Profile: Matt Warshaw

Surf historian Matt Warshaw spends his days in Seattle sifting through the ruins of our strange and beautiful past time. He says he’s motivated by an effort to assign meaning to his own story and to understand why he’s spent so many hours of life obsessed with riding waves. How did he arrive here? Matt learned to surf in Venice Beach with Jay Adams, competed in the first Katin Pro/Am, edited Surfer Magazine — and that was just the beginning.

In 2022, I wrote a profile of Matt for the print magazine Emocean. The story appeared in the magazine’s fourth issue, Devotion. It was a joy to work with the crew at Emocean, who love surfing and making print media as much as anyone I’ve ever met. You can check out their current issues available at emocean.surf. Here’s the story of Matt’s life-long fascination with surfing.

When Matt Warshaw was six years old, there were three things he wanted to be: the driver of a drag racing car, a drummer in a band, and a surfer. One day his Uncle Daniel came to visit and brought his Hansen longboard. At the time, Warshaw and his family lived in the San Fernando Valley and they had a backyard pool. Uncle Daniel put his board in the pool and told Warshaw to sit on it. Then he pushed it across the pool. On the third trip across the pool, Uncle Daniel told Warshaw to stand up. “In my mind, I was a surfer.”

What became a life-long obsession, began that day. Now 62, Warshaw is surfing’s most dedicated historian. He learned to surf as a grom in Santa Monica, became a professional contest surfer, and edited Surfer Magazine, the most influential publication of its time. A move to San Francisco led Warshaw to discover the magical sandbars of Ocean Beach, and he wrote two monumental books, The Encyclopedia of Surfing and The History of Surfing. 

These days, Warshaw lives in Seattle and has made the comprehensive, online version of the EOS his life’s work. “If you really care about surfing and it’s a world and a universe that you love, which I think a lot of us do, Matt’s doing this unsung job that benefits all of us,” says writer Jamie Brisick. Each time Warshaw tried to escape surfing, it pulled him back. Each time he came back, he went deeper. And he has never stopped learning. 

Sometime after Warshaw turned seven, his family moved to an ocean-front house in Venice Beach. His mom Mimi taught at Pier Avenue School in Hermosa Beach, while his father Michael worked as a physicist at the RAND Corporation. Warshaw fell in with a crew of kids who ran free while their parents worked. One of them was Jay Adams, who later became famous as part of the Dogtown skateboard scene. At age eight, Adams was an engaging blonde with a bent for trouble that was still mostly harmless. Adams and Warshaw became inseparable. 

In the summer of 1969, the two groms got a ride each day to the breakwater on the north side of the Santa Monica Pier. Warshaw had a bright red 7’4” pintail, a gift from Uncle Daniel. Reshaped from a longboard, the board was so wide that Warshaw couldn’t wrap his arm around it. The two groms carried sack lunches that never lasted long. “We’d go up and panhandle on the pier,” Warshaw recalls. “So it’d be, ‘hey mister, I need a dime to call my mom.’ And then we’d have enough money to go buy french fries and for the arcade.” 

The next year, the two friends moved on to better waves at Pico Blvd. and Bay Street. Sometimes, they made it as far as Malibu. Ten-year-old Adams had a rare charisma that melted the resistance of even the toughest locals and ensured they were protected out in the lineup. Adams also had a natural talent that made surfing come easily. “I was always trying really hard, and Jay didn’t have to try hard at all,” Warshaw recalls. Growing up in the South Bay, Warshaw watched some of the era’s best surfers and dreamed of matching their skill. 

Life wasn’t all surfing. Each week, Warshaw went to the library and checked out as many books as he could carry. He played with the rest of the Venice kids in the streets where the burned-out remains of the Pacific Ocean Pier had a magnetic lure for them. Until 1967, POP was an amusement park rivaling Disneyland with a ferris wheel, wood roller coaster, and ocean-themed exhibits. After it closed, a series of fires turned the structure into an apocalyptic vision out of a Ray Bradbury novel. Here was the ghost of summers past, and the kids ran wild in the ruins. 

Nostalgia too easily spins grit into gold, and while Warshaw remembers those wild, free days in Venice, he recognizes how close to disaster they danced. “It always seems like a crazy stroke of luck that it worked out as well as it did,” he says. “But it didn’t work out for Jay. And it didn’t work out for most of the friends I had in that period.” And it nearly didn’t work out for Warshaw. 

One day when Warshaw was in junior high, a Black friend told him to head straight home after school. Warshaw was a white kid in a racially divided city and his long blonde hair marked him clearly as a surfer. He went home that day. A friend got a knife in the ribs. “I rolled sevens again and again and again,” says Warshaw. That same year, Warshaw left Venice midway through the school year. His parents had divorced, and he moved south to Manhattan Beach to live with his mom. “The kids I left behind, the drugs came and the violence. I left just in time.”

Held north of the pier in Huntington Beach where oil wells still stood on the cliffs, the 1976 Katin Pro-Am was the biggest contest in California. A prize purse of $2000 lured top surfers such as Shaun Tomson and Larry Bertlemann. Among the starting field of roughly 200 surfers was sixteen-year-old Warshaw. To his surprise, Warshaw reached the semifinal at the Katin and finished sixth. “If I have a gift, it’s that I can really stick with a project,” he says. “The project at that moment was to become a good surfer.” 

