“Welcome to Mickey's House,” by Steve Pezman, was published in the January 1992 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been shortened and slightly edited.


Being small in junior high school and high school is a little bit tougher when you are being compared to the football and basketball players. They got the best looking girls and all of that business. But then I started surfing. Ricky Grigg helped get me into it, and I bought a paddle board in 1948 [when I was 11] that I had to drag end-over-end to get out of the water. An awkward surfing vehicle. I’d been bodysurfing, mat riding and belly boarding, all of that before, then I got on the paddle board and began to ride one-foot waves inside the Santa Monica breakwater. And then in the winter of 1950, I bought my first real board and started surfing Malibu. And I remember Ricky screaming at me, “you chickenshit little bastard, take off, take off!” And I’d be hesitant and unsure of myself, and that probably reflected in my social life as well.


I went to Hawaii for my first time in 1954, at 16, before I was out of high school, and rode Waikiki mostly, but took trips around the island and tried other places. I didn’t actually surf Sunset that trip, but we went out there once when it was four or five feet and I bodysurfed it. Anyway, I came back home with a lot more confidence after going over there and living on my own. Then the next time I went was in ’57 and we spent the whole winter on the North Shore and ended up riding Waimea. Yeah, I rode some big waves, and came back with 

 confidence. It was a case of realizing that your limitations often come from your own limited thinking, and that if you think you can do it, that's a huge step toward actually doing it. That was a big deal in my life. That kind of attitude has helped me all the way through, in every aspect. Realizing that you didn’t have to be a big guy to ride big waves.


For years after that first time at Waimea, I went back to Hawaii, almost every winter, and usually rode big waves. I was mostly driven by my peers and my own reputation into having to go out and ride those waves. Sometimes I was confident, sometimes not, and sometimes I was really afraid. Finding myself in situations that were foolish, and thinking, “What am I doing out here? This is so stupid!” 

One day a friend and I walked from Waimea along the beach to Pipeline. We ended up sitting at Pipeline, it’s 8 to 10' and perfect, just a beautiful day, and 50 of the best surfers were out there competing for waves. After about 45 minutes, I turned to my friend and said, “You know, this is the first time I’ve been able to sit on the beach and really enjoy watching without feeling like I have to surf.” I just kind of blurted it out, and my friend didn’t really understand, and I’m not even sure I understood until right then. But that was the moment I realized I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody—or, more particularly, myself. Surfing has always been fun for me, but from then on it took on a different meaning. Of course, I still try and challenge myself because that’s a huge part of life. But I didn't have to do it anymore in big scary waves. 

The quotes below are excerpted from “Still That Way,” by Steve Pezman, published in the December 2005 issue of Surfer’s Journal.


I was one of a group of California surfers on a trip around the South Pacific in 1967 for a film project called 

, which told the story of the longboard-shortboard transition. Our group were all on longboards when we left California. When we landed in Australia, the first guy I met off the plane was Bob McTavish. We got along like long lost brothers. He was a driving force in contemporary board design, which at that time in Australia was shorter, wide-tailed, with a deep vee—way more maneuverable than the boards we were riding. It was the beginning of the era where you had to pump and skate your board to make a wave rather than just aim and fire. I was so taken by what they were doing that immediately upon return from that trip I made a series of deep vee shortboards for California. I knew they were happening, but the affirmation came for me at Rincon on a big day. I took off behind Corny Cole, Peter’s brother, who was an aim-and-fire type rider, and I was making three or four turns to every maneuver he was making, and we both ended up way down on Coast Highway. Except I felt like I’d traveled at least twice the distance Corny had and ended up in the same place. That verified the smaller, more maneuverable boards for me. Luckily, I was small enough to make the transition fairly easily. 


