After the thousands of hours spent on this project, it made a lot of sense to me. Surfing is a thousand things all in one. By looking at the facts of each and every separate aspect, one of the most comprehensive pictures of what surfing really is can be developed. And importantly, the picture is developed by the reader, not the writer. Our job with this book is not to tell anyone what surfing is to them, but rather, to simply make as much information about it available to them in a single source, and let each person piece together their own puzzle picture.

“Okay. Well, let me put it this way,” I said, dropping the brown-nose voice. “We’re doing an entry on you in the book. You can either help us get it right or not.”

“CALL THEM ALL,” NATHAN MYERS WRITES ABOUT DOING RESEARCH FOR ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SURFING (2003)

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