Playing Doc's Games (Part One)

'Playing Doc's Games' arrived in August 1992 as something the surf world had almost no precedent for: a piece of serious longform journalism about surfing published in the New Yorker, written by a political reporter who was also a committed surfer and was nervous about whether his editors would take him seriously after it ran. The nervousness, in retrospect, was misplaced. The piece is regularly cited as one of the foundational texts of modern surf literature, and the version of Mark Renneker it portrayed became, in the surfing community, a figure almost as mythologised as the waves he studied.nnThe first key argument is not about surfing at all but about obsession and its relationship to identity. Renneker kept a journal of every single surf session at Ocean Beach from 1969 forward — wave interval, swell height, water temperature, wind direction — a record that no other surfer in the world was maintaining, and which he could call on to make statements like 'the longest interval I have ever seen at this break was twenty-five seconds.' Finnegan uses this compulsion to ask a question about what it means to commit yourself completely to something that society does not recognise as significant. Renneker was also a nationally recognised cancer educator. The journal was the proof that the two things were equally real.nnThe second and more uncomfortable move is the description of Ocean Beach itself. Finnegan renders the winter surf at OB as genuinely frightening — cold enough to be hypothermic without a wetsuit, powerful enough to hold a strong swimmer down for multiple waves, with a shorebreak that has killed experienced surfers. He stays out with Renneker through an afternoon session and describes the moment Renneker turns to him and yells 'This is great!' as the sets come in. The gap between what Renneker's face says and what the water says is the whole essay.nnWe picked this because it is one of the finest pieces of magazine writing about obsession — the specific quality of loving something that cannot be explained to the people who do not share it. The question it leaves you with is whether you have anything in your own life that would survive that same description.