By Matt Warshaw

The introduction

James Cook, celebrated master and commander of the Resolution, in the service of God, King, and the British Navy, dropped anchor at Tahiti’s Matavai Bay in late 1777 and rowed ashore for a quick surf check. A single canoe-paddling native was riding the small waves along the northern point. Cook was impressed — not just by the strange new “amusement” itself, but in the near-rapturous state it seemed to produce, to the point that the surfer showed no interest in the sunburned visitors, or their impossible three-masted vessels floating in the waters nearby. “I could not help concluding,” Cook wrote in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, the wildly popular multi-volume account of his third and final venture, “that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea.” First written account of surfing. Bull’s-eye.

Having spent way too much time slogging through the millions of banal, overwrought, mistaken, or otherwise stoke-sucking words published on surfing over the past two-hundred-plus years, I now find myself veering pretty regularly into the near reaches of surf world burnout and cynicism. Follow your passion diligently enough and it often becomes … a job. Yet I still marvel at Cook’s “supreme pleasure” sentence; at its compact elegance, and how the wonder and simplicity of his words mirror the wonder and simplicity of wave-riding itself. The opening paragraph of Genesis’ ends with “and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters,” and I don’t think it’s too ridiculous, and maybe only a little imperialist, to say Cook’s passage gives surfing it’s own creation moment. (Staying with the religious analogy for a moment, I’m happy to credit Cook alone for the first surfing reference - just as Genesis is credited to Moses and not unknown author J or whoever - even though scholars agree that it was likely written by the surgeon of Cook’s consort ship, Discovery, and further ghosted by a London editor.) Cook is an antidote for surf-world burnout and cynicism. The day I read his stoked little dispatch and don’t feel cheered is the day I throw the boards and wetsuits on the curb and drive east to begin a new life somewhere in the foothills.

Cook is the obvious starting point for a surfing anthology. Where it goes from there, after the rest of the small but reputable surf-lit canon is accounted for (Mark Twain, Jack London, Tom Wolfe and a few others) is pretty subjective. Glancing at the Zero Break table of contents, it looks as if I’ve favored either darker pieces or comedy. Other editors would probably select differently; more travel-adventure pieces, for example, or more surfer profiles. But I’ve always thought the motherlode of surf-writing material, fiction and non-fiction, is located along the seam between the surfing and non-surfing worlds, and that this material is best processed as comedy or tragedy. (Two of my favorite pieces are missing from this collection: the Jeff Spicoli sections of Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and “William Finnegan’s 1992 New Yorker essay “Playing Doc’s Games.” Crowe has never granted excerpt rights for Fast Times, and in fact has never allowed the book itself to be reprinted. Finnegan is saving “Games” for his own surfing book.)

Not counting the four excerpts that make up Zero Break’s opening section, all but one of the pieces included here were published within the past forty years. This is partly a function of supply, as the number of surf-themed essays, articles and books shot way up in the early ’60s. But it’s also a matter of quality. Surf writing, in general, has improved steadily over time. It’s also worth noting that all but five of Zero Break’s pieces were written by non-surfers, or surfers writing for the non-surfing reader. Surfer-to-surfer text is arcane and insider, encoded with first names (Andy, Kelly, Corky, Lisa), unlocated places (Bells, the Bay, the ‘Bu), and slang that can be fun or indecipherable or both (”Bru, that sunset is mental!“). None of the pieces included here demand any real surf knowledge on the part of the reader. Then again, a little context and perspective never hurt, and the evolution of surf writing is a worthwhile story itself.

• • •

Nearly all post-Cook surf writers remarked on the sport’s beauty and grace, but for a long time there was an ocean of difference between those doing the writing (missionaries, sea captains and first-generation travel writers, mostly American, all white, none comfortable in the wave zone), and those doing the surfing (dark-skinned Polynesians who could swim before they could walk). So more than anything it was the oddity of the sport that connected the handful of nineteenth-century surf-related monographs, travelogue excerpts, book chapters, magazine features and newspaper articles. The physics of balancing atop a floating wood plank was strange enough, but mostly it was the astonishing notion of play in an element that to the Western mind was just slightly safer than fire. The division between surfer and surf-watcher was always made clear. To see a native “riding on an immense billow, half-immersed in spray and foam,” missionary William Ellis noted in his 1831 book Polynesian Researches, “is one of the most novel and interesting sports a foreigner can witness in the islands.” Or as Mark Twain wrote thirty-five years later, after a game but futile attempt at surfing, “None but the natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.”

