The Closest Thing To Being Born

While the current Wedge crowd—a fraternity of approximately 25 men between the ages of 19 and 32—will support the testimony that Quigg and Pyle were the true original Wedge men, while they will admit that Mickey Mu�oz is one of the really creative body surfers of his time and while they will concede that what Mu�oz says about the Wedge being a manhood rite and being definitely bitch-in' is true, they will not accept him as a spokesman for body surfing or the Wedge. As a matter of fact, present-day Wedge men hate Mickey Mu�oz.

"Mickey Mu�oz' brain is five sheets to the wind," says Kevin Egan, a bartender at the Ancient Mariner in Newport and an up-and-out-at-7-in-the-morning regular at the Wedge. "He's overrated. He's blown all out of proportion. He came up to the Wedge one day, saw it and liked it, and the next time he brought a whole camera crew, writers and the whole bit, to do a story on himself at the Wedge for Surfer magazine. Then he left and never came back. He takes a camera crew with him wherever he goes. All the stories in the surfing magazines talk about Mu�oz riding the Wedge, but it never happens. He's never here. We all resent it."

"Mu�oz hasn't been at the Wedge in six years, except maybe to take pictures of himself," says Ron Romanosky, another regular. "He's a turkey. A Mexican turkey. And a goon besides."

"If Mu�oz popularized the Wedge, I know a lot of guys who would like to beat up on him," says a third Wedge man. "Get him up here right now and we'll all head-hop him."

Although their life-style seems tame by the surfing standards of yesteryear, some of the Wedge men will, on occasion, slip into those erratic tendencies that people "on the flats" have come to believe are characteristic of the species. Among those who can be found most any morning between 7 and 11 sitting on the sand several paces from an ancient spit upon which is scrawled WEDGE, WE LOVE YOU are: Egan, a transplanted Easterner who is murder on the side wave but gets sick in moving cars; Romanosky, a good-looking Vietnam veteran who angers easily and is considered the only blond Polish knee-board rider in existence as well as the best knee-board rider period; Bill Sinner, a salesman for Carnation milk products who moved from Whittier to the Newport area just to be near the Wedge and who now and then hands out chocolate-fudge Instant Breakfasts as a dole to his compatriots; Pat Carden, a former MP in Korea who fires off blasts on his Acme Thunderer whistle to scare turkeys and goons out of the water; Ralph (Redbeard) Polston, 6'5", 250 pounds, who stands on, not in, public bars a lot and ripples the muscles in his usually uncovered stomach; Fast Eddie Nastri, who got his name by unsuccessfully hustling pool players superior to himself and "always goes right" at the Wedge; and Nick Hudson, an unemployed ski-lift operator who collects food stamps because there are no ski lifts in Newport Beach and who goes to his Coast Guard Reserve meetings with his arm in a homemade sling in order to "provoke hassles."

Perhaps the experiences of Kevin Egan serve best to illustrate to what extremes a passion for the Wedge will take a man. While body surfing at the Wedge, Egan has pulled every muscle in his lower back, slipped two discs, pinched several nerves, broken his hand, been knocked unconscious twice, opened up countless parts of his body for stitching, fractured his spine and marked and scarred his feet to a point where they now look like twin topography maps of the Sierra Mad-re. Egan passed out two years ago on Christmas Day from the constant pain caused by some of these injuries. Still he comes to body-surf.

"I could have gone to Notre Dame. I could have done what my parents wanted," Egan says. "My brother is a doctor, and he was going to pay my way through school. He was against Notre Dame. He offered me two weeks in Hawaii if I stayed home and went to college here. I stayed home and graduated from Cal State Fullerton, but I never got my trip. I got gypped. But I don't hold any grudges. It's only cost me $40 for X rays the two times I tried to kill myself on waves.

"This is my life now," says Egan. "I could have signed on as a steward on a boat, gone all over the world, but I'm not sorry. I just want to ride waves. Before I was married I never got in before 4 in the morning. It was lucky I was away from home. Each day I came back to the apartment there would be a party going on whether I knew about it or not. I mean, my mother doesn't understand drinking beer out of surfing fins. I think people know what the Wedge is now. They respect us for the skill and the guts it takes to ride it. Of course, my mother still can't understand the water syndrome. She says anyone who stays in the water as much as I do has to be psychologically upset."

Egan admits that Wedge men can be pretty tough on turkeys, goons—and the Newport Beach Body Surfing Association. "It's a joke," Egan says. "Nobody who lives anywhere in Newport is in it. Hardly any of them come to the Wedge, because they can't ride it. They give us bad names. They're the grubby ones. They're mostly younger guys. They asked me to join a few years ago. I'm 24. I told them I was too old for clubs. Sometimes if they do come to the Wedge we'll head-hop them. I say, 'Get the hell out of here, you with your water-polo hats on.' They wear water-polo hats. We can be a nasty group, I'll say."

"The Wedge guys are hogs," says a young surfer down the beach at 19th Street. "They hog every wave for themselves. I saw one of those guys—a Wedge hog—down at a beach in San Diego. They have all these old guys down there. Well, not really that old. But guys who think slow and surf straight off. You know, over the falls. Guys about 35. Anyway, this Wedge guy kept head-hopping these old guys and stealing all the waves. One old man said, 'You from the Wedge? One of those hard riders?' He said 'Wedge? Wedge? No, where's that?' He was laughing and laughing. Then he head-hopped the guy again. He was a miserable Wedge hog."