Word: surfer
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Flexed Feet. The Pacific off Southern California is relatively cold, averaging about 60°F. even in summer. A surfer may get uncomfortably chilled if he rides his board out toward the breakers in the traditional Polynesian fashion-lying prone while paddling with arms deep in the water. To a man, California surfers have adopted the kneeling position with feet flexed back, all their weight resting on the top of the shin just below the knee, the middle of the top of the foot and the top of one or more toes. After a week or two of paddling...
...first case of surfer's knobs seen by Dr. Sheldon Swift at the Permanente Medical Group in Panorama City made a deep impression; the British-born dermatologist had never seen anything like them around the muddy Mersey, where he went to medical school. Dr. Swift reported in the A.M.A. Journal that the knobs were benign tumors, made up mainly of an overgrowth of the horny layer of the skin. They were not to be confused with the socially less acceptable housemaid's knee, which is a bursitis. Dr. Swift saw no reason for surgical removal of the knobs...
...might have hit a misplaced tendon or nerve. Eventually, he decided that the white strands were an overgrowth of connective tissue, the deeper, fibrous layer between skin and bone. This might be more serious than an overgrowth of the horny layer, but it too will subside if the surfer stays off his board for four to six months...
Australian surfers get their kicks on the combers at Sydney's Neilson Park, zipping through shark nets so ragged that they no longer stop sharks, only surfers. At Huntington Beach, Calif., the gasser is "pier shooting" - hurtling between the concrete pilings of a pier. But these pastimes are only makeshift substitutes for riding the "heavies" off Makaha, a lonely beach on the west coast of Oahu that is every surfer's idea of paradise...
...make things more interesting, the surfers were required to follow a zigzag course, much like a slalom ski run. Judges deducted points for such infractions as "bottom turning"-cutting in front of another surfer knifing down the wave. The surprise winner: Honolulu Schoolboy Fred Hemmings Jr., 18, who became surfing's youngest world champion ever by riding three waves 600 yds. or so, tucking himself out of sight in "the pipe" (the fastest, most dangerous part of the wave, where it rolls over and down) to gain speed, sliding around the buoys without losing "the green,"-the unbroken portion...