I mentioned Finnegan’s New Yorker article and raved about it. In 1997 my old friend Peter Spacek surfed a December swell with me in Santa Barbara while he escaped from the Long Island winter cold. Those of us who actually grew up surfing felt a powerful affinity for Finnegan’s authenticity, and those of us who scorned the marketing copy that usually spoke for our game were thrilled to hear an actual literary voice on the page. I was thrilled and blown away when I read Playing Doc's Games, and not alone in my reaction. It was a singular milestone because it was the one and only piece that I had ever seen which transcended the surfing milieu as a genre - every other artistic attempt, whether painting or cinema or literature, invariably issued whiffs of kitsch, however faint. I’m an unabashed fan, like so many others who read his 1992 two-part essay in The New Yorker called Playing Doc’s Games, which detailed Finnegan’s complex negotiation between his life as a hard-core surfer and an up-and-coming writer. I just read William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, a fine memoir of his surfing life.
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