Whoops! That was supposed to read: "Encyclopedia of Surfing WRITER Wins Pulitzer!"

Like most other surfers, I was introduced to William Finnegan's work by way of "Playing Doc's Games," his magisterial 1992 two-part New Yorker piece on Mark "Doc" Renneker and the still-underground San Francisco surf scene. Unlike most other surfers, however, I was good friends with Doc, who was unhappy with the piece, and thus unhappy with Bill, and because Doc's opinion counted for a lot in my world at that point, I wound up in a confused state—not liking Bill, but loving his article—and it was all kind of a mess for a few years. In 1997 I wrote a Surfer's Journal feature about surf writing, with "Doc's Games" and Finnegan as the deserved centerpiece, at which point he kindly got in touch to say "thanks," and we became became email pals, which led to a phone call or two, which led to a late summer lunch in the Hampton's when I next visited New York, which led, finally, in 2002, to a timorous but hopeful request that Bill write the Foreword to my new book, The Encyclopedia of Surfing. He did, and it was just right: smart and funny, and yes very flattering—the perfect cherry atop the book I'd been laboring on the previous three years. Off to the printer it went. And now here we are 13 years later. Bill just earned a much-deserved Pulitzer for his sublime memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. And hey, aren't those coattails looking ridable?

I don't always stoop to blatant self-promotion. But when I do, I prefer to use Pulitzer winners.

Here is Bill Finnegan's original Foreword from the Encyclopedia of Surfing.

Surfing as a subject really has no edges. It’s not like baseball or aviation or beekeeping, where the relevant information—box scores, airports, honey produced—is more or less identifiable. Organized competition, for instance, takes up only a small corner of the surfing world. There is a loose set of enterprises known as the surf industry, which surfers depend on for equipment (though it seems geared mainly to selling sunglasses by wrapping them in the mystique of surfing), but if it were to vanish tomorrow nearly all surfers would somehow carry on with their wave-riding lives. So surfing, in a way, has no center, no institutional structure—no obvious place to start or finish the kind of monumental project of intellectual organization represented by the book you hold in your hands.

There are, of course, great and famous surfers, whose influence and inspiration are widely felt, and great and famous waves that every surfer dreams about riding. These are some of the shoo-in entries for an encyclopedia of surfing. But it is in the nature of the sport, somehow, that there are even more great surfers who are not famous, and an unknowable number of great spots that still break unridden, or are ridden by only a few discreet devotees. (“Lo pro bro” is the term of art here.) It’s sometimes said that surfing is a religious practice more than it is a sport, and there is certainly something deeply private about it for many of us—not just the untranslatable personal experience of riding waves, but the fact that most surf sessions take place in utter obscurity, leaving no public record, no tangible mark on the world.

Matt Warshaw knows all this. He lives and surfs at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, which is one of the lonelier, more humbling and capricious spots around. He is also surfing’s foremost scholar and scribe. As editor, author, screenwriter, journalist, and consummate niche savant, he’s spent decades sifting through historical memorabilia and the riprap of daily surf life for the scattered gold of the newsworthy, the meaningful, the amusing, the lore that’s worth preserving. He is definitely the only person I know, or know of, who could have tackled with any hope of success the job of sorting and distilling the whole, hopelessly diffuse body of surf-related knowledge into a useful, authoritative encyclopedia. Even so, this is a totally idiosyncratic magnum opus.

I know that Matt and his research team built a database full of primary and secondary classifications, arcane ratios and quotas, and that they consulted thousands of sources, all toward creating an “evenly distributed framework across the entire length and breadth of the sport.” Still, the project as a whole is at least half mad, which helps give it, to my mind, a glittering vitality that precious few reference works attain. Matt acknowledges his own subjectivity, and he battled it, by his own testimony, with exhaustive peer review and extra research in sensitive cases, all of which did not succeed, fortunately, in purging the finished work of innumerable quirks.

Leafing idly, one passes from a blow-by-blow description of an epic swell-producing cyclone off the coast of Queensland in 1982 to an entry on Angola, featuring oil-field workers who surf only under armed guard, and then on to a fine short essay on ding repair. I’m sure that each of these anecdotes and disquisitions, along with 10,000 others, belong somewhere on an evenly distributed framework. But that careful framework stretches, I would argue, not across a vast, edgeless field of tangentially related phenomena—certain reefs, minor celebrities, hydrodynamic discoveries—that, taken all together, constitute “surfing.” The true framework instead delineates the capacious, discriminating mind and archives—the manic curiosity and Talmudic diligence—of Matt Warshaw. And that is simply much more interesting country than the data world of conventional sports almanacs. It’s rock-solid on the facts, of course, but quietly funny and consistently original in their selection and expression.

