You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago, Phil Edwards's 180-page autobiography, came out in the summer of 1967. A lot of things were lined up in the book's favor. It was published by powerhouse Harper & Row, home to Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and Harper Lee, among others, and Endless Summer had just introduced the non-surfing world to "the amazing Phil Edwards." The book was co-authored by Sports Illustrated star writer Bob Ottum, whose recent profile on Edwards had been an SI cover story.

Ottum was a good choice. He specialized in auto racing, and didn't surf, but was clearly delighted with his new subject. In the prologue, Ottum notes, correctly, that "the Edwards style of surfing years ago become the style to follow," adding that nobody in the sport "can ride a board as gracefully—with such a fluid, easy, go-to-hell stance," then pivots to note that "contests are fine [and] surfing will certainly become an Olympic event," but "there is reason to believe that the best surfers do not need, nor seek, the regimentation of contests" and that "surfing is for kicks, not crowds." Ottum got Edwards and surfing, both.

The rest of the book, apart from a brief epilogue, is presented in Phil's first-person voice, and while I'm guessing Ottum shaped every sentence to one degree or another, I have no doubt whatsoever that the tone and timbre, as well as the ideas and emphasis, are all 100% Edwards. However they got there, Phil and surfing, together and separately, come off as unique and compelling.

A lot of older surfers, to this day, think You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago is the best surf book ever written. Dave Parmenter and Sam George revered it, literally, even Biblically—they called it The Book of Phil.

But it bombed, sales-wise. You Should Have Been Here came out just after Endless Summer ended its long movie theater run, and the surf craze in general was poised for a steep decline. The sport was changing so quickly, furthermore, that Edwards' book was dated before it was even published. George Greenough, Nat Young, and Bob McTavish were already reshaping not just the boards but the surfing attitude, and while Edward was in some respects as radical in terms of placing surfing as an outlier in the world of sport, he looked square and was ancient—29 when the book hit the shelves—and was already sailing away, literally, in a sleek DIY catamaran, from his long-held position at the top of the surfing heap.

Four years earlier, Edwards had won the inaugural SURFER Poll Awards. When You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago came out, the magazine didn't even bother to review it.

I'd long wondered, in fact, if everybody involved just gave up on the project before the book even rolled out. Far from it. The Harper promo machine was in high gear, and the reviews were glowing. If Hour Ago had come out in 1965 or 1966, I think it would have done well.

Some of the excerpts, below, have been shortened or otherwise edited.

"SURF SPRAY," Ron Haworth, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Feb 17, 1967


For those who prefer to sit at home with a good book, Phil Edwards has some noteworthy news. He says a new book is due out in May entitled 

. Harper and Row are the publishers. Edwards is completely happy with the book and the writing of 

 Bob Ottum. The storyline revolves around Edwards and surfing as he has lived it. The book contains many passages that should provide the reader with a hearty belly laugh.

Ottum is no stranger to surfing and Edwards. Last year he did an article for 

 on Phil and the East Coast surfing boom. Said Phil: “It was the magazine’s way of saying "sorry" for the first surfing article they did in which we all looked bad.” [

Phil spent several days in New York taping interviews for 

 And it is these tapes and the days spent with Ottum along the California shores that the book is drawn from.

“It’s not a typical surf book,” Phil said. “This one will be different.”

"THE BOOK MARK," Redwood City Tribune, June 10, 1967


One of the wildest—and best—surfing books we’ve ever seen is 

 by Phil Edwards of Dana Point, SURFER Magazine’s selection as “world’s best.” The book totally unplugged us. Or plugged, if you will. In surfer jargon, the words are interchangeable.

"SURF SPRAY," Ron Haworth, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, June 23, 1967


Phil Edwards received five copies of a new book, 

 for a 29th birthday present this month. Co-written by 

’s Bob Ottum and published by Harper and Row, the book will soon be on sale around town.

Phil loaned us a copy and we read it at odd moments — while waiting for a traffic light, on the beach with one eye (the other followed the bikini parade), and in the sauna, where after 20 minutes the waves rolled off the pages and dripped onto the floor.

