32: Newport Beach's J.J. Moon — The Greatest Surfer Ever Created

J.J. Moon was more Paul Bunyon than Kelly Slater. The surf hero
of the 1960s was the alter ego of Ned Eckert, a very average
weekend surfer–and still a Newport Beach resident, by the way–who
enthusiastically embraced a practical joke played on him in 1964
by some world’s best surfers and ran with it until he became a
near mythical figure sitting atop the surf world. 


It’s true that J.J. Moon may have not been the world’s greatest
surfer, but he did pull off the biggest hoax in the history of
the sport.