Finding the Unbroken Thread with Surf Scribe Matt Warshaw

Warshaw is the former editor of SURFER Magazine. He is also the Surf Consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary (no joke). The big kahuna, indeed.

Despite such prestige, Warshaw is modest and warm on our video call.

“You read about Hawaii, hundreds of years ago, when the surf would come up and everybody in the villages, in the taro fields, just dropped everything. I mean, what is that?!"

He's grinning as he talks. Mantling the wall behind him are rows upon rows of books, magazines, and catalogs—enough to rival even the most devoted zealot.

“I just love it,” he continues. “And I think that still exists. That’s really the whole point of The Encyclopedia. I wanted to figure out what got us into it, not just when we were kids, but when surfers like Duke were kids. I wanted to figure out what that unbroken thread means, and where it’s leading the next generation of surfers.”

Warshaw has lived his life in service to surfing, with every decision, he says, guided by how he could keep riding waves. He grew up in the surfing mecca of Southern California, and while he was a top amateur competitor in the ’70s, he says he wouldn’t have gotten far in the “comps.” Instead, he became the editor of SURFER—not too shabby for a backup, if you ask me. But he left SURFER in 1990, just a year after landing the Editor-in-Chief post. To most, it would be the ultimate surf-media dream job. The obvious question: why walk away?

“All I’d done was surf, or write about surfing, for so long,” he explains. “I wanted to broaden it somehow. So, I turned 30, and went back to school. History major.”

In full pursuit of that “unbroken thread”, he studied the likes of Duke, Miki Dora, and 12th-century Polynesians at UC Berkeley, with no real idea of where it might lead him. To an unprecedented catalog of the sport, it turned out.

Fast forward to 2013, 10 years after the publication of his 2003 bound opus, The Encyclopedia went digital. EOS, as it's known, is a continuation of the book, and is Warshaw's ongoing “love letter to surfing”. 

“Every project I do takes twice as long as I think it will,” he says. “And this one absolutely did. But I had this insane support and a million lucky breaks that allowed me to really pour my heart and soul into this.”

Launched in 2013, the EOS website features Warshaw's succeeding book, "The History of Surfing", as well as its ever-growing archive dedicated to the preservation and celebration of surf history and culture. Spanning the sport’s history, users can find information on surfers, interviews, places, events, contest results, video edits, surf commentary, and more. Besides the usual “person”, “place”, or “year” categories, the EOS search bar allows users to filter by type of gear, weather & oceanography, and even by wave pool category.

Warshaw asks me if I'm familiar with the Winchester Mystery House. I say I am.

"It’s kinda like that. I just kept adding bits and pieces to the site until it evolved into these seven color-coded sections, like history, videos, interviews, surfboards, and contests," he says. "I'm not a historian, and I'm definitely also not an archivist. It might sound like false modesty—maybe it is—but it's honestly a really big scrapbooking project.”

Equally appealing to the site’s content is its obvious lack of advertisements. EOS is completely independent, subscriber-funded, and is actually registered in California as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Like any passion project, the revenue is, at times, low—but EOS is as much Warshaw's brainchild as it is a labor of love.

The latest addition to Warshaw's own EOS Mystery House is “The Sunday Joint”, a weekly newsletter that offers subscribers a deeper dive into surf and surf-adjacent topics, accompanied by links to explore the site further. 

“I chose something that is a guaranteed low-paying job. And I have no real business skills on top of that,” Warshaw laughs. “I can’t say to somebody, ‘this is a thing you should pursue’. But it's amazing that it's working. I love doing it. I pour my heart and soul into it.”

I ask if he has found what he was looking for, whether he found out what that unbroken thread means. 

"I recently went to Fiji with a friend of mine," he says. "I was really good, up until about 10 years ago. Now, every time I surf, I get worse. And it really frustrates me, because I'm so egoed-out. But I caught this little wave. And it just sped me along, for about 100 yards, through this insanely clear water. Whatever I was feeling when I was eight...I'm right back there. I’m 63, and still feeling that same thing". 

Warshaw shares countless stories—like surfers during the Great Depression who stowed away on ships bound for Honolulu—to illustrate “all the crazy human stuff, all the knots we tie ourselves into, just to do it.”

Expressing concern about modern innovations like wave pools—“you’ve changed the sport so fundamentally, it is not the same thing”—Warshaw remains “cynical but optimistic,” anchored by the thread of surfing that has endured throughout.

“It’s that mini-adventure that happens every time you’re on our board,” he says. “It's so weird that we’re trying to change it with inventions like wave machines. But even still, we sit, we wait, we look at forecasts, and we try to figure out where and when to have that mini-adventure. It’s this amazing chess match that you're playing with the elements."

He continues, “It’s so obvious, and yet it doesn’t get talked about much. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to build a story around it—it’s just a matter of doing it, of wanting to be able to do it. That’s the thread I wanted to convey.”

Matt Warshaw, Central California, 1982. Photo courtesy of Matt Warshaw.