The funny but not handsome little brother Parker, the gay-hating but otherwise rad skate icon Jay Adams and… Conner himself! "Life's pretty bizarre in general… pop music's bizarre, the fact that people like Justin Bieber is popular is shocking to me. America is one of the most bizarre places in the world," says Conner.

My 10 Mistakes with Parker and Conner Coffin

By Derek Rielly

10 years ago

One is cute as a button, the other is ugly as sin but such a merry prankster!

It ain’t difficult to tell these two bro’s apart. Parker bursting from the mouth, Conner swollen with the good looks. Don’t you want to fondle Conner’s golden hair and kiss his eyelashes? Just last year, Conner was the subject of a Surfer magazine cover that I can confidently assert was the greatest cover in the last 10 years, a cutback for the ages.

Parker, meanwhile, is affixed to his board as if with sticky jelly, and is freckled and often delirious and babbling, uttering sounds of enjoyment.

For this BeachGrit piece, I approached the Coffin brothers to combine for 10 mistakes; a combination I sort because the pair have led such pleasurable lives it would be impossible to find a 10-pack of errors. Now let’s rap!

Conner:

1. Eating Grandma’s Pie: She made the best apple pies ever. She was surrounded by apple trees and she’d make these rad apple pies which I’d eat with the most gusto. And therefore I went through a doughy pre-puberty phase. I have a round enough face as it is, but fuelled by apple pies, I chunked out.

2. Not Learning to Play Music Earlier: I wish I was that kid who took music class. I wish I had music ingrained in me. Kids who have parents who play music have it tapped into their DNA. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was 12 and now I feel like learning to read music and having that instinctual approach is impossible.

3. Smashing my brother: I’d just gotten back from a trip, Parker was annoying me and I overreacted and pushed him. Due to an unfortunate chain of events he hit a fire hydrant and had to go to ER. I may’ve scarred him subconsciously and, deep down, he may even hate me. Was I punished? Well, yeah, their deal was pushing us to be pals.

4. Listening to rap: I can’t believe I wasted year of my life listening to that instead of things that involve real instruments. I don’t like the artificial nature of it. I mean, I understand the sonic structure, the engineering, but I believe music should be played with instruments. I love the Stones, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin.

5. Breaking up with my gal: At the time it felt like the right thing to do, and maybe it still is, but she’s super cool and now she’s dating another guy and I think, was it a mistake? I was 20, she was 27 and at different points in our lives. It definitely bums me out a bit but I’ve got to feel happy for her.

Parker:

1. Not smelling the roses: I regret not being more of a tourist when we travel to all of these amazing places. It’s hard to get motivated to go out and be a tourist when you are on a surf trip for some reason. So that’s a new personal goal I have. I want to try and learn more about the various places that we go to instead of just going to surf and then going home. It’s a lot more meaningful to come home with some thing knowledgeable than just a description of how the waves were somewhere,

2. Splitting from school: I so regret not going to school for a few more years. My family was super supportive of the whole surfing thing and at the time all I wanted was to not be sitting in a classroom all day. Looking back on it I wish I hung in until at least middle school because then I would have known a lot more girls throughout my teenage years. But it’s all good, I met ’em elsewhere.

3. My big mouth: There has been a lot of times when I was younger that I would just mouth off to people I shouldn’t have. At my local break I was just some cocky little shit-grom who would make fun of the older guys and they would just get me right back with some grom torture. I’m still learning my lesson with that one.

4. Burning my ears off: One of my biggest mistakes is being on my phone too much. I’m trying to make a serious effort to cut back because my brother is always making fun of me for not being a part of conversations. Technology is taking over our lives and I don’t want to miss anything by looking at a stupid little device.

5. Acting old: Sometimes I’ll worry about stuff that don’t really matter instead of just being a grom. I mean, one day I’ll wake up and be 30 and have a 30-year-old’s problem instead of being a teenager enjoying the essential breeziness of life.

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A junkie can always be spotted by the way he rests his chin on his fist.

Fact: Kieren probably did go!

By Chas Smith

10 years ago

KP as the commissioner of surfing? Much like giving Sid Vicious the keys to the heroin store.

Matt Warshaw wrote a wonderful piece on yesterday’s BeachGrit, sharing his frustrations with a lay-day being called on a perfect, albeit CRAAAAAAZY, Pipeline afternoon. The waves shook the sand and rumors of best Pipe ever? circulated from Ted’s Bakery to New York City.

It is commissioner Kieren Perrow responsibility to say yay or nay to a day of professional surfing. He checks the forecast, gazes out toward the horizon, puts his finger to the wind, goes for a test surf and then says, “Aye mates, we’re on.” Or, “Naaaahhhhhhhhhh mates, we’re off.”

But there is a small problem. As likeable as Kieren Perrow is, multiple sources on tour, from worker bees to professional surfers, have confided frustration about that fact that he is a full-blown surf junkie. He goes out for a test surf and doesn’t come back in. Or he goes out for a test surf, comes in, says, “Naaaahhhhhhhhhh mates, we’re off….” And then goes back out and surfs some more. Or he goes out for a test surf, comes in, says, “Mates. I can’t quite tell. I just need another few hours. Mates.” And then goes back out and surfs until his knees are sore. It is much like giving Sid Vicious the keys to the heroin store. Sure, he knows the product. But he also knows the product.

There was the epic lay day in Fiji, there were multiple late starts in Tahiti and now Pipeline. The ASP likes to call it a win-win. The kids at home can watch the freesurfs! But doesn’t that defeat the entire point of the ASP?