School couldn’t compete. Warshaw dropped out of El Camino Junior College and San Diego State in rapid succession and went to work at a surf shop. Though he scored a string of local and regional contest results, pro surfing’s top level hovered just out of reach. “I wanted to compete so badly right from the beginning,” he says. “I did it as hard as I could, and it was the driving focus of my whole surfing life for ten or twelve years.” In 1982 he achieved one of his best results when he finished ninth at the OP Pro. By then Warshaw was already 22.

Professional surfing had passed him by, but a new career beckoned. From behind the counter of the surf shop, he learned about a new magazine. With his father’s advice — and a loan — Warshaw became part-owner of South Bay Surfer. There he learned each production step from writing to layout to printing. When South Bay Surfer folded, Warshaw moved on to Break Out, where he hand-pasted layouts and wrote stories. Then one day a call came from Surfer Magazine. They wanted him to come for an interview. 

When Warshaw went to work for Surfer in 1985, he arrived during a surf media golden age. “It was a really wild and fun period,” says Brisick, who was a pro surfer at the time. “This was the period of Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, and Mark Occhilupo — the surfers were still characters.”Advertising money flowed, and the magazine was fat with the work of writers such as Derek Hynd and Dave Parmenter and photographers such as Jeff Divine and Art Brewer. “Had he been the editor at a different time, he might have come out of it a different person,” says Brisick.

Shelved in publisher Steve Pezman’s office were bound copies of the entire run of the magazine. Warshaw read them all from start to finish. “I wanted to absorb it completely. I wanted it to come through my eyes, my skin, and my blood, and my hands,” he says. “I’m not a fast learner, but I never don’t get better.” Soon Warshaw was managing editor at Surfer. 

When he made editor-in-chief, Warshaw’s future in the surf media looked assured. He was less certain. His younger brother Chris had traveled widely and gone to the University of Chicago. All Warshaw had ever done was surf. “There is a real risk of intellectual suffocation in surfing,” says Lewis Samuels, who wrote the widely read blog PostSurf and was a senior writer at Surfer. “I think you’re more likely to suffer some form of intellectual suffocation than to die from drowning.” In a long-shot move, Warshaw applied to UC Berkeley. To his surprise, they agreed to admit him as a junior after adding up the miscellaneous credits he’d accumulated. 

Walking up the trail at Trestles one evening, Warshaw encountered Sam George, who wrote for Surfing and had somehow learned of Warshaw’s disaffection. He tried to change Warsaw’s mind. “You’re the fucking leader of the free world! You’re the editor of Surfer Magazine,” George recalls saying. “What is wrong with you? Revel in this!” But George was too late. In many ways, Warshaw had already left.

Not long after that conversation, Warshaw sold the house he had bought near T- Street Beach and packed his bags. He had been editor of Surfer for just five months. In January 1991 at age 30, he arrived in Berkeley to pouring rain. “I was like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz who needed a diploma to feel smart,” he says. His first paper came back with a C grade. Warshaw worried that he had made a terrible mistake. When his grades improved, his uncertainty washed away. 

Then one day, Mark “Doc” Renneker called. He invited Warshaw to come out to Ocean Beach for a surf. When Warshaw arrived at Berkeley, he believed that he had left surfing behind. Surfing had other plans for him. 

From the kitchen window of his apartment on Taraval Street, Warshaw had a near-panoramic view of the ever-shifting lineup at Ocean Beach. Throughout the day, he picked up his binoculars and scanned the surf. Whenever it looked promising, Warshaw drove down to the Beach and meticulously surveyed the three-mile stretch of waves. Often Warshaw drove home to wait for a tide swing or a wind shift. Then he did the whole thing all over again, driving the Great Highway from South Sloat to the VFW’s on Balboa in pursuit of the perfect sandbar. 

“If you could boil all of surfing down to one thing for him, it would be dropping in behind the peak on a right, getting a pipe, and just doing that all day, every day,” says Samuels, who surfed the Beach with Warshaw at the time. “That’s all he really wanted in surfing.”

After finishing Berkeley in December 1992, Warshaw applied to graduate school to study history. It seemed like a logical choice, but he only lasted three weeks at UCLA. Warshaw began collecting surf magazines and videos. Already, he could see his next career coming into view like a perfect set wave on the horizon. “What I wanted to write about then was surfers that I admired from the past,” he says. No one else was doing these stories at the time, and Warshaw felt relieved by the lack of competition.

In the second bedroom of his apartment, Warshaw hung blankets over the windows to block out the light and began to write. A series of longform profiles of surfers such as Jock Sutherland and Rabbit Bartholomew for The Surfer’s Journal gave him the confidence to attempt a book-length project. In 2000, Warshaw turned the story of big-wave surfing at Mavericks into a well-received book. 

