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This article ran in the February 2012 issue of The Surfer’s Journal. The 1968 World Surfing Championships were held Puerto Rico, in mid-November. Fred Hemmings won the men’s division, and Margo Godfrey, at age 15, took the women’s.   *  *  *  CORKY CARROLL (California, competitor) It was the first World Contest held during the shortboard...

Back in 2014, I posted a short piece on how Miki Dora was influenced by his two fathers. “My own father taught me a gracious way of living,” Dora said, “while my stepfather showed me how to survive. One showed me how to atone for indiscretions and the other demonstrated how to commit them.” The...

Sam George once wrote that Jimmy Blears is surfing’s “least-known world champion,” and while I’ll always wave the flag for disappeared two-time champ Sharron Weber, Sam ain’t wrong. Blears won his title in ’72, in San Diego, and all anybody remembers about that shitshow of a contest is that a board belonging to crowd favorite...

I sort of hate myself for the enjoyment I took in putting together this little showcase of bad behavior, all of which took place during the 1972 World Surfing Championships in San Diego, either at the Harbor Island Travelodge or nearby. Bunch of punk-ass surfers being dumb and destructive, is what it comes down to....

This is a slightly edited and condensed version of “Winning and Losing in Fat City,” which ran in the February 1973 issue of Surfing magazine *  *  * Official headquarters for the 1972 World Surfing Championships was the Travelodge on Harbor Island, San Diego. The events there, and at the contest site, have been succinctly...

“Waterman: Darrick Doerner Seeks Perfection in the Danger Zone,” by San Francisco sportswriter Bruce Jenkins, ran in the September 1990 issue of SURFER.   *  *  *  Pops Aikau passed away in late October 1989. He had withstood the pain of untold tragedy—the death of one son, then another, and the passing of his beloved wife....

This article on Mark Foo and Ken Bradshaw and their half-real half-performative rivalry was published in the May 1988 issue of Outside magazine. I took plenty of notes while visiting Hawaii to talk with Mark and Ken before writing “Divided Rulers.” Some went into the article, most didn’t, and I’ve attached a few to the...

January 18, 1985, was a springboard for Mark Foo’s big-wave career. That afternoon he bailed his way through what might still be the biggest Waimea Bay closeout set to ever roll through an occupied lineup, and afterward he paddled into, and was annihilated by, another closeout wave. More importantly for his career, Mark wasted no...

Chris Brown of Santa Barbara died yesterday, at age 48. Details of his death are still unknown. This afternoon I had this email exchange with Derek Rielly of BeachGrit.  *  *  *  BeachGrit: I got vague memories of a kid with stiff white hair slinging it to Kelly in the late eighties, early nineties. Warshaw:...

After his stint as a self-described “total drug fiend,” but before he became a surf industry titan, Bruce Raymond was one of those hard-charging Free Ride-era Aussies who were busy reinventing the surf world in their own charismatic image. Bruce spent two years in the Top 16, then made a hard pivot away from pro...

Greg Noll’s monster drop-to-annihilation wave at Makaha on December 4, 1969, was the defining wave of surfing’s defining big-wave swell. World champ Fred Hemmings watched from the beach and said it was the biggest wave ever ridden. Noll himself said it was five or ten feet over his previous best, and not long afterward he...

This 1969 Surfing magazine article by Margo Godfrey might be the saddest piece of surf writing ever published. Godfrey, 16, was the newly-crowned world champ. She didn’t yet have the big-wave chops that would define her career as a professional in years to come, but was already a mile ahead of her contemporaries nonetheless, and...

Two weeks ago I introduced my eight-year-old son to Kookslams. Together we laughed as kooks of every description were slammed in various and sundry ways. Teddy noticed that Kookslams has 1.1 million Instagram followers, and his enjoyment shot up. (My enjoyment dipped as I felt Teddy’s unspoken judgment against Encyclopedia of Surfing’s paltry 15.3K followers. Click...

Art Brewer was the hottest teenage surf photographer in the world in 1970—or forget the “teenage” bit, Art was the best photog in the game, full stop—when he piled into a battered camouflage-green bus for a SURFER-directed trip to the Ranch. A few days earlier, in a vacant lot in San Juan Capistrano, Brewer photographed...

Drew Kampion’s “Almondeyes No. 2” originally ran in the September 1970 issue of SURFER. This version is slightly edited and shortened.  *  *  * The Ranch is a thing that happens to your mind. It covers you and moves into you and changes you. The Ranch is California at its best. It is clean and...

Brad Barrett was the unsung hero of SURFER Magazine’s High Renaissance (I like my double-entendres the way I like my Twitter victims: easy and weak), from 1968 to 1972. Most of Brad’s contribution was photo-related. He and Ron Stoner were the only two masthead-listed staff photographers in 1968 and ’69, and a year or so...

This art-project-slash-surf-trip took place in January 1970, lasted three days, and was filled with good vibes, small waves, and soft drugs. You can read more about it here and here, and see some fantastic Art Brewer pix of the trip here. John Severson and Spyder Wills filmed the sequence above for Pacific Vibrations, Severson’s last surf movie,...

I believe it is Genesis 4:20 in which John Severson damns the head dip as a “completely useless” maneuver whose only point is to demonstrate a surfer’s “complete domination of the curl.” And yea, John spaketh the truth. The head dip is completely useless. That “complete domination” bit, though . . . . Is it...

The Tom Morey Invitational, held on 4th of July weekend, 1965, in Ventura, was the first surfing contest to offer prizemoney. The total purse was $1,500, and Mickey Munoz banked $750 for the win. In 1966, the contest was renamed the United States Professional Surfing Championships, and was again held in Ventura, with the pot...

The ivory tower of surf academia has long been filled with soft-voiced argument as to who exactly is the 1965 American men’s division champ. Mark Martinson won the United States Surfing Championships that September at Huntington Pier. But Rusty Miller was the United States Surfing Association rating’s leader, meaning he out-pointed the field over a...

The footage in this little remix is lifted from Follow Me, a failed Endless Summer knockoff from 1969. The howling surf track is “Escape” by the Mustangs, a college town garage band from what was then called Madras (now Chennai), who were thrilling local clubgoers at the same time the Follow Me crew was in town. (The Indian...

“Thunder from the Sea,” by longtime motorsports writer Sam Moses, was Sports Illustrated’s cover story for the week of March 8, 1982. It’s a long article, probably close to 7,000 words, on the history and mythos of what SI editors anachronistically call The Banzai Pipeline. Moses gives us the full dose of hyperbole. A surfer...

Famous surfers used to write letters to the surf magazines. The hand-addressed envelopes arrived at the offices, sometimes weeks after being stamped and sealed, from around the world. Surf magazines were a big deal in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s—before the internet, before cheap international phone rates, mostly before VCRs. You read the mags, studied...

“22 Street” was the bare bones title of a feature piece in the June 1963 issue of SURFER. Eight full pages on a negligible little piece of Hermosa Beach, holding down the middle of an issue that’s just 60 pages front to back. If you don’t know Hermosa, you are baffled. If you do know Hermosa—you are...

We’re going the Full Larry here on this beautiful Monday. “The Rubberman Cometh” is the title of the video you see above, as well as Bertlemann’s History of Surfing chapter. And here’s a taste of Phil Jarratt’s 1979 interview with Larry, which posted on Above the Roar. Rubberman was not shy. If your phone’s plugged back...