A book critic we’re not, but for the sake of living dangerously—here goes!

Edwards was a pioneer in a new realm. He was an urchin (sea) who loved not sandlot baseball or marbles but the surf, and the story skillfully weaves its theme around his dreams and aspirations. Those who have never experienced a flirtation with the sea, or a love affair with the surf, will care less about young Edwards and his “pumped and unpumped” childhood. And these “flatlanders” will get bored long before he bursts forth from his first tube, wildly excited and a trifle weak in the knees.

It’s the young and jazzed surfer-to-be who will hang on his every word. And no complaints here. Edwards is a good image for the sport to wear. He’s also well-groomed.

Controversy can be the writer's best weapon: it can also sell books where books might not otherwise sell. Phil’s book is loaded. If Edwards had wanted to make two statements that would cause a thousand throats to protest with vigor, he would have had trouble coming up with two better than:

1. "I do not surf in contests because they tend to compartmentalize the sport and lead it away from its basic purpose of man against the sea."

2. "I’m the best surfer in the world.”

Ironically, it might very well be those surfers most caught up in the trophy quest who will disagree with the first statement and agree on the second. For Edwards is one of the few surfers who has earned the respect of his California peers while refusing to ride in contests.

As any surfer must, Edwards came to Hawaii to try his luck in the big waves. He came with Bruce Brown. And there is the hint of a suggestion that Edwards was the first to ride Pipeline and that he named it. We don’t know. Others have claimed to have been the first to ride Pipeline before it had a name. It makes little difference.

Surfers should take the time to read this book. The writing is subtle like perfume. It’s enjoyable, good entertainment, well-written, and is loaded like a pair of crooked dice.

Advertisement, Honolulu Advertiser, June 24, 1967


Honolulu Books Shops invites you to meet PHIL EDWARDS, the Manolete, the "Big Daddy" of America's fastest-growing sport—SURFING!—in honor of his book, YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE AN HOUR AGO. Exciting action pictures and stories on the stoked side of surfing, or (HOW TO HANG TEN THROUGH LIFE AND STAY HAPPY). Have your personal copy autographed. Saturday, June 24th, 11:00–1:00, Ala Moana Center Shop.

"SURFER'S SURFER TELLS HIS STORY," Pearl Barbone, Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, July 30, 1967

 is a book out to win every surfer’s heart. It could also win the hearts of people of all ages who are "stoked'’ on having fun and enjoying life. Phil Edwards is the surfer’s surfer. He was recently picked by thousands of boardriders as their all-time favorite. Phil Edwards is the big daddy of board-riding. From the very first page to the last, this book gives the reader that "slightly jazzed” feeling. One can almost hear those thundering waves off the Californian, Hawaiian and Australian coastlines that Phil describes so vividly.

Edwards explains conquering the sea like this:

You must one day, one time in your life, stand on top of a monster wave with the wind blowing spray like stinging little needles into your flanks and your back, and look shoreward into those incredible green and umber hills. The water is alive with sparkle, and the surfboard makes a hissing sound like a thousand yards of tearing silk. In the moment you are riding along on the moving boiling top of the world, attached only occasionally to this planet. And you are forever jazzed.

 will leave everyone who reads it wanting a surfboard—and really “unplugged” on the idea!

"WORLD'S GREATEST HOT-DOGGER TELLS HOW IT IS ON TOP OF THE BIG ONES," Jim Gallager, Peninsula Times Tribune, July 1, 1967


Subtitled “The Stoked Side of Surfing or How to Hang Ten Through Life and Stay Happy,” this volume is one of those rare excursions into a relatively off-beat sport (well, you wouldn’t compare it to night baseball for spectator appeal, would you?) that should leave both the practitioner and the total unbeliever well satisfied—and even somewhat emotionally spent. One suspects this is largely due to the salt-flecked typewriter of Bob Ottum, one of 

’s finely-tuned stable of glib, expressive writers who seem able to worm their way inside a subject and explode it into nuggets as delectable as a sugary watermelon.