All of that served as a prologue for Warshaw’s two master works. In 2000, he sold his most ambitious work yet: The Encyclopedia of Surfing. It was supposed to be a two-year project, and he received a $80,000 advance. After spending the first year building a database, Warshaw devoted almost five years to finishing the book with the help of a series of paid assistants. With his advance exhausted, Warshaw’s father provided financial support. Another five-year project, Warshaw’s richer narrative, The History of Surfing followed. 

Scoring tubes remained Warshaw’s obsession and he continued to surf every day. “The paddle-out at Ocean Beach is a nightmare and we learned that it was a mistake to try to follow Matt,” says Daniel Duane, who wrote Caught Inside, a surf memoir. “He was so powerful and fast on the paddle-out, that if you tried to stay with him, you would just get smoked.” But Ocean Beach injected as much frustration as it did elation into Warshaw’s surfing experience.  

“San Francisco is the kind of place that will make you want to quit surfing,” says Samuels, who has surfed Ocean Beach since high school. “It makes your life pretty small at a certain point. You’re just shackled to the Beach waiting for your window.”

Marriage to his wife Jody and the birth of his son Teddy shifted Warshaw’s priorities. “If you go back to that time, the thing I wanted was to be a father,” he says. “That was an ambition that obliterated all of the rest of them.” He wanted to give his son the energy his own father had provided him, and that until then, he had put almost entirely into surfing. 

Not long before his marriage, Warshaw took his last few surf trips, including one to the town of Todos Santos, Mexico. There he met up with Duane and they scored one of the best swells the area had seen in decades. In a lineup full of barrels, Warshaw was a kid in a candy store. A local videographer caught Warshaw’s session. “You could hear some local guys standing next to the video camera,” says Duane. “You can hear one of these guys saying, ’Fuck you, Master Tube!’” They couldn’t believe just how many barrels Warshaw rode that day.

In 2011 Jody received a job offer at Amazon in Seattle. At first, Warshaw could not imagine moving away from Ocean Beach and the city he had come to love. But he soon recognized that here was the off- ramp he needed from his lifetime obsession with surfing. Now at last, he could stop. 

Each morning, Warshaw drops a pod into his espresso machine and makes a shot. Then he climbs the stairs to his office on the second floor of his tidy craftsman-style house in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. A small bedroom with a walk-in closet serves as his office and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the walls. Rows of bound volumes of surf magazines occupy the shelves. As he adds each volume to his digital database, Warshaw marks the spine with a black “x.” Throughout the day, he takes walks around the neighborhood and his Fitbit counts his steps. 

Sifting through the sands of surfing’s past, Warshaw adds piece by piece to the sprawling digital version of the Encyclopedia of Surfing that he began creating before he left San Francisco. The site currently contains more than 1000 videos and 30,000 images — and it’s growing all the time. Each week, Warshaw publishes a newsletter called the “Sunday Joint,” a playful melding of past and present. “It’s EOS until the end,” he says. “The only thing I can imagine doing at this point is a memoir and fuck, the world doesn’t need another surf memoir.”

The nearest surf spot is Westport, a three-hour drive from Seattle. Warshaw never goes there, and he believes the distance has shifted the way he perceives surfing for the better. He feels more balanced, as though he can finally see clearly. “Moving to Seattle and taking a step away from the culture the way I have makes me appreciate it more,” he says. “Not being in that white hot center of my surfing life has been nothing but good for my writing.” Occasionally, Warshaw daydreams of bodysurfing the shorebreak somewhere warm but the thought of standing on a surfboard leaves him cold. The fire has burned out.

All the same, surfing still retains its hold on Warshaw’s imagination. As he writes surfing’s history, Warshaw is trying to understand his own. “I’m trying to explain why surfing is as attractive as it is to so many of us,” says Warshaw. “Why do we all do it? What was it about surfing that it could just pull me in like that for so long?” The experience of surfing is often individualist and self-centered. Through his writing, Warshaw has found meaning and connection which have endured beyond his fleeting experiences riding waves.

Like surfing, writing is a form of self-expression, and there are limits to any one individual’s perspective. A history written by a single person can never encompass the entirety of the narrative. Warshaw grew up surfing at a specific time and in a specific place — a white boy in a racially divided Los Angeles and in a largely white lineup. He worked in media at a time when few women appeared in the magazines, and even fewer wrote for them. Sam George even had a female pseudonym at Surfing.

To his credit, Warshaw has continually expanded his vision. His narrative in The History of Surfing highlights the contributions of women such as Joyce Hoffman and Lisa Andersen. More recently, Warshaw discovered that the EOS includes very few surfers from Japan. He has since set out to explore the rich culture of surfing there. His determination to keep learning has helped Warshaw see beyond the limits of his own experience. Still, a more complete history awaits additional voices to build on what he has begun.

Sitting at his desk in Seattle, Warshaw has traveled a long way from that moment standing on Uncle Daniel’s Hansen in his family’s pool, captivated by the feeling of walking on water. Riding a wave is ephemeral, gone almost before a surfer realizes it was there. A lifetime of surfing adds up to a succession of so many short-lived, elusive moments. Try to hold on to them; they slip away.  To write surfing’s history  is to try to replace transience with permanence and to try to hold fast to those memories’ faint echoes.