Three years later in 1972, a twelve-year-old Matt Warshaw accidentally became the owner of the very first surfboard made under Jeff Ho's Zephyr Productions brand.
18 Facts About Matt Warshaw
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When he received the new board from shop manager Skip Engblom, Matt Warshaw noticed that the shaper's name had been replaced with a single airbrushed word, Zephyr.
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Matt Warshaw had unintentionally become the owner of the very first Zephyr artifact of any kind, well before Ho's new surfboard label and its homonymous skateboarding brand had gained fame through the Zephyr Competition Team, or Z-Boys.
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Matt Warshaw was later one of the first Zephyr surf team riders.
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Matt Warshaw began writing for surf-related publications in Southern California in the 1980s.
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Matt Warshaw lived, surfed, and wrote in San Francisco for over two decades.
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Matt Warshaw's work has since appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Outside, and The Surfer's Journal, among others.
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Matt Warshaw is regularly consulted for online content for prominent surfing media outlets, including BeachGrit, Surfer, Surfline, and STAB.
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In 2017, rather than shut the site down, Matt Warshaw started a fundraiser to support the Encyclopedia of Surfing.
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Matt Warshaw successfully raised the funds necessary to keep Encyclopedia of Surfing running.
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Notable for his archival scholarly rigor and "brazenly incisive prose," Matt Warshaw has long been noted by fellow surf journalists and writers as a foremost popular historical authority on the subject of surfing.
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Chapter Eight of Finnegan's Pulitzer-winning Barbarian Days discusses a specific stretch of Northern California beach that he and Matt Warshaw both frequented at different points in their lives, before the area was hopelessly crowded.
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Matt Warshaw has mentored numerous young journalists, placing writers on the Surfer editorial staff and connecting independent authors with editors and surfing personalities for their investigative work.
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Matt Warshaw is known for his generosity with information and willingness to share research material with university researchers and academics and his work is regularly cited and acknowledged by international scholars publishing about surfing.
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Also a bibliophile and collector, Matt Warshaw is reputed to hold one of the largest private archives of surf-related publications, media, and memorabilia in the world.
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In spite of his renown, Matt Warshaw has publicly and humorously decried the difficulty of earning a living through writing about surfing.
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In 2012, Matt Warshaw was inducted into the Hall of Fame at his high school alma mater, Mira Costa High School, in Manhattan Beach, California.
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Matt Warshaw was a classmate of Lance Dixon, presently a distinguished Professor at Stanford University's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.