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…this time three years ago (2011) the ASP's highly credentialed Commissioner Kieren Perrow was owning the podium. Winning the contest? Possible. Making calls at Pipe? Not so easy.

Opinion: Kieren would’ve gone!

By Matt Warshaw

10 years ago

Matt Warshaw on calling a Pipe Masters lay-day during the best Banzai all year…

I whinged on Twitter, as any right-thinking WCT surf fan would, about Kieren Perrow calling off the Pipe Masters on Saturday, thus depriving spectators of what would have been a fine afternoon of high-stakes showdown surfing. The following day I asked if anybody had yet seen video from Saturday afternoon’s session. Links were forwarded. Clips were downloaded. PiL’s “Order of Death” sprang from the dusty recesses of my iTunes catalog onto my FCPX timeline, and the clip you see here practically made itself.

And yes, if they hold the Pipe finals in blown-out chest-high Beach Park, on the last day of the waiting period, I will indeed be tuning in. Throwing thunderbolts of pure Twitter fury, but watching nonetheless. The ASP is the gang that keep shooting blanks. And I will always ride along. Damn it.

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Exclusive: Pro Bodyboarding part of WSL?

By Chas Smith

10 years ago

Or to quote Leonardo DiCaprio, "I don't see why I can't have friends of both sexes without wild rumors being circulated."

The Association of Surfing Professionals, soon to be World Surf League, is nearing the end of a dramatic season, or to quote CEO Paul Speaker, “The ultimate goal is that we can deliver a world-class sporting and entertainment product direct-to-consumer in real time.” Or to quote Gavin Belson, “I got seven words for you. ‘I love Goolybib’s integrated- multi-platform-functionality!'”

When we think of professional surfing it is most often the men’s and women’s Championship Tours but did you know the ASP, soon to be WSL, also includes a longboard world tour, a big wave world tour, a junior world tour and a heritage series? It is a great, multidimensional surfing experience, or to quote CEO Paul Speaker, “We synergize granular systems while growing out-of-the-box e-markets and, at the same time, evolve customized ROI through synergistic portals.” Or to quote Erlich Bachman, “I memorized the hexadecimal times tables when I was 14 writing machine code, okay? Ask me what 9 times F is. It’s fleventyfive.”

With such a wide array of surfing experience on tap, there are currently no rumors that a professional bodyboard world tour will be added to the slate of next year’s programming but why not? I would very much like to watch those wild savages throwing their bodies into slabby maws. I would like to watch that more than Adam Melling.

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John John Florence doesn't cut himself up in the gym and he's the best surfer in the world. And how about if we told you that if you can get hold of your mind, you'll never feel tired in the surf again? | Photo: Morgan Maassen

Mind Games: Get better at surfing instantly!

By Derek Rielly

10 years ago

Feeling tired after that paddle out? You ain't even close to being cooked says new study…

Let’s get one thing straight. BeachGrit isn’t of the belief that going to the gym can make you a better surfer. You think John John and Dane lift and squat and shake ropes to make their turns sharper and their oops’ higher?

But what about… fatigue? That’s different to strength. It eats me alive, probably does you too. After a couple of consecutive waves, after a difficult paddle-out, we’re off our game. We squeeze in two turns instead of four, we fall off in the shorey.

And therefore should we train?

According to a new study about fatigue, it turns out we’ve got a ton of gas left in the tank, even after that paddle out, even after catching four waves in a row.

And that whole thing about lactic acid? The juice actually… helps.

The New Yorker reports, “The study, which was published last month in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, by Samuele Marcora, who heads the University of Kent’s Endurance Research Group, and two of his colleagues at Bangor, Anthony Blanchfield and James Hardy, is the latest salvo in an ongoing debate about the very nature of fatigue. According to one study fatigue is ‘the inability of the contracting muscles to maintain the desired force.’ But what causes it? Physiologists in the early twentieth century studied exhaustion by cutting off the hind legs of frogs and electrically stimulating the muscles over and over until they couldn’t contract anymore. In 1907, the Nobel Laureate Frederick Hopkins and one of his colleagues showed that the depleted frog muscles were bathed in lactic acid. Their experiment gave rise to an enduring—and incorrect—explanation for muscle failure; scientists now know that lactate, the form in which lactic acid occurs in the body, actually fuels muscular contraction rather than inhibiting it. Nevertheless, the view of fatigue as a mechanical breakdown has persisted. You max out your ability to pump oxygen, the acidity of your blood creeps up, and the neuromuscular signalling between your brain and your muscles gets weaker: one way or another, you hit a limit.

“Marcora believes that this limit is probably never truly reached—that fatigue is simply a balance between effort and motivation, and that the decision to stop is a conscious choice rather than a mechanical failure. This, he says, is why factors that alter a person’s perception or motivation (monetary rewards, for example) can affect performance, even without any change in muscle capacity. In the subliminal experiments, the cyclists’ heart rates and lactate levels rose at the same rate no matter which faces they saw, indicating that nothing had changed from the neck down. Considerations like heat, hydration, and muscle conditioning, Marcora says, ‘are not unreal things, but their effect is mediated by perception of effort.’

“In other words, they don’t force you to slow down, as happens with the failing frog muscles in the petri dish; they cause you to want to slow down — a semantic difference, perhaps, but a significant one when it comes to testing the outer margins of human capability. Marcora calls his theory the ‘psychobiological model.'”

What’s it all mean for you and me? That you’ve got a ton in the tank. Those eight-hour surfs and open-ocean reef paddle-outs (think Teahupoo) you think are beyond you? They ain’t.

Read the rest of the New Yorker story here. (Just click!)

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