Matt Warshaw

Matt Warshaw (born 1960) is a former professional surfer, former writer and editor at Surfer magazine (1984-1990), and the author of dozens of feature articles and large-format books on surfing culture and history.

Warshaw currently curates the online Encyclopedia of Surfing and History of Surfing, each website based on expanded material from the archives assembled for their print companions. He has 1 child.

Background Born in Los Angeles and raised in Venice Beach and Manhattan Beach, at his competitive peak Warshaw was the second-ranked amateur in California and 43rd-ranked professional on the International Professional Surfers world tour (1982).

Warshaw is noted for saying "All I knew when I quit [graduate school at UCLA] was that I was going to make a living writing about surfing, and as a matter of vanity, I wanted to be the world's authority on it."

As Warshaw recounts, he had been surfing a custom Jeff Ho swallowtail for about six months before the board was stolen from the car park at Leo Carrillo State Beach. Devastated, the young surfer scraped together money from odd jobs to order another board from Ho a few months later. When he received the new board from shop manager Skip Engblom, Warshaw noticed that the shaper's name had been replaced with a single airbrushed word, Zephyr. Described as the "synthesis of a museum, an archive, and even a theater" at its launch, Warshaw describes the online portal as "a conservation project. [...] a digital place where the sport can be presented, stored, celebrated, archived, and accessed." the Encyclopedia of Surfing was sponsored by Surfer magazine. However, Surfer magazine dropped its sponsorship. In 2017, rather than shut the site down, Warshaw started a fundraiser to support the Encyclopedia of Surfing. He successfully raised the funds necessary to keep Encyclopedia of Surfing running.

His 2003 work, Mavericks: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing, sold over 35,000 copies and was released in a second edition in 2005. wrote the foreword to the 2005 print edition of The Encyclopedia of Surfing. Chapter Eight of Finnegan's Pulitzer-winning Barbarian Days discusses a specific stretch of Northern California beach that he and Warshaw both frequented at different points in their lives, before the area was hopelessly crowded. Journalists such as STAB magazine co-founder Derek Rielly regularly praises Warshaw in print.

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. Also a bibliophile and collector, Warshaw is reputed to hold one of the largest private archives of surf-related publications, media, and memorabilia in the world. As a formal consultant to the OED, Warshaw continues to contribute to the authority's surf lexicon with quotation evidence for numerous surf-specific terms.

Referencing his family's academic pedigree, Warshaw said his consultancy for the OED is his accomplishment that has "most impressed his parents." Warshaw was a classmate of Lance Dixon (Class of 1978), presently a distinguished Professor at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It is rumored that more people have read Warshaw's work than Dixon's.