Greg Noll

1989

Guys who normally would have been going out for sports were surfing instead. [We] didn’t care about the letterman sweater and the squealing girls in the grandstands.

All quotes below are from Greg Noll’s 1969 biography “Da Bull: Life Over the Edge.” To keep this at a reasonable length, the time frame begins with Noll moving to Manhattan Beach and runs through his high schools years—well before he became a famous big-wave surfer. Some of the excerpts been slightly edited and-or compressed.

*  *  *

MOVING TO SOUTH BAY
My mother and I moved from San Diego to Manhattan Beach in 1943. We’d lived in San Diego since I’d been born, in 1937, the only child of Grac...