IN DEEP

A collection of wave-riding pieces from an industry titan.

In this volume, legendary surfing writer George collects pieces from his decades of profiling people and places for magazines like SURFER. The author states at the outset of this anthology, “I am not a writer who surfs—I am a surfer who writes,” and this self-conception gives his work a distinctive voice that made his articles must-reads for surfing fans. This volume includes perhaps his most famous piece of writing, “The Seduction of Kelly Slater,” done for SURFER magazine in 1989 (Slater provides the book’s foreword), and the material ranges widely. “Red Water,” an almost equally famous profile of Bethany Hamilton, daringly opens with the focus not on Hamilton but on the shark that bit her arm off in 2003: “With one last savage kick of her great tail, she opened her jaws in a ragged yawn, and taking the thin, pale arm in her throat, she clamped down with over sixteen tons of sawing pressure.” Taken together, these vivid pieces provide readers with a sense of the inner workings of surfing as a sport while chronicling surfing’s evolution from a scruffy hobby to a multimillion-dollar international industry. George includes many of his own arresting photos, but it’s his thrilling, thoughtful prose that brings the book to life. Readers of those now-defunct old surfing magazines who’ve kept this author’s pieces in yellowing folders all these years now have the book they’ve wished for. George is equally evocative writing about individuals (Slater being an obvious favorite, along with the sport’s famous Curren brothers) and places, as when, in “Don’t Mess with Texas,” he profiles the U.S. Amateur Surfing Championships on South Padre Island. This is sports writing well worth preserving.

A well-balanced collection of some of the best surf writing ever done.