MATT WARSHAW is the former editor of Surfer magazine and has been writing about surfing for more than twenty years. A surfer all his life, he competed professionally in the early eighties. Warshaw’s articles have been published in the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and he is the author of several books on surfing. He lives in San Francisco.

A-frame:
Peak-shaped wave, generally short, hollow, and powerful; ridable in either direction-left or right-and often well-suited to tuberiding. Viewed front on, the A-frame wave has a symmetrical outline resembling that of an A-frame building.Aaberg, Denny:
Good-natured surfer/writer/musician from Pacific Palisades, California; best known as cowriter of Warner Brothers’ 1978 surfing film Big Wednesday. Aaberg was born (1947) in Boston, Massachusetts, and moved with his family at age two to the west Los Angeles town of Pacific Palisades. By the time Denny Aaberg began surfing in 1959 as a 12-year-old, his older brother Kemp was regarded as one of California’s top surfers. Aaberg’s involvement in the sport branched out as he played guitar on Innermost Limits of Pure Fun, a 1970 surf film, and contributed a song to Big Wednesday-a movie inspired by a 1974 Surfer magazine short story written by Aaberg titled “No-Pants Mance” that looked back at his wave- and beer-soaked salad days at Malibu in the early ’60s. The sandy-haired Aaberg continued to serve as keeper of the Malibu flame, appearing in the 1987 documentary The Legends of Malibu, and describing in detail Malibu’s characters, scene, and rituals in “Tres Amigos,” a 1994 Longboard magazine feature. “Malibu was rough theater,” Aaberg wrote. “In ancient Greece, plays lasted all day, beginning at dawn and not ending until dusk. Malibu was the same way.” See also Big Wednesday.Aaberg, Kemp:
Lean, blond, smooth-surfing regularfooter from Santa Barbara, California; a Gidget-era Malibu icon and costar of filmmaker Bruce Brown’s 1958 surf movie, Slippery When Wet. Aaberg was born (1940) in Peoria, Illinois, spent his early childhood in Boston, Massachusetts, and moved with his family in 1948 to Pacific Palisades, in west Los Angeles. Eight years later he began surfing, at Malibu, first using a right-foot-forward goofyfoot stance, then switching to a left-foot-leading regularfoot stance so as to be facing the long right-breaking Malibu waves. Although Aaberg had been surfing for less than three years when he was picked to go to Hawaii with Brown to film Slippery When Wet, he was already regarded as one of California’s premier surf stylists. A black-and-white photo of him back-arching in perfect trim at Rincon appeared in the second issue of Surfer in 1961; a duotone version of the shot became the magazine’s first logo later that year, and was reprinted on the magazine’s 25th anniversary issue cover in 1985. The Surfer’s Journal later described the Aaberg back-arch shot as “one of the most instantly identifiable surf images of all time, and an enduring statement about the joy of surfing.” Australian Peter Townend, the 1976 world champion, reintroduced Aaberg’s move in the mid-’70s as the soul arch. Congenial and easygoing, Aaberg could nonetheless be obsessive: he avoided surf competition, but won the grueling 32-mile Catalina-to-Manhattan Pier paddleboard race in 1961; he studied flamenco guitar in Spain for six months in 1972; he placed highly in triathlons in the mid-’80s.

Aaberg wrote articles for Surfer, Surf Guide, and H2O magazines, and his monthly “Surf Scrolls” column appeared in the Santa Barbara News Press from 1989 to 1992. He appeared in a number of ’60s surf movies, including Surfing Hollow Days (1962) and A Cool Wave of Color (1964). The Jack Barlow character in Warner Brothers’ 1978 surf movie Big Wednesday was loosely based on Aaberg; the Big Wednesday screenplay was cowritten by Denny Aaberg, Kemp’s younger brother. Aaberg received a B.A. in social sciences from University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1966; in 1991 he was nominated to the International Surfing Hall of Fame. Aaberg is married and has no children.

Abellira, Reno:
Stylish, enigmatic regularfooter from Honolulu, Hawaii; world-ranked #4 in 1977, and a central figure throughout the first decade of shortboard surfing. Abellira was born (1950) and raised in Honolulu, the son of a middleweight boxer who was shot and killed in a barroom fight. Abellira began surfing at age four in Waikiki, but didn’t get his first board until 11. He won the juniors division of the Makaha International in 1966 and 1967, and earned $200 for winning the 1966 Hawaiian Noseriding Contest, the state’s first professional surfing event. Abellira was Hawaii’s juniors division champion in 1968, and made his international debut later that year in the World Surfing Championships, held in Puerto Rico. Although he placed sixth, many observers thought the small-framed (5’7″, 135 pounds) 18-year-old was the event’s most exciting surfer, as he consistently rode just beneath the curl on a stiletto-like purple surfboard. “It was a skateboard,” California surf publisher Dick Graham wrote, marveling at Abellira’s radical new equipment, “and he rode it like a god, because he is one.”