A magazine article, published while he was somewhere in the middle of this massive task, called Warshaw “the Madame Winchester of surf writing.” Madame Winchester was a nutty nineteenth-century heiress to a gun-making fortune. She was reportedly told by a psychic that she wouldn’t die as long as she kept adding on to her California mansion, and so she kept a brigade of carpenters busy for decades, building and unbuilding hundreds of rooms. It was an ominous simile, you could say, but Matt, with the publication of this book, has lived it down. This is his mansion, complete (at least until the next edition) and extraordinarily well furnished.

For the initiated, it’s full of things that you feel you should have already known. It’s a sour sort of pleasure to learn, say, that Mark Richards used to shill for Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I’m still glad to know that. The introduction of surfing to France, through a California screenwriter working in Biarritz on a film of 

, makes a neat little story, and it’s especially good to have it from such a reliable source. There are, inevitably, countless choices and considered omissions for the cognoscenti to stew over and debate. (Why “dogs and surfing” but no Dogtown? Is that some kind of self-censoring South Bay reverse bias at work?)

For non-surfers, this book will provide a terrific peephole into an elaborate and esoteric world. Its built-in emphasis on the public sphere may seem to belie my contention above about the essentially solitary quality of most surfers’ experience. But there is actually a powerful paradox at the heart of the sport. One pursues a kind of 

, an electrifying asocial bliss, through years of hard effort and ocean study. At the same time, almost all surfers love to be watched (at least when they’re ripping). They’re performing, they’re competing, and they love to surf better—and to be seen to surf better—than their friends.

So part of surfing takes place inside society, in sanctioned spots, even in commercialized zones, and an encyclopedia naturally highlights this visible and conventional side of the story. But surfing’s vitality, I want to say, flows largely from elsewhere— from its consuming relationship with the wildness and violence of the ocean, from the obsessiveness that is required to get any good at it, and from its outlaw roots as an idle, barbarous pastime abhorred by the prim and industrious. Surfing has a scruffy, even avant-garde, side that has always attracted free spirits. It privileges, as an academic might say, personal satisfaction over social production, animal joy over a steady job. Although fundamentally apolitical, the simple fact of its popularity carries, in most places and contexts, a whiff of dissent, a faintly anarchistic suggestion about what really matters.

Becoming a competent surfer actually does bear a resemblance to joining some rigorous cult. And this book will, I believe, become one of the sect’s principal texts. It’s a grand compendium of the tribe’s arcana. And, in an odd way, a surfing encyclopedia seems to me to come along just in time. Part of learning to surf has always been absorbing the lore. I started surfing in the sixties, and there was already much to absorb then—the names of the elders and their exploits, the fabled breaks, the fabled sessions, the reigning hotshots. There were a few books around, and there were always the surf mags, but there was nothing comprehensive. The closest thing to a bible we had was the 

, which was a wonderful spot-by-spot guidebook, compiled and written by David Stern and William Cleary. My friends and I practically memorized the book, and we certainly knew all the pithy, clever picture captions by heart. There is something in surfing that craves a literature that rings true. But then surfing’s popularity boomed. And boomed again. What had been the eccentric pursuit of a few zealots became a mass phenomenon. Worldwide, the number of surfers today is said to approach twenty million. A subculture so immense is a contradiction in terms and breeds a kind of internal frenzy. Nothing can be allowed to stay the same. Board designs change constantly. High-performance surfing mutates endlessly. New heroes, a new aesthetics, seem to scream across the sky every month. New spots are discovered, new frontiers crossed. Aerials, tow-ins, giant Tasmanian death barrels. Somebody has to go surf Antarctica. The lore of surfing, in other words, has been expanding relentlessly and alarmingly for a long time now. It’s like the universe, as cosmologists have come to understand it. But no one knows what to do about the universe. Surfing, blessedly, has Matt Warshaw.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SURFING WINS PULITZER PRIZE!

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint