Steve Pezman

Steve Pez­man is a Cal­i­for­nia surfer/publisher who is the cre­ator of The Surfer’s Jour­nal. Pez­man has brought surf­ing to the level of schol­ar­ship and merit and is often quoted in films and pub­li­ca­tions. We spoke with Pez­man about his life and philosophy.

Tell us a lit­tle bit about your­self.
I was born in 1941and I grew up in Los Ange­les. My fam­ily lived in Los Feliz orig­i­nally, and then later moved to Brent­wood, above the city, in the Santa Mon­ica moun­tain area. We even­tu­ally ended up in Long Beach in an area called Naples—a lit­tle com­mu­nity of canals. This intro­duced me to life at the ocean ver­sus an annual trip to the beach every sum­mer with the family.

I started off skin div­ing, in the mid 50s, in the Alami­tos Bay area. Surf­ing was just start­ing to hap­pen in ’56 or ’57. By 1957, I was begin­ning to surf at Ray Bay in Seal Beach and the Hunt­ing­ton Cliffs. The Hunt­ing­ton Pier beck­oned but we were afraid to go there until we had “earned our bones”. Over the fol­low­ing years, I called the Seal Beach/Huntington zone home and began surf­ing Tres­tles in 1960, hit Mazat­lan in 1961 and then Hawaii in ’62.

I lived on the North Shore when only a dozen or so surfers lived out there, so although that had been hap­pen­ing for five years, it still felt like we were pio­neer­ing. I rode Waimea, Sun­set and Laniakea—had that foun­da­tional surf­ing expe­ri­ence. I ended up com­ing back, life­guard­ing, doing other odd jobs, then ship­ping out as a civil­ian in the Mer­chant Marine (to Viet­nam) in 1965 car­ry­ing a cargo of stale beer to the PX’s. When I came home, I was a part­ner in a silk screen­ing busi­ness. Then we started the Good Earth Health Food Bar at George’s Surf Cen­ter in Hunt­ing­ton with some money I had inherited.

Later, I learned to shape surf­boards. I shaped momen­tar­ily for sev­eral labels, includ­ing Weber, Hobie, and did longer stints with Varde­man and Chuck Dent. Next, a friend, Stu Herz , and I built an exper­i­men­tal shap­ing machine and started the first pri­vate label surf­board man­u­fac­tur­ing busi­ness out of Goat Hill in Costa Mesa—making boards for shops in Texas and the East Coast. Later, we started our own label, Cre­ative Designs Surf­boards, first on P.C.H. in New­port Beach then smack-dab in Surf City, down­town Hunt­ing­ton, in ’68 and ‘69.

How did you get started in pub­lish­ing?
Duke Boyd, who started Hang Ten, was also serv­ing as man­ag­ing edi­tor at Petersen’s Inter­na­tional Surf­ing mag­a­zine. He was help­ing pub­lisher Dick Gra­ham repo­si­tion his title as com­pe­ti­tion to Surfer. Duke was hip enough to mer­chan­dise the mag­a­zine around the Hunt­ing­ton Under­ground, which was flow­ing back and forth between there and the North Shore, at a time when Surfer was still a bit obliv­i­ous to what was going on. This was the lat­ter 60s. He invited Stu and I to write surf­board arti­cles and later brought me in as an assis­tant editor.

After Surf­ing folded six months later (the adverts stuck with Surfer), I went down to Surfer to see if I could free­lance and they hired me as an inside edi­tor. Six months later, I fell into the publisher’s job because John (Sev­er­son) had sold the mag­a­zine and was look­ing for some­one to fill that chair. I stayed as pub­lisher for about 20 years until 1992, when my wife Debbee (who had been mar­ket­ing direc­tor at Surfer) and I left and started The Surfer’s Journal.

Tell us about your rela­tion­ship to surf­ing.
Magazine-wise, I’ve been a stu­dent of the sport for over 40 years in the sense of observ­ing it and think­ing about it and writ­ing about it, and being respon­si­ble for describ­ing it to other surfers in an accu­rate way. When you pay atten­tion to some­thing for that long, you acquire a sense of its his­tor­i­cal time­line and that gives you ref­er­ence points with which to under­stand much more of it—to be able to exam­ine it and have a rela­tion­ship with it.

My life has been about artic­u­lat­ing that rela­tion­ship. I’ve been lucky to earn a liv­ing involved with some­thing that I really care about deeply, which is bet­ter than weld­ing bridges or some­thing. (Laughs)

With The Surfer’s Jour­nal, do you see your­self as the cura­tor of the sport?
I am one of the cura­tors. For­tu­nately, or unfor­tu­nately, when you print infor­ma­tion, it has the ten­dency to be taken as the truth … and it sel­dom is the whole truth. That is a big responsibility—if you take it seriously—which I do. It’s also a reward­ing cre­ative process. It’s like being an art gallery owner who loves art and gets to install a new show every two months. Every issue is artic­u­lated through a matrix of hun­dreds of peo­ple who must join together just so to make this thing come out. It’s really a mir­a­cle that it gets done. You become the con­duc­tor of that ensem­ble and the results reflect the team. It’s like we put our­selves out there, stand­ing naked before the world, and the read­ers give you thumbs up … or thumbs down. We get plenty of both.