Phil Edwards is the world's greatest surfer, as selected in a poll by 

 Magazine. He lives with his attractive doll-sized wife in a cottage overlooking the booming combers at Orange County’s Dana Point, next door to girl surfing champion Joyce Hoffman. He spends part of his working day—as little as possible—designing for Hobie Surfboards at Capistrano Beach. Edwards is nudging up on 30, but give him a choice between surfing and eating, and it’s no contest.

One thing about Edwards, he’s cognizant that California board surfing was not originated during the 50s by a group of hot doggers in baggy britches zigging through the pilings at Huntington Beach. This concept, pushed vigorously by iron cross manufacturers and record distributors, infuriates pre-World War II amphibious types who steered their 50-pound paddleboards shoreward off Pedro Point and at what later was to become known as Steamer Lane at Santa Cruz. Many watched, but few joined.

Edwards is properly deferential to these pioneers and their Southern California counterparts. But it was he, as a skinny seventh-grader in 1951, who introduced the dimension that revolutionized surfing as surely as the T formation did for football and the jump shot for basketball. To quote:

"(1) you caught the wave, and just as your board began sliding to oblivion, you (2) stood up on it, leaned in toward the wave, and (3) the crazy thing turned—beautifully—swinging back up the shoulder of the wave. The curl breaking over jolted the nose around and you moved slightly forward to get more wave under the back of the board and you and the curl raced each other to the beach."

This technique, discovered quite by accident, pointed the way toward today’s sophisticated surfing—playing the wave, nursing it, caressing it, milking its tons of energy until its lifespan ends in a ribbon of docile foam on a sandy beach or in an angry collision with an implacable cliff.

If for nothing else, Edwards would qualify for surfing immortality as the first recorded human to ride the Banzai Pipeline, a man-killing course on the north coast of Oahu that Edwards named himself. He took an 18-footer across a deadly patch of razor-sharp coral that lurked just five feet below the surface. A wipeout meant curtains.

“Here I was 18 feet aloft on the crest of the wave—and at the bottom of it, where the water was sucked away, lay the jagged teeth of a jillion coral spires. ‘Hot damn!' I thought, fleetingly, and rode straight down into them.”

 is an instruction book, too—not quite a primer, for Edwards has too much to tell—because the world’s greatest is willing to share his surf.

“What this sport needs is hackers—the wonderful world of everybody trying this pagan game. There are days when I feel that every time I make a new surfboard it is like giving guns to the Indians. Still, the oceans of the world are big enough for everybody.”

"SURFER COLLABORATES ON IN-DEPTH TREATISE," Elaine Jennings, Asbury Park Press, Aug 4, 1967


Phil Edwards, who dunked into the surfing kick as a young boy, accidentally wrapped a living around the sport. He’s now a chief designer for Hobie Surfboards. Edwards doesn’t think much of entering competitions, but he’s been elected the surfer’s surfer. This book, written with the 

 associate editor Bob Ottum, tells the life of Edwards, the affair real surfers are having with the ocean, and what it’s like to be jazzed on the sport, to ride a sizzling monster mountain and be caught in the half-life of a wave’s curl, in life’s womb.

Edwards has dedicated the hook to the “legions of the unjazzed,” those people who stand wide-eyed on beaches wondering why these fellows spend hours at a time out in that crashing foamy fringe of the blue-green. His language is natural and keenly descriptive, and the photographs are breathtaking. This isn’t a learn-how book, nor a collection of flip surfy phrases washed into a quasi-digestive whole. It’s a display of feeling and respect for an almost ritualistic sport, the effects of being stoked, and the next best thing to skimming along a silk wave. Foaming throughout the text is humor, tenderness, and a bubbling passion for the sea. Included is a round-up on surfing around the world, sailing, photography, a bit of history, and geography. Technicalities are treated so delicately that they sneak in and stick—like sand on wet trunks. The book shares Edwards' world of being stoked by captivating the reader with delicious language. Edwards and Ottum have risen upon a perfect wave in sports literature.

“A PERFECT WAVE IN SPORTS LITERATURE” - REVIEWS AND PROMO FOR PHIL EDWARDS' 1967 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, “YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE AN HOUR AGO”

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