Christian missionaries arrived in Hawaii in 1820, and the natives who survived the ensuing plague of Western-born disease were for the most part remade into modest, obedient, busy-handed Calvinists. Surfing, meanwhile, withered and nearly died under what a visiting writer archly described as “the touch of civilization.” It’s revival began at the turn of the century, following Hawaii’s annexation by America. Waikiki was the most popular surfing area, and the sport was buoyed by the islands’ rising tourist economy and the public’s appetite for travel writing, both of which portrayed wave-riding as exotic, colorful and romantic. Newspapers and magazines rushed to correct the long-standing idea that there was a race-connected knack to surfing: “The Daring Sport of the Pacific Islands,” a Collier’s headline read, “In Which Both Natives and Whites Become Adept at Triumphing Over the Beach-Combers.”

Two big surf world events took place in 1907: Woman’s Home Companion published Jack London’s feature article on his Hawaiian surfing experience, and Honolulu’s George Freeth — the Irish-Hawaiian surfer described by London as “a sea god, calm and superb” — moved to Los Angeles and introduced the sport to Southern California. Freeth became California’s first professional lifeguard, and this, along with mainland visits by Hawaiian surfing master and Olympic gold medallist Duke Kahanamoku, made the sport even more dashing and gallant — the recreation of choice among a new set of bronzed beachside heroes.

Surfing’s peril and risk were a source of ongoing fascination to writers. London, who as one biographer put it, aspired to be “a great writer with biceps to match,” set metaphors off like cannon-shot, making the very act of entering the ocean sound like nothing short of a death sentence. “Thousand-ton” waves roll forth as “white battalions of the infinite army of the sea,” while London himself is nothing more than “a finite speck of pulsating jellyÉ soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible and frail.” The common man, London says, wouldn’t stand a chance. But as he watches this “kingly species” of surfers, barreling toward shore in spray-flecked magnificence, he rises from the beach to “bit the sea’s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should.”

The sport grew. By the beginning of the Depression, surf colonies were established in Australia and New Zealand, as well as on the East, West and Gulf coasts of America. In 1931, California bodysurfer Ron Drummond self-published five hundred copies of a twenty-six-page softcover primer titled The Art of Wave Riding; four years later Wisconsin-born surfing champion Tom Blake published a similar number of his Hawaiian Surfboard, a hardcover book with chapters on surf history, board construction, competition, and wave-riding technique.

Modern surfing was forty years old when America entered the World War II, and it’s gathered collection of surf writing, small but growing, carried on for the most part in the same enthusiastic and reverent tone used by London. Nobody mentioned the punch-outs between Hawaiians and Californians. Nothing about the special “surf lessens” offered by the Waikiki beachboys to officers’ wives and University of Hawaii coeds that ended with furtive half-submerged couplings fifty yards beyond the wave zone. Nothing about tedious flat spells, nasty rivalries between top surfers, or boozy weekend surf club get-togethers. This filtering-out process wasn’t so much a failure on the part of those who wrote about surfing as it was the style of the times, when sports and leisure were relegated to a little sunroom in the house of literature, well removed from heavyweight topics like race and class, Communism and Fascism, war and Depression. Just as beery philistine Babe Ruth was presented exclusively as a big, lovable, goodhearted slugger, wave-riding was presented exclusively as thrilling and heroic, with surfers referred to as “aquatic artists,” and surf stories wandering freely between truth and myth. “The ocean was like glass, except for the swells [which] were running about 30 feet high,” Duke Kahanamoku tells Tom Blake in Hawaiian Surfriders, recalling a gigantic summer swell from 1917. “We were so far out, we recognized the captain on the bridge of a passing steamer.” Kahanamoku was an Olympic hero who golfed with Douglas Fairbanks, taught FDR’s sons how to surf, drew a paycheck as sheriff of Honolulu, and made headlines in California for daring rescues as a lifeguard. If he told Blake he’d ridden a fifty-footer across the bow of a passing steamer and done a reverse kickout onto the lido deck, nobody was going to call him out.

• • •

Surfing went through a decade-long overhaul after the war, marked by streamlined balsa-core boards, a new set of turns and cutbacks, and the founding of a niche industry.

As Southern California replaced Waikiki as the sport’s hub, the surfer image was also transformed: Duke Kahanamoku, the sport’s archetypical figure for decades, dark-haired and soft-spoken, gave way to the peroxide-blonde suburban teenager barreling down Pacific Coast Highway in a $25 woody wagon. Surfing continued for the most part to baffle the general public. It looked fun and exciting, but somewhat pointless. Paddle out, ride, repeat. It couldn’t be a sport, really; nobody kept score. Yet it seemed oddly addictive. As the surfing population began to shoot up in the mid-’50s, California beach community conservatives snapped to attention in the face of what appeared to be a youth-culture pincer movement, with Brando and Elvis sweeping down from the inland valleys, and these new surfing hooligans massing along the shore. Anti-surfing measures were passed. County lifeguards were told to monitor surfers, creating a permanent rift in what had once been a unified beachfront bloc.

Viewed from the outside, surfing had gone from strange and exotic to strange and menacing, and the change was reflected in surf literature, including 1957’s Gidget, the first popular work of surf fiction and the opening shot in a ten-year commercial surf-boom. Frederick Kohner, a Viennese-educated scholar and playwright, wrote Gidget in six weeks. His affection for surfers is obvious, but librarians and PTA members across America paged through the book and red-flagged dozens of passages: the Malibu gang bantering over the latest issue of Playboy, Moondoggie responding to an insult from another surfer with “Ah — blow yourself!”, a tiki-torch beach party that sets off a fire in the nearby hills. In this context, D.H. Halacy’s young-adult novel Surfer! (1965) can be read as a beach city elders’ revenge fantasy. After a gang of switchblade-carrying surf punks damage public property, the city plows over the local break with a sand-dredger, and surfers are told that from now on they’ll only be able to ride on weekends, within the confines of a nearby Marine base.

The predictable next step was to cross surfing with pulp fiction, and five-and-dime paperback racks were soon stocked with titles like Hang Dead Hawaiian Style, Scarlet Surf at Makaha, and Cute and Deadly Surf Twins. (Meanwhile, the surf press, founded in 1960 with the creation of Surfer magazine and backed mainly by eager young surfboard manufacturers with a vested interest in “cleaning up” the sport, spoke in a conformist, even reactionary, voice. “The Surfer’s Creed,” a four-point loyalty oath published in a 1963 issue of Petersen’s Surfing, reads in part as follows: “Surfing is our hobby and our recreation. We will not allow it as such to interfere with any of the duties we owe to our home, our job, our school or community.”)

Not everyone viewed the sport with tight-jawed disapproval. A congratulatory New Yorker review described Bruce Brown’s 1966 crossover hit The Endless Summer as a “brilliant documentary about surfing as a sport rather than as a fad or gimmick,” and Life ran a warm profile on John Severson, Surfer’s thirty-two-year-old founder and publisher. The first surfing biographies also appeared in the mid-’60s: This Surfing Life, a humorless but sincere effort by world champion Bernard “Midget” Farrelly of Australia, and the easygoing You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago, by American favorite Phil Edwards. Surf’s Up! An Anthology of Surfing was published in 1966, three years after Surfing Guide to Southern California, the sport’s first guidebook. Peter Dixon’s The Complete Book of Surfing, released in 1965, sold over 300,000 copies before the decade’s end.

