SUNDAY JOINT, 7-22-2018: TOM CARROLL, SAM HAWK

Hey All,

“South Africa in Black and White,” last week’s History of Surfing chapter, seduces you with Jeffreys Bay and the dynamic Gunston 500 (pro surfing’s best-run contest throughout the 1970s), then gut punches you with the shameful Eddie-Aikau-is-too-black-for-Durban story, and just the whole blithely ignorant way our sport originally responded to what everyone but us recognized as the rolling human rights tragedy of apartheid.

But stay tuned. Tom Carroll will soon put his freckled foot right up the ass of mid-’80s racial politics, and even today it feels righteous.

A big Thank You to everyone who wrote back last week regarding the creeping length of Encyclopedia of Surfing videos, and I hear you loud and clear. Longer clips are fine—provided the subject is worthy, and if I have the video goods on the hard drive.

Both boxes are checked with this new Sam Hawk clip.

Hawk is a mystery to me. Last Thursday I tore through the database looking for just the right interview for a Sam Hawk Above the Roar post and, damn, as far as I can tell Hawk was never once featured in a surf magazine profile or feature-length interview. Sammy Hawk! Huge Monday's Blond Bombshell! I have one 1976 throwaway piece he did for SURFER about board design, but that’s it.

Four or five years ago I was in brief email contact with Sam, and was hoping to talk to him on record, but the last couple of notes I sent went unanswered and that was that. If anybody out there knows Sam, tell him the world wants to get his take on the Expression Session, Huge Monday, and Dick Brewer. And who would be the surf-avian superheat between Sam Hawk, Owl Chapman, the Wounded Gull, and Bird Mahelona? (Sam or Owl wins if it’s bombing Second Reef Pipe, Bird wins if it’s Makaha, MR wins anywhere else.)

Lots more coming up. Thanks for reading, everybody, and see you next week.

Matt