SUNDAY JOINT, 8-11-2019: A SATISFYING GRAPPLE WITH DEWEY WEBER

Hey All,

I downloaded Final Cut Pro in 2011, just after it was updated, with tremendous online clamor and controversy, from 7 to X, and began making EOS video clips. So far I’ve banged out, in total, just north of 1,000 clips. Because I started with zero experience and learned as I went, and thus made every possible mechanical and stylistic error there is to make, about 700 of those 1,000 videos (look for the thin horizontal bar in the opening title) need to be taken behind the glassing factory and quietly dropped into a drum of glossing resin. For three years, I have been slowly going back and replacing the early clips with newer, longer, hopefully better versions. Last Monday, for example, I did a remodel on Dewey Weber.

I stayed on the Weber beat for the rest of the week, starting with this Above the Roar interview, followed by Dewey’s classic “Makaha is the Worst!” rant from SURFER. (Our dysfunctional relationship with contests predates the WSL by literally 100 years, and do you think this fact is comforting to Dirk Ziff and Sophie Goldschmidt, or depressing? I would think depressing, but then again they have kidnap insurance while I work in a converted guestroom with a full laundry basket to my right and an also-full kitty litter box below the window.)

I also revisited the now almost-60-year-old blowout between Weber and Dale Velzy. Read all about it here, and special thanks to Paul Holmes and Gerald Derloshon for lending perspective to the tale. While we’re at it, and if you’ve got five extra minutes, this 2017 post on Dewey fits neatly into the mix. “What really fascinates me about Weber,” I wrote, “is the crazy drive and ambition. The white-hot coals, so to speak, beneath the hotdog. The will to achieve, to focus, to defeat, build, create, rise.”

Finally, and this happened on Instagram, I offered some too-flippant words last night about surfing and wrestling. Dewey, of course, was a nearly unbeatable matman in his teen years, which I noted in my Insta post before going on to say how the wrestlers when I went to Mira Costa (same school Weber attended, but 20 years later) were brutal and terrifying and had zero overlap with surfers. In the thread, the Weber camp lightly took me to task, and then shed further light on both Dewey and wrestling, for which I am grateful. Longboard great and multi-level grappler Joel Tudor chimed in as well. The back-and-forth was respectful and humorous, and I wonder sometimes if social media, or pockets of it at least, is maybe less toxic than we think. Here’s hoping.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Matt

[Photos by LeRoy Grannis, Ron Stoner]