SUNDAY JOINT, 12-22-2024: FUNDRAISER WRAP – $80K IS THE NEW BLACK!

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 nonprofit website, has crossed a threshold and become—I'll say it here now, by damn, out loud, for the first time—an institution. We are not the most-viewed surfing website. Far from it. Some days EOS has less traffic than the Hollister Ranch frontage road. But the site at this point is a fixed part of the surf media landscape, of surf culture itself, at a time when things in general feel especially unfixed. Yes, the Sunday Joint, which has become the EOS spotlight-stealer, is loose and lightweight and flyaway—and why not, surfing itself is all of those things—but there is weight here too, in those massed pages half-hidden behind the Joint, and I think a collective decision has been made out there that this weight (meaning surfing's history, our uniqueness and peculiarity and influence and timeline-telescoping good looks) is worth more attention and money than we've been giving it.

That's the long version.

The short version of how and why EOS crushed the fundraiser is: Danny Kwock and Spencer Croul.

Croul and the charitable foundation that bears his name is fully responsible for EOS Archive being as far down the track as it is. For the third year running, the Croul Family Foundation has granted EOS $25,000, with the general aim of keeping the project moving smoothly along, but more specifically to build EOS Archive. The grants have all come free of targets, requirements, or thresholds, apart from us having to report in at the end of the year with a brief on how the site is going. When the Archive demo was finally ready, last month, Spencer was the first person outside of EOS to see it. The grant that just arrived will go toward getting Archive from demo phase to administration and content loading.

I met Danny Kwock 40-something years ago, at a hinky little tinplate pro-am contest in Santa Monica, and we never became friends, exactly, but we watched each other progress on our respective career paths, me at SURFER Magazine, Danny at Quiksilver. I bailed out of Orange County a few years before he did, but kept my hand in the game. Danny bailed out and just—vanished. A few weeks ago his name showed up in my inbox as a new EOS subscriber, and I reached out to see if it was the same Danny Kwock who thumped me at Bay Street in that pro-am way back when. It was indeed, so we bounced a few nostalgia-dipped geezer-in-training emails back and forth, and maybe my karma is in better condition than I give it credit for, because not long after that a hand-addressed letter containing a Danny Kwock Family Foundation check for $21,000 arrived. Why $21000, you ask? "It's a lucky number to have in this casino of Life," Danny said when I asked. I'm still processing. But it looks like the extroverted and super-hyper Newport New Wave Danny Kwock of 1980 who became the surfwear titan of the 1990s has now become the upbeat and slightly whimsical rainmaking sage I've been corresponding with this month. I double-checked to see if Danny wanted his name on the donation, and got an emphatic "yes" in return:

I did two decades of anonymous philanthropy. Now I want my name on there, maybe it will inspire other well-to-do surfers to pay it forward. “Can’t take it with you," as they say. Born naked, leave naked! I've always had the most respect for the creative shapers who built boards before computers; for the writers who took on our sport with intelligence, wit, humor, and truth; and the photographers who made us all look so good! In my humble opinion, these folks gave us the most beautiful things in the Surf Universe—some of the surfers weren’t so bad either hahaha—and they all deserve to be remembered. Good luck with the fundraiser!

Click here to see a tribute video to 2024 donors, and apologies for not being able to fit all of you on there! Click here to for a work-in-progress of 2024 donor's list. If you gave but don't see your name, please let me know, I am literally building this page while writing the Joint you're reading. 

Thank again, everybody. Wishing all of you a glassy, long-period, low-crowd holiday season, and see you back here in a week or two.

Matt