[4] After working as a student at several Southern California community colleges and San Diego State University while still a competitive surfer, Warshaw earned a B.A.
[4] 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.
[5] 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.
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.
As a Z-Boy, Warshaw outgrew his pre-teen moniker, "Wimpy," although his clean-cut image stood in striking contrast to the rebel personalities (Jay Adams, Tony Alva, etc.)
Shortly thereafter, he left the monthly magazine, a decision which he described as "[doing] them a big favor by leaving; they just didn't know it at the time," citing his dislike of crunching numbers for advertising revenue.
[2] Longtime The New Yorker staff writer and 2016 Pulitzer prize winner in the «Biography and Memoir» category William Finnegan[12] wrote the foreword to the 2005 print edition of The Encyclopedia of Surfing.
[13][14] 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.
[17] 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.
Later that year, Senior Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, David Martin, contacted Warshaw about providing additional source citations for the earliest published usage of a large body of surfing terms, including "barrel," "reef rash," "board sock," "grom," "close out," "dawn patrol," "doggy door," "green room," "shaper," and "swallowtail.
"[24] 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.
[25] Warshaw was a classmate of Lance Dixon (Class of 1978), presently a distinguished Professor at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.