Abellira’s style developed over the next three years. He rode in a low crouch, chin tucked into his left shoulder, arms extended, wrists cocked, each part of his body precisely arranged. Whether or not the streamlined stance added speed to Abellira’s surfing is impossible to say, but nobody in the ’70s-except for Australia’s Terry Fitzgerald-looked faster on a surfboard. Abellira also proved to be one of the sport’s most mysterious figures: he kept to himself for the most part, rarely smiled, and countered the scruffy surfer image with Italian-made leather loafers, pressed linen pants, and neatly coiffed hair. “He’s a bit of a dandy,” Australian surf journalist Phil Jarratt wrote of the dark-eyed Hawaiian, “and could teach most surfers a thing or two about color coordination.”

Abellira competed regularly throughout the ’70s, winning state titles in 1970 and 1972, placing fourth in the ’70 World Championships, second in the 1973 Duke Kahanamoku Classic, and making the finals in more than a dozen professional events on the North Shore of Oahu. He was also an Expression Session invitee in 1970 and 1971. In what many still regard as surfing’s most thrilling big-wave contest, Abellira beat fellow Hawaiian Jeff Hakman by a fraction of a point to win the 1974 Smirnoff Pro, held in cataclysmic 30-foot surf at Waimea Bay. Among the first Hawaiians to set out on the pro circuit, Abellira was world-ranked #4 in 1977, #8 in 1978, and #13 in 1979.

Abellira was also a first-rate surfboard shaper, learning the craft from board-making guru Dick Brewer in the late ’60s and early ’70s, then going on to work for the Lightning Bolt label; Abellira and Brewer together experimented with an early version of the tri-fin design in 1970 and 1971. Mark Richards of Australia later became an international surf hero while riding Abellira-shaped boards, and it was Abellira’s stubby double-keeled “fish” that inspired Richards to produce in 1977 the twin-fin design that swept through the surf world in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

While Abellira was for the most part removed from the surf scene beginning in the early ’80s, he occasionally produced thoughtful and eloquent articles for the American surf press. He made headlines in 1993 when he disappeared for several months after being indicted on cocaine distribution charges; he was later convicted and spent several months in prison.

Abellira appeared in more than 15 surf movies, including Hot Generation (1968), Sea of Joy (1971), Going Surfin’ (1973), and Tales of the Seven Seas (1981). In the late ’70s, he lent his name to a short-lived surfwear company called Reno Hawaii. He competed in the 1990 Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau big-wave contest at Waimea Bay at age 40, finishing 24th in a field of 33. Abellira has been married once, and has one child; in 2002 he was living in Santa Monica, California.

Abubo, Megan:
Determined pro surfer from Haleiwa, Hawaii; world-ranked #2 in 2000. “Abubo looks soft but surfs hard,” Surfer magazine said in 2000, noting that the Hawaiian regularfooter, then 22, was likely five or six years from her prime. Abubo was born (1978) in Connecticut, moved with her family to Hawaii, began surfing at age 10 in Waikiki, and won seven national titles as an amateur. She was the pro tour’s rookie of the year in 1996, and in 2000 won two of nine world circuit events to finish runner-up to Australian Layne Beachley. Abubo had by that time developed a reputation as both friendly and feisty. “What man-made object best represents your personality?” Surfer asked her in 1998. “What a stupid question,” she answered. Abudo faltered competitively after her second-place finish in 2000, placing 8th in 2001 and 9th in 2001. Abubo has been featured in a number of surf videos, including Triple C (1996) and Peaches (2000); she also stunt-doubled in the 2002 Universal film Blue Crush. Abubo posed in the nude (covering herself with a surfboard) for Rolling Stone’s 2001 Sports Hall of Fame issue.
academia and surfing Although tens of thousands of recreational surfers have enrolled in colleges and universities over the decades, and coastal-area college surf teams and clubs have been around since the mid-1960s, surfing and the academy have had little effect on each other, and connections between the two are still for the most part regarded as novel, quirky, or gently amusing. Just a small number of well-known surfers have earned graduate degrees of one kind or another, the best known being a pair of California big-wave riders: Ricky Grigg (Ph.D., oceanography, Scripps Institution, 1970) and Peter Cole (M.S., informational sciences, University of Hawaii, 1971). The number of first-rate academics who also surf is proportionally small, and includes Kary Mullis, a San Diego longboarder and 1994 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, and Donald Cram, another San Diego surfer, who earned his chemistry Nobel in 1987. (It is estimated, meanwhile, that between one-third and one-half of the world pro tour’s top 44 surfers in any given season are high school dropouts.)

Colleges and universities have produced more than 500 surf-related thesis papers, and a much smaller number of journal articles, with titles including “A Study of the Growth of a Deviant Subculture…