Divine Jeff - Surfing : an illustrated history of the coolest sport of all time

Author Ben Marcus, left, hanging with the world-famous Robert Wingnut Weaver.

Ben Marcus grew up surfing in Santa Cruz in the 1970s, during a time when everyone wore puka shells and ONeill Supersuits or Animal Skins, had long blond hair, and rocked out to Honk, Blind Faith, and Jimi Hendrix. An era like that will hook anyone on surfing for life, and Ben was a stoked gremmie, surfing the east side of Santa Cruz at Pleasure Point and also the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor and Rivermouth in the winter.

After graduating from high school, Ben traveled the world in search of the perfect wave. In the 1980s, he wrote a short story about a surfing adventure on the Spanish Basque coast and submitted it to The Surfer magazine. TheSurfer hired him as associate editor, where he remained for ten years, writing about many of the changes in surfingthe discovery of Mavericks, the debut of tow surfing, the arrival of the New School, and stars such as Lisa Andersen, Kelly Slater, and Laird Hamilton.

Now here in the twenty-first century, Ben still surfs and travels as much as possible, writing for The Surfers Journal and other publications.

Surfing USA! was inspired by an interview Ben did with Jim Fullerguitarist for the Surfaris and coauthor of Wipe Out!while riding in a limo from Santa Monicas Viceroy Hotel to the Hollywood Bowl to see a James Brown concert. Fullers story of a bunch of kids from Glendale writing a song that would be played eight million times on the radio over the next forty years got Ben thinking about all the other pioneers of surf culture and their stories. Many of them are in this book.

Id like to thank the Academy foroops, wrong speech.

The first person to blame, er, thank is Steve Hawk, who handed this project off so he could free up personal time to play Tony Hawks Pro Skater with his kids.

Hawk handed me off to Michael Dregni at Voyageur Press, who could not have known what he was getting into. Surfing USA! was supposed to be a fifty-thousand-word book with a deadline of October 2004. Instead, it was a two-hundred-thousand-word manuscript that took many more months to write and edit back down to fifty thousand wordsfinishing, appropriately, on April Fools Day 2005.

Michael Dregni had all the qualities desirable in an editor: patience, communication, patience, style, and patience. He did a good job editing this book, considering he is from Minnesotaand because he was from Minnesota I could not hear his screams. Editing this book was like fighting a Malibu fire in 100-mph offshore winds. As soon as he had it batted down to a reasonable size, I would submit a forty-thousand-word chapter on surf music, and he had to suit up again.

My thanks as well to Margret Aldrich, copy editor extraordinaire, for keeping me honest.