New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe meanwhile seemed to split the difference between the surfing scolds and admirers in his 1966 essay “The Pump House Gang.” Rank-and-file teenage surfers, as observed by Wolfe during his brief visit to the beaches of La Jolla, are dead-enders who smoke and drink and steal car parts. He seems both delighted and disgusted when recounting how the La Jolla surfers, after seeing headlines about the Watts riots, decide to drive into Los Angeles and check things out; one surfer brings a tape recorder and says he’s going to make a record called “Random Sounds from the Watts Riots.” But there’s also an older and much smaller group of surfers, captains of surf industry for the most part, Bruce Brown among them, that the Yale-educated Wolfe admires as happy escapees from the workaday world. “Brown has the money and The Life,” Wolfe writes in his hyper-italicized style, before speed-shifting into a riff that careens from descriptive to mocking to something close to wistful. “[Brown] has a great house on a cliff about 60 feet about the beach. He is married and has two children, but it is not that hubby-mommy you’re-breaking-my-gourd scene. God, if only everybody could grow up like these guys and know that crossing the horror dividing line, 25 years old, won’t be the end of everything.”

While surf magazines in the late ’60s jumped into the deep end of the counterculture, mainstream surf writing generally continued as a kind of sociological treasure hunt for the lurid, the violent and the prurient. Life Australia speculated that big-wave surfers were “latent homosexuals,” while Time noted that “Riding a board through the surf is a little like going on hashish.” A Sports Illustrated feature story on a pro contest in Santa Cruz seemed to take a quiet delight in the anti-contest guerilla tactics of local surfers, who stole boards from visiting pros and at night pushed the empty judges scaffolding off the beachfront cliffs. (James Michener’s Hawaii brought the reverence back to surfing, just for a moment, as a wool-clad freshman missionary sees natives riding waves for the first time. “Apparently,” he says in a hushed voice to his wife, “there are many who can walk upon the waters.”)

Surf writing fell out of fashion during the 1970s. The shortboard revolution at the end of the previous decade brought radical changes not only to surfboards, but to the way surfers viewed themselves and their sport. Hanging ten, Gidget, Endless Summer, the Beach Boys — surfing’s cultural touchstones from just a few years earlier — now seemed hopelessly dated. As the surf press earnestly tried to redefine surfing (”sport” was far too Establishment), variously describing it as “a dance on a liquid stage,” “a mystical experience,” “a way to humble ourselves before God,” mainstream writers lost interest. They recognized that the “surf craze” phase of the early- and mid-’60s had clearly run it’s course. And maybe they just didn’t know what to make of surfing’s new pose — the Charlie Quiznel Surfboards ad in Surfer, for example, showing Quiznel standing nude in a forest, arms spread, face to the heavens. No product shots. No mention that it’s even an ad for surfboards. Just a naked man and a quote: “I had a vision.” Maybe so. But Tom Wolfe and the rest of the American pop culture literati didn’t want to know about it.

• • •

Jump ahead 30 years, to the early ’00s. Surf-themed museum exhibits are reviewed in the New York Times, surfing documentaries air on PBS, and surfer-models are featured in ad campaigns for life insurance and bath towels. Latent homosexuals are off the surf-world radar. Latent free market surf-capitalists — a queerer breed in many respects, given the righteous non-materialistic pieties mouthed by surfers through the decades — have meanwhile turned the sport into a red-hot lifestyle commodity: surf companies are listed on the NYSE, department stores put surfers on billboards, top pros sign million-dollar contracts, beach city toy stores double-order the new surfing edition of Monopoly.

Surf writing played a role in surfing’s latest image makeover. In 1982, Sports Illustrated ran a well-researched cover story on Pipeline, the fabled Hawaiian surf break, while California magazine published a feature on Malibu legend Mickey Dora. Even the perpetually-stoned Jeff Spicoli, introduced in Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, was a funnier, better-drawn, far more believable surfing miscreant than those presented in the ’60s. (Sean Penn did a pitch-perfect job with Spicoli in the Fast Times movie, and his drawling voice and mannerisms — but none of the red-eyed soul — have been recycled continuously for more than twenty years, from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, to Dude, Where’s My Car? and Finding Nemo.) Surf fiction also took a step forward with Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source, a ghoulish 1983 noir thriller set in Huntington Beach. Surf magazine writing improved as well, led by Nick Carroll, Derek Hynd, Phil Jarratt, Sam and Matt George.

