Hey All, Gene "Tarzan" Smith spent most of the Depression either in Hawaii or Southern California, surfing and lifeguarding. He was superhuman on a paddleboard, and in 1940 became the first to cross the 90-mile channel between Oahu and Kauai. But to those who knew him personally, friend and foe alike, Smith was best remembered as a bull-sized, bloody-knuckled, never-say-die street fighter. Surf h...
Hey All, Last week's Joint about upward-thrusting red lines and bulb-bursting finales got you guys all hotted up! Big finish for the 2024 Fundraiser. Massive. Thermometer destroyed, replaced by our back-up thermometer, which was also destroyed. So . . . middling-good fundraiser goes record-breaking in less than a week. How? The wordy answer is that EOS, 11-plus years into its life as a nonprofi...
Hey All, We're eight days into the 2024 EOS Fundraiser, and I am always raccoon-eyed and fretful and espresso-drenched at this point, and this year is no exception. We've done okay so far. Middling-good. If I'd followed through on my first bad idea of the morning and downloaded a cartoon clip-art thermometer in order to show where the fundraiser is right now, the red line would be maybe two-third...
Hey All, Master shaper and surf-world gentleman Tom Parrish, as mentioned a few weeks back, believes that all of us—EOS devotees included—will be healthier, happier, and more evolved when we quit paying attention to surfing contests and spend that time instead on virtually any other surf-related topic. He's not wrong. Except for this—contests are really sticky. Contests have the hooks. Not all ...
Hey All, Peter Drouyn has many pages in Encyclopedia of Surfing. His place in surfing is credited, accounted for, saluted. So the plan was to let Drouyn be, EOS-wise. My take is that for four decades now, more or less, Drouyn has been travelling on rough mental health terrain—to which his splashy gender transition in 2008 was all but incidental—and the fact that we are periodically invited by Pet...
Hey All, Phyllis O'Donell, who won her final in the 1964 World Championships at Manly Beach about 45 minutes before Midget Farrelly won his, and thus became our sport's first world champion, died this week at age 87. She was private and level-headed, intense but funny, upbeat by nature. Zero pretense. Sure-footed in every sense of the word. O'Donell loved getting in the water, and for 15 or so ye...
Hey All, I have pulled a few historiographical boners in my day, more than a few, but the results by and large have been humbling instead of mortifying. I wrote that former Top 16 pro Wes Laine was from West Virginia, for example, instead of Virginia Beach, which mistake-wise is a long way from signing off on a King James Bible run with “Thou shall commit adultery” jumping off the page like Magic...
Hey All, Last week's Joint on the UAE and Kelly's wavepool and surfing's ongoing move toward a chlorinated, less-democratic, rich-guys-ride-first future, was a surprise hit. My inbox lit up and wow you bunch are just as pessimistic as me, and that feels . . . great? Comforting, is the better word. We are going down, but we're going down together, and righteously, and if there was thread of sadnes...
Hey All, It took years, nearly a decade in fact, but I finally cycled through all the stages of grief regarding Kelly Slater's Westworld-lite wavepool—only to end up, surprisingly, more or less back where I started. Nonplussed. Cool. Maybe a bit arch. I could ignore Surf Ranch or laugh at it, whichever suited. Not laugh hahaha, like Raglan Surf Report, but I can eye-roll Surf Ranch and judge it d...
Hey All, David Nuuhiwa's rank and standing as a benchmark surfer for the ages needs adjusting on both ends of his career. As a longboarder, peaking in 1966, he was even better than we remember—and there's not much room to move there, he's already rightfully thought of as among two or three best performance surfers of the pre-shortboard age. But still, yes, nudge him even further up. The long beau...