Describe what surf­ing is for you.
At the time I was an accom­plished surfer, I would ride maybe 25 to 35 waves or more in a go-out. At that time I was involved in the close-up detail of each ride. The longer I surfed and the older I got, the more basic it became; the rela­tion­ship became sim­pli­fied. I was sat­is­fied with a less com­pli­cated ride and sought ele­gance ver­sus busy action—trim ver­sus lot of move­ment. You begin to see the big­ger pic­ture from a higher ele­va­tion. A deep take­off with a pure, clean trim becomes very sat­is­fy­ing. At that point, the num­ber of rides reduces. I would ride maybe three in a go-out instead of 35. How­ever, the plea­sure of the whole expe­ri­ence was just as large. It filled the same space that 35 rides had.

You begin to rise away from the detail clut­ter each year. I’m 68. I hate to think how many years I’ve been surf­ing. My god, it’s been over 50 years! As you start float­ing higher and higher above it, you view a broader swatch. You lose the lit­tle detail and see the big pic­ture of it all. After a while, just sit­ting on your board in the lineup becomes joy­ous. You are immersed in the sen­sa­tion and you appre­ci­ate the per­spec­tive it affords.

Tell us more.
There is some­thing cos­mic about surf­ing. Waves are nature’s mode of trans­fer­ring energy from A to B. They occur in many forms: thought waves, heat waves, radio waves. Ocean waves hap­pen to be some­thing that we can see and then we actu­ally learned to ride them, which in itself seems very improb­a­ble, so improb­a­ble that the surf cul­ture was detached from the main­stream. Wave rid­ing has always been an inte­gral part of the Hawai­ian cul­ture, but in West­ern cul­ture it was seen as such an anom­aly, such an unusual side­bar, that it didn’t seem seri­ously worth doing.

When you go surf­ing amongst the many things you might do in a day, it makes the day feel good—somehow round and com­plete. That con­nec­tion to the basic cos­mic core of energy at the cen­ter of Life in the Uni­verse some­how makes wave rid­ing deeply sat­is­fy­ing. It is some­thing that you can spend your time doing and it feels like a life well spent—a non-productive, non-depletive act that is purely aesthetic.

(Tim­o­thy) Leary was doing lec­tures at col­lege cam­puses in the 70s that he called “Man, The Evo­lu­tion­ary Surfer”. Of course, that caught our atten­tion at Surfer Mag­a­zine. We inter­viewed him and his point was that surfers weren’t the dregs of soci­ety. They were the throw-a-heads! Surfers under­stood that life was all about the aes­thetic, not how many acorns you could store in a tree beyond what you needed to eat. Leary felt that the evo­lu­tion of Man to his high­est pos­si­ble form would be towards a purely aes­thetic state of being. Fur­ther, Leary believed that surfers were already trav­el­ing that path. There­fore, their role amongst mankind in gen­eral was to lead us (laughs) to a higher place (more laughter).

As spacey as that might seem to some folks, there is some­thing within that idea that gives surfers a sense of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion about mak­ing time for surfing—and that being time well-spent. It’s all a rather ver­bose, bom­bas­tic state­ment, but I think there is some­thing to it.

What can you tell us about the sen­sory aspects of surf­ing?
From a pub­lish­ing stand­point, surf­ing itself is so sen­sory that when a surfer is famil­iar with the sen­sa­tion of doing it, look­ing at a pho­to­graph will give him a per­cent­age of that sen­sa­tion by being men­tally con­nected to it. It’s the basic foun­da­tion for the suc­cess of surf magazines—you’re pro­vid­ing pretty intense vic­ar­i­ous expe­ri­ences to surfers who can relate to them.

I actu­ally like myself as a surfer, and my sense of surf­ing aes­thetic. How­ever, I don’t like the way I am dete­ri­o­rat­ing because of old age. I can’t pop-up any more. (The com­mon old-guy lament.) That destroys your chore­og­ra­phy because it means you can’t take off where you want to; you take off where you have to (laughs).

It’s all about feel­ing trim across the green wall. That’s my dream image. Man yearns to fly. It’s the “Icarus Syn­drome”. Surf­ing is as close to what I imag­ine swoop­ing and glid­ing like a bird would be like. The wave is a liq­uid base. Every­thing about it is soft and fluid, so the ride itself is a fluid expe­ri­ence, a deeply grat­i­fy­ing flight. It touches some­thing in your soul that makes you feel so good that when you glide out over the back of the wave after a ride, you are still flushed with the sen­sa­tion, and you pad­dle out com­pelled to have another one … and another one … and another one.

The Surfer’s Jour­nal, a pub­li­ca­tion by Steve Pez­man can be found here.