Matt Warshaw

Matt Warshaw (Los Angeles, 1960) is a former professional surfer, former writer and editor at Surfer magazine (1984-1990), and the author of dozens of feature articles and large-format books on surfing culture and history. He is currently the curator of the online Encyclopedia of Surfing and History of Surfing, each website based on expanded material from the archives assembled for their print companions. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Venice Beach and Manhattan Beach, at his competitive peak Warshaw was the second-ranked amateur in California and 43rd-ranked professional on the International Professional Surfers world tour (1982). After stints as a student at several Southern California community colleges and San Diego State University while still a competitive surfer, Warshaw earned a B.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley (1992). After finishing his degree at Berkeley, Warshaw briefly aspired to a career in academia, enrolling in the graduate program in History at UCLA. He quit after three weeks. He is famously quoted as saying "All I knew when I quit [graduate school at UCLA] was that I was going to make a living writing about surfing, and as a matter of vanity, I wanted to be the world's authority on it." Today he is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost historians of surfing, living up to a 2005 feature on his work that named him "the caretaker of surfing history."

1969 marks the year that Warshaw began surfing in Southern California along with friend and future skateboarding icon Jay Adams. Three years later in 1972, a twelve-year-old Warshaw accidentally became the owner of the very first surfboard built under Jeff Ho's iconic Zephyr Productions label. As Warshaw recounts, he had been surfing a custom Jeff Ho swallowtail for about six months before the board was stolen from the car park at Leo Carrillo State Beach. Devastated, the young surfer scraped together money from odd jobs to order another board from Ho a few months later. When he received the new board from shop manager Skip Engblom, Warshaw noticed that the shaper's name had been replaced with a single airbrushed word: Zephyr. Sensing Warshaw's surprise, Engblom explained that Zephyr was a new label launched by Ho's shop. As it turned out, Warshaw had unintentionally become the pre-adolescent owner of the very first Zephyr artifact of any kind, well before Ho's new surfboard label and its homonymous skateboarding brand had garnered fame through the Zephyr Competition Team, or Z-Boys.

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