A wise, richly atmospheric account of riding the gelid, powerful gray waves of San Francisco while negotiating the demands of a fanatical surfer-oncologist named Doc Renneker, “Playing Doc’s Games” combines the deep knowledge of a widely traveled hard-core surfer, the observations of a born ethnographer and the wry aplomb of a New Yorker staff writer. Then, in the summer of 1992, there appeared in The New Yorker a long, two-part article by William Finnegan titled “Playing Doc’s Games” that was instantly recognized as a masterpiece. It came to seem that surfing, like some pagan mystery cult, might simply defy literary representation, remaining properly understood only by initiates who were too busy surfing to learn to write. Yet when surfers themselves began to write about it, in the 1960s, what they produced was usually bad in other ways - pretentious, semiliterate, purple or merely slight.
Most canonical accounts of surfing, from Captain Cook to Tom Wolfe, are written by nonsurfers who tend to wax gooey about the sport’s joys while getting its mechanics and ethos laughably wrong.
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