Surf-lit continued to flourish in the ’90s, highlighted by William Finnegan’s magisterial “Playing Doc’s Games,” published as a two-part New Yorker article in 1992, and Dan Duane’s 1996 memoir Caught Inside. Finnegan and Duane take a similar approach to an inherent surf narrative problem: that the sport doesn’t easily lend itself to a customary set-up/conflict/resolution plot structure, but instead fits into most surfers’ lives as part of familiar and indispensable routine, like running, or church, or therapy. In “Doc’s Games,” Finnegan recalls his decision to give up life as a full-time surfer — a pursuit that had taken him on surf junkets to Hawaii, Indonesia, Fiji, and beyond, and landed him in a beachfront home in San Francisco — in order to become a career writer in New York. Duane’s Caught Inside transformation comes at the other end of the surf experience, from neophyte to full-timer — but he has reservations about the commitment required, and the way in which the sport can at times seem utterly pointless. “One thing seems weird about it,” Duane’s wave-riding mentor, Vince, says near the end of the book, “is that to anybody who’s inside surfing, you know it doesn’t mean shit.” Duane, startled, looks at Vince and wonders to himself: “All those years given to such a beautiful pursuit, and still so much doubt. I didn’t agree, didn’t even believe he meant it, but perhaps only because the price had, as yet, been so much lower for me.”

More often than not the sport is still written about in trite, dull, ineffective or bombastic prose. Surf violence remains a favorite angle for the unimaginative journalist: A 1982 Esquire feature managed to group surfing territorialism with drive-by shootings and gay rape-murders, and a flood of “surf rage” articles appeared in the early ’00s. (Anecdotal evidence was the rule here, even with the venerable New York Times. Surfing lineups can be tense and unpleasant, but fights in the water or the beach are a lot rarer than they are on playground basketball courts and soccer fields, and if the easygoing surfing brotherhood has always been a bit of a hoax, so is the idea of widespread surfing thuggism as reported in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles.) Surf-world titillation — updated versions of ’60s articles describing “sexy twist parties” where “bikinis come off easy” — remains a common surf-writing trope, but again writers and editors seem poised at all times to amplify events, or invent them outright, in service of the story. The last photo in “Big Blue,” a long 2002 Vanity Fair article, features six of the world’s best big-wave riders posed on the beach, facing away from the camera, naked, their trunks dropped to their ankles, and you can imagine the overseeing editor back in New York bending the page back and thinking how edgy it is. Surfers themselves certainly aren’t above manipulating the media. The six nude Vanity Fair surfers all have boards planted in the sand in front of him, angled so that their surf-company logos are as clearly visible as their milky-white behinds.

But if it’s true that surf writing is packed with average or below-average work, it’s also true that good pieces — serious to satirical; essays, articles, novels, even poems — appear more often and in more places than ever before. Former Surfing editor Nick Carroll once said that he “didn’t want to intellectualize surfing,” and I suppose on some level I understand the idea that the sport’s purity is somehow lessened by thinking about it and writing about it. I cherish the quote from the anonymous Malibu surfer who told a Life reporter, in 1957, just after Gidget was published, “If I had a couple bucks to buy a book, I wouldn’t. I’d buy some beer.” But looking at the Zero Break table on contents gives me a mild rush of euphoria. Maybe, like Dan Duane, I’m still looking for validation for all those hours, days, years spent in the water, and this book answers that need, at least in part. I love how surfing is elevated and honored by the writers in Zero Break. I love just as much how the featured writers are energized and inspired by surfing, and how adept they are at passing the feeling on to the reader. Surf journalist Mike McGinty described in 1993 how difficult the surf-writing task can be. “I don’t need paper and ink, I need 24-karat gold monster-cable speaker wire with one end plugged into Backdoor Pipeline and the other soldered into your adrenal glad. I need elongated vowel sounds and exaggerated hand movements. Can you feel it? Did it work? Do you have any idea what surfing is really like? Sure. But only because you’re a surfer. Not because I said so.”

Great image, wrong conclusion. Yes, as a surfer I understand surfing. But that understanding is deeper, finer, and better contoured for the efforts of Mark Twain, William Finnegan, Susan Orlean, and the rest of the 24-carat-gold writers, non-surfers and well as surfers, who’ve examined the sport. And if I do at times feel as if I’m a member of a kingly species, it’s partly because I surf, and partly because Jack London said so.