I was hired by a sports variety show [in the early ’60s]. They’d set up a big canvas pool and wanted to know if I could ride tandem with a gal on a surfboard while being towed across the pool. I said of course I could. So they paid my way to Chicago and off I went. I was a jack-of-all-trades. I worked with a dog team act. I worked with some tumblers. There was an ex-pro wrestler that had a bear-wrestling act. He needed a shill to come out of the audience and wrestle the bear. The bear was a 400-pound black that loved beer and Coke and had a tongue on him about a foot long. He actually had some good moves. Ain’t no way you’re going to beat a bear. In 20 tries, I managed to get him down once. My strategy was to raise my arms and stand up tall, which he would mimic, then I'd suddenly dive down, grab him by the ankles and try to topple him over. The bigger the guy, the easier it was for the bear. He’d been declawed and de-fanged but he’d grab you and lick your face with his big stinky tongue and the crowd loved it. He had a tough time with me. I was small and could squirm around.


Phil was so graceful, even on a nothing wave you could see it in his body language, his read of the section and his cocking the board for a little move of some sort. I think Phil’s uniqueness stemmed from the fact that even while he pulled off radical things on waves, as a seaman he always understood and flowed with the ocean rather than trying to overcome it. Although Phil rarely, if ever, rides waves on a board these days, he has other ways of expressing his “surfer” self. Still, it troubles us when someone as great as Phil walks away from something the rest of us are still obsessed with. My guess is that his standards are so high that he just isn’t comfortable with anything less. For Phil, it is way cleaner to let his peak be his statement and move on.


I had a friend who was a commercial diver, and I dabbled in that too. He was a demolition expert, and our first job together was taking out the old Capistrano Beach Pier [in 1965]. I kind of introduced the surfboard to that industry, in fact. I don’t think they’d ever used one before and they all kind of poo-poo’d it, but we ended up finishing the job 50% faster than scheduled because of it. The surf happened to be up during the job. We had these things we called wiener schnitzels, flexible tubing that we’d run eight sticks of dynamite through, two abreast, and then run Primacord through it. We’d make up a bunch of these sausages, tie them around our waists, our necks, and our arms, wherever they’d fit, and we’d swim to a piling with an Aqua-Lung. You’d dive down to the base of the piling—and it’s dark, almost black, especially after the first detonation brings up all the stuff from a hundred years of the pier being there; dogs and rats and shit, tires and steel, all this stuff—and you'd wrap a wiener schnitzel around it and tie it off. You’d do eight or ten pilings then run a trunk line to each charge to interconnect them, then bring that line up to the electrical box, which we had on the boat. Meanwhile, out on the pier, there were four guys with chainsaws cutting the planks away and another guy with a torch cutting all the steel. It was a big job. There were sewer pipes, electrical conduit, water pipes, gas lines. We’d do 60-foot sections at a time. Finally, when everything was clear, we’d detonate the charge, which sheared the piling off at the base, after which we had tons of shit in the water that we had to clear out and get to the beach before we went to the next section of pier and started over. 

That’s where the surfboard came in. Rather than trying to get a boat in and out through the surf, I could paddle way faster. So I’d haul a tag line out from the beach, connect it to a load, which got pretty hairy at times with breaking waves, then they’d pull it out with a D9 bulldozer, stack it, and haul it away. It was quite an operation. 

My first day on the job they told me if you see any dynamite with white crystals coming out, that’s nitroglycerin, which is not good. Be very careful. Be careful of the caps, too. Everything else was okay. I was learning the demolition business. It was fascinating in that there were a lot of moving parts. Guys using chainsaws, other guys using the torches, and we were using dynamite. The guy I was working with was highly experienced, while I was faking it as a Lung diver. 

After we’d taken the pier down, the surf had come up double-overhead. We still had to clean out what was left of the pilings, and the only way you could do it was blow them out. That was the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been in the ocean. We’d anchor the boat, get out, and dive down with a line into pitch black, crawling on the bottom. A set would come through, and we’d be swept 50 feet in, totally out of control, along with the dead fish. It was a war zone out there: timber, metal, you name it. After 20 minutes, we came up, looked at each other, and had this little conversation. “I think we got ’em all.” “Yup! I think so.” “I want outta here!” “Me too!”

Mickey Muñoz

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