by: Mark McDermott
A room at the California Surf Club in Redondo Beach is named after Greg Browning.
Jim Lindberg, frontman of Pennywise, was invited to help name the rooms when the club was coming together. When he walked into a snug little room behind the media room stage, he didn’t hesitate.
“Well, we have to name this Greg’s Green Room,” he said. “Since Greg was so involved in putting together all the media for BeachLife Festival, it only seemed fitting.”
In surfing, the green room is what you call the inside of a barrel — that brief, perfect place where the wave folds over your head and the world goes quiet. Few surfers have lived inside the green room more than Greg Browning, known locally as Geebs. And perhaps none ever resided there with more cool calm and easy style.
Pieces of Greg’s life adorn the walls of the Green Room — photographs from a career spent surfing some of the most consequential waves of a generation, taken by his longtime collaborator and friend Mike Balzer.
There’s one of Greg at the Breakwall, a John De Temple shot: an orange and yellow sunset backdrop to an enormous wave, upon which Greg is just a speck moving across all that light and water.
When Greg got sick and he and his mom Dinah were packing up the house, BeachLife founder Allen Sanford came over and Greg told him to take whatever he wanted for the club. He took some of the photographs, the Pac-Man game from the garage, and framed surf jerseys that were gifts from surfers Greg had coached, Carissa Moore and Tatiana Weston-Webb, after they won world titles.
Dinah Lary, Greg’s mother, has been a South Bay fixture for decades.
“She was instrumental in the development of the club and, along with being the coolest mom around, she is a historian of the South Bay and a local legend herself,” Lindberg said.
Greg actually got to see the room before he passed.
“When I go there, I feel Greg,” Dinah says. “I work there, not every day, but a lot of days. And I feel good when I’m in there, because I know he really thought it was a cool place.”
Balzer first photographed Browning when he was a skinny 14-year-old kid, on a shoot for Body Glove at the Avenues. That shoot ended up in Surfing Magazine, launching a collaboration that would help put the South Bay on the global surf map.
“He wasn’t afraid of anything,” Balzer recalled. “He knew how to draw the right lines. He had that in him from day one.”
Browning would become a pivotal figure in the Momentum Generation, the group of young surfers who revolutionized the sport in the early ’90s. He carried that same connective energy off the water.
It was Browning who handed filmmaker Taylor Steele a cassette tape of a South Bay punk band called Pennywise, landing them on the soundtrack of Steele’s landmark film Momentum.
“Pennywise owes its career in part to Greg Browning,” Lindberg says.
Greg’s own explanation for how he moved through life was characteristically simple.
“I just wanted to stay close to it, stay in it,” he said. “So I kept doing the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.”
That instinct — stay close, keep connecting people, keep showing up — defined everything he touched.
“We all have people in life that we need to look up to,” Sanford says. “It helps us figure out who we want to be, who we strive to be, and ultimately what type of people we become. Greg was that type of human being.”
“Sure, it’s easy to look up to a good looking guy, a great surfer, creative videographer and a popular person. But for me personally, I looked up to Greg because he was humble despite all of that. His genuine care for others is what I’ll remember about him the most.”
At his Hermosa Surfers Walk of Fame induction in 2024, Greg thanked a long list of people who’d carried him — including his crew from 16th Street, his brother Jeff, Balzer, his wife Carrie, and his boys.
He called them his village.
“I tried to build you guys a village,” he told his sons, Parker and Drew. “Just remember that the village will be here for the rest of your life.”
The village is keeping its word.
